Coming here from this thread by Kurungu. I already posted my thoughts on HP visibility there but I though it might be good to share them here as well. Allow me to quote my post in that thread:
I do understand how some tactical game aficionados always strive for
having as much detailed information about combat situation as possible
to make the best possible decision but in case of XCom games(and I use
this term loosely here), fighting the unknown threat, making the best of
what you know and learning more through research is a crucial part of
what makes those games unique and appealing.
I do think that outside of basic human opponents, well-known human
vehicles and tech(i.e. mutants and experimental tech fall outside of
that category), enemy stats should not be available to players unless
particular enemy is researched. Information starts as “healthy/lightly
wounded/severely wounded/dead” and “unarmoured/lightly armoured/heavily
armoured” for unresearched enemies. Researching a body part provides
detailed info for it while having more than 50% of the enemy body parts
researched provides the detailed info on the enemy total health.
As for new player experience, firstly I do not think the game should
extensively cater for inexperienced and, more to the point, those
unwilling to learn. XCom-like games were always quite hard and quite
complex; those qualities are an integral part of what makes them
appealing, what makes them stand out. So a good tutorial and detailed
“ufopaedia” articles should be much more preferable that an overbundance
of easily available tactical information with no efforts required to
obtain it.
Now, how I think new player experience as well as veteran experience
should be tackled. My solution is to tie the stat information
availability into difficulty settings. While basic selection of
“easy/med/hard etc” difficulty levels should provide a quick way of
selecting a difficulty, all(or at least some) variable difficulty
settings should be available via advanced difficulty options, similar to
how it is done in Long War. Each “base” difficulty setting will have a
pre-set of advanced options with a difficulty score indicating how
selected difficulty mode relates to pre-set modes.
Easy mode will have “research required for detailed enemy stats”
disabled by default while other pre-sets will have it enabled. Players
will be able to either pick a pre-set which will cater for their overall
idea of difficulty or, in case of a experienced player who simply
prefer having the full stat info right off the bat, pick a difficulty
and then tweak it via advanced options. To keep the difficulty score at
the desired level(i.e. custom but still qualifying as “hard” for
instance), other difficulty options could be enabled to compensate for
the additional stat info. This will solve the new player experience
issue for those who will be unable to deal with the lack of start right
away.
Now, to make things interesting for seasoned veterans, who are on
their Nth playthrough and could already memorized all alien start, we
can introduce and additional difficulty option to slightly randomize the
stats for each alien body part at the start of the campaign. I expect
this to be in line with the overall feel of the game as randomized alien
composition from a library of body parts is already being implemented,
this idea only takes this a step further, if not envisages the already
planned but not yet announced feature. Stat variation have to be
limited, of course, to prevent aliens form being impossible to kill
early on. But if implemented as a pick out of 3-4 stat pre-sets for each
alien body part, instead of being fully random, it can go a long way to
make stat research meaningful even when you have several playthroughs
under your belt.
To add to this, I don’t think that there is a need for a particular way of balancing the extra research goal for body part stat info, I simply think body part autopsy itself should provide the data when completed if the research-dependent stat availability is enabled. That way no extra research tree items will be necessary.