Ground combat mission scores

[vaultdweller]

The game grades your performance on ground combat missions, and gives you a numerical rating. Letting civvies die hurts your score, capturing aliens instead of killing aliens helps your score.

I have no idea what that score means.

I know that higher is better than lower, and it has something to do with my national standings, but I really have no idea the significance of the number. Does that extra 1 point for capturing a live alien actually do anything meaningful? Is a dead civilian even worth paying attention to?

[Max_Caine]

Is your question regarding the mechanics of nation relations, or is your question more of a request to make the numbers more meaningful? Because it looks like both. Or is it both?

[vaultdweller]

Both, I guess.

We get a very specific number that gets plugged into a subsystem that reveals no specifics. That is a poor combination.

Either the mechanics of what the number does should be made more transparent, or it shouldn't be given as a number. Numbers without context are not useful.

{Edit}

This was prompted by your post on the Geoscape balance thread about defense strength from missile batteries. It made me start thinking about where else the game gives us numbers without providing any meaning for them.

Edited November 11, 2013 by vaultdweller

[superbob]

So how can the number gain some meaning?

Ideas:

1. display effective funding increase
   
2. display progress toward maintaining/improving current standing with the nation
   
3. provide averages, target and max scores for a given mission
   

The alternative would of course be hiding the number, or actually all associated numbers - no more points per captured aliens or civilian casualties, just the raw statistics. TBH I'd rather have a number that I don't understand (except that higher=better) than have to guess or count it all myself, then maybe look up the actual values on some wiki page.

Then again I'm of a fan of fine-grained evaluation, that takes more into account than just the basic outcome. Stuff like demolished houses, missed shots, injured (and bandaged?) civilians, aliens splattered all over the place that someone has to clean up. Basically a system that gives scores that go into thousands and actually rewards playing the missions cleanly, however not so much I couldn't go on a rocket launcher rampage... But I guess it's a little late for changes like that.

[Aaron]

The entire mission over screen is due for an overhaul - we will replace the score with something more informative then.

[StellarRat]

Cool!