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[Mephansteras]

There is speculation that the saved seed is there to specifically deter save scumming just to get a good roll every time.

In any case, I play Ironman so I don't really care. Only times I'll crash it out to reload is if a bug screws things up. And, even then, I'm likely to just roll with the bug as long as it isn't truly game breaking.

[sambojin]

I wasn't actually trying to support save-scumming (I tend to play plenty of rogue-likes, so the perma-death idea is fine with me). But it makes you wonder if this was the best choice. Especially with people saying that AI decisions are made completely determinately off either squad positioning/actions, the RNG seed, or both.

It does make it a very good strategy game in the sense that it's learnable. You can create strategies, with an effective outcome, due to your positioning and tactics. But you could probably only learn these things by replaying a turn over and over again, to see how the computer player reacts. Games like openCiv (I think it may have been that, something similar anyway) made this choice, and it made for a good game.

Anyway, it's a horribly meta-gaming way of looking at it, that you could gain at least a little bit of an idea of the alien's actions due to experience of such things, but I wonder why it was designed this way?

Maybe it tended to form more cohesive enemy groups? Maybe if the RNG was updated on other levels, in other ways, the AI couldn't form an effective strategy? Not that it's impossible to have several variables that are random going at once, for firing/soldier-enemy stats/AI choices. But maybe this gave the best and easiest to program game, that gave players a good challenge, whilst not being unfair?

Anyway, I hope that there's a DLC AI update at some point. I'd buy that. Shitloads more multiplayer maps, more techs, more playstyles, and some different AI types.

Maybe not as one DLC. But different AI types would be interesting, regardless of turn-based RNG seeding. Fighting against a close range horde, or a bunch of stealthy runners, or suppressive-max, would all make for very interesting and different play-throughs. Even having it vs-alien-types as campaigns. Vs sectoids? The floater/muton elite invasion? Holy-F-robotic-invasion?

I'd rather buy something like that, which is kind-of-easy-to-program, than buy a few armour baubles and a few one-off-missions.

Hell, I hope they milk it that way. It makes better cheese.   

[EnigmaticHat]

For me, there are two big LOS issues.  One, the game will sometimes fail to "redraw" line of sight or who can be shot (or... something, I think that's what's happening), so you end up with things like a guy right next to an alien who can't shoot it.  This one is simple, you just wait for the game to catch up.  Switching between guys seems to help.  In my experience, the game will never guess low in terms of whether you can see someone, if an alien is obviously in sight and you can't shoot it or see it, just wait for a little and hit tab a bunch (or click on units if they've already moved).  I think the reason for this is that the game will try to tell you how many aliens each agent can see, so it will recalculate line of sight for each agent you select, fixing the issue when you jump back to the guy you actually want to shoot with.  This issue is almost certainly the reason for those pictures of agents right next to aliens with "no targets in sight" messages.

The other is that buildings are poorly stitched together sometimes.  This is what I meant by not guessing low, in my experience the game is way too generous about when people can be seen.  I've spotted a cyberdisk in between the roof of the building at the back of the army base level and the top of the front wall.  I also know I've seen Beagle fire a rocket through the corner of a building on his ironman playthrough.  UFOs in particular seem to have this problem.  It seems to me there are places in the game where there is an impossibly thin "space" where walls and ceilings meet that can be seen and shot through.

That being said, I'd be careful what I call a LOS glitch.  Remember that the game works under the logic that soldiers are constantly peeking out of cover and stepping out of it to take shots.  This means that for purposes of seeing and being seen, soldiers in cover essentially occupy the tiles to either side of their cover.  This is usually intuitive but can result in some very strange situations such as this:

 |A
 |
 ---
 X

Where A is an alien taking cover to the side of the entrance to a small UFO, and X is an Xcom agent taking cover outside it, and they can both see each other.  Its not what you'd expect, but it does sort of make sense by the game's internal logic.

There are also a few glitches out there that appear to be LOS glitches but are actually something else.  For example, the "enemies appearing in the midst of your troops without being seen" glitch isn't your troops failing to spot the enemies, its a result of the devs optimizing the code for unseen aliens moving around so that they teleport between waypoints rather than walking.  Thankfully, as far as I know this only happens with unseen enemies, so as long as you don't get very unlucky you should have time to deal with your new friends.  I've also seen a soldier shot from nowhere, who survived and during his turn still couldn't see the muton that hit him.  I have no idea what causes that, but fortunately it seems to be vanishingly rare.

