What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Zevox]

Started playing XCOM2 today. I did play it once before, not too long after the console version came out, but I drifted away from it without finishing it, so I want to try again. Did not start out so hot - the one unit who's scripted to survive the first mission got killed in the second, and then the third was a near-disaster where I lost the two rookies I'd brought and barely got my more experienced units out. Between the dead and wounded, and I did not have enough troops around at that point to even field a full squad for a while, and my money quickly ran out, so recruiting more was not an option. Was kind of worried that I'd have to start over entirely.

Fortunately, things turned around since then. I did have to do one mission down one soldier, but actually pulled that off without losing any more, and afterward made some decent progress towards getting myself more stable.

Have to say though, those early missions really highlight what frustrates me about this series sometimes: the RNG can be ridiculous. When you miss 3 shots in a row that had a 70-75% hit chance each, - or one shot that had a 94% hit chance against an enemy with no cover once - and then get hit back by the enemy you missed because of it, you just kind of have shake your head and wonder what the hell the game expects you to do. It seriously feels sometimes like the game is telling me that my hit odds are at least 20% higher than they actually are, just to mess with me.

[MCerberus]

I direct you to the chart below

Spoiler

Show

If you're playing easy or normal the RNG is actually weighted Fire-Emblem style to fudge the numbers for you. However, the two higher difficulties they preserved the... well the series is known for catastrophic cascading failures.

[Zevox]

I direct you to the chart below

Spoiler

Show

If you're playing easy or normal the RNG is actually weighted Fire-Emblem style to fudge the numbers for you. However, the two higher difficulties they preserved the... well the series is known for catastrophic cascading failures.

(Fun fact: I know basically nothing about the other games on that chart besides their names.)

And wait, hold on, that last makes no sense. Because I am playing on the "normal" difficulty - or at least, what I'm pretty sure is the normal difficulty, since it was the second one on the list and said it was for those familiar with the series. The only one below it said that it was for newcomers to the series, so I presume that was the easy difficulty. Are you sure it's not just the easy difficulty that has those weighted RNG numbers? Because if it's not, that makes my luck with this game all the more ridiculous.

[MCerberus]

According to the xcom lead dev

There’s actually a number of things that tweak that number in the player’s favor at the lower difficulty settings

Someone crunched the numbers on Reddit a long time ago but it's buried in search results by now.
Anyway, never pay for rookies, you can get free units from Guerilla ops and a "rookies" scanning site usually appears in the first couple of months.

[IthilanorStPete]

I remember reading something about how Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, of all games, tackled the RNG problem. As I understand it, basically every dice roll was rounded to either 100%, 50%, or 0%. Probably makes for a few less amazing beating-the-odds moments, but eliminating the frustration of missing ~90% chances sounds like it's worth it.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

(Fun fact: I know basically nothing about the other games on that chart besides their names.)

And wait, hold on, that last makes no sense. Because I am playing on the "normal" difficulty - or at least, what I'm pretty sure is the normal difficulty, since it was the second one on the list and said it was for those familiar with the series. The only one below it said that it was for newcomers to the series, so I presume that was the easy difficulty. Are you sure it's not just the easy difficulty that has those weighted RNG numbers? Because if it's not, that makes my luck with this game all the more ridiculous.

Yeah, it turns out the human brain sucks at intuitive statistics, so the numbers the game gives are changed to reflect what we intuitively feel like they should be. However, unless I misremember, the actual accuracy caps out at 95%; it's literally impossible to make a shot a sure thing, no matter what the game tells you.


EDIT:
Here's a lovely video on how games 'cheat' to improve the players' experience, including XCOM 2.

[Eldan]

MMORPGs lean heavily into that. If a million people play regularly for hours, then at some point, someone is going to fail 10 90% chances in a row. And they are going to complain. So there's usually some kind of algorithm that gives you better chances the more you fail.

[Triaxx]

One of the things I like about Dungeons and Dragons Online. It doesn't do that hand holding BS. Succeed or fail, it's on you.

[Rodin]

According to the xcom lead dev

Someone crunched the numbers on Reddit a long time ago but it's buried in search results by now.
Anyway, never pay for rookies, you can get free units from Guerilla ops and a "rookies" scanning site usually appears in the first couple of months.

