[DONE][Suggestion] "Autosave Frequency" and "Autosave Slots" for Geoscape

[0ros]

UPDATE 2:

Given the request by the Dev for a prune of the amount of features listed previously...



1: A feature for an unlimited-slots one-keypress save (& load), auto-writing "new game ##" and being renamable (would replace quick-saving).
 1.1: Option to limit the loadable saves to the most recent 1-50 (applies to saving through the menu, shares the limit).
 1.2: Additional control keys for bringing save & load menus.
2: Battlescape auto-saving frequency limit increased to 50.
3: Option to prevent modification of such features upon game-start.

Those seem to be the most important ones.



UPDATE:

Given the feedback...



Initially:

"...outside-battle 10-slots auto-save limit occurring once a day--reload anytime--plus the standard extra save at the beginning and end of a (the) battle."


Now:

1: A feature for an unlimited-slots one-keypress save (& load), auto-writing "new game ##" and being renamable (would replace quick-saving).
 1.1: Option to limit the loadable saves to the most recent 1-10.
 1.2: Additional control keys for bringing save & load menus.
2: A feature for Geoscape unlimited-slots auto-saving after a certain number of days has passed.
 2.1: Option to choose the frequency of the auto-saves.
 2.2: Same as 1.1.
3: A feature for having limited points that could be spent to save the game at any time.
 3.1: Option for adjustable amount of points (e.g.: 1-50).
 3.2: Option for renewing the points after a certain number of days has passed.
4: Battlescape auto-saving.
 4.1: Battlescape auto-saving frequency limit increased to 50.
 4.2: Choosing the number of auto-save slots, limit being 10.
5: Options for disabling manual saving, loading.
6: Option to prevent modification of such features upon game-start.

- Features above could be modifiable (enabled/disabled, adjusted) through the Advanced menu.
- Choosing the game mode could activate them.
- Their activation could hide the game modes [Ironman, SUPERMUTANT].


Possible improvements are welcome.



ORIGINALLY:

I've an issue of saving too frequently in micromanagement-heavy games...in order to avoid having to redo stuff in case something unwanted happens.

Certain games (such as baldur's gate 3) also compel players to save often, due to other reasons.

The temptation of having to save often is known to experienced gamers. It's natural to prefer a more pleasant outcome, since we're playing games for pleasant feelings. But the ability to create many saves any time lessens the experience by lessening its seriousness, thus its excitement--such as a 'save point feature' would be in reality. So we might want to restrict ourselves, but the temptation ends up being bothersome in ways. (Do I have to say that we don't have full control over our feelings (and thoughts)?)
It also hurts immersion in ways, knowing that the ability to save any time is a "rule of this world", whilst actively opposing it for a better experience.

Players normally don't find a Ironman mode viable since it tends to be extreme.


This game's Ironman already doesn't delete the save upon a defeat. I suggest something between that and the standard saving method.

It's a 'soft ironman' idea, which was implemented for some similar project for the game Jagged Alliance 2. thepitDOTja-galaxy-forumDOTcom/index.php?t=msg&goto=331318

So I asked a couple of Devs in XPiratez Matrix platform about the idea in order to gather some feedback. One concern mentioned is that a single save would hinder bug-reporting. Another is that it could be risky due to save corruption.

So what I ended up thinking of is a outside-battle 10-slots auto-save limit occurring once a day, plus the standard extra save at the beginning and end of a (the) battle. (Not having to manually save would also be a plus, since it takes us out of the game and takes some key pressed every time.)

I normally don't keep more than 10 saves or more than fit the screen, since I'd rather not have to scroll (plus, so many older console games had a limited number of save slots...)--I wouldn't want to go back too far, and I believe most gamers think the same. (Some freakish BG3 players keep thousands of saves, though.) I pretty much tend to save every time I buy something or spend some time micromanaging, so I'd replace those 10 saves within 10 days.
That many save-slots would alleviate the issues mentioned previously. (I believe that players normally don't report bugs that don't bother them enough, anyway (it's about what you'll get for what you'll give--in this case, the effort spent going out of your way to report), and they'd have 10 in-game days to feel like it--but I don't have the perspective of a Dev.) If that's still too concerning, shouldn't, instead, some export-saves feature be added? (Something that can't directly be used to load the game from.)


"Ironman" modes have been popular recently. For example, WoW Classic Hardcore mode, BG3 Honour mode.

(Concern for bugs shouldn't hinder the gaming experience, otherwise it'd be the norm.)


And a name for it? Uh, for the base game, simply 'soft ironman'. For XPiratez, though, uh, something like "TALENTED MUTANT".

[psavola]

I play ironman so I may be biased but.. even when I did not, I never actually used more than a couple of save slots for a certain game. I don't think essentially anyone (other for game debugging purposes) would continue playing the game but reload a game you played three days ago and 8 saves earlier. So I don't really think this proposal adds anything, because by that definition everyone would be using this mode.