And that is the extent of all the LOS issues I've encountered.  They pissed me off somewhat when I did my first successful playthrough (and I did an ironman mini-savescum whenever they happened, only time I ever savescum), but later I largely stopped mini-savescumming and all these issues are honestly pretty manageable unless you get terribly unlucky.  There may be some I haven't encountered, especially since I've been down a computer for a month and updates may have introduced more bugs.

PS the random seed not changing when you reload is almost certainly an intentional design situation, it would be crazily easy to set another seed whenever a game is loaded.  Its likely either to make ironman savescumming less practical, or to force the player to change their decisions when they reload if they want a different outcome.

[Jelle]

Hey me again, sorry if it's getting old.

Don't know if this is the right place for this, as it's not discussion of the game per se. I can remove this post as needed.
Anyway! I just wanted you guys to know I'm having a stab at modding this game, but I'm still considering what to change. Warning, big write outs in ze spoilers.

Here's my initial thoughts for combat.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Can't tinker with the combat mechanics at its core to remove all random elements but I can normalize it a bit to feel less like playing russian roulette.
To that end I think I'll quadruple all health values to change the pace of the game and give more meaning to buffs and penalties over multiple turns, e.g holo targeting, smoke grenade, disablign shot, and having more shots fired wich should even out the randomness. Or I could lower all weapon damage, or a combination of the two.
Either way I found the strategy to just position your troops for a full scale attack on the enemy ending it or decimating enemy troops in a single turn, to strong and frankly a little boring. Should also put more emphasis on flanking enemy positions, wich was pretty nonexistant in my playthrough because everything dies before I could get in position.
I'm a little concerned that would make chrysalids and berskers to strong, might need to change those to since the strategy of killing them before they close in might be a tad harder. Also medkits might need a change if weapon damage is tweaked, will see how it pans out.

And the strategy side.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

First order of business is upping research times, especially for lategame tech. I found it to easy to just rush plasma and never even touch laser weapons. With higher research times it'll actually be beneficial to construct additional labs, I found them to be absolutely obsolete in a regular playthrough, still finishing techs in three days with no single lab late in the game. As a rough estimation I could double mid game research time and quadruple late game research time, so that there's more meaningful choices on what to focus research.
Engineer workshops is the same story, found them obsolete apart from netting some early bonus engineers to rush more satelites. Might dramatically increase costs of engineer projects to make the bonus from additional workshops meaningful.
I'd also like to change the heavy emphasis on spamming satelites early on as quickly as possible to reap in silly amounts of money. Might need to change panic values and modify money income from coverage and stuff, don't really have a plan here yet. May also reduce the engineer/scientist gain from abduction missions to further make labs/workshops a viable alternative.

Opinions, I need them! If you have an idea of your own or want to comment on what I have in mind do let me know, msg or post it I don't know wich is most appropriate.

[Knirisk]

Hey me again, sorry if it's getting old.

Don't know if this is the right place for this, as it's not discussion of the game per se. I can remove this post as needed.
Anyway! I just wanted you guys to know I'm having a stab at modding this game, but I'm still considering what to change. Warning, big write outs in ze spoilers.

Here's my initial thoughts for combat.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Can't tinker with the combat mechanics at its core to remove all random elements but I can normalize it a bit to feel less like playing russian roulette.
To that end I think I'll quadruple all health values to change the pace of the game and give more meaning to buffs and penalties over multiple turns, e.g holo targeting, smoke grenade, disablign shot, and having more shots fired wich should even out the randomness. Or I could lower all weapon damage, or a combination of the two.
Either way I found the strategy to just position your troops for a full scale attack on the enemy ending it or decimating enemy troops in a single turn, to strong and frankly a little boring. Should also put more emphasis on flanking enemy positions, wich was pretty nonexistant in my playthrough because everything dies before I could get in position.
I'm a little concerned that would make chrysalids and berskers to strong, might need to change those to since the strategy of killing them before they close in might be a tad harder. Also medkits might need a change if weapon damage is tweaked, will see how it pans out.

