That is one of my questions as well. I almost always take some damage with some of my units during a mission. However, it doesn’t seem to be much of factor in the ramping up of DDA. To add to this, does healing a unit on the field undo the fact that they suffered injuries? The result page implies that if they are healed up prior the end of the mission there were no injuries.
Basically, every mission spits out a predicted amount of damage that the player is probable to take across the mission (I don’t have the exact details how this is calculated, but it’s based on a number of factors including enemy strength and composition).
So say you go on a mission where you’re expected to lose around 20% of your HP on a mission. That could be 20% each from 5 soldiers, or it could be 1 dead soldier from a group of 5. It’s looking at an average number.
If the player repeatedly completes missions and doesn’t take as much HP loss as is predicted, the difficulty goes up. Equally, if the player consistently takes more damage than the upper threshold, the game will get easier.
These numbers are being adjusted in the March 4th balance patch in favour of the player. So a mission where you may have been expected to only return with 80% of your health might now be 90 or even 95 (just making these numbers up for the sake of example).
But this means that the difficulty won’t increase as often if you’re not taking enough damage. Of course, if you complete every mission and take no damage, the difficulty will increase (as it should do). The problem is, the game can’t tell if the player isn’t taking damage because they’re good/game is too easy - in which case the difficulty should be increasing, or if it’s because the player is save-scumming.
Please keep in mind that this is also only one part of the balance patch changes. I just wanted to offer some more insight into how it worked.
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For the record, I think this explanation is spot on: the DDA is not (hopefully yet) working as intended and save scumming is not something that you can just stop doing even if someone shows you the math to prove that you will be better off not doing it.
And I say it as a former save scummer.
So the other option, aside from losing troops to tune down DDA, is to have some pistol friendly fire towards the end of a mission.
@UnstableVoltage Does healing units prior to the end of the mission undo the calculations of injury for the DDA adjustment? I ask because healing units prior to the end of the mission can leave units with no injury.
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You don’t have to lose troops. Just lose some HP due to enemy attacks. That answers also your suggestion about pistol fire.
Is system is watching soldiers HP at the end of battle (what is suggested) instead of contribution points after taking damage, then healing undo the calculations.
Is that expected HP loss also weighted by difficulty level? i.e on normal it might be 20% for a given set of circumstances, but on Easy those same circumstances lead to an expected 10% HP loss.
As I said in the original post, I don’t have all of the specifics at the moment - however, I do believe that difficulty level does have an impact on it in some way.
Is it worth explaining it in game?
I think part of the frustration that player experience in connection to DDA is to a) not realise that it’s present within the game, and then b) not know how it actually works.
I’m not entirely sure whether we should know the answer to b) but certainly letting a player know that DDA is present allows them to be fully informed about possible consequences of save scumming in advance, and not find out about it the hard way.
This isn’t the sort of “behind the curtain” information which is explained within the game itself. When the system is working as it should, it shouldn’t be something the player ever needs to worry about, or even be aware of.
When players are aware of the intricacies of how systems like this function, playing to “game the system” starts to happen. In a sense, this is what save scumming is to a degree - players attempting to game the system by making sure they can just roll-back and re-do any “bad” turns.
Now that I know a bit more about the dynamic difficulty, I’m starting to realize, that I kinda want the option to have recruits who come with nothing in an easier game. Because I like outfitting my troops my way, and I have more reasons to manufacture. If I don’t need armor and weapons because I can just buy a troop, the manufactories are only used to get better equipment, not new. Also, I’m not wasting materials on guns and such that comes with the troops, I’m spending it on the guns I want to produce.
Thanks UV. Good to know.
As you say, this won’t fix the major game-breaking problem that you have with the DDA, as it doesn’t take into account the thing that actually breaks it - the number of saves/restarts that a player makes during a mission.
However, I have proposed one way round this on another thread:
So what the devs need to do is figure out some way of using the stats of the amount of damage a player’s squad actually took, to mitigate the severity of the DDA’s adjustments.
Hope that helps - and doesn’t create too many headaches 
Help me out here. I also originally thought that save scumming was a trigger. But further posts indicate that it’s the actual outcome of the mission - loses vs. no lose that triggers the DDA outcomes. The saving/reloading (I actually dislike the term save scumming as it implies cheating & saving/reloading is cheating how?) isn’t an actual factor of resulting DDA, just a possible factor of the outcome.
Can you explain why damage taken by the player, in a single mission, should have any impact on the difficulty level of the game?
The player explicitly selected the difficulty level they wanted, manually, at the beginning of the game. So why is the game attempting to change this?
Edit for a further question - if it must be changed, why isn’t it changed only in the player’s favour (and temporarily at that), in case they picked a higher difficulty level than they can overcome? Context - they just had a total squad wipe but are continuing to play the game, why not give them some easy missions to get back on their feet?
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Saving & Reloading/Restarting a mission is a trigger because it artificially skews the final result in the player’s favour.
