How's the RNG treating you so far? I start most battles surprised, in some sections (forest at night & nightmare world) even all of them. And when my trio of Briley, Sebastian and Smokey don't get ambushed, more often than not all three miss their attacks. Effectively cancelling out my first turn and they could have just getting surprised anyway.
Am i just having a bad luck streak or is the RNG that stacked against you?
I had such events too.
There is probably a simple/normal random number generator here. So it is very possible to have a few / a dozen! times with rows of "surprise".
For example, the "Advanced" ;) RNG in the XCOM game is done like this: if there is a 50% chance of taking damage, we are hit. This is when the game "cheats" to the advantage of the player, and the chance of another second hit is, for example, 25% (despite the fact that it displays 50%)
It is the same when the player attacks and has a 50% chance, if he misses, the next attack has 60% (and it shows 50%)
This is just so as not to irritate the players.
The % numbers I gave are just an EXAMPLE, not the actual values in the Xcom game ;)
In the revamped recent XCom games by Firaxis, what happens is that the game produces a "seed list", and generates all the random numbers between 0 and 100 in a long, long list. When it needs to use a number it takes the next one off the stack to compare to your action, be it firing a weapon, capturing an alien etc.
In the first game, the stack was fixed for the duration of the game. So even if you reloaded and attempt the action again, it would always be the same outcome. There was an option in the second game to "scum save", which meant when you reloaded a save game, it would regenerate the random number list. This did make completing Impossible difficulty a little easier!
