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There was a post on the Steam forums that got me thinking. With most games, the accuracy system just uses a "dumb" RNG that will be correct for sufficiently long playthroughs, but can still result in streaks of good or bad luck that last for most/all of a mission (if not longer). While the streaks of good luck are nice, they generally don't seem to alleviate the frustration caused by the streaks of bad luck. My question is thus: Is it hypothetically possible to override the accuracy calculations in order to create a "smart" RNG that prevents streaks (both good and bad)? If so, where would be the place to look if I wanted to attempt to write such a "smart" RNG? The algorithm itself probably wouldn't be too hard to get working on a basic level, but I'm not familiar with modding Xenonauts, and have no idea where/how the best place/way to get started is.

Well...the main effect this has had is that I have to shoot aliens 3-6 times to kill them now, instead of 2-4. Right.

Hey all. Loving the game so far tonnes of forum input that i can see too, but another idea or 2 cant hurt can it? I know that there is a significant amount of random stuff loaded in the latest few builds, but i was thinking that a few invisible overlays could be made for each tileset that uses some form of loading an asset from a pool of assets(to further randomise) to make the maps even more varied. This could also be used indoors to turn houses into shops, shops/houses into warehouses/storage etc. It would basically dynamically load pre-made assets over the tiles using what should be a super-easy to produce colour map(which is obviously invisible to the player) These assets would also have various states of destruction, such as fire hydrants spraying water constantly when shot up, road lights no longer illuminating light missions. As the image attachment thing shrunk my file to buggery, ill put the legend here Blue - road lights/power lines/road lights & power lines Red - North-west road crossing Yellow - garbage cans, post boxes, fire hydrants, etc. Green - North-east road crossing Purple - 4-way traffic lights Cyan - Random trash? 10%? chance of appearing (Can move over with TU penalty if exists) Olive - Flowers/weeds asset pool (% chance of appearing ) I'll have to grab my gold pre-order medal thing too sometime now that I have finally registered on the forum again. And hopefully the 10 or so "Xenonauts" games in my windows games folder will dissappear too someday too... Anyways thanks for reading;)

I have just read this interesting article on the strategy gaming blog Flash of Steel, and though it doesn't mention X-Com style games it could easily been written about them. The article is worth a read by itself, but is also a good opener for a specific discussion on Xenonauts. For those not interested in reading the whole thing: it talks about random elements in strategy games and how these elements can prevent singleplayer strategy games from becoming boring and rote in the long term and also how they lead to the dynamic generation of "stories" in these games. X-Com and its descendants are very good at using random elements to stay interesting after the player has mastered the core game systems. They are also notorious for being occasionally violently unfair, but interestingly these moments of cruelty are rarely as annoying as they are in other games; the crucial difference in X-Com games, I believe, is that almost all of the random elements can be adapted to by the player in some way. This is what creates the dramatic tension of the missions, and prevents them becoming repetitive; even experienced players can find themselves in an unwinnable situation, created by a combination of random elements. Those dynamic "stories" the article mentions are created when the player find themselves in one of those no-win situations and then uses everything at their disposal to win anyway. I'm interested in other people thoughts on this; do you agree that the randomisation of the player challenge is one of the key ingredients to the X-Com (and by extension, Xenonauts) formula? What are the ways they use random elements that work best and provide interesting but surmountable challenges? In which ways do they work the least well, simply being annoying with no way for the player to fight back? My personal view is this: X-Com was released as "UFO Enemy Unknown" in the UK, and that title was very deliberate - the most important aspect of randomisation in the game isn't the inaccuracy of shooting, or the random maps - it's the aliens themselves. In ground combat, the real trick to winning is unmasking the alien force - once you have found out who they are, how many they are and where they are then victory is almost assured - the real challenge is uncovering that information before your forces are picked off from the shadows. This consequently means once the player has, after a first playthrough, figured out the order the alien races appear in and their relative abilities the challenge is lessened significantly. I wonder if these elements could be randomised on a per-playthrough basis to increase replayability and maintain that fear of the unkown? Perhaps the first time you play the intitial enemies are mostly Sectoid style aliens, and rely on long range weapons - but maybe the next time you play the game adjusts the stats of a different alien race, and gives them nasty close range weapons (and you meet the Sectoids-alikes later in a more powerful form). Maybe sometimes they will have weapons platforms, maybe sometimes hoards of weaker troops. You could introduce a minor chance that an more powerful alien race could make a one off appearance earlier in the game than they normally would - so you shoot down a UFO expecting it to be full of Sectoid-alikes, but instead get a hive of Chrysalids-beasts - do you run away, fight them? Imagine if you fought them and won! Perhaps you could even lock out entire enemy types in each playthrough - imagine playing through the game a second time and meeting an enemy unit, weapon or even entire race that you had never seen before! Anyway, I hope this was interesting and generates some discussion. To be clear, I put this in general discussion because I specifically wanted to avoid it turning into a "We have decided it should be like XYZ in Xenonauts, Chris!"; I'm more interested in just talking about these ideas.