Yes, I have to agree with this. The Pandoran evolution turned out to be like one of those promises that are made in a drunken stupor. There is this “let’s not talk about it and pretend it never happened”, but also a feeling that after shouting it for so long at the pub something approximately in that direction has to be done.
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MichaelIgnotus I agree with you on all your point and have had them myself! What I meant by broken is that the game will keep winding up the difficulty till it kills your men, that is what I meant, I know losing men is part of the game, but I like to work out the tactics till I get it right and by getting it right I mean complete without having to lose a man just to keep the AI happy… That’s what I was referring to…
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Fair enough 
Where I do agree with the thrust of your original statement is that the DDA should somehow pay attention to save scumming - or at least Restarting. If it takes you 3 or 4 Restarts to win the Mission, that should class as 1 win + 3 or 4 losses in the way the DDA counts your stats. That way, it would stop ‘punishing’ players who need several goes to win a scenario - and ‘Easy’ might actually become Easy after all.
I do suspect, however, that taking count of save scumming would be an order of magnitude more difficult. I mean, how do you as a programmer set up a code to keep track of the number of times a player saves the game - and how useful is that information when you have it?
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No it doesn’t. It says: “This player took X casualties and Y wounds in the last Z games, so we will adjust the difficulty so that the ‘game optimal’ result (M casualties and N wounds) is more likely at his level of play next time around.”
The next time you go on a mission, you will find the forces ranged against you are either stronger or weaker, depending on whether X is greater than or less than the value of M. That’s actually quite clever in my opinion, because it’s designed to give you a game experience that’s constantly pitched at just the right level for you.
However, if the player ‘cheats’ by Restarting or save scumming, it throws the balance of that system completely out of whack. Now the system says: “This player took 0 casualties and Y wounds in the last Z games, so we will make things harder so that the ‘game optimal’ result (M casualties and N wounds) is more likely at his exceptional level of play next time around.” And it treats you as if you are Superman, because according to your record, you are Superman.
That’s not the program’s fault. You aced the test because you went back and re-did it every time you got an answer wrong - so the program is now convinced that you are a genius and makes the questions harder - and harder - and harder… until they become unanswerable without a PhD in game-playing.
However, the programmers can at least mitigate the program’s mistaken assumption by making it pay attention to the number of times you actually get killed in the game, rather than the number of times you admit to it.
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Why pay attention to how many times a player saves/reloads. There are many reasons why one would do that and not with the intention of beating the system. I’ve relaoded numerous times in PP because I can’t rebind the keys. I mean to rotate the map, but instead hit R (not E) and replace an almost full magazine. With the penalties imposed by the game, that could be a mission killer. Other times I reload because I thought I was moving another unit only to find out that I have now undone a whole process of strategy. Yeah, I know it was stupid mistakes that I made myself and I should be punished for them. I get interrupted by a family member or someone at the front door and when I return to the game I have lost the thread of my strategy. I’ve reloaded saves because the game froze. Yep let’s count these as save scumming and treat the player accordingly.
Just saying, how does one program the code to take into consideration why someone reloads?
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My point exactly, @mcarver2000 
However, this discussion has just crystallised something for me.
This game keeps stats. We know it keeps stats because the devs say they use the stats to nerf things like Dash and the Piranha. Presumably it only keeps the stats of saved games, but that’s great if you want it to take account of save scumming - because a save scummer by definition automatically saves at the end of every move.
So instead of looking at the Final Mission Result and saying: “This player took zero casualties against 10 Pandas - let’s increase the number of Pandas until he starts taking casualties.” - it looks at the stats and says "This player actually lost 10 men before he succeeded on this mission, so let’s reduce the number of Pandas until he only loses 1 man per mission [or whatever the ‘game optimal’ result is deemed to be].
Doesn’t matter why you saved the game. Maybe you were scumming, or maybe as mcarver2000 has described, you were doing it for a host of other reasons. It really doesn’t matter, because the stats say that on Mission #42, you lost X men before you achieved a Mission Successful result, and therefore your ability level is X rather than A.
God knows how easy that is to program. I’d hazard the answer is ‘not’. But that’s what the devs need to do if they want the DDA to work as intended.
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Just in case you missed it in the other thread:
(there is a bit more after that too, regarding what will happen with the first DLC patch)
TBH, I think that rather than going for the trouble of adjusting DDA to account for save scumming, they should just make the DDA optional - it’s an absolute no-brainer.
