Graze Band Strategy?

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trihero
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Graze Band Strategy?

Post by trihero »

I thought I'd open a thread to discuss what you guys think about the graze band and what various levels you prefer to work at, and most importantly I'd like to see if there's an "optimal" graze band %.

I personally put graze band at 0% because I just hate it so much when I expect my min roll to kill something but then we graze, but do you guys think that having the graze band at higher, even up to 20%, benefits xcom more than the aliens or not? Of course the mechanic is applied symmetrically, but do you think there are ways for the player to "abuse" the graze band or get more use out of it than the aliens do?
Goumindong
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Goumindong »

Mechanically the graze band tends to benefit aliens.

This is because:

*the graze band has a larger effect the lower your aim is: aliens tend to have lower aim
*the graze band has a larger effect the more often you shoot: aliens tend to shoot more often
*wounds are an aspect of the game that enforces wounds and wounds mitigate the ability of XCom to do missions
*HP is generally balanced around 1.5-1.8 hits to kill: Graze band makes it more likely that aliens can take down a single unit.

There are some places where the graze band helps XCOM:

*When attempting to finish low HP aliens off the larger the graze band the higher effective % shot you have. This can make low % shots actually effective at finishing off some aliens.
*a higher graze band reduces variance, which is generally good for XCom when single hits are debilitating.

In general you "ought" to play with the graze band at 10% or higher. The effect is to enforce some wound timers on XCOM without going overboard. If you're only being grazed the wounds will stay manageable while still forcing you to rotate some troops into your a team. This smooths out the balance effects between "good missions" and "ok missions". With a zero % graze band you're more likely to have flawless missions or super high wound timers which can snowball your game as your soldiers catapult up in ranks faster than maybe they ought to.
Sporadix
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Sporadix »

Higher graze band benefits XCOM. There are a lot of perks and items that get better the wider the band gets, and you can build around that. Shredder, Viper Rounds, Rapid Reaction etc. all apply even on grazes. Meanwhile, the AI behaves the same as it did before; the aliens will not change loadouts or alter their perk specs to take advantage of the changes.

Even if they did I'm not sure it would matter. The game is extremely alpha-strike oriented. If something exists on the tactical layer that's exploitable by both sides it's going to favor XCOM because somewhere between half and all the aliens are dead by the time their turn is over.
trihero
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by trihero »

Good points.

I'm thinking a higher graze also encourages you to pick perks/item with armor, since for instance a 20% graze band effectively gives xcom 40% dodge. You will be getting hit more often, but the hits are for less damage, and armor really helps out when the damage is first reduced by half. It does cut both ways though; you should be seeing a ROUGH time killing those 3+ armor enemy units and you really need to pay attention to shredding more than normal.
Goumindong
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Goumindong »

A higher graze band does not benefit xcom. Imagine the extreme; a 100% graze band. Every hit always grazes unless it's a crit or a dodge.

Aliens have better HP, more numbers (make more shots on average) and require no downtime. They make use of fewer abilities which modify to-hit. A larger graze band means that every largish fight is a slaughter unless xcom is packing a high armor unit... Which I can assure you you will never reach with the amount of damage you will take every fight*.

*The exception being the cheese shinobi with the "100% dodge until you take damage ability" who as far as I can tell is pretty much invulnerable if they're in cover or they roll Resiliance on the AWC.
seananigans
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by seananigans »

Definitely going to respectfully disagree. I'd say the graze band benefits XCOM quite a bit more than the aliens. If playing even halfway properly, you should always be the one getting the first rounds of hits, often reducing enemy pod numbers drastically. I'm not sure where you're coming up with "aliens shoot more than XCOM," that's the complete utter opposite of my experience in hundreds of hours of LW1 and LW2.
Goumindong
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Goumindong »

seananigans wrote:Definitely going to respectfully disagree. I'd say the graze band benefits XCOM quite a bit more than the aliens. If playing even halfway properly, you should always be the one getting the first rounds of hits, often reducing enemy pod numbers drastically. I'm not sure where you're coming up with "aliens shoot more than XCOM," that's the complete utter opposite of my experience in hundreds of hours of LW1 and LW2.
Its because enemies do generally shoot their guns more often than XCom. A lot of times they're shooting into smoke or shooting when flashed or... whatever. But they're shooting. And the higher the graze band the more often that those "misses" become "grazes" and when that happens wounds and deaths will start accumulating.

