Reducing Hiding RNG headaches

[Saxony]

Like the surgery skill adds an option to craft FAKs for 5AP, I was thinking advanced hide could add an option to hide with 100% success chance for a certain amount of AP. I think somewhere around 3 or 4AP would be alright, probably not overpowered. If some people think that's too good, 5 or even 6AP could be chosen instead.

I think everyone who uses hiding runs into times when RNG is very unfavorable and they spend 10 or more AP trying to hide. I know that's one of the main reasons I don't want to touch any character builds that plan to use hiding a bunch; getting RNG screwed sucks. Some people think that's okay, or even intended. As the game is coded right now, that is how it works and eventually the RNG will throw out some numbers like that. If the design team thinks that's okay, then this suggestion is dead in the water.

It's possible to tie the ap cost with the base hide chance the character is hiding in. For surgery, the 5AP cost is balanced against the find chance in hospitals and pharmacies and is mostly comparable to just searching for FAKs, but that's just two building types. Players can hide in every tile (both inside and outside) and that's a sort of balance decision (some tiles having bigger hide chances than others), or at least I assume it was more or less intentional. That could be a holdover from decisions made ten years ago in nexus war. But in case we want to preserve that variation in hiding difficulty (and I see no reason not to), we can add some variation in the hide cost.

Some basic numbers for that varying hide cost would be:
5AP hide cost: 10% base chance (40% with advanced hide)
4AP hide cost: 20-30% base chance (50-60% with advanced hide)
3AP hide cost: 40%+ base chance (70%+ with advanced hide)

I think those numbers are worse than than the average AP cost for hiding. This suggestion isn't meant to buff hiding by reducing the average AP cost of hiding, it's to normalize the AP cost and remove the chance for the RNG to be very unfavorable. I think going to 2AP or even 1AP for a 100% chance to hide would be too good (especially when considering real time combat). 3AP or 4AP sounds a bit more reasonable.

Again, if the people on the design team reading this suggestion think the RNG handing out 10 or more unsuccessful hide attempts in a row is okay or even desirable, this suggestion is dead in the water.

[Saxony]

Another way to reduce the RNG headache from hiding (which would be a bit more elegant) would be to add an option to increase the hide chance per attempt at increased AP cost.

Let's say add 1AP to the ap cost for +30% hide chance, so 2AP total. In a tile with a base chance of 40%, advanced hide boosts that to 70%, so this option would boost that to 100% and cost 2AP.

Maybe a bit too good (though that only applies in some the best building types for hiding).

It could be changed to +20% per extra AP spent, so you could add 20% for a 2AP total cost, add 40% for a 3AP total cost, add 60% for a 4AP total cost and so on. That last option would probably cover everything (since a base chance of 10% gets boosted to 40% with advanced hide and adding 60% on top of that would make it 100%).

Again, the numbers can be tweaked around, but this version of the idea would allow some building types to require more AP cost to hide in, just like how it normally works. In a building type with a low base hide chance, a player will be spending more AP to get to 90% (or 100%) and in a building with a high base hide chance, a player won't need to spend as much to get to 90% (or 100%).

The goal of this suggestion isn't to buff hiding, but rather to add an option to avoid RNG headaches (and for balance reasons make that option worse on average than just hiding normally), just like the surgery skill adds an option to craft FAKs with a 100% success chance instead of searching for them and possibly failing to find any because of the RNG being mean every now and then.

[Kandarin]

This is a good idea.