[Answered] time travelling idea

[Rangerh]

Looking around the saved games i noticed that they take track of time

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time:
  second:
  minute:
  hour:
  weekday:
  day:
  month:
  year:

and

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monthsPassed:

I had read that monthsPassed: is used for for many weighted alien missions, alien base upgrades ...
So i was wondering if it could be possible to manipulate those values from the save game to incorporate time travel in some gameplay format.
An idea i had by example :
on year 2 of your playthrough by completing a specific mission you discover a document that after research will tell you that there was an undiscovered secret base that in the middle of year 1 that triggered a chain of event that would lead to an alien faction becoming nearly undefeatable.

from there you could continue on your game though that specific alien factions bases would be insanely hard to destroy.
Or you could think about time travel as this could then be a way to prevent this alien faction to get too strong, by doing a few specific missions you could get your hand on some time traveling tech/facility blueptrint and effectively trigger whatever will change the saved game time/monthpassed values to effectively bring you back to the "past" of your current run , spawning the secret base that did whatever would make a faction too strong, allowing you to destroy it and continue that now changed timeline in which that alien faction will then do not upgrade.

Can this kind of time manipulation be possible in OXCE ?

[Yankes]

There is now function like this, its named save/load :>

I do not see benefits in gameplay, its will be only a gimmick.

[krautbernd]

I don't think "time travel" would be the right word for this - this would indeed require multiple save states (unless x-com somehow manages to teleport all of their assets/relations/etc. as well).

But being able to modify/reset "months passed" via research/events/etc. could be useful (for exmaple to depict major alien setbacks after an importan mission, sabotage, killing of high ranking commander whatever).

[Yankes]

It could then not name it "months passed" but more "threat level" and this indeed could have good interaction with gameplay.

Research could decrees or INCREASE it. Some bases/missions could affect it.
Ignore of mission could affect it, or even opposite taking mission will affect this level.

[yergnoor]

As I see it, restarting the game process from a distant time point in the past is too drastic a change.
But the idea of "time warfare" itself is quite interesting. In science fiction it is played out in different ways, for example the Terminator movies come to mind.
How could this happen in an X-Com game, based on the idea of the enemy base problem?
Suppose research shows that there is an enemy base that is so well fortified that X-Com is currently powerless to capture or destroy it. And there is information that the existence of this base threatens to defeat the war. For example, the base will begin to expand rapidly, taking over more and more territory. As far as I remember, the enemy bases have such a possibility - to send UFOs, so that they founded more and more new bases, saw a screenshot of this.
That is, you need to somehow make the first enemy base is invulnerable to X-Com attack.
Then the only option would be a past operation - sending a special group to destroy a base when it was just founded and no different than a normal base. Such a journey would only be possible with the use of a huge amount of Eleurium-115, which is a unique resource.
This would require launching a combat mission based on the results of the research and only if the necessary resources are available. Externally, such a launch should work similarly to a flight to Mars. Instead of specifying a point on the map, there should be a separate button to send a special intertemporal jumper.
If the mission fails, the transport and everyone on it is lost, and the enemy base remains in its previous location. If successful, the enemy base disappears from the map as having been destroyed long ago, and the plane returns with the surviving soldiers... who must now explain who they are and where they came from to management. After all, no one sent them anywhere. Destroying the base in the past made the mission unnecessary.
Anyway, that's the basic idea. Not a restart of the game process, but a local operation in the past to change the situation in the present. I have no idea how feasible this is. And whether it's worth doing.

[Meridian]

It could then not name it "months passed" but more "threat level" and this indeed could have good interaction with gameplay.

Research could decrees or INCREASE it. Some bases/missions could affect it.
Ignore of mission could affect it, or even opposite taking mission will affect this level.

This is all doable already with custom counters.

Counters can increase/decrease based on research, mission completion/non-completion/avoidance.
Counters can then affect the generation of missions and events.