@Meridian: And your example was cherry-picked to be the most advantageous possible.
I was wrong in my initial assessment, but
averages still matter because no matter what the player does, the
second roll is still random and not a guaranteed -50% roll.
If Piratez wants do disable such a relatively meager advantage (even 834/1000 ~= 17% is not a gigantic advantage for that amount of micromanagement hassle), Piratez can always lock that option to disabled.
Edit2: I think the actual problem here is not the ability to get some relatively mild research savings (~5% on average without reloading, and once you're savescumming the whole issue goes out of the window anyway), but the fact that a player will be able to intuit the actual cost and remove
any and all uncertainty from the process at will (and nominally without cheating). /edit
@Delian: Genuine, ground-breaking research doesn't really work that way. People can give you estimates, but unless they've already
done the research (a practice of quite a few scientists, sadly), that is going to be pretty useless for anything other than project management ("You said you'd be done two years ago! You're fired!"
).
The current formula is a compromise between having a certain measure of uncertainty while being very simple and easy to grasp. Obviously, most people here, myself included, seem to be of the opinion that giving the player any more control over this state of affairs would tip it too far away from a 'desirable' amount of uncertainty.
I don't see much harm in this being an
option, but then again I'm not the person who has to maintain this whole thing.
Edit: As to scientist roll-over, I imagine that discussion was done to death when the original bug was squashed (or not re-implemented) when moving forward with OpenXcom.
That is certainly going to raise some immersion issues - so 499 scientists collectively managed to come up with the bright idea of blasting alien alloys with EM radiation, and then the
other 335 went back in time, saw that they weren't needed to finish the project and decided to redo their day and study laser pistols instead?