I had a discussion about this with someone complaining about the RNG in Battle Brothers just the other day. They were complaining about how Battle Brothers had crappy RNG compared to "realistic" numbers like you see in XCOM. In fact, XCOM cheats in your favor. A lot. And not just on easy difficulty - the bonus gets smaller on Veteran and only disappears on the highest difficulty.

From what I recall from that thread:

1) XCOM has a "base" +10-20% chance to hit secretly applied to all XCOM characters on all shots above 50% hit chance. The variation is based on difficulty.

2) If you miss your first shot, you get an additional 10% chance to hit on the second.

3) If you miss your second shot, you get another 10% chance to hit.

The same is true of enemies shooting at you - they have an inherent malus applied to their shots, and that malus increases if they hit you.

------

Fire Emblem has a different system. It doesn't "cheat" per se, as the RNG is applied both to you and your enemies. However, it does weight the numbers. I forget the exact math, but the affect is to draw the outcomes to the extremes. A high percent chance to hit is MUCH higher than is displayed. A low chance to hit is much lower. This is to encourage a certain style of play. Players don't risk multiple 70% chance swings at their units because that's almost certain death, and they don't bother swinging at enemies below 30% chance unless they're desperate.

Fire Emblem's system is more biased, but it is also more fair because it applies to both you and your opponent. Playing a game that doesn't weight the numbers at all is downright weird. Multiple 90% swings in a row that miss are the norm in Battle Brothers, but you rarely notice that much because there are a lot of attack rolls going in and a single bad roll is unlikely to result in a death. On the flip side, I quickly learned to spam arrows at Geists with only a 5% chance to hit. Without Fire Emblem weighting you have a pretty decent chance of getting lucky.

[Man_Over_Game]

One of the things I like about Dungeons and Dragons Online. It doesn't do that hand holding BS. Succeed or fail, it's on you.

There was an interesting debate some gamers had the other day. Is it better for the developer to lie in your favor, or is any level of hand-holding considered as not putting trust and power to the player?

Does it matter if we're talking statistics, or physics?

For example, a lot of games use "Coyote Time", or "Just-in-time Jump" to allow you to jump briefly after falling off of a ledge to compensate for a player's poor reaction time on platformers (especially 3d platformers). Is that more acceptable than changing the statistics?

Or is it only unacceptable when the game specifically provides false information that breaks our expectations (like lying about RNG)? If the player gets what he expected (such as hitting when your hit chance is 90%, or jumping just past the edge of a platform), is it a bad thing?



What separates the difference between jumping near the edge of a platform vs. a listed percent chance of failure?

[warty goblin]

Fudging jump times doesn't bother me very much, since it's just compensating for the inherent imprecision of the control scheme. People don't generally deliberately run off ledges and forget to jump, because we know where our feet are, have precise control over stride length and foot placement and so on. None of this is available in a game, just the engine's binary assessment of if I'm still on the ledge or not, which forgoes such niceties as which leg I'm jumping with, where in my stride I'm jumping, and so on. Its boiling down a complex piece of kinematics to the timing of a button press, within a certain margin judging in favor of the player isn't more arbitrary than judging against.

Fudging probability annoys me a lot more. Firstly because the game is displaying an artificial degree of precision, and then not even telling you the true value. Secondly because people are already terrible at understanding probability, and reinforcing their bad understanding is, generally speaking, not a good thing. And unlike timing when Mario jumps, this does have real world ramifications.

That said, I can understand why XCOM does it. Besides the obvious make the player feel badass level, there's an odd bit of statistics going on with shots in game. Because shooting is an expensive action in the game and missing is a complete waste, you are strongly incentivized to only take good shots. So most of your shots will come from the upper half of the probability distribution. If the game didn't cook the books, a huge proportion of the shots you miss are ones that were substantially in your favor,which just increases the feeling that the game is unfair. After all, how many 5% hits do you make? Probably zero, because you never shoot at odds that low.

On the other end of the spectrum I've played a fair amount of Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, which is a reasonably accurate simulation of dreadnought battleship combat. You're always shooting at very low odds of success, to the point where I'd bet the majority of my hits have been scored with a hit probability under 5%, simply because its damn hard to get a hit chance above that. But because you shoot a lot of guns a lot of times, you get a lot of hits at 5%.

