Can you then prepare a mod to decrease explosive damage done to weapons? It looks like still broken feature despite increse in HP pool of weapons.
If so, this is genius! 
The ability to save-scum has been the bane of balancing within the TBS genre for years.
I donât know about that, but I might well be sending one or two guys out who are slightly unequipped in the armour department. 
(I was already planning to only shoot Pandorans in the legs)
Itâs nothing genius, itâs since the 70âs there are games with forced ironman and permadeath, no way this is explaining this system.
Itâs nothing genius, let say in simple words what would be such system, if you play well the game becomes harder. Try sell that, lol.
I did a test and I donât believe what is explained in this thread, that the code is here doesnât mean it is activated. Killed half of roster among highest soldiers generated no clear changes, after like 6 sites search, for a scavenging mission. But ok it was a quick test, get a Chiron at start of this mission is perhaps not enough significant.
@Zzzz itâs the average over a number of battles and itâll trend over time. Itâs not going to immediately swing in your favor because you had one bad battle, and itâs not going to immediately crush you just because you dominated one mission.
Also, the code is definitely called and in use.
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The real funny part here is that I would not save scum if the game did not have absurdly high recruiting costs - a few too many high level soldier losses and its game over anyway.
Itâs a bit of a viscous circle.
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It is not about save scumming. It is about how your soldiers look after battle. You can use as many saves as you want but when you will come from battle unscratched then difficulty will go up.
Agreed. Weâve got a bit of a weird balance right now where itâs trivially easy to get a soldier to max rank without them even seeing combat, but itâs incredibly expensive to recruit new soldiers.
So itâs very hard on you to lose men, even new rookies, but their veterancy and experience doesnât really count for much.
I think we could do with a step towards XCOMs âRookies canât hit the broad side of a barn and are a dime a dozenâ approach, drastically slow down the leveling rate and increase the impact of higher ranks.
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Ok the effect of difficulty auto scaling is on time, itâs a lot more difficult to test then.
This lead to a question, how many soldiers death per day is required to have a normal difficulty scaling along progression? 
In the game current context where confidence in dev game tuning is very low (obviously itâs a team overloaded here, if they canât clean an UI how could they for difficulty setting), this system is a rather unfortunate choice. Itâs not necessarily a bad design when it will work properly but I continue believe it shouldnât be forced to players, automatically harder if you perform better isnât an obviously great feature.
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I didnât mean literal time. It updates whenever you finish a tactical battle.
At a high level it works like this:
- Start Mission
- Predict Outcome - Lets say it expects a score of 100
- â Fight the Mission â
- Calculate Score - Lets say you get 110
- Add the score difference to a log of the last few battles. In our case youâd have a score of 10
- Now lets say your last few battles in the log have difference results of {10, 15, 2, -5, 4}. Average of 5.2
- The game now uses this modifier (and some tuning values) to move the deployment value a fraction either up or down (depending on whether your average is positive or negative), the exact amount depends on the magnitude of the average.
So this means youâll have to do badly for a protracted time before it start to trend downwards. When you first start losing your average of the past few battles will still be positive, so for a while the game will keep getting incrementally harder.
Ok so roster of 16, 6 among the higher level soldiers dead, even if in one battle, should have a significant consequence, or the history weight is excessive. Itâs also possible my test was too superficial, that is next combat should have been finished to get a complete feeling.
Ouch. 
I dug further into it and the aliens completely ignore the deployment value for everything but reinforcements. Everybody else does seem to obey it.
Instead the aliens use their evolution points / 2000. This value never goes down and gets increases from several factors, so the longer you drag out the campaign the worse itâs going to get.
As far as I can tell (and Iâve looked thoroughly this time), they evolve from time (per-day), per-mission loss and per-base destruction.
