Disruptive changes to stat calculation in latest 2.5-dev

[H-Hour]

It effects all levels, but easierian difficulties will face fewer ufos.

[Beren_Erchamion]

Are you still interested in data on the stat change?

[H-Hour]

Yes, thanks.

[Telok]

It effects all levels, but easierian difficulties will face fewer ufos.

It shows too. I'm playing on hard and an in the middle of a spate of attacks.  I cleared four missions in a day and still have three to complete, plus two gunboats and a corrupter flying around. While me first squad is fully in power armor my second squad is still has half the soldiers in nano-composite. With PB blasters doing ~100 damage and PB rifles doing ~75 damage through the power armor a single hit relegates a trooper to the safe zone for a few days. Bringing in new soldiers isn't working because they only have about 100 health and can't wear the power armor, making them one-shot kills for the aliens. With the AI coded to preferentially shoot at the soldiers with the least health those noob soldiers are turning into disposable mooks. It's harsh.

It looks like Hard difficulty is going to require one of two tactics, ablative armor mooks or a stable of extra soldiers that are rotated through missions from the beginning to get them the health points to survive the late game. Man, that's gonna bring back the old X-Com vibe. Mooks with electro-flares being sent out to draw fire from the aliens while your good soldiers stand back and snipe. I'm just glad we don't have cryssalids here.

[H-Hour]

The game is fairly random about this too. Every time it goes to spawn new UFOs, it can spawn a lot or a few. The difficulty level just adjusts the overall likelihood, so at any time in the game you can get a real rush of UFOs.

When I play, I am always rotating soldiers in and out throughout the campaign as they get injured. This ensures a decent stable of "backup" soldiers in place even in the late game. With the faster stat gain, though, if your new guys can survive 5-10 missions, are they able to wear the power armour?

[Telok]

When I play, I am always rotating soldiers in and out throughout the campaign as they get injured. This ensures a decent stable of "backup" soldiers in place even in the late game. With the faster stat gain, though, if your new guys can survive 5-10 missions, are they able to wear the power armour?

Lets see, noobs have 35-39 strength (weaklings get assigned to radar garrison duties and don't get to wear armor or carry med-kits, high damage weapons and low survival rates). Nano weighs 9kg and power weighs 14kg, med-kits run 2kg, sniper rifles are 6.4 plus a 0.5 clip, a GL is 6kg plus the 1.5 ammo, PB rifle is 3.4 plus the 0.5 clip almost the same as the plasma rifle.

Minimum, without reloads or smokes or anything else will be about 15kg with nano-armor (everyone can do this but nano isn't cutting it any more by this time) and almost 20 with power armor. So we need a 40 strength score for the least equipped rifle man in power armor, 46 for a sniper and 47 for an exploder.

Looking at the stats I posted it will take 10 to 20 missions for a soldier to be capable of wearing power armor. If you want ammo reloads, IR goggles, and grenades it's definitely going to be 20 missions. Given the alien preference for shooting the noobs first (lowest health targeting priority) trying to build these guys up late-game is just not happening for me. It's really uncanny how often the new guy on the team gets blasted when the aliens have a choice of targets.

As for the randomness of UFOs appearing, is it always a fixed chance or does it modulate based on recent activity? For example is it something like a fixed 10% chance per day or is it closer to 10% - 1% per UFO/landing in the last three days?

[H-Hour]

Ufo appearance: every four or eight days a new cycle starts. The game rolls x number of times a number between 1 and 100. If the number is higher than the ufo reduction rate (maybe 65 on normal if memory serves) then a ufo is spawned. With this mode it is possible that every possible duo spawns in a cycle - or none. Though most of the time it will tend towards Total Rolls * Ufo Reduction Rate.

[Telok]

So it's a flat % chance with no modification.

Let's say there are 8 chances for a ufo every 4 days at a 35% rate. You can expect two or three ufos every four days but if the RNG hates you there can be a streak of 24 ufos in nine days. So I've just hit a RNG streak that gave me eight to ten ufos in two or three days so far. I suppose it's fair in that it balances out the time I didn't get any ufos for six weeks, but both extremes annoy the player.

Would it be considered to change the ufo spawn rate to modify based on the number of days since the last ufo spawned? It's an attempt to move the spawn rate towards a smoother and more constant rate and level out some of the peaks/valleys. Something like: 1 chance for a ufo every 12 hours at a 35% +  (number of days since last ufo mission * 5%) - (number of ufos/missions currently in progress * 5%) rate? What would that do to the number of ufos? We may need to make and compare some graphs.

[H-Hour]

I understand it can be frustrating for some players, especially considering the lengths that modern games go to to ensure players experience little to no "friction"  in their games. But to me, the potential for outliers is an important pact between the game and the player. I know, as a player, that I face a randomly generated challenge, that the game has jot been deliberately engineered to ensure I face only mild challenges, and that makes the victory mine in a way that I don't feel in other modern games. The peaks and valleys are an integral part of what makes a sandbox game meaningful. We already have some hard limits - the game can not sustain more than 8 missions on the roadmap at once, and will discard New spawns - but it's important to me as a gamer that the game does not "auto-tune" itself to safeguard me from outlier moments. In a game like this, where the narrative shape emerges dynamically from the unique circumstances of each campaign - and my own successes and failures - such outlier moments provide the game with the uncertainty and struggle which gives the game meaning. We can gate the experience and narrow the range of possibilities as mass-marketed games do, but in my view doing so undermines the power and investment that comes from forcing responsibility onto the player.

