Why? They are fine in games like Master of Orion or Heroes of Might and Magic. These recommendations are good enough for me. I've played these games a lot, you know.
I also happen to have played a lot of MOO/MOO2, and none of the random events in those was an automatic "game over". Because random events either affected all players equally (e.g. hyperspace distortion) or affected only single planets or systems.
Neither Master of Orion nor HMM (at least the parts of the series I remember playing) had any kind of score system that lead to an automatic game over when you had to many "bad" turns. MOO2 had the "election of galactic emperor" thing, but even there the player had the option to simply not respect the decision (and turning all other parties hostile mind you).
The thing is that all of these were designed and balanced with negative and positive events in mind. None of these were automatic game overs and the player had an option to deal with the fallout. X-Com/XCF doesn't have any of that. On the one hand you have RNG mission generation that give you bad ratings even if there was no possible way you could have reached the sites in time and you have RNG events that can screw you over. How are you even supposed to recover when you have no option to raise your score out of the negative because RNG decides that you get no other missions until the end of the month, or not enough to balance out the score?
The thing is that the metric here is detached from what the player can influence. Random events in MOO could impact your economy, research, fleets etc. - but not some abstract thing that was primarily dependant on RNG events like monthly score.
Plague on one of your planets? Get scientists to work on it.
Pirates raiding your freighters? Sent combat ships to the system.
Virus resulting in a one-time research points loss? Focus on research.
Earthquake destroys buildings? Rebuild.
None of these are simply something that "happens" to player. They are incentives for player interaction because the game gives you options to deal with them. The game is *engaging* the player. Randomly deducting points from the player in XCF is the exact opposite, because you are dependent on RNG mission generation to offset point loss, and you can - through no fault of your own - get into a situation where you can not offset negative points becasue the game doesn't give you an opportunity to.
I mean random credit deduction can at least be countered by selling items - not that you have a realistic option to create income via manufacturing anymore.
The point is not that random events
in general are bad, the point is that they are bad as they are implemented in XCF, because they accomplish the opposite of what they do in the games you're referring to. What am I to make of some crop circles that the game didn't tell me about? Nothing. What am I to make of some planes getting shot down half-way accross the globe that again the game doesn't tell me about? Nothing. What am I to make about aliens abducting a child that I had no way of preventing? Nothing.
No player engagement, no active option to counter or to offset. Just wait for next RNG misison generation that might or might let you offset these.
The idea behind random negative events isn't to punish the player. The idea is to engage the player.
You are not engaging the player if "engaging" equals "wait for next RNG event". Because unlike MOO and HMM X-Com doesn't have an option to seek out the enemy. The game decides when you get an opportunity to engage, not the player.Contrast to this for example Finnik's FtA which let's you sent out agents to actively generate engagements.