And the strategy side.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

First order of business is upping research times, especially for lategame tech. I found it to easy to just rush plasma and never even touch laser weapons. With higher research times it'll actually be beneficial to construct additional labs, I found them to be absolutely obsolete in a regular playthrough, still finishing techs in three days with no single lab late in the game. As a rough estimation I could double mid game research time and quadruple late game research time, so that there's more meaningful choices on what to focus research.
Engineer workshops is the same story, found them obsolete apart from netting some early bonus engineers to rush more satelites. Might dramatically increase costs of engineer projects to make the bonus from additional workshops meaningful.
I'd also like to change the heavy emphasis on spamming satelites early on as quickly as possible to reap in silly amounts of money. Might need to change panic values and modify money income from coverage and stuff, don't really have a plan here yet. May also reduce the engineer/scientist gain from abduction missions to further make labs/workshops a viable alternative.

Opinions, I need them! If you have an idea of your own or want to comment on what I have in mind do let me know, msg or post it I don't know wich is most appropriate.

I like the first idea, although it really doesn't fit the usual XCom idea of going-around-a-corner-and-suddenly-aliens. It'll be much much more forgiving if you run into aliens and are in a cover-poor area. Perhaps being out in the open without cover should increase your chances of being critically damaged more? It would make overwatch and suppressive fire still useful.

I'm not sure about the second idea, though. Personally, I'm fine with the research times being so low (although it really isn't that realistic), mainly because UFO encounters happen so frequently, causing the game to drag on if you're a person who researches EVERYTHING like me. Although, it is true, I haven't built like anything in my base for a month or two because I haven't needed additional workshops/laboratories (thankfully, my attempts at stunning aliens have been largely successful, even on the Sectoid Commander).

[Damiac]

Jelle, what difficulty are you playing on? With some enemies, killing them ASAP is the only real way to deal with them.

Also, if you quadrupled XCOM soldier health, all the sudden there's no big punishment for rushing and positioning mistakes.  Getting your whole squad into a position to be able to fire on every enemy isn't always possible or practical. 

I have been playing on classic ironman, and I was starting to think the game was getting too easy.  Then I got a landed cargo ship, i sent in my B team, since 3 of my A team was in psi testing.
This is the mission i first met sectopods.  I had guys way out of position, due to trying to capture a heavy floater.  And just to be funny, the game threw 2 sectopods at me.  A couple crits later, and 3 soldiers are down.  I thought if I could get my other 3 into a decent position, I still had a chance, and since I had stabilized 2 of those 3, I didn't want to abort.

While trying to get into position, I discovered another new enemy.  Elite mutons.

At that point, I decided there was no way I was killing all these enemies, and decided I'd rather lose 3 guys than 6. After a super lucky miss by a muton on a flanked soldier, I got out of there. Mission aborted.

I since got into another mission, with only 1 sectopod.  I handled it easily, although I did lose a squaddie on that mission, when a heavy floater punished me for moving to flank a muton.  At least I finally got my heavy floater capture.

I am starting to wonder if putting off the base assault until I finished all possible research was a bad idea.  It put me ahead for a little while, but now my psi research is behind, and I've got nothing new to deal with these new enemies.  Sectopods are a nightmare if you're not already in good position when you find them.  Heavies with heat ammo suddenly became very valuable...

In light of this new threat, I've decided to get my shiv program up and running.  It's looking like I might need some expendable soldiers in the near future...

[Jelle]

classic ironman

It was easy enough in my opinion, I never really got caught out of position since I always moved with great care. Well there was this one time with a group of muton early in the game, and my guys in a parking lot inbetween two cars. Double alien grenades, cue explosions.
Anyway, yeah I know killing them asap is the best strategy, wich is what I think needs changing. Make no mistake I aim to make it a tad harder with more viable strategies.

If you're interested I finished with 11 deaths, 10 of wich were instant kills or something like that, wich I assume are deaths within a single enemy turn. I mostly just roflstomped through the lategame using psionic mindcontrole as three of my elite were psionics. There was a single soldier from the staring squad of 4 who survived through the campaign, and ultimately

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

volunteered for the final attack

.

[EnigmaticHat]

classic ironman

It was easy enough in my opinion, I never really got caught out of position since I always moved with great care. Well there was this one time with a group of muton early in the game, and my guys in a parking lot inbetween two cars. Double alien grenades, cue explosions.
Anyway, yeah I know killing them asap is the best strategy, wich is what I think needs changing. Make no mistake I aim to make it a tad harder with more viable strategies.