[Man_Over_Game]

Fudging jump times doesn't bother me very much, since it's just compensating for the inherent imprecision of the control scheme. People don't generally deliberately run off ledges and forget to jump, because we know where our feet are, have precise control over stride length and foot placement and so on. None of this is available in a game, just the engine's binary assessment of if I'm still on the ledge or not, which forgoes such niceties as which leg I'm jumping with, where in my stride I'm jumping, and so on. Its boiling down a complex piece of kinematics to the timing of a button press, within a certain margin judging in favor of the player isn't more arbitrary than judging against.

Fudging probability annoys me a lot more. Firstly because the game is displaying an artificial degree of precision, and then not even telling you the true value. Secondly because people are already terrible at understanding probability, and reinforcing their bad understanding is, generally speaking, not a good thing. And unlike timing when Mario jumps, this does have real world ramifications.

That said, I can understand why XCOM does it. Besides the obvious make the player feel badass level, there's an odd bit of statistics going on with shots in game. Because shooting is an expensive action in the game and missing is a complete waste, you are strongly incentivized to only take good shots. So most of your shots will come from the upper half of the probability distribution. If the game didn't cook the books, a huge proportion of the shots you miss are ones that were substantially in your favor,which just increases the feeling that the game is unfair. After all, how many 5% hits do you make? Probably zero, because you never shoot at odds that low.

On the other end of the spectrum I've played a fair amount of Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, which is a reasonably accurate simulation of dreadnought battleship combat. You're always shooting at very low odds of success, to the point where I'd bet the majority of my hits have been scored with a hit probability under 5%, simply because its damn hard to get a hit chance above that. But because you shoot a lot of guns a lot of times, you get a lot of hits at 5%.

Interesting point.

It could probably work well to not have a 0-100 chance system, but instead show the player a "layer" of possible success. For example, "Bad, Possible, Probable, and Good" Bad could be between 0%-30%, Possible is 30%-60%, Probable is 60%-80%, and Good is 80%+.

So you don't know the exact odds, you just know that you have a "probable" chance of success.

This would give developers what they're looking for, in giving players what they expect, while not having to play the losing game of "fudging statistics around human psychology".

[tyckspoon]

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Fire Emblem has a different system. It doesn't "cheat" per se, as the RNG is applied both to you and your enemies. However, it does weight the numbers. I forget the exact math, but the affect is to draw the outcomes to the extremes. A high percent chance to hit is MUCH higher than is displayed. A low chance to hit is much lower. This is to encourage a certain style of play. Players don't risk multiple 70% chance swings at their units because that's almost certain death, and they don't bother swinging at enemies below 30% chance unless they're desperate.

The Fire Emblem RNG is actually rolling twice and averaging the results, IIRC; that averaged number is then compared to the displayed hit chance, so the long-term expected result is 55-56 (not sure which way it rounds), not an even distribution over 1-100. The upshot, as you mentioned, is that everything over about 80% to hit or under like 30% can be practically played as 100% or 0%, but it's not because the individual rolls are weighted.

There are a couple of games (mostly the older ones) that actually do just use a straight 1-100 RNG check. They are notoriously more difficult.

[Zevox]

Anyway, never pay for rookies, you can get free units from Guerilla ops and a "rookies" scanning site usually appears in the first couple of months.

I probably wouldn't have ordinarily, but when I'm down to five soldiers total and three of them are wounded and won't be back in action for two to three weeks, I think it's kind of necessary.

I remember reading something about how Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, of all games, tackled the RNG problem. As I understand it, basically every dice roll was rounded to either 100%, 50%, or 0%. Probably makes for a few less amazing beating-the-odds moments, but eliminating the frustration of missing ~90% chances sounds like it's worth it.

It does, though that's not a rounding thing. It works on a very straightforward system: you either have no cover, half cover, or full cover. No cover means a 100% hit chance and enhanced crit chance (I forget by how much), half cover means 50%, full cover means 0% - though there is still a point to shooting even someone in full cover, since you'll hit their cover and reduce its effectiveness to half cover for future shots (this can happen to half cover too, destroying it entirely, but doesn't always). Simple system, but quite effective, I felt.

I had a discussion about this with someone complaining about the RNG in Battle Brothers just the other day. They were complaining about how Battle Brothers had crappy RNG compared to "realistic" numbers like you see in XCOM. In fact, XCOM cheats in your favor. A lot. And not just on easy difficulty - the bonus gets smaller on Veteran and only disappears on the highest difficulty.

From what I recall from that thread:

1) XCOM has a "base" +10-20% chance to hit secretly applied to all XCOM characters on all shots above 50% hit chance. The variation is based on difficulty.