Also, ironman mode already allows a softer approach, which I sometimes used before moving on to "hardcore ironman". If you kill the program before the game saves itself automatically, in battlescape at the start of every X turns (by default 5), you can continue from the earlier point. The only thing you risk is savefile corruption if you do it at the wrong moment, while the game is updating the save. But as a player you already know when that happens and can avoid that. Savefire corruption has never occurred to me while playing soft or hardcore ironman. (Note that earlier OXCE tried to save the game when playing ironman when the program was closed, but that is no longer the case, precisely to avoid savefile corruption.)

[0ros]

I play ironman so I may be biased but.. even when I did not, I never actually used more than a couple of save slots for a certain game. I don't think essentially anyone (other for game debugging purposes) would continue playing the game but reload a game you played three days ago and 8 saves earlier. So I don't really think this proposal adds anything, because by that definition everyone would be using this mode.

Also, ironman mode already allows a softer approach, which I sometimes used before moving on to "hardcore ironman". If you kill the program before the game saves itself automatically, in battlescape at the start of every X turns (by default 5), you can continue from the earlier point. The only thing you risk is savefile corruption if you do it at the wrong moment, while the game is updating the save. But as a player you already know when that happens and can avoid that. Savefire corruption has never occurred to me while playing soft or hardcore ironman. (Note that earlier OXCE tried to save the game when playing ironman when the program was closed, but that is no longer the case, precisely to avoid savefile corruption.)

I'm primarily interested in XPiratez and it seems that that's a much longer (400+ hours) and more complex game, so reloading from a 10 days earlier save is reasonable.

There'd be no real (newbie-) need to Alt+F4 the game if one could reload from a day earlier anytime. And such a thing isn't proper and a game shouldn't be compelling the player to do that.

[Juku121]

I am personally a hardcore savescummer, but...

10 autosaves doesn't really seem like a particularly better idea, since the game automatically decides when to save for you. I've ended up with 10 autosaves clustered around the same particular moment in other games. Your 10 days' worth of auto-save grace could all be beyond the tipping point, like the aliens/whoever having launced an infiltration of your biggest sponsor. Or there are three incoming terrors that you can't handle at the same time, while being on your second month of negative score. Etc.


And the 'no debug saves' issue is real, whatever you may think about it being 'normal'. I've lost count of how many times someone comes in (not only here; on other projects, too, including some of my own), says 'this kinda looks buggy' and when questioned can't come up with any details and says that they either overwrote the save or that they only have (much more recent) autosaves. It's a real pain to debug things this way.


I think a sort of interesting 'soft' ironman could be achieved via something like the system the old tactical game Spellcross used - you had 10 save slots, and could save into each only once through quite large battle maps. Give players a limited number of a 'save resource', like once per week, or once per tactical battle, that could stack up to, say, 10 Geoscape and 3 Battlescape saves.


Piratez being longer doesn't really make 10 days of lost game time better. If anything, it's worse because of the sheer volume of things that happen and stuff that has to be managed. Psavola also plays various megamods, like XCF, which - while not quite as massive - are generally in the same ballpark.

[0ros]

I am personally a hardcore savescummer, but...

10 autosaves doesn't really seem like a particularly better idea, since the game automatically decides when to save for you. I've ended up with 10 autosaves clustered around the same particular moment in other games. Your 10 days' worth of auto-save grace could all be beyond the tipping point.


And the 'no debug saves' issue is real, whatever you may think about it being 'normal'. I've lost count of how many times someone comes in (not only here, on other projects, too, including some of my own), says 'this kinda looks buggy' and when questioned can't come up with any details and says they either overwrote the save or they only have (much more recent) autosaves. It's a real pain to debug things this way.


I think a sort of interesting 'soft' ironman could be achieved via something like the system the old tactical game Spellcross used - you had 10 save slots, and could save into each only once through quite large battle maps. Give players a limited number of a 'save resource', like once per week, or once per tactical battle, that could stack up to, say, 10 Geoscape and 3 Battlescape saves.


Piratez being longer doesn't really make 10 days of lost game time better. If anything, it's worse because of the sheer volume of things that happen and stuff to manage. Psavola also plays various megamods, like XCF, which - while not quite as massive - are generally in the same ballpark.

But that's similar to ironman mode. It's meant to be a convenient, not extreme version. If the player didn't manage things well thus lost the game, it's as supposed to be.


But that's the norm--players won't be making hundreds of individual saves. Making some key presses plus typing the save name every time is inconvenient and unnatural. If the game created a save automatically upon pressing 'save game', it'd be a different story.


That sounds good also, and would alleviate even more the bug-reporting issue. But it'd be best not to be concerned with saving at all. Once a week for the auto-save (every 4th day) would also be reasonable.