[Beren_Erchamion]

Yes, thanks.

These were the stats before the first mission with the new calculation:

No.	Missions	Kills	Strength	Speed	Accuracy	Mind	Close	Assault	Sniper	Explosives	Health
1.	35	28	47	29	36	37	27	29	38	23	124
2.	31	30	43	23	35	38	23	24	38	30	117
3.	39	12	47	32	35	39	30	27	21	26	111
4.	42	46	42	25	33	41	23	36	25	24	110
5.	24	14	40	27	34	41	28	22	32	20	113
6.	38	19	43	23	32	46	27	31	26	27	107
7.	45	33	48	24	32	45	27	22	28	40	124
8.	42	29	47	26	32	38	21	28	21	21	121
9.	45	37	44	32	36	47	25	21	27	34	114
10.	29	19	44	23	34	40	23	33	27	27	104

These were the stats afterwards:

No.	Missions	Kills	Strength	Speed	Accuracy	Mind	Close	Assault	Sniper	Explosives	Health
1.	36	nn	73	51	59	79	38	43	86	29	173
2.	32	nn	70	39	56	79	32	38	82	48	165
3.	40	nn	80	59	56	71	56	52	36	51	150
4.	43	nn	73	52	55	90	43	78	43	46	161
5.	25	nn	65	49	53	69	40	37	68	34	156
6.	39	nn	73	46	56	84	35	63	46	48	148
7.	46	nn	84	49	49	91	39	39	48	92	177
8.	43	nn	74	48	49	79	30	62	29	35	169
9.	46	nn	77	60	57	97	42	32	44	88	171
10.	30	nn	71	47	49	76	32	64	46	44	141

[ShipIt]

I understand it can be frustrating for some players, especially considering the lengths that modern games go to to ensure players experience little to no "friction"  in their games. But to me, the potential for outliers is an important pact between the game and the player. I know, as a player, that I face a randomly generated challenge, that the game has jot been deliberately engineered to ensure I face only mild challenges, and that makes the victory mine in a way that I don't feel in other modern games. The peaks and valleys are an integral part of what makes a sandbox game meaningful. We already have some hard limits - the game can not sustain more than 8 missions on the roadmap at once, and will discard New spawns - but it's important to me as a gamer that the game does not "auto-tune" itself to safeguard me from outlier moments. In a game like this, where the narrative shape emerges dynamically from the unique circumstances of each campaign - and my own successes and failures - such outlier moments provide the game with the uncertainty and struggle which gives the game meaning. We can gate the experience and narrow the range of possibilities as mass-marketed games do, but in my view doing so undermines the power and investment that comes from forcing responsibility onto the player.

+1

[MonkeyHead]

Hear Hear. I dont want to always win. I want to lose horribly and enjoy the small victories when they come. To borrow the motto from another community where I hang out a lot, Losing is Fun!

[Telok]

I seem to have been misunderstood. I absolutely do not want an easy, non-random game. I like and support the current implementation, that's why I try to do data mining and testing. What I'm concerned about is that it might be better to put some limits on the randomness at some point.

My current situation is what raised the question. I have now had 12 missions in three days and the current code seems to lack any sort of upper limit to that. Likewise it sounds like there is no possible streak breaker code to prevent a game going for three months without any missionsat all.

On an unrelated note I have sold off all the plasma blasters and particle beam cannons in my radar base garrisons. One of the missions was a base invasion on one such garrison. The blasters are too inaccurate at ranges of more than two or three squares and the cannons are too slow and heavy (and still rather inaccurate) for green troops. In any case neither weapon can stop an armored ortnok in a single hit, combined with the inaccuracy this makes them unsuitable for my base defense purposes.

My base defenders are being moved to a plasma and sniper rifle based defense plan. If I'm going to lose a soldier every hit then I want at least some damage from my troop's reaction fire. That means weapons with less than a 3 spread.

By the way, I won that mission with only three survivors out of the twelve soldier garrison. Plasma rifle bursts were more effective than the blasters.

[ShipIt]

Not sure about this, though - but at this point in the game you should already be able to use the EP-Ammo for your initial weapons (Assault, Sniper, HMG), no?

[Telok]

Not sure about this, though - but at this point in the game you should already be able to use the EP-Ammo for your initial weapons (Assault, Sniper, HMG), no?

I've had that stuff for a while now but I only use it with the sniper rifles on my real soldiers. While it is a boost to the damage it suffers from being workshop only like the PB grenades for the grenade launcher and advanced aircraft. With competing demands on my workshop time trying to arm the garrisons with first-rate ammo is way way down on the list. They'll get coilguns before they see plasma ammo because I can buy coilgun ammo from the market faster than I use it. Even with my best sniper teams it's 2/3 coilguns to 1/3 sniper rifle and that's only because the TU difference keeps sniper rifles competitive.