2) If you miss your first shot, you get an additional 10% chance to hit on the second.

3) If you miss your second shot, you get another 10% chance to hit.

The same is true of enemies shooting at you - they have an inherent malus applied to their shots, and that malus increases if they hit you.

I can barely believe that, because it feels like nearly the opposite is true. Not just for my current run, but for my previous one and the times I played the first (new) XCOM as well.

Fire Emblem has a different system. It doesn't "cheat" per se, as the RNG is applied both to you and your enemies. However, it does weight the numbers. I forget the exact math, but the affect is to draw the outcomes to the extremes. A high percent chance to hit is MUCH higher than is displayed. A low chance to hit is much lower. This is to encourage a certain style of play. Players don't risk multiple 70% chance swings at their units because that's almost certain death, and they don't bother swinging at enemies below 30% chance unless they're desperate.

The Fire Emblem RNG is actually rolling twice and averaging the results, IIRC; that averaged number is then compared to the displayed hit chance, so the long-term expected result is 55-56 (not sure which way it rounds), not an even distribution over 1-100. The upshot, as you mentioned, is that everything over about 80% to hit or under like 30% can be practically played as 100% or 0%, but it's not because the individual rolls are weighted.

There are a couple of games (mostly the older ones) that actually do just use a straight 1-100 RNG check. They are notoriously more difficult.

I am aware of that with Fire Emblem, and personally I quite like the effect that it has on the game. Attacks that are supposed to have a high chance of hitting actually feel reliable (but not guaranteed, missing a high-accuracy attack does happen from time to time), while you're justifiably hesitant to even try if your odds are bad.

I should say, another point of comparison between Fire Emblem and XCOM in this area though, is that Fire Emblem usually gives you better odds of hitting than XCOM on the display to begin with. Most of your attacks in Fire Emblem will typically have a hit chance in the 80s-90s with little trouble - it only really gets lower in specific circumstances. Either your attacker has a low skill stat reducing their accuracy, you're trying to attack something with a high speed/avoid stat (usually a Thief/Assassin or Myrmidon/Swordmaster type), or the target is on a tile that increases their avoid stat like a forest. Getting a genuinely low chance to hit usually takes several of those coming together.

By contrast, with XCOM, the default seems to be somewhere in the 60-70% to hit range. Half-cover tends to make shots have a mid-50s to high-60s chance of hitting, and even no cover doesn't get above the mid-70s (at low levels at least) unless you're very close to the target. To get that 94% hit chance I mentioned I not only had a target flanked to eliminate his cover, but quite close by (just a few spaces), and my unit was on the top of a building to gain an elevation bonus to his shot.

Which kind of brings me to the reason that XCOM's RNG is frustrating. It is a strategy game - thus, in playing it, you expect to be rewarded for good strategic moves such as that one, which give you excellent odds of success and good positioning. When that gets taken away because the RNG just doesn't feel like cooperating no matter how good the odds were, it's pretty frustrating. When that kind of thing happens repeatedly in quick succession, it results in cries of "Oh come on!" and the me questioning why I'm even playing the game.

Playing a game that doesn't weight the numbers at all is downright weird. Multiple 90% swings in a row that miss are the norm in Battle Brothers, but you rarely notice that much because there are a lot of attack rolls going in and a single bad roll is unlikely to result in a death.

This is also a pertinent point there. Because of how lethal XCOM is made to be and how few units you have, especially at the start, missing attacks in it can be very likely to result in character death. Especially when you miss multiple attacks in succession. That, too, makes the RNG more frustrating compared to other games.

Don't get me wrong, I like difficulty in my games. I really loved playing Cindered Shadows on Hard, which was a challenging experience with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and I intend to challenge the game on Maddening someday. But when the difficulty feels more like it's because of factors completely beyond my control than because I made any mistakes, it's not fun, it's irritating. That's perhaps why I generally like action games for a challenge more than any RNG-based ones: there it's legitimately only your decisions that determine your success or failure (assuming the game is well-designed, anyway), since nothing is up to pure chance.

There was an interesting debate some gamers had the other day. Is it better for the developer to lie in your favor, or is any level of hand-holding considered as not putting trust and power to the player?

Does it matter if we're talking statistics, or physics?

For example, a lot of games use "Coyote Time", or "Just-in-time Jump" to allow you to jump briefly after falling off of a ledge to compensate for a player's poor reaction time on platformers (especially 3d platformers). Is that more acceptable than changing the statistics?

