[Suggestion] AI cheating toggle-able

[new_civilian]

After playing a game with cheatTurn set to 200 I realized how much less artificial and more realistic the game has become. I really liked it much more than the default setting. However, enabling this for EVERY AlienDeployment entry is a real burden, especially if you use a lot of new terrains/missions/uf/usos. So here my suggestion:

Could we make the cheating AI an option?

[Meridian]

1/ Should be easy to do, I'll post the necessary code here later.

2/ "realistic", really? If there was a war against aliens, it would look anything but like this... it's just a game.

[Arthanor]

Maybe realistic in the sense that conditions don't change all of a sudden with the enemy becoming much more dangerous for no reason than an arbitrary time limit? The AI doesn't allow for realistic combat (which would be brutal and hardly enjoyable with the current system. You'd lose all soldiers something like 75% of the missions, and the landing craft too? bleh!) but that doesn't make arbitrary abrupt changes in it any better. Ideally, we'd have an AI that performs the same way from T1 to T200 and is good enough to provide a challenge the whole time.

[Hobbes]

After playing a game with cheatTurn set to 200 I realized how much less artificial and more realistic the game has become. I really liked it much more than the default setting. However, enabling this for EVERY AlienDeployment entry is a real burden, especially if you use a lot of new terrains/missions/uf/usos. So here my suggestion:

Could we make the cheating AI an option?

IMHO, I wouldn't know which one is less realistic: the AI knowing where all your units are, or aliens only maneuvering to attack only when they see an enemy unit otherwise off they go patrolling a map section completely in the wrong direction of the fight.

What I do know is that cheatTurn was designed to speed up fights (it is also triggered if there are only 2 or less live aliens) and prevent the endless search for last alien which is hiding in the closet. It also gives an incentive to the player not to camp because if most aliens are still alive by turn 20, then he/she will be most likely swarmed, if they are spread out across the battlefield.

As a modder, having cheatTurn as an option is also undesirable because I have created maps/missions for Area 51, designed for different cheatTurn settings (some have is set as 0, others have 30). Giving control to the player to disable all of those would really mess around with these missions.

[new_civilian]

^what Athanor said. Realistic in the terms of being more fair and balanced.

And yes a war against Aliens would look NOTHING like XCom, actually there would never be one, all that would happen would be some relativistic weaponry popping out of seemingly nowhere and there, that was life on earth and now it's over.

[Arthanor]

I didn't say anything about fair or balanced One could say that both of these characteristics do not belong in a realistic AI! A realistic AI would be ruthless, brutal and unsportsmanlike, like we are with our blaster launchers and smoke screens.

What I argue is that a self-consistency is realistic, more so than an abrupt change after and arbitrary time limit. That said, until the normal AI is improved, I can't see changing it and in fact could consider that setting cheat turn to 1 produces the most realistic AI: uncannily perceptive and deadly which fits with alien supersoldiers bred for combat much better than stupid wandering idiots.