Seems that in XPiratez, some battles can last over a hundred turns--which is an experience I didn't have yet. So 3 saves, but each occurring every 30th turn would be a good tweak to the idea.


It does give a point to reloading that far, since there'd be much more reluctance to abandon such a long game. Also, in that mod, basically, the game can be played in many different ways, so it allows for an opportunity to choose different paths.

[Juku121]

If what you're after is that close to 'hard' ironman, what exactly is the point of even having it, then?

As to 'inconvenient and unnatural', speak for yourself. Saving a game/ongoing work/other info is as natural to me as e.g. searching the web.

And the point here was that if the saves are fully automatic, they are almost exactly as bad as a single ironman save wrt bughunting. Your once-a-week save days later is not particularly more useful for debugging than a single ironman save. If you even remember to take and store that save afterwards.

One-button saves exist, press F5.


Basically, you can already have most of what you're proposing by playing with a larger number of auto-saves and foregoing manual saving entirely. This seems to be what you're after, isn't it?


Given the choice of replaying a busy week in-game, or living with some moderate catastrophe (like losing a new base, or somesuch), it's not clear the catastrophe loses. Mods like Piratez have a ton of management going on, not to mention big swings in what the RNG gods give you.

From what I've seen, people tend to pick a path/captain/codex and follow it even after reloading, and the big choices aren't nearly as frequent as to be weekly, so it's not really that these bronzeman autosaves would offer much in terms of additional replayability. IMO, a save at the exact point of decision is much more convenient and tempting than having to play half a week to get to that point.

[0ros]

If what you're after is that close to 'hard' ironman, what exactly is the point of even having it, then?

As to 'inconvenient and unnatural', speak for yourself. Saving a game/ongoing work/other info is as natural to me as e.g. searching the web.

And the point here was that if the saves are fully automatic, they are almost exactly as bad as a single ironman save wrt bughunting. Your once-a-week save days later is not particularly more useful for debugging than a single ironman save. If you even remember to take and store that save afterwards.

One-button saves exist, press F5.


Basically, you can already have most of what you're proposing by playing with a larger number of auto-saves and foregoing manual saving entirely. This seems to be what you're after, isn't it?


Given the choice of replaying a busy week in-game, or living with some moderate catastrophe (like losing a new base, or somesuch), it's not clear the catastrophe loses. Mods like Piratez have a ton of management going on, not to mention big swings in what the RNG gods give you.

From what I've seen, people tend to pick a path/captain/codex and follow it even after reloading, and the big choices aren't nearly as frequent as to be weekly, so it's not really that these bronzeman autosaves would offer much in terms of additional replayability. IMO, a save at the exact point of decision is much more convenient and tempting than having to play half a week to get to that point.

The OP should've made the point(s) clear.

Standard save mode is: manually save any time, no limit, reload anytime.
Ironman mode is: only auto-save every 10th day, 1 save, no reload.
Suggestion is something like: only auto-save every under 4 days, 10 saves, reload anytime.

That looks between both, which is distinct enough.


It's the norm--what most players do, that matters. Again, I don't think that they keep hundreds to thousands of saves. For me to believe that that's the norm, saving would have to take only about a couple button presses and no real need for typing due to the game automatically writing "new save ##".

I mean, it's obvious, so I'll assume that the Devs found it unfeasible to do--which is why I considered auto-save every 4th day reasonable--but for them to incentivize players to keep a massive amount of saves, they could implement an unlimited one-keypress save function. If the once-a-week saving isn't effective, the idea goes back to save once a day.


Where's the Geoscape multiple-slots frequent auto-saving? The disabled manual saving option? The Geoscape auto-saving with frequency higher than 5?

Ideally, we'd be able to configure the saving methods at the start of the game and opt to only be able to do so then. Ironman could be replaced for that, and most players would prefer something not extreme. That would be outstanding--shouldn't that be feasible for a 20+ YO game? (Are you some Dev? What's your perspective on that?)


That depends on countless factors, such as what the player may be feeling at the time.

"Paths" don't have to necessarily be important-feature related, but regular gameplay decisions.

Ironman modes are popular for not allowing that much freedom, which is why they are much more exciting.

[Juku121]

As I said, I don't think this is distinct enough from Ironman, nor does it address the 'debug save' issue. Saving once per day is even closer to ironman than the previous idea. But ultimately it's not me who you have to convince.


The problem with auto-saves only is that the player (deliberately) has little control over when to save, so these are still quite hard to use for debugging. It's not so much about keeping a hundred saves, but rather being able to save when necessary, and without worry that the game will overwrite that save.


Also, TIL who to blame for the annoying only-auto-names-for-my-saves 'feature' in some modern games.