Or is it only unacceptable when the game specifically provides false information that breaks our expectations (like lying about RNG)? If the player gets what he expected (such as hitting when your hit chance is 90%, or jumping just past the edge of a platform), is it a bad thing?


What separates the difference between jumping near the edge of a platform vs. a listed percent chance of failure?

That kind of lenience in a platformer is easily understandable. If you feel you need to jump at the last possible moment like that to make it, it's not just a matter of timing, after all, but of understanding where that particular game draws the line on when you no longer count as being on the platform. Some are more lenient and your character model will be half off the thing before you start falling, such as the old Mega Man games; others are much less forgiving and the moment you have more than a toe out over the pit, you're falling. But it's kind of annoying to go through a trial-and-error period of figuring out how lenient a particular game is on that, especially if it's the kind where falling means death.

[warty goblin]

Which kind of brings me to the reason that XCOM's RNG is frustrating. It is a strategy game - thus, in playing it, you expect to be rewarded for good strategic moves such as that one, which give you excellent odds of success and good positioning. When that gets taken away because the RNG just doesn't feel like cooperating no matter how good the odds were, it's pretty frustrating. When that kind of thing happens repeatedly in quick succession, it results in cries of "Oh come on!" and the me questioning why I'm even playing the game.

This is also a pertinent point there. Because of how lethal XCOM is made to be and how few units you have, especially at the start, missing attacks in it can be very likely to result in character death. Especially when you miss multiple attacks in succession. That, too, makes the RNG more frustrating compared to other games.

Don't get me wrong, I like difficulty in my games. I really loved playing Cindered Shadows on Hard, which was a challenging experience with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and I intend to challenge the game on Maddening someday. But when the difficulty feels more like it's because of factors completely beyond my control than because I made any mistakes, it's not fun, it's irritating. That's perhaps why I generally like action games for a challenge more than any RNG-based ones: there it's legitimately only your decisions that determine your success or failure (assuming the game is well-designed, anyway), since nothing is up to pure chance.

I think one of the less than ideal elements of XCOM's combat design is that shooting is expensive in terms of actions (at least half your turn, plus hastening the need to burn half a turn reloading down the line), and almost entirely binary in terms of outcomes. You hit or you miss, and if you miss there's absolutely no benefit. I guess you can graze, but that's just a crappy hit. This makes missing feel like a really big deal, particularly in the early game when you've only got 4 shots a round, the least ability to recover from bad situations, and your dudes are more likely to miss anyway.

(And then XCOM 2 really doesn't do itself favors with its extremely harsh and also very random wound penalties, so if you get shot because you couldn't kill some alien bastard, you lose a soldier for like a month even though he took like 2 damage. It's a very hard penalty for something that might not have been a mistake on your part, with the lack of correlation to actual damage dealt making it feel arbitrary. This is, I suspect, why like 80% of enemies default to using an ability that will be very bad for you in exactly 1 turn, instead of just shooting at you. Getting damaged is so terrible most of the enemy roster is designed around not actually hurting you. It's the most passive aggressive alien invasion ever.)

There's a number of ways a game can ameliorate this problem. Wasteland 3 rolls it's to-hit dice per-bullet instead of per-action, so a four round burst is four chances to hit. Since you effectively get more attacks per round with automatic weapons, shooting on lower odds isn't as risky and failure/success has more gradations than "you wasted your entire turn." Gears Tactics takes a different route to the same end by giving you 3 AP per turn (with the ability to get more for certain actions) and not forcing your turn to end when you attack. You can shoot more, so missing isn't as punishing. It also does some amount of ballistic simulation, so partial hits, or hitting the unit next to the one you were aiming at, is a thing. If your game includes any sort of a suppression mechanic, shooting becomes a form of crowd control and can be very useful; it's not a turn based tactics game, but hosing down a coverpoint with an MG in Division 2 can be quite handy because it forces the enemy to stay in hiding, reducing how many people are currently trying to kill you. If XCOM's cover degradation mechanic was more reliable and nuanced, that would help quite a bit as well.