Let’s say it takes you 3 retries to master the mission. The implication here is that you ‘lost’ the mission 3 times before you succeeded - or at least maybe lost a soldier you didn’t want to lose (if you wanted to lose any, and I’m beginning to realise here that there are a lot of players out there who don’t believe they should have to take any losses to win this game - which I find baffling in a ‘survival against the odds’ game, but horses for courses).
But the DDA as it currently stands, only looks at your final recorded mission stats. So it believes that you won this mission while taking absolutely ZERO losses. It thinks you’re a genius! It doesn’t take into account the fact that you almost got wiped out/lost a man/stubbed somebody’s toe and dented their nice new armour [delete as appropriate] THREE TIMES before you managed to achieve that nice. perfect result.
So it treats you as if you are a player with a 1-0 record; not as if you are a player with a 1-3 record, which you actually are. It then adjusts the difficulty accordingly. Which means that it makes the next mission 3 times harder than you can cope with, because actually you technically ‘lost’ 3 times before you ‘won’ - but by hitting ‘Retry’ in whatever form you chose, you effectively hid that fact from the game engine.
I can attest to this from the other side. I very rarely restart, and am prepared to accept more than 50% casualties, as long as I think they’re my fault and not some Crimson Bat. I’m still on my first runthrough (I play slow 
) and I have never encountered the kind of difficulty spike that others have described. At worst, I’ve faced 5 Sirens in a Lair, coming at me 2 at a time, with around 15 Crabbies backing them up - and that’s only because I turtled and didn’t push forward fast enough.
So the DDA is working for me. It resets the level so that each mission is just about winnable with no fatalities, unless I get unlucky or do something stupid - and because I don’t Restart and try again until I don’t lose anyone, I find this game is pitched perfectly at my level most of the time.
That’s why saving &/or restarting is a trigger.
Damage taken on a single mission has very little impact. Damage taken over an aggregate of missions slowly builds up a record of your ability level, which the DDA then tries to compensate for.
And you should be aware, it doesn’t just adjust the Difficulty to make the game ever harder, if you give the DDA space to do its thing, it adjusts the Difficulty downwards to make the game more achievable for you.
That’s exactly what the DDA is designed to do right now - and what it does really well if you don’t screw it up with Retries till you get a ‘perfect’ score.
When it works properly, it’s supposed to set the game at an optimal level chosen by you in your Difficulty selection at the start of the game. I don’t know the details here, but as a ‘for instance’, it may be that Easy is preset so that you should only take 10% casualties per mission. If you take more than 10% over an aggregate of, say, 5 missions, the number & HP of enemies goes down: if you take less than 10%, they go up. Veteran may be preset to 20%; Heroic to 35% and Legendary to 50% - I don’t know, these are just numbers pulled out of the air to explain the way it works.
Problem is, as I explained to mcarver2000 above, if you keep Restarting missions until you get ZERO casualties, the DDA looks at your final result and says: “Took no casualties, increase the Nasties.” And it will keep on doing that every time you register 0 casualties - because it currently doesn’t know that you are doing this by effectively turning back time and doing everything over until you score a perfect result - or whatever result is acceptable to you.
So the DDA isn’t designed to punish you for doing well - which a troubling number of players seem to believe - if you don’t interfere with the algorithm by saving & restarting when you don’t get a result you like, it’s designed to make things easier for you until you start regularly getting the results you like.
Only problem is, Restarting till you’re perfect screws the whole system up the way it’s currently designed, because the devs never anticipated that players would simply keep doing over until they got exactly the result they wanted. So they need to include a way of keeping track of the amount of times you ‘lost’ before you got that ‘perfect’ score - and keeping track of your damage stats at every save &/or Restart is a pretty good way of doing that I believe.
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To give a perspective on how save scumming is considered cheating I’ll answer this, but let me say first that I care not a jot what other players choose to do in a single player game, and I’m giving the reason as to why I consider save scumming cheating within my own personal game play experience only.
To me save scumming is the equivalent of taking a mulligan in golf. Mulligan (games) - Wikipedia
I think it’s a fair thing to do when playing a friendly game against someone - Be it golf, pool (where someone accidentally touches a ball with their hand, I wouldn’t claim a foul in a friendly) or any other sport or game. However I also feel that it’s against the rules of the game, and is only allowed out of good sportsmanship and because that game is a friendly. - No way on earth would I let someone get away with a pool foul if the game was part of a league or tournament.
I also thing that a mulligan is beyond fair, I’d say beneficial when teaching someone how to play a game that they’re not familiar with. I’m playing my nephew at Connect four (he’s 6) I’d let him remake a bad move once he’s realised it’s bad… Without allowing for that mulligan, and in some cases some quite bad moves of my own he’s not going to enjoy playing that game and I would expect that he’ll stop playing long before he learns how to play well. And besides, it’s about the fun of playing more than anything - though he is a competitive bugger.