For me, ESC-click-click-type2-or-3-numbers-click isn't particularly taxing, and saves without description are annoyingly hard to sift through in the case I actually do want to reload to a certain point. But I see no big problem with auto-naming the save after e.g. the in-game date. Make a separate feature suggestion topic and I'm sure the developers will listen, or at least explain why it's a bad idea. I imagine the current state of affairs is so because OXC was a more or less faithful recreation of the original, with some bugfixes, blackjack and hookers added later on. And none of the people who play these old games are particularly bothered by naming their saves, since this is what we've done all our lives.

Multi-slot auto-save seems to be Battlescape only, sadly. I play with autosave off, since it consumes not entirely trivial amounts of time, so initially thought multiple slots covered both Geo- and Battlescape. Frequency is only for Battlescape.

Unlimited one-keypress save/load is quicksave. Again, I think your needs would be realistically covered by quicksave and a larger amount of Geoscape autosaves rather than anything more complicated.


After playing a whole lot of OXCE, with some big mods, I don't think redoing a week is much of a difference in meaningful paths taken in any but the most pivotal of moments. I'd rather see what the next week has to offer than replay the last one. The mods are long enough as they are.

OXC ironman (and ironman in general) is not popular for its lack of freedom, but rather for the permanence of the decisions. Which means each choice is weighed much more carefully, and in X-Com in particular that there are fewer superheroes and more casualties. The lack of viability/freedom is more of a side effect.



As Meridian (one of the OXCE devs) said, "...everything is possible... the question is if you can do it and if it is worth it". I am not an OXCE developer, just a nosy forumite. But broadly agree with the statement, and even if I didn't, successful forks of OXC(E) are few and far between. If OXCE devs don't bite, you can try asking Xilmi. But nothing is ever guaranteed.

[0ros]

As I said, I don't think this is distinct enough from Ironman, nor does it address the 'debug save' issue. Saving once per day is even closer to ironman than the previous idea. But ultimately it's not me who you have to convince.


The problem with auto-saves only is that the player (deliberately) has little control over when to save, so these are still quite hard to use for debugging. It's not so much about keeping a hundred saves, but rather being able to save when necessary, and without worry that the game will overwrite that save.


Also, TIL who to blame for the annoying only-auto-names-for-my-saves 'feature' in some modern games.

For me, ESC-click-click-type2-or-3-numbers-click isn't particularly taxing, and saves without description are annoyingly hard to sift through in the case I actually do want to reload to a certain point. But I see no big problem with auto-naming the save after e.g. the in-game date. Make a separate feature suggestion topic and I'm sure the developers will listen, or at least explain why it's a bad idea. I imagine the current state of affairs is so because OXC was a more or less faithful recreation of the original, with some bugfixes, blackjack and hookers added later on. And none of the people who play these old games are particularly bothered by naming their saves, since this is what we've done all our lives.

Multi-slot auto-save seems to be Battlescape only, sadly. I play with autosave off, since it consumes not entirely trivial amounts of time, so initially thought multiple slots covered both Geo- and Battlescape. Frequency is only for Battlescape.

Unlimited one-keypress save/load is quicksave.


After playing a whole lot of OXCE, with some big mods, I don't think redoing a week is much of a difference in meaningful paths taken in any but the most pivotal of moments. I'd rather see what the next week has to offer than replay the last one. The mods are long enough as they are.

OXC ironman (and ironman in general) is not popular for its lack of freedom, but rather for the permanence of the decisions. Which means each choice is weighed much more carefully, and in X-Com in particular that there are fewer superheroes and more casualties. The lack of viability/freedom is more of a side effect.



As the Meridian (one of the OXCE devs) said, "...everything is possible... the question is if you can do it and if it is worth it". I am not an OXCE developer, just a nosy forumite. But broadly agree with the statement, and even if I didn't, successful forks of OXC(E) are few and far between.

I meant unlimited-slots one-keypress saves.


And players would naturally save in opportune situations to lessen penalties and improve rewards, decreasing seriousness.



I'll update the suggestion, then. It won't be so limited, since I'll be assuming that it's feasible to implement.

[Delian]

Game options currently contain two settings: "Autosave Frequency" and "Autosave Slots". However, these two options only apply to battlescape.

I think the suggestion you're looking for is adding two options called "Geoscape Autosave Frequency" and "Geoscape Autosave Slots".

Of course, they still wouldn't apply to Ironman, but I think anything more specific than that would not be useful enough to add to the game.

[Meridian]

Done.

There are 2 new user options:

Autosave Frequency for Geoscape
- default value = 0 is for OXC backwards-compatibility (save on 10th and 20th day of the month)
- values between 1 and 10 save after so many days (e.g. 1 saves every day, 7 saves once a week)

Autosave Slots for Geoscape
- default value = 1 for backwards-compatibility
- values between 2 and 10 works similarly as in Battlescape

The new special save slots are only for periodical saves based on the day.

Other geoscape saves still go into the classic geoscape autosave, including:
- save after a mission