What I learnt from Trauson playing TFTD with Brutal-AI on SH/IM

[Xilmi]

Note, almost everything I'll write about here spoils the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0Ydl82-0JU

So if you are curious on seeing how someone fares with the odds stacked up against them, like this without being spoiled, watch the video first.

Spoiler:

Here's my conclusion: The game has an issue with reverse-difficulty-scaling and Brutal-AI just exacerbates this issue.
Surviving the first two months with it showed to be extremely difficult. It required a lot of skill, dedication and even a bit of luck.
The first goal is to extend the X-Com-project by not dropping too low in score twice in a row while getting what's necessary to get you to the mid-game.
In TFTD this means Ion-Armor. Ion-Armor made it so, that small-ufo-missions against non-lobsters became kinda trivial and secured a relatively stable income of score and stuff to sell while still looking a bit challenging. He tried to do a medium-landing site once but it was still too hard.
His new goal was Molecular-control. The ingredient necessary was a life Tasoth. He encountered them first on a cruise-ship-mission. And he got exactly what he came for. No chance to beat the mission but getting one life Tasoth was doable.
He didn't need to do anything difficult to stay afloat while getting his psi-training-facilities up and training his soldiers. All the score came from small subs. Bigger subs were ignored and terror-missions were just retreated from.
Molecular-control changed everything. Once he had a few decent psi-soldiers, it turned the game into a meme-fest and trivialized everything he did after that. The AI stopped mattering at that point. If they don't have control over their own units anymore, it makes no difference whether they would have acted smartly or not. He could beat a large lobsterman-sub fielding the nastiest of weapons without any losses. There's quite a lot of stuff to do to finish the game but I have a hard time imagining that anything could happen that could still stop him or even provide a reasonable challenge.

Sure, there were a few bloopers from the AI that he capitalized on and allowed him to get into this position. Most prominently the interaction of "There's 1 alien without a weapon spawned on Terror-Missions all the time" and "Brutal-AI will now try to pick up any weapon it can and is not limited how far it will go for this." This made getting the living Tasoth exceptionally easy as it was basically delivering itself for a juicy weapon he put out as a lure. Fixing the loadouts or changing the AI not to want to walk into danger they'd otherwise avoid to get one would have made it more difficult.

But I feel that any further improvements of the AI just make the discrepancy between extremely difficult early-game and mind-numbingly-easy mind-control late-game even bigger.

I'm now thinking of making a mod that turns the psi-item into something that just gives you a passive bonus to the stats that make mind-controlling you more difficult instead of giving that super-OP-ability to yourself.

[Yankes]

For psi, there way to nerf it, one is require LoS, bump cost of each action (like it will drain morale/energy or even health for each use).
Only allow Fear for starting psi-amp. Require better psi-amp for stronger aliens etc.

For further changes that require changes in engine, make unit that use psi-amp move visible and more vulnerable to counter psi actions.
Image special item that make alien attacking you visible on next turn. Or psi-damping items that are requited to even getting close to some powerful
aliens that simply melt you brain when you are close to them or even try psi-amp them.

[ps]
Another nerf could be limit numbers of aliens one solder can MC (if you success once, different alien cost more to MC), and even make it more fun in case death of MC-ed alien, solder get penalties from feedback.
This could be interesting mechanic as next MC of same alien will give bonuses but killing this alien instead will still give penalty to solder because of lingering mind link that persist some time after end of MC.

[Xilmi]

Thanks for the inputs on potential solutions for tackling the Psi-issue.

Now that I'm considering non-AI-modding anyways, I'm wondering whether I should start thinking about some design-goals.

I think that losing the game via cancellation of the X-Com project feels very anti-climatic and in a way also limiting how difficult missions can be.

I don't like the way it impacts decisions in terms of risk vs. reward. No reward will lure the player into doing a difficult-mission if failure would end the game.

What I'd like to see is: Individual missions being and remaining very hard but losing them not have such severe implications on the outcome of the game.

I really like the interaction of X-Com-progress and retaliation by the aliens and think that this is how the game should be lost. I've already done steps for that with the modification of "Aggressive Retaliation" as an attempt to make the mechanic more consistent. But at the moment it's relevance as a game-mechanic gets completely overshadowed by the score-defeat, which often hits before the Aliens would even start caring about X-Com enough to consider retaliating.