But that doesn't matter because the higher the graze band the less the low aim matters in actually doing damage. At 20% graze band 20% to-hit is 40% to graze. As the graze band gets bigger this becomes more obvious, at 100% graze band 0% to hit is 100% to-graze. Flashbangs and smoke are now worthless as anything that isn't a hard stun has little or no effect. A larger graze band makes low damage more consistent, which is bad for xcom
trihero
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by trihero »

Interesting discussion, how would you factor in armor? If everything is a graze, then armor helps reduce damage more, and could xcom make more use of this than the aliens (i.e. stack armor items/perks, and take care to shred the enemy quickly).
Goumindong
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Goumindong »

trihero wrote:Interesting discussion, how would you factor in armor? If everything is a graze, then armor helps reduce damage more, and could xcom make more use of this than the aliens (i.e. stack armor items/perks, and take care to shred the enemy quickly).
You could. But you're still going to be taking more chip damage in total. And you also have to make it to the point where you have enough armor for this to matter.

The easiest way to do this would be to grab evasive. You start the game with 100 bonus dodge. Every hit is a graze, which you then dodge for zero damage. You're now invulnerable.

But these are edge cases and probably don't effect the things that most people will be doing
Sporadix
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Sporadix »

Armor becomes better the higher the graze band becomes, so in theory XCOM could abuse armor stacking to gain an advantage. In practice though, there aren't actually a ton of accessible ways to actually stack armor in the game. There's the Formidable perk, armor upgrades through research, and Damage Control PCS if you're lucky enough to find one (which becomes ridiculous against frequent grazes). That's about it AFAIK.

Still, I'm imagining what actually happens with a 100% graze band and I'm picturing something like all Shinobis with Evasion, all loaded out with Shotguns shooting at enemies in full cover from 15 tiles away. Meanwhile, the AI is completely non-adaptive to the rule set change. Advent Engineers are still deploying flashbangs and many enemies are still using Suppression even though these will do practically nothing.
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Devon_v
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Devon_v »

Wait, how does Graze get better the lower to hit is? It's +-10, regardless of aim. An alien with 30 to hit grazes on a 40. A rookie with 65 to hit grazes on a 75.

I do agree though that with a massive graze band armor stacking is the thing to do.
Goumindong
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Goumindong »

Devon_v wrote:Wait, how does Graze get better the lower to hit is? It's +-10, regardless of aim. An alien with 30 to hit grazes on a 40. A rookie with 65 to hit grazes on a 75.

I do agree though that with a massive graze band armor stacking is the thing to do.
Because you start to cut into the 0% bound. You lose "hits" that aren't hits and gain grazes in return.

The easiest example is 0% to-hit at the base graze band. Has a 10% chance to graze. Enemies take a lot of low% shots like this. At 20% graze band any base "to-hit" under 20% is a net expected value increase. Moreover the effective percentage of shots that deal damage increases as to-hit increases.

At 20% graze band and 20% to-hit, 40% of shots produce wounds. As shots(comparing no graze band to high graze band) increase the probability of the extreme values decreases but the probability of the average values increases. But because it only takes average values to kill units this increases the overall expected wounds and deaths. The variance of high damage shots with low hit% actually works in your favor.
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Devon_v
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Devon_v »

Goumindong wrote:
Devon_v wrote:Wait, how does Graze get better the lower to hit is? It's +-10, regardless of aim. An alien with 30 to hit grazes on a 40. A rookie with 65 to hit grazes on a 75.

I do agree though that with a massive graze band armor stacking is the thing to do.
Because you start to cut into the 0% bound. You lose "hits" that aren't hits and gain grazes in return.

The easiest example is 0% to-hit at the base graze band. Has a 10% chance to graze. Enemies take a lot of low% shots like this. At 20% graze band any base "to-hit" under 20% is a net expected value increase. Moreover the effective percentage of shots that deal damage increases as to-hit increases.

