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Certainly. This doesn't stop bad luck from potentially slaughtering your front-runner team, however.
X-com: UFO defense was one of the first games where I was introduced to the concept of 'pirating' and 'cheats' by someone in charge of the computer lab at a school I was helping out at. And while I don't have it installed right now, it's currently sitting nice and neat in my steam library.
Yes, I've played it. I've played it alot, thank you. You trying to brush off it as 'just a meme' makes me wonder if you've played it.
Yes. And that's part of the difficulty curve - negating random change as much as possible. The original X-com has a surprising amount of tactical depth that can make even normally terrifying circumstances(such as night missions or breaching buildings/landed space ships) trivial, but even experienced gamers likely aren't going to get that out of the box and will experience a learning curve.
I've beaten it on Superhuman without active psi and with Cydonia on June 1, and I literally wrote a non-negligible chunk of the wiki.
The hit chances are accurate, at least for "hit" rolls vs. "miss" rolls (rolled misses can still hit at close range, and I think it's possible for rolled hits to miss at extreme range or where there's cover involved, both of these symmetrical between X-Com and aliens). Aliens hit a lot on higher difficulties because their accuracy stats are pretty high. If you think there's "weighting" going on that makes X-Com rolls systematically worse and alien rolls systematically better than the normal formula, you're seeing a pattern that's not actually there, presumably due to negativity bias letting you recall "bad" results better than "good" ones. I guess you're one of the (many) sources of that meme.
There are three ways that the AI "cheats"; it can perform Auto mode reaction shots (you can only use Snap), it "remembers" the position of your units after they leave LoS (most notably allowing psi-attacks on them), and it gets omniscience after turn 20. This isn't one of them.
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