Personally, what I don’t like about the DDA (besides that it is a poor replacement for what would have been an awesome feature) is that it messes with expectations/understanding of difficulty. The player should know why things are getting easier, or harder, and what agency he/she had in it.
Now, I might accept this serios drawback because it suits my playstyle, or because I want a greater challenge, or perhaps because I even trust the DDA to provide an adequate challenge. But other players clearly do not, and I can 100% understand why.
Personally, I think the DDA has become a players’ bugbear because it failed to take into account the way many players play these games - and that immediately broke it.
If from the word Go, it had just gently ramped up the difficulty - and even taken it down on occasion - in tune with each player’s ability, no-one would even have noticed. It would have felt much the same as Thin Men appearing when Lasers are Researched, or Mutons triggering on Gauss Guns, though technically it would have been better because you would never outstrip the new aliens and it would remain challenging to the end - inasmuch as a game where alpha-striking superheroes who have the ability to take out any creature on the map in one turn by abusing their skillset can ever be deemed to be challenging.
But by failing to understand what players do, they created a system which broke immediately and created a difficulty spike so horrendous that the kind of player who will restart a mission multiple times to get a perfect score was - almost by definition - hounded out of the game. That gave the DDA such a bad rep from the very beginning that even people who might have liked it were immediately put off.
And I agree wholeheartedly - it’s a really poor substitute for ‘The Pandorans will evolve in response to your tactics’. Frankly, XCOM does a better job of evolving than this game, because at least you get Thin Men (or Vipers), Mutons, Muton Berserkers, different Advent Classes, and different types of Android each triggered by the progression of your Tech and/or your level within the game - and each requiring you to adjust your play style in response to the new threat they present.
By I think there, my friend, we are crying in the wind… 
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Sorry but that is NOT cheating! It is working out your tactics, it is not “REQUIRED” you must lose a man it is a game FFS and if you want to take the results of NOT reloading that’s up to you! But don’t spoil my game because someone does not like the way I play it, it really is that simple! I paid for it so I get to choose how I use it, simple END OF!
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Hence the reason I put ‘cheats’ in inverted commas. So let’s calm down a bit, shall we 
Please remember, this is only a game - and a solo game at that. How you or anyone else plays it is neither my business, nor quite frankly could I care less.
I only care if you or someone else does something untoward that breaks the game and then complains so loudly that the devs change something that is working fine for me and many others.
Despite the fact that the DDA has never caused me any problems, I have been very publicly at the forefront of calling for it to be fixed, and for Easy to actually be Easy. But the fact still remains that S&R (saving and retrying) is completely throwing the system out of whack and needs to be addressed.
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I am constantly loading and saving if a soldier dies, and while things become more difficult, it overall feels quite natural and up to now manageable. I am not reloading to get the perfect outcome, I simply don’t want to let anyone die for whatever reason. I don’t mind if they get hit, and I use the Medkit whenever it’s needed.
Compare it to a game of chess though.
You move your rook, then your opponent takes it with their knight. You can’t just “reload” or ask to take your previous move back to “work out your tactics”. The idea is that you plan and make a move, and have to live with the outcome for better or worse.
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However, in a chess game one sees the whole board and knows the opponent’s forces. In PP, this not the case and there are times where one finds themselves setup by the random placing of their and the opposing forces units. Throw in the aggressive DDA, one is either forced to throw in the towel and resort to what many say is cheating. If one wishes to enjoy the product they purchased and resort to reload, who are they cheating? The game is code not a real person. Hopefully when the game is truly balanced ,the player will have less reason to “cheat”.
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Or one is forced to mount a tactical withdrawal and live to fight another day.
PP is a tactical battlefield sim - albeit with superheroes. And on a battlefield, you don’t get a do-over - but that’s frankly irrelevant, because it is also first & foremost a game.
As I said above, I care not one jot how anyone else plays their game, as long as it doesn’t ultimately spoil my enjoyment because they’ve complained too much - but for me, part of the enjoyment of these games is treating it as a ‘live’ tactical experience. So I will make a mistake, take my hits - maybe even lose a squaddie cos I ran him round a corner too fast (or forgot to activate Rapid Fire and therefore left him out in the open) , and learn from the experience for next time.
