My noob comment to that is, that keep the high STR if you use big guns, else with 1 aimed arm shot from crippler, you can't retaliate.
About the PE thing, the code does not show anything related to PE and crit chance, as long as you both 95% hit chance.
There is a hidden crit chance bonus, that is the 1/10 of the difference between your attack roll and chance to hit, with a maximum of 9.4. This bonus is added to you critical chance, however it's not a reliable source, as depends on your chance to hit roll when attacking. It's effect varies from 0.1 to 9.4, depending on roll and your chance to hit. This hidden bonus is always there (except the burst/flamer bug?) regardless if the shot is aimed or not.
The other hidden bonus (noted on Wiki so not hidden) is the extra crit chance you get when calling shots, that is: AimPenalty * ( 60 + 4 * Luck), where AimPenalty is the usual 60 for eyes, 40 for head, as defined on wiki or visible in game, so a maximum of 60 with aiming for eyes with 10 LUCK.
On a side note, the lower your chance to hit is, the higher the critical failure at a miss. (Depends on that margin (hidden bonus) variable described above, If your chance to hit is 0 and you miss, the chance to critically miss is close to 50%.)
At critical failures the current deterioration of your weapon also matter.
If the miss is not critical, then comes the Jinxed debuff, which gives a 50% chance to fail, but this roll is a separate roll. Critical failure threat roll also depends on the critters luck, bonus is (luck - 5) * 5, meaning low luck means penalty, higher chance of very bad thing happening.
While I am at it:
- Silent Death is allowed only on pistols with pistol animation
+ 14mm Pistol + 233. Pistol, you have to be sneaking and behind (behindish-sides) the target.
- Aimed melee attacks have less aim penalty, penalty is divided by 2.
- Blocking targets give a -10 to hit.
- Combat.fos->CombatAttack needs some kind of restructure, currently single target weapons, like pistols, one shot rifles, depend on hit chance calculation at the beginning of the function, however burst attacks with riffles or flamers, simply ignore if that was a miss. In your face perk is not used at these attacks at all, it only matters at single shot type of shots, melee weapons, rockets and throwing weapons, and only if the target (the one with the In your face perk) has close combat weap equiped or is unarmed and you are in his weapon (melee) range.
- Shotguns, LSW, Boozar burst only in 1 line, multiple targets can only be hit if they are blocking the view.
- One hander trait give +20 to hit on 1 handed weapons and -40 to 2 handed weapons.
- +40 to hit bonus on knocked out target, and +15 if target multihex, whoever that is...
- -20 to hit for each strenght missing from weap requirement.