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SubstantialFrivolity  I'm not even supposed to be here today  2yr ago (text post)   2534 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Oh, dynamic difficulty is a good choice. I suggested that to the original team way back in LW1, to avoid the "steamroll or die" problem that rewarded gamey strategies and trivialized the extremely drawn-out endgame. But they just tried to nerf all the good strats while balancing around people using them, turning the meta into exploiting the few things they couldn't control: breaking the AI with tedious LOS manipulation, pack activation mechanics, etc.

The sad part is that XCOM had a great lore justification for dynamic difficulty. Since the whole campaign is a test or experiment by the aliens for their new slave race, showing more promise should make them ramp up the pressure, and vice versa.

Didn't LW1 actually have elements of dynamic difficulty? It's been a while so I don't recall the datails, but I'm sure there was something.

Dynamic difficulty is something that I wish more games would attempt. Steamrolling and getting steamrolled after having invested hours into a campaign is always a very disappointing ending.

That said, IMO TI gets some things about it right and some horribly wrong.

The good: You can almost always come back from losses. You can always hire new councilors, take over small countries and work your way up, start a new space program.

The bad: And sometimes you can't, or the AI can't, and then there's still a very, very long game ahead of you. Sometimes the factions just run the Earth's economy into the ground and there's nothing to be done about the alien invasion. Sometimes you manage to unite all the Earth's nations into a few superblobs and retain control of all of them and all the other factions are now unable to do a damn thing. Sometimes you accidentally annoy the aliens prematurely and they lock down space forever, GG.

I stopped playing after the .12 nerfs, and didn't follow 1.0 at all, so they might have added it. But the mid-dev versions had a fixed difficulty curve timetable you could get ahead of: cheese an early supply ship and the Zhang missions, get early mecs & laser intis, and the rest of the game was just smashing endless UFO crash sites and milking exalt missions for meld.

Edit: I only just remembered that there was a reverse difficulty scaling mechanic in Alien Research, which made the aliens harder the poorer you were doing, and vice versa. If you were smashing it the aliens would fall behind on their tech curve and get even easier (even losing the ability to do terror missions). If you lost soldiers or failed to stop UFOs they would start showing up with 60 HP mechtoids against your basic rifles.

It was retarded and a big reason I burned out on the game.

The sad part is that XCOM had a great lore justification for dynamic difficulty.

Terra Invicta also kinda has an explanation but it's not great. Just to do spoilers for the alien motivation, which you won't discover the entirety off in every faction's playthough. Spoiler:

The aliens themselves were almost defeated by other aliens, and only barely managed to win. So now they're terrified of all other aliens and seek to enslave them before they can be enslaved themselves. But they're they have a pro-peace political faction of their own that doesn't want to just destroy humans - which I guess ends up being the explanation for dynamic difficulty. The whole reveal of 'the aliens were nearly enslaved themselves which is why they're acting this way to humans/xenophobic' is portrayed as some really deep, and cool reveal ('doesn't it say something deep about society') but really comes off as trite and uninspired to me.

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