Hereâs some info that I dumped from the game:
Info Dump
Evolution Per Day: 10
Evolution Per Loss: 50
=== Base Type Info ===
ID: Citadel_GeoAlienBaseTypeDef Name: PANDORAN CITADEL Evo Points on Destruction: 225
ID: Lair_GeoAlienBaseTypeDef Name: PANDORAN LAIR Evo Points on Destruction: 75
ID: Nest_GeoAlienBaseTypeDef Name: PANDORAN NEST Evo Points on Destruction: 25
ID: Palace_GeoAlienBaseTypeDef Name: PANDORAN PALACE Evo Points on Destruction: 5
Little bit more info. It uses this to generate enemies that sit inside bases, then when you get attacked it gets all of the enemies from the nearby bases and throws them at you with various budgets depending on the threat level. Scripted missions are special, and all of the rules get bent or broken for them.
I should probably put up a separate thread for reverse engineering this stuff.
Mmm so my test wasnât that bad, I just didnât played enough the mission to see probable effects on reinforcement.
That said for most missions involving the aliens, most enemies are reinforcement.
Only speaking for myself, but Iâd snap their hands off. Too many games, IMHO, have either a fake scaling method to simulate progression (youâre given something that provides the chance to get strong in someway, then the enemy is given something, then you are, then they are, then you both areâŚ) youâre not getting better at the game, youâre given the illusion of that by finding new shiny equipment and perks. Itâs why, for me, AIs will never replace the fun of the right human opponent, even setting the level of an AI just right doesnât quite do it, as youâll still learn how to play a better as you go along, whereas it usually wonât. I put a lot of games down in the final 3rd as I feel Iâve outstripped them and become bored.
With scaling difficulty, I think itâs a thing that depending on the genre can work well or badly. I wouldnât want to experience it in a casual game where Iâm just trying to relax. But in a TBS game I think the game lives or dies based on whether your opponent gives an equivalent level of challenge or not. Chess and Scrabble are two good examples here, theyâre both cracking games if youâre playing against someone who you have a fair chance to win or lose against, but border on torture if youâve got an opponent who is stronger or weaker.
The fact that PP is using a scaling difficulty is something that I find really encouraging. Itâs still not a human opponent, but it brings the experience of playing against an AI one step closer to it. I can imagine that it is a tough challenge to balance, but if Snapshot can get it right then once everything is patched up Iâll be really looking forward to playing through PP in a natural way.
Funny. The lair he was playing (when was was being mind controlled all the time) was the exact same I was talking about in Lairs are a boresome slog, needs reinforcements either removed or curbed. You climb the ladder, you see far and have a clear view of the surroundings. Everythingâs fine. But a Siren was hidden beneath the ledge and screams.
So if you ever go on this map, just explode the rocks on the side to make your own path and avoid going on top. Itâs a trap !!
Other than that, I find his review well made and accurate with how I feel. But I so would have liked to see Angry Joe doing the review like he had done for both FiraXCOM.
I donât disagree that auto scaling on player recent results in a campaign is a good option, Iâm saying that itâs probably difficult to sell well, and that there should be an option to disable it.
Face it they sold the tactical adaptation but not this and this is quite different.
EDIT:
If I knew there was such mechanism I would have start a campaign at minimum difficult for first play.
To be honest, I donât know if the difficulty scaling is good or bad - having enemy scale up or down is strategy game sounds like a bad idea. That said, for what I have seen I wouldnât call PP a strategy game. And if the goal is to keep difficulty go up and down in individual tactical engagements it sounds like a fair system, as long as one isnât aware of its existence.
Zero Punctuation:
Nice
Heâs doing a live letâs play of it at the mo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7ieQjWoAFM
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With more thought on that auto scaling, if it was well done, save and reload often should not change much, ok the game evaluate for like a better player, except this player will continue save and reload so is really better.
If then the difficulty scaling lost players itâs because of a bad design of the curve not because of the auto scaling principle and use save and reload.
Itâs possible that this auto scaling isnât well tuned for example, but save and load shouldnât change much.
For playing with true scam loading, which is totally boring, thatâs different, I doubt many players do that.