[Zevox]

I think one of the less than ideal elements of XCOM's combat design is that shooting is expensive in terms of actions (at least half your turn, plus hastening the need to burn half a turn reloading down the line), and almost entirely binary in terms of outcomes. You hit or you miss, and if you miss there's absolutely no benefit. I guess you can graze, but that's just a crappy hit. This makes missing feel like a really big deal, particularly in the early game when you've only got 4 shots a round, the least ability to recover from bad situations, and your dudes are more likely to miss anyway.

Also fair.

And then XCOM 2 really doesn't do itself favors with its extremely harsh and also very random wound penalties, so if you get shot because you couldn't kill some alien bastard, you lose a soldier for like a month even though he took like 2 damage. It's a very hard penalty for something that might not have been a mistake on your part, with the lack of correlation to actual damage dealt making it feel arbitrary.

Oh definitely, that's pretty iritating. Case in point: I just finished a mission where I had only two units get damaged, both for the same amount of health, from the same attack (it was an AoE). One was actually on fire afterward, though I did put that out by using a med-pack on her that turn. Yet the one that wasn't on fire (but whom I did also heal on a later turn) ended the mission "gravely wounded" and out for 15 days, while the one that had been on fire is just "wounded" and will be out for 6. What?

To be fair, if the game is like the first those penalties will mostly disappear once I get better armor, since you don't suffer them unless you take more damage than the armor adds to your health. But it is still a huge early-game issue and the lack of consistency with it makes it more irritating than it otherwise would be.

[Sermil]

There's a number of ways a game can ameliorate this problem. Wasteland 3 rolls it's to-hit dice per-bullet instead of per-action, so a four round burst is four chances to hit. Since you effectively get more attacks per round with automatic weapons, shooting on lower odds isn't as risky and failure/success has more gradations than "you wasted your entire turn." Gears Tactics takes a different route to the same end by giving you 3 AP per turn (with the ability to get more for certain actions) and not forcing your turn to end when you attack. You can shoot more, so missing isn't as punishing. It also does some amount of ballistic simulation, so partial hits, or hitting the unit next to the one you were aiming at, is a thing. If your game includes any sort of a suppression mechanic, shooting becomes a form of crowd control and can be very useful; it's not a turn based tactics game, but hosing down a coverpoint with an MG in Division 2 can be quite handy because it forces the enemy to stay in hiding, reducing how many people are currently trying to kill you. If XCOM's cover degradation mechanic was more reliable and nuanced, that would help quite a bit as well.

The early Civs had a similar problem. There was no health, so you when you fought, the results were only "Unit A died; unit B is fine" or "Unit B died; unit A is fine" and the probabilities were dependent on their relative strength. That lead to things like the famous "spearmen kill a battleship", and you could certainly get screwed by the RNG. It wasn't as bad as XCOM because you frequently had 10 or 20 units, and you could always build more, so one or two bad rolls was annoying but rarely determinative.

Now Civ seems all the way on the other side, you seem to always know exactly what the results will be. I think technically there's some randomness but I've never seen the results differ materially from the predictions. It's never bothered me much; there are things that bother me about the new Civs but the lack of randomness certainly isn't one of them.

[warty goblin]

Oh definitely, that's pretty iritating. Case in point: I just finished a mission where I had only two units get damaged, both for the same amount of health, from the same attack (it was an AoE). One was actually on fire afterward, though I did put that out by using a med-pack on her that turn. Yet the one that wasn't on fire (but whom I did also heal on a later turn) ended the mission "gravely wounded" and out for 15 days, while the one that had been on fire is just "wounded" and will be out for 6. What?

To be fair, if the game is like the first those penalties will mostly disappear once I get better armor, since you don't suffer them unless you take more damage than the armor adds to your health. But it is still a huge early-game issue and the lack of consistency with it makes it more irritating than it otherwise would be.

They won't. In XCOM 2 armor adds extra health, but the game doesn't (as far as I can tell) distinguish it from normal health. So any damage will put a unit out of commission for a while. According to a quick search, it looks like recovery time is dependent on the lowest HP percentage the were ever at, but the recovery intervals are very broad, and substantially overlap for different wound severities.

This is somewhat ameliorated by later armors granting actual damage-reducing armor, albeit generally in fairly small amounts.

I can sort of get what they were going for, since it got pretty easy to facetank damage in XCOM 1, and wound severity can vary widely even for injuries from the same weapon. But I don't think the game hangs enough fiction or obvious simulation on the results to make it feel sensible that Alice took 5 damage and is in the hospital for a week, but Bob to 1 and is out for 13 days. This is, after all, a game where grenades do damage with absolute laser precision, but bullets can go just about anywhere.