So the idea for a simple mod in this regard would be: Remove the score-defeat, force-enable the"Aggressive Retaliation"-option and do something about mind-control.

[Juku121]

Psi has long been an issue and your desire to remove it from the player is essentially rediscovering Xenonauts. Players weren't too happy about that, either. Nor the removal of Blaster Bombs.

Yankes has already listed a lot of common counters to psionics, although he missed what's probably the most important of them all: disallowing psi-waves propagating through the ether or, in plain language, making the power of psi attacks scale (edit: more strongly) with range.

Another thing along the lines of only allowing panic at first is to give the psions an actual damaging attack. I did that years ago with the goal of removing the 'psi lightning rod' tactic, by making both player and alien psi have a stun attack. I think already Apocalypse had psi-stunning? Anyway, that solved the issue of the 'lightning rod' who went to sleep and ceased to be a problem without removing all agency from the player - the victim is still alive and can even be revived if need be.

Otherwise, I watched the original stream from Trauson and caught some of yesterday's stream. I think I saw the Tasoth-napping and the first batch of Lobstermen.

In any case, the strongest impression I got from his play was that vanilla grenade range is utterly broken, as I've been preaching on occasion. I'm using instant grenades myself, instant (heh) gratification whore that I am, but I also restrict throwing ranges to 12 tiles (and Trauson made me think even that is too much) and make them explode in inventory when time is up. This means no pre-priming shenanigans, no man-mortars, and grenade relays have to use inert grenades and thus the point man or woman must be able to prime as well as throw.

The second was just how much he abused his invulnerable cover. The missile spam during the base attack only failed because TFTD elevetors are made of indesctructible hard light. Not to mention all the abuse heaped on the Triton.

Third, I think there's some danger in refining the AI exclusively with OG and TFTD playthroughs. Both of the original games had a lot of shortcomings that have seen various tweaks and additions over the course of the OXC and OXCE projects. And they're pretty barebones compared to many mod offerings available here and elsewhere.

As to the reverse difficulty curve, I'm personally not against it. Playing a game that gets harder and harder and then ball-crushingly hard is an exercise in masochism. Although the degree (or maybe slope) of this curve with BAI is certainly something.

Otherwise, the original "aliens prime all their grenades and blow up all the loot" idea was pure evil. And alien sniping and cover use is really what I like to see from them. Blowing up the landscape, themselves and precious veteran soldiers with Pulsers and PWTs, not so much.

[MaxMahem]

It sounds to me like this project might be better thought of as two projects (or even more).

One project is the one you've been working on. Improving the AI. It looks like you've made good strides there.

A second project is rebalancing TFTD and XCOM for a more even challenge.

These two projects can be interrelated, the second one might even depend on the first, but it feels like they could be and should be distinct. I'm excited to use your AI in other mods, but not necessarily if I have to take a whole bunch of other balance-related changes with it. (I also might want to use mods that are distinct *not* TFTD and XCOM).

Maybe you were already thinking along these lines, but I thought I'd make that point explicit. To that end, the more you can make the AI's behavior adaptable and configurable, the better.

I think Yankes suggestions have some merit. Especially the one about psi-use giving other psi-capable aliens "vision" of the user. But maybe that could work both ways? Would be interesting. Seems like if you made yet another mod/patch/fork that did this, it could feed into the Brutal AI without any other changes.

Also, having watched a bit of the stream, I think it's worth also considering people who are not-super experts at the game and play at difficulties less than superhuman in TFTD. Frankly, at those levels, I think the gameplay is kind of degenerate. The aliens are super-snipers and countering them with mass grenade spam is... interesting. But I don't think it reflects how most people play the game (it's certainly not how I play it).

I also think it plays up the problems in the game's balance since it kind of becomes a game of rocket tag, where strategy revolves more around being able to infer and predict the enemy's position and kill them on your turn. So positioning and whatnot become somewhat less important.

[Xilmi]

Maybe you were already thinking along these lines, but I thought I'd make that point explicit.