The only time I ever go back to a previous save is if I feel that the game has just jumped me with some mechanic I wasn’t previously aware of - (or when I almost suffered a TPW in that frickin’ Lair thru a string of bad luck, but let’s not dwell on that one, shall we? 
)
TBH, I have reached that stage near the endgame where if something goes really badly I will probably reload, because I don’t want to go back through the grind of getting to this point again, but other than that…
But that’s the beauty of solo games - and the main reason why I don’t bother with multi-player. You are free to play however you like, as fast or slowly as you like, with whatever house rules you like - and the only time the outside world impinges on your enjoyment is if you are trying to help the devs by feeding back on a forum like this.
That said: it’s not the DDA’s fault if you are fooling it by fritzing the algorithm somehow. You could (and I do) argue that the devs should have anticipated the way that many players play this kind of game and programmed around it. But I repeat: the tenor of many of these posts is that Snapshot somehow set out to deliberately ‘ruin’ your game experience for you by creating an algorithm that was only designed to make things harder. No they didn’t! They set out to do exactly the opposite, but they got it wrong because they did not take into account the way you play. So I suggest that you politely tell them how you like to play the game - without throwing wild accusations at them - and let them get on with trying to fix it for you.
After all, all they are really trying to do is make sure that the game stays challenging (or easy) enough for you throughout its entire length.
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Yes, but chess is a much shorter game to play. One perception that I have is that people are a bit overwhelmed with the tactical layer, so consequently value their soldiers more. There are a large amounts of resources and soldiers available in the game, but I think that lots of people are struggling to grasp how to aquire them. It’s not X-com and trying to break away from this model in their minds takes time. The gaming pleasure can be lost through this frustration and thus hours, days and weeks of work and gameplay can be ruined. Chess doesn’t take that long!
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I know it’s not a perfect analogy. The point I was trying to make is that these games are designed around players living with the decisions that they make. Traditionally, save functionality is included to “save your place” so that you can break from and continue your game later. Of course, over the years, saving has been seen as a way to “undo” either bad decisions or any situation where the player doesn’t feel that the game is favourable or fair.
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They should have implemented an ‘iron-man mode’. Then I think that people could learn to live with their decisions. Then DDA would be completely appropriate. I never played it in any other way with Firaxis XCOM 1&2.
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I completely agree. I was just trying to voice what I think has assisted in the issue. I throughly enjoy this game, but please when can we have iron-man mode added? I hate having to save (I just want to click exit) and it’s very motivating, especially for those who haven’t experienced it before.
I do not think its general agreement that this is how save is supposed to be used. I mean you can of course set this as expectation for this game, but then it should be somehow made clear to the user that losses are to be expected.
There are lots of games with scripted stuff where saving and reloading is kind of part of the game, whether that is good or bad doesn’t matter in this context.
And if taking losses is the expectation, then i would argue that the game is very poorly balanced, in regards to difficulty levels, ressources etc…
Just as a disclaimer, for me personally i dont have any issues with balancing so far, even though i reload to avoid taking losses.
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We do agree that the balancing isn’t right, which is why we’re working on it.
However, some players are making the game more difficult for themselves as save-scumming is causing the game the believe that the game is too easy for the player (when in fact, the player is probably save-scumming because they’re finding it too difficult). So, it’s a bit of a vicious circle.
That said, as I mentioned elsewhere, the dynamic difficulty is being adjusted in favour of the player. Even with that adjustment in mind, continuing to save-scum so that ever mission is “perfect” will still lead to similar results (though there are other balance changes which should make things easier on the easier difficulty levels). Players who naturally get “perfect” results in a lot of missions without save-scumming will have a difficulty increase - but that’s working as intended. The idea is for the game to always provide a challenge (but a beatable one, which is why we need to work on the balance).
Most of this happened because we wanted to avoid the key problems in difficulty with both the original X-Com games and the Firaxis XCOM games - the inverse difficulty curve.
In most games, they start off easy until you learn the ropes, and become more difficult and more challenging as you progress.
XCOM/X-Com games have always had the opposite issue - they start off quite difficult - you have a low budget, very few troops with poor stats and pretty rubbish gear. Towards the end, even though the enemies may be more difficult and greater in number with more frequent attacks, the player has a bigger squad with better skills/stats and weapons/equipment on par with the enemy. This often leads to the late game just becoming a cakewalk. This is what we were trying to avoid with the dynamic difficulty. We will get it right, though.
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