The early Civs had a similar problem. There was no health, so you when you fought, the results were only "Unit A died; unit B is fine" or "Unit B died; unit A is fine" and the probabilities were dependent on their relative strength. That lead to things like the famous "spearmen kill a battleship", and you could certainly get screwed by the RNG. It wasn't as bad as XCOM because you frequently had 10 or 20 units, and you could always build more, so one or two bad rolls was annoying but rarely determinative.

Now Civ seems all the way on the other side, you seem to always know exactly what the results will be. I think technically there's some randomness but I've never seen the results differ materially from the predictions. It's never bothered me much; there are things that bother me about the new Civs but the lack of randomness certainly isn't one of them.

Civ games are large enough level that having substantial randomness would feel very wonky, although in a lot of ways it's probably necessary to capture some weird outcomes like, say, Hannibal. But I wouldn't put that high on my list of problems with modern Civ games; the absolutely miserable 1UPT combat is way, way farther up there.

[Rodin]

A-ha!

I found the Reddit thread that goes into the details of how XCOM 2 cheats for you. It includes how to look at the .ini files yourself and change them if you like, as well as a link to a tweet showing the code for the "increase chance to hit on miss"

https://www.reddit.com/r/XCOM2/comme...g4&sh=1fce6b7b

I checked my .ini files and confirmed. Fun fact: Chimera Squad uses the same .ini files. Including a ton of stuff that doesn't exist in that game.

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For wounds, there's a mod I consider essential. It judges how bad the injury is based on how many HP were lost. If the wound is light, your soldier will be wounded for less time than Vanilla. If they barely survived, your soldier will be wounded for longer than Vanilla.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=1149730999

[Zevox]

A-ha!

I found the Reddit thread that goes into the details of how XCOM 2 cheats for you. It includes how to look at the .ini files yourself and change them if you like, as well as a link to a tweet showing the code for the "increase chance to hit on miss"

https://www.reddit.com/r/XCOM2/comme...g4&sh=1fce6b7b

I checked my .ini files and confirmed. Fun fact: Chimera Squad uses the same .ini files. Including a ton of stuff that doesn't exist in that game.

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For wounds, there's a mod I consider essential. It judges how bad the injury is based on how many HP were lost. If the wound is light, your soldier will be wounded for less time than Vanilla. If they barely survived, your soldier will be wounded for longer than Vanilla.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=1149730999

Good to know the former academically I guess - even if it does make my experiences with the game make even less sense - but I'm afraid that any suggestions of modifying things are wasted on me, being a console player.

[LibraryOgre]

And, now the Eternal Champion of Tamriel became the Agent who caused the Warp in the West.

Any suggestions for mods, aside from "Passive Cliff Racers", which I am already doing?

[Eldan]

There's a few good inventory mods out there, as I find Morrowind's inventory system pretty horrible by now. At least one for searchable inventory, the late game is a pain otherwise.

[Aotrs Commander]

First thing I did when it became apparent X-Com 2 did not have X-Com 1's option to disable preserve random seed was to go find a mod that did it. I'll do my save-scam reloading, thank you. (The punishment of reloading usually multiple times when RNG throws a wobbly in whatever game is more than penalty enough, ta very much.)

I REALLY hate Firaxis' obsession with that, that sets it as the default back through I think even to Civ 2 - it's a low-grade ironman, and if I wanted to play ironman, I'd turn Ironman on. And they seem to be ALMOST the only ones that do it (I think Creatue does with Total War for some stuff) - but no-one else does. I do hate when people (game dev or otherwise) try to tell me how I should play a sngle player game, the thing I do SPECIFICALLY to not have to worry about anything other than entertaining myself...



(That issue, more than anything else, is what finally convinced me I wasn't going to get Pokémon Sword and Shield - when they tacitly said "the way you want to play? Yeah, you can't do that anymore, because XP share is now on forever." And I was like "okay, then I won't be playing at all, then, will I?")

[GloatingSwine]

Fixed seed doesn’t stop you savescumming anyway, it changes how you do it so you look for an order of operations that uses up the bad rolls on actions that either matter less or will still succeed anyway.

[Aotrs Commander]

Fixed seed doesn’t stop you savescumming anyway, it changes how you do it so you look for an order of operations that uses up the bad rolls on actions that either matter less or will still succeed anyway.