Of course. The idea is to make a mod that does some configurations that go well together with brutal-AI. Less punishing geoscape and nerfed psi are the only plans for that so far. My general idea is that the game should be difficult to progress through but not difficult to survive.
And I'm pretty sure that this doesn't really need new source code. And if it does, it would of course be optional same as "Enhanced Dogfight Behaviour", for example.

I think revealing the Psi-user would do very little. It's used by people who are mostly just staying inside of the Triton anyways. So even if you know where they are, it would be hard to punish. Ideas such as giving it some cost you aren't willing to pay over and over, sounds more interesting.

[Xilmi]

Psi has long been an issue and your desire to remove it from the player is essentially rediscovering Xenonauts. Players weren't too happy about that, either. Nor the removal of Blaster Bombs.

I should probably play that game.

Psi-attacks already scale with range. But high psi-strength+skill makes it overcome more and more of the range more and more easily.

The excessive grenade lobbing over unreal distances does indeed look a bit wrong too. However, I don't think it completely breaks the game as good positioning can invalidate it to a degree and the aliens can also do it. Basically it allows some counter-play.

The invulnerable cover-abuse also promted me to do a lot to take this into account from the AI side. He was not playing any officially released version of BAI. In 3.10.0 that doesn't work as well and neither will it in 3.11.0. I very much like the TWOTS-solution of simply dropping the soldiers off and picking them up again after the fight. Most elegant solution to that issue I've seen so far.

Well, yeah, the AI being built mostly around the vanilla-games does indeed mean it'll have short-comings in other mods. For example in WH40k, there's enforced ExtenderAccuracy in combination with a lot of weapons that don't have an aimed-shot. Doing well with those requires quite different play compared to doing well with weapons that can shoot over the entire map. But essentially my time is limited and I can only do so much when it comes to making the AI more adaptive to all the possibilities that exist. Every single feature potentially warrants it's own implementation for the AI. I could spend days on stuff like teaching the AI to use smoke-grenades properly and use sprinting when enabled and appropriate. Let alone whatever modders have come up with.

I thought about the reverse-difficulty-curve. And I concluded that I don't actually want increasing difficulty either. What I want is more something that's kinda constant. I mean psychologically, the more time is invested into a run, the more frustrating it would feel to just lose.

I said it in another post: My idea is that progressing should be hard but surviving should not and that mistakes should be recoverable from.

The aliens don't prime all grenades. Only when they find themselves in a situation where they are isolated and don't have anything better to do. The purpose also wasn't to blow up the loot. It was to be able to throw it with fewer TU's when they need it.
In UFO they have grenades far less often and later in the game. So they do more of the sniping and cover using and less of the blowing stuff up.

[Yankes]

I should probably play that game.

Psi-attacks already scale with range. But high psi-strength+skill makes it overcome more and more of the range more and more easily.

This could be migrated too by changing how psi-power scale with strength and skill, you can put some polynomial that keep low ranges same but cap hight end.


And for reviling units, idea is that if you are safe from attack inside craft you will be not safe from PSI attacks, it will be bit hard to MC aliens when you are under MC yourself

[MaxMahem]

I mainly think from the player end, and it if I had a psi-talented soldier (and maybe even if I did not!) it would be cool that if I came under psi-attack, I knew the position of the attacker. Even if it was only one highlighted square in a see of darkness.

Actually come to think of it, some sort of "remote vision" psi thing would be cool. I should look into that.

[Juku121]

The excessive grenade lobbing over unreal distances does indeed look a bit wrong too. However, I don't think it completely breaks the game as good positioning can invalidate it to a degree and the aliens can also do it. Basically it allows some counter-play.

Sure, but it's counterintuitive and, as another poster put it, degenerate play and counter-play. You could and should make sure that the AI can handle it since most mods retain that mechanic, but IMO it's a mistake inherited from the OG and the only reason it persists is because not everyone is a Trauson.

I very much like the TWOTS-solution of simply dropping the soldiers off and picking them up again after the fight. Most elegant solution to that issue I've seen so far.

That was one thing nuCom did right as well. Even Xenonauts had some sort of marked-off LZ for the highest-tier transport. Although the flying coffins with open doors present their own problems.


Otherwise, good points and a companion mod to BAI sounds very much like a good idea.

Actually come to think of it, some sort of "remote vision" psi thing would be cool.

Psi vision exists, although it's not quite crystal-ball style scrying.