When playing video games myself the situations where I’ve save scummed have been within games where I’ve reached a point in the game that I can’t get past any other way. I’ve done it predominantly in either platformers (which I suck at) or in first person shooters/rpgs prior to boss battles. In many modern games in these genres, it’s actually the game that is save scumming for the player, (anything where your game state is saved on each new screen/corridor) but either way I hate the game during this time, and if I find that I’m save scumming too much, I’ll usually give up on it and play something else for a while. I think the last game where I did this was ‘Thomas was alone’
An example of where I wouldn’t ever use save scumming, no matter how difficult a game became is in driving games. For me there, doing something such a reloading a corner because I crashed the first time around and I want to try get a better line in order to stay in first place in the race is what I would define as cheating.
I think the difference is that in a platform game, it’s me vs the game world. Whereas in a driving game it’s me vs the AI within a game world. - In a driving game we’ve both got to try take that corner to the best of our ability (my reaction as a player vs its programming as an AI). If I reloaded the game in order to take that corner a second time then I consider that I’ve cheated in order to gain an unfair advantage. I’d certainly consider it cheating if it were the AI crashed out, and then sent us all back in time by 20 seconds in order to take that corner again. - I think the other difference is that the one race isn’t being played in isolation, it’s usually part of a bigger picture within the game as a whole, and I’ll still have a chance to come back with a victory in the next race. I treat things the same way in any other sports game, if I lose a race or match I take the result and try to do better next time. (Whereas in Thomas Was Alone the game is linear, so there’s no choice but to reload saves upon death, it’s the only way to progress).
And that’s pretty much where I am with TBS games as well. In a TBS I’m playing against the AI within a game world where we’ve both been given a set of rules to follow. I wouldn’t be happy at all if the AI would reload its turn every time I killed one of its creatures, in fact I’d be here on this forum calling it out as cheating. Therefore I won’t allow myself to reload my turn if it kills one of my squad.
I have been known to reload entire missions, especially early on in a game where I’m learning its rules. And I have also taken a game state back by a few months when I’ve released that I’m heading towards an inevitable defeat and I don’t feel the game is something that I would ever start over from scratch. I’m reloading the earlier save there to just get to the end of the game so that I can consider it completed, but I’m not overly happy with myself about having to reload in that case.
But essentially in a competitive game against the AI I’ll treat it as I would any human opponent. I’ll play by the rules within the game because that same constraint is put upon the AI. Something like save scumming I find is outsider the forth wall, the AI doesn’t have the option to do it, so I don’t feel that I should either if I want to play that game in a fair way.
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See I think the reason I don’t feel this is ever going to work as intended has to do with the fact that the dynamic difficulty doesn’t just cause problems for people save scumming.
I played my first game, played poorly but got quite far into the game because my poor playing caused the dynamic difficulty to make the game easier on me. Now once I learned how to play I did what I’d do in any other game, I went back to the beginning in order to get myself a better start without so many people lost.
And while I knew that I was better at the game it was harder than it was originally. Now because I was better I was able to struggle through for awhile but every time I did well the difficulty would increase removing the buffer that I had from my improvement and putting me in an even worse scenario, and then I’d eventually make a mistake (because I’m not perfect) and I’d get hammered for it. And while I wasn’t save scumming before that I started doing it then as if the game wasn’t going to play fair neither was I.
I’m getting actively punished for playing better and beating the curve. Any other game would be rewarding me for playing better. I’d be better off playing less good the entire game, working out how to take as much damage per character as possible every mission without losing anybody to keep the game easier. This is entirely unintuitive and backwards the system is encouraging a style of play that isn’t the way anyone should play the game and yet if I want to win that is the best way to do it.
Save Scumming might make the problem more visible, but it’s a massive problem even without it (as I found in my second playthrough and it’s massive increase in difficulty as it adapted quickly to the fact I was now better at the game). Nobody is perfect and with the scaling small mistakes start to have outsized impacts (you’ve trained the game to think you can beat 4 to 1 odds, but you slip up just once and you are looking at a team wipe with that). Sure the next missions will be much easier but the resource cost of these units isn’t cheap they aren’t expendable, and you’ve potentially lost the game as you are now unable to really continue on the strategic layer through no fault of your own.
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Imho the DDA game system should read the players squad deployment and last known of HP per character as their measurement to counter player squad unit in the battle, and maybe some battles has a bit more random of challenge for the player.
There’s nothing wrong with load/save features Imho. At some point it gives a boredom of gameplay once player keep restarting new game just because player can’t beat it (I believe there’s other reason why player use save - load features). I would suggest add some additional statistic player info, in FPS called as K/D (kills - death) stats, perhaps for TBS could be call as S/L (save - load) 
.
That’s all well and good but it isn’t achieving anything remotely like you’ve just said. I play my games as though they are ironman and only save the game to continue it later. I can emphatically state that squad wipes do not cause any subsequent missions to get easier, in any of the games I’ve played, on any difficulty setting. This is an aspect I’ve been complaining about.
Ironman mode could be solve the problem. *I’m still waiting it so much…
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