At 20% graze band and 20% to-hit, 40% of shots produce wounds. As shots(comparing no graze band to high graze band) increase the probability of the extreme values decreases but the probability of the average values increases. But because it only takes average values to kill units this increases the overall expected wounds and deaths. The variance of high damage shots with low hit% actually works in your favor.
Ah, but only at the extremes. The default 10 is rarely going to influence extreme low accuracy shots since all to-hits are basically 10 higher than displayed anyway. If the alien has a 7, it really has a 17, just like my Sharpshooter with 90 really has 100. It's just some of them will be edge hits.

I like damage, period. I'll gladly trade 10 points of half damage on one end for 10 points of negated miss on the other. I try not to leave anybody alive to shoot back.
Goumindong
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Goumindong »

Devon_v wrote:
Goumindong wrote:
Devon_v wrote:Wait, how does Graze get better the lower to hit is? It's +-10, regardless of aim. An alien with 30 to hit grazes on a 40. A rookie with 65 to hit grazes on a 75.

I do agree though that with a massive graze band armor stacking is the thing to do.
Because you start to cut into the 0% bound. You lose "hits" that aren't hits and gain grazes in return.

The easiest example is 0% to-hit at the base graze band. Has a 10% chance to graze. Enemies take a lot of low% shots like this. At 20% graze band any base "to-hit" under 20% is a net expected value increase. Moreover the effective percentage of shots that deal damage increases as to-hit increases.

At 20% graze band and 20% to-hit, 40% of shots produce wounds. As shots(comparing no graze band to high graze band) increase the probability of the extreme values decreases but the probability of the average values increases. But because it only takes average values to kill units this increases the overall expected wounds and deaths. The variance of high damage shots with low hit% actually works in your favor.
Ah, but only at the extremes. The default 10 is rarely going to influence extreme low accuracy shots since all to-hits are basically 10 higher than displayed anyway. If the alien has a 7, it really has a 17, just like my Sharpshooter with 90 really has 100. It's just some of them will be edge hits.

I like damage, period. I'll gladly trade 10 points of half damage on one end for 10 points of negated miss on the other. I try not to leave anybody alive to shoot back.
No. The effect of increasing the range of average damage occurs not only at the extremes but at every point.
Mavoc
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by Mavoc »

trihero wrote:I thought I'd open a thread to discuss what you guys think about the graze band and what various levels you prefer to work at, and most importantly I'd like to see if there's an "optimal" graze band %.
I've found 5% to be a much more sensible value. It also speaks to my inner d20.
mmCion
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by mmCion »

Graze really depends on your playstyle.

If you prefer grenades, rockets, and other AOE damage, the it probably benefits the aliens.

If you prefer flank shots, cover destruction, point blank high % shots, then it probably benefits the aliens, since your "sure" shots are less sure.

If you prefer from over to cover firefights, (so shooting at aliens in cover), overwatch and suppression style gameplay, it probably favors XCOM.

Also, perks, as others have mentioned, can take more advantage of graze.

I've found, that for my playstyle and liking, 2-5% graze band is best.
dragon95046
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Re: Graze Band Strategy?

Post by dragon95046 »

I agree with mmCion. It really comes down to playstyle and I've found the existence of Graze has forced me to adapt my playstyle, especially since I also use Red Fog - All.

With Red Fog, just doing damage to enemies is important, even if it doesn't kill them. Graze and the associated perks makes this more likely, making it easier to reduce enemy effectiveness even if they survive the shot.

Graze has also made Plating much more useful for me. Often times, a soldier with Plating can shrug off a Graze with minimal actual damage and thus maintain their combat effectiveness while under fire and lower heal times after a fight. Without Graze, it usually seemed my soldiers only had 2 statuses: full health or dead. And it didn't matter much if they had any Plating or not.


I should, though, that I have not had nearly as much time to play this as I would like so this has only been my experience through the early to mid game. It is entirely possible this may change in the late game. Hopefully some day I can found out.
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