Yeah, which means it just adds more reloading and tedium, 'cos if you're gonna do it, you're gonna do it. (See: making pointless diplomatic requests in Total Warhammer to use up the bad rolls for, like assassinations and stuff.)



I mean, for frack's sake, time was games would come with actual, literal cheats (sometimes as easter eggs, sometimes right there in the options menu) you could activate, for, y'know, fun or if you got stuck. I NEVER would have completed TIE Fighter at all (and likely just rage-quit) back in the day if it hadn't had that submenu.

It only a relatively recent obsession with trying to make that not a thing (which I think can be squarely placed on the rise of multiplayer and thus the problems of people wanting to cheat THERE, instead of against an AI outside a competative environment where it doesn't MATTER).

But that's the problem isn't it? A lot of devs now (GameFreaks, for example and Nintendo generally, though they've always done that) want to tell you how to play with your toys even when you're not playing with the other children, which I think the digitial equivilent of coming around my house and forbidding me from playing with my Action Force toys because I'm playing it wrong because I'm mixing them with my A-team toys (which were at the same scale) and having them join Cobra-side because it makes the numbers more even, or from using the little ship models from Escape from Atlantis to play Man o'War with, or stop me playing BattleTech because I was using LEGO space men to represent new homebrew Clan mechs or something.

I bought it, it's my toy, I'll play with it how I want, thank you; if I'm not playing as part of a competation (and I will NEVER be playing as part of a competition, because I'm practically anti-competative), you don't get to tell me I'm playing it wrong.



Back vaguley on topic, I have been having a bit of a cack at Frostpunk now the last bit came out, so I have three expansions worth of stuff to play with.

This was somewhat hampered by me having to take the primary idiot into replace the PSU. As Wednesday night, we had another "abrupt power-off, won't restart" error, which we thought we'd fixed by changing the surge suppressor back in June. On checking the PSU was seven years old, and talking to a mate of mine two two hours earlier who's PSU had dided after taking months, I figured sod it, change the PSU, it's the oldest part of the computer, and if the problem is the motherboard after all (it ought not to be it was new Jan 2018), wouldn't hurt to have replaced the PSU anyway. So, fingers crossed. ('Course, I'm away for a week tomorrow, so...)

I did managed to get Nanny's old computer (which was brought back here the last time - she died in June, a few days before it started happening) running enough to do Internet Stuff, but it would never handle games. And after uninstalling Norton, I even got it to not run at 100% disk speed and to merely "slow" not "phenominally slow.)

[Anteros]

I never really understood the point in cheating the system in strategy games. At the end of the day you're only cheating yourself of the challenge and thus the fun.

Still, it's a single player game, so if someone enjoys breaking the game more than playing it as intended who am I to tell them otherwise?

[factotum]

I mean, for frack's sake, time was games would come with actual, literal cheats (sometimes as easter eggs, sometimes right there in the options menu) you could activate, for, y'know, fun or if you got stuck. I NEVER would have completed TIE Fighter at all (and likely just rage-quit) back in the day if it hadn't had that submenu.

Even without that, it often used to be possible to actually change the difficulty of a game partway through if you were struggling--I would never have completed the original Dark Forces if I hadn't been able to drop the difficulty for the final mission. It annoys me that they often force you into one difficulty upon starting a game these days, because that often then boils down to a choice: do I start on Easy so I can be reasonably sure I'll finish the game but may well find it too unchallenging, or start on a higher difficulty for the challenge but risk never being able to complete it?

[Eldan]

It's sandbox mode. Sometimes, I just want to see what a game can do. And for example, I enjoy Cities: Skyline a lot more with unlimited budget to build weird configurations. Or sometimes, I just want to put something in orbit and then fly it around the solar system in Kerbal, instead of doing a dozen launches and docking maneuvers to assemble it.

[Triaxx]

The first time perhaps, but after struggling for several weeks and banging your head against the wall to beat a particularly hard mission, very little is quite as cathartic as rolling up with a few unstoppable units and utterly trouncing the opposition.

[GloatingSwine]

I never really understood the point in cheating the system in strategy games. At the end of the day you're only cheating yourself of the challenge and thus the fun.

I think it depends on how much it feels like the player and the AI are playing by the same rules.

The more the asymmetrical the rules of play feel the more likely it is that players will approach it like a puzzle game, and that means using puzzle-like tools like retrying until you find the move that works.