This is why xcom games have iron man mode. Save scumming is so much a known part of the game that it’s considered an extra challenge to play in a mode where you can’t save scum. I love xcom but I’ve never done iron man mode because there are some moments occasionally that are just serious bullshit and I don’t have the tolerance for it.
Play the way thats fun to you. That’s the point of games.
Not to take from your point (which I fully agree with)…. But doesn’t XCom do an anti scum method of feeding the RNG seed in a way that prevents save scumming?
I know I’ve tried to scum some hacks in that game that always returned the same value.
Sort of. It depends where your save point is. If you’re on the world screen and save before selecting a mission your mission can generate differently when it loads. If you save in mission making the same moves will always give the same results, but changing your moves slightly will cause some different background math and change the chances on a shot hitting, etc. All the enemy groups are generated already if you save in level, so if you get ambushed in some horrific way you can avoid them on reload. I would typically save just before selecting a mission, another at mission start once I’m deployed, and then once more on mission completion. I would rarely use it and eat most of my mistakes, but on a few occasions I would have one of my units get totally fucked by a group somehow hidden one space away around a corner or something like that and then the scum power comes out to save my ass.
Yeah XCom is ridiculously bullshit with how RNG can completely screw up a mission. Ok if you miss a 90% shot, sure there’s a 10% chance you miss so that can happen. Missing multiple 90% shots in a row and getting completely slaughtered because of it? Complete bullshit.
It should add some compensation for this, like if you miss a 90% shot you get some extra points added to the next roll. There’s nothing realistic about rolling an RNG number to check if something happens or not so it’s being too strict on that just to make the game needlessly frustrating. Like if I’m doing perfect tactics and lose because of a string of unlucky rolls, it’s just the game randomly telling that I lose. Not much fun.
I remember one in particular where point blank shotguns with 2 soldiers and then my sniper all missed hitting the same damn enemy, all with 90% chance to hit. Resulted in my team getting absolutely steamrolled the next round. This may be the incident that caused me to figure out how to properly save scrub, haha, I was fucking pissed!
The RNG will return the same sequence of random numbers, but doing things in a different order will have those numbers used for different purposes. So saving and trying the exact same shot again will give the same result. If you rolled a 23 and you needed >25 to hit, it will always miss no matter how many times you reload it because 23 will always be the first number in the sequence. But if you do some other action, that 23 gets used for that, and if 56 is the next number in the sequence then that shot will hit when you do it on the next action.
This is why xcom games have iron man mode. Save scumming is so much a known part of the game that it’s considered an extra challenge to play in a mode where you can’t save scum. I love xcom but I’ve never done iron man mode because there are some moments occasionally that are just serious bullshit and I don’t have the tolerance for it.
Play the way thats fun to you. That’s the point of games.
Save Scums Ironman Mode 😎
(Actually a thing btw)
Not to take from your point (which I fully agree with)…. But doesn’t XCom do an anti scum method of feeding the RNG seed in a way that prevents save scumming?
I know I’ve tried to scum some hacks in that game that always returned the same value.
Sort of. It depends where your save point is. If you’re on the world screen and save before selecting a mission your mission can generate differently when it loads. If you save in mission making the same moves will always give the same results, but changing your moves slightly will cause some different background math and change the chances on a shot hitting, etc. All the enemy groups are generated already if you save in level, so if you get ambushed in some horrific way you can avoid them on reload. I would typically save just before selecting a mission, another at mission start once I’m deployed, and then once more on mission completion. I would rarely use it and eat most of my mistakes, but on a few occasions I would have one of my units get totally fucked by a group somehow hidden one space away around a corner or something like that and then the scum power comes out to save my ass.
Yeah XCom is ridiculously bullshit with how RNG can completely screw up a mission. Ok if you miss a 90% shot, sure there’s a 10% chance you miss so that can happen. Missing multiple 90% shots in a row and getting completely slaughtered because of it? Complete bullshit.
It should add some compensation for this, like if you miss a 90% shot you get some extra points added to the next roll. There’s nothing realistic about rolling an RNG number to check if something happens or not so it’s being too strict on that just to make the game needlessly frustrating. Like if I’m doing perfect tactics and lose because of a string of unlucky rolls, it’s just the game randomly telling that I lose. Not much fun.
I remember one in particular where point blank shotguns with 2 soldiers and then my sniper all missed hitting the same damn enemy, all with 90% chance to hit. Resulted in my team getting absolutely steamrolled the next round. This may be the incident that caused me to figure out how to properly save scrub, haha, I was fucking pissed!
The RNG will return the same sequence of random numbers, but doing things in a different order will have those numbers used for different purposes. So saving and trying the exact same shot again will give the same result. If you rolled a 23 and you needed >25 to hit, it will always miss no matter how many times you reload it because 23 will always be the first number in the sequence. But if you do some other action, that 23 gets used for that, and if 56 is the next number in the sequence then that shot will hit when you do it on the next action.