If you're interested I finished with 11 deaths, 10 of wich were instant kills or something like that, wich I assume are deaths within a single enemy turn. I mostly just roflstomped through the lategame using psionic mindcontrole as three of my elite were psionics. There was a single soldier from the staring squad of 4 who survived through the campaign, and ultimately

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

volunteered for the final attack

.

If you want to keep it interesting into the late game, don't upgrade your weapons.  No psionics or plasma should make muton elites less of a joke.  Or hell, just finish your run quickly.  Once you have satellites everywhere, the hyperwave beacon, and plasma you've essentially won (unless seven nations have left or xcom isn't set up to take casualties or something).

The second wave options are one way to go, if you can find a combination that isn't broken.  Lowering damage or raising everyone's health would actually make things easier, because your weapons can do vast amounts of damage while the aliens are balanced so that they probably can't kill a given agent in one shot.  Your best bet is turning the difficulty up, either by jumping to impossible or by doing something to make classic harder.

Also...were you scumming?  The only reason I ask is because two alien grenades + car explosions + early game sounds like 15+ damage on multiple squad members, which should be a total party kill.

[GlyphGryph]

I am pretty sure he was explaining a TPK, or at least losing the units that got caught in the blast. Hence the "It was easy! Well, except that one time... that sucked" kind of comment.

And he also said the increased health or lowered damage would be coupled to an increase in the number of shots fired - basically, reducing the effects of chance by spreading damage out over multiple instances. the actual %health damage would, I assume, not change, just how it was dealt.

[EnigmaticHat]

I am pretty sure he was explaining a TPK, or at least losing the units that got caught in the blast. Hence the "It was easy! Well, except that one time... that sucked" kind of comment.

And he also said the increased health or lowered damage would be coupled to an increase in the number of shots fired - basically, reducing the effects of chance by spreading damage out over multiple instances. the actual %health damage would, I assume, not change, just how it was dealt.

Oh, I thought he meant more shots would NEED to be fired, misread that.

[majikero]

I wish the countries that pulled out have more gameplay effects. Sure losing money and the continent bonus is a big thing but those are passive gameplay effects. It's something that goes into the background after you get over the initial loss.

As it is right now, X-com is more of a reaction force than Earth defense. Why can't I send independent Recons on countries that pulled out to get them back to at least providing the continent benefits or at least pull them out of the doom tracker? Why can't there be an alien base on each country you lost?

[Kagus]

Sectoid Science Officer: "Commander, we have readings of seven distinct lifeforms within 300 meters of our current position"

Sectoid Commander: "Excellent.  Team, set phasers to 'Bullshit' and follow me"

Why can't I send independent Recons on countries that pulled out to get them back to at least providing the continent benefits or at least pull them out of the doom tracker? Why can't there be an alien base on each country you lost?

Because as it stands, you are an organization that is funded and sanctioned by a council of governing bodies, rather than an independent force.  If someone pulls support, you not only lose their funding, but also the right to operate within their borders.  And since the level of conflict occurring in XCOM still isn't full-out war, I guess you still have to abide by Tha Rulz.

See UFO: Extraterrestrials for an example of how being the main military force against an invasion would be (includes reclaiming "occupied" territories by clearing out the base that pops up in them).

[majikero]

I understand that part about abiding the rules but why can't I sell my advance weapons to curry favor or simply give the countries that left a fighting chance?

Don't tell me the ruling council would object to it. Quite frankly, the ability to buy the advance tech should be an appeal. The more you flood the market, the cheaper they should be. If you flood the market enough, you get the ability to but the weapons themselves. Then there would be a demand of alloys. weapon fragments and elirium.

My point is, once a country is out, it has no more effect on the gameplay once you adjust to the initial loss.

[Nadaka]

I may be close to winning impossible. Just built my psi chamber and hyperwave beacon, ive run out of tech to research as well, at least until I capture a couple more aliens, and I have a squad fitted in titan armor and plasma weapons. The only thing that would throw a monkey in the works is if none of my veterans have psi potential, or you know, an impossible random sequence that even save scumming can't save me from.

[Damiac]

Have you done a lot of save scumming? I don't see the point of playing impossible if you've just gotta keep doing the same thing again and again until you come out ahead.

That's the same reason I got sick of playing Skyrim on master.

I like ironman mode, but from what i've heard, impossible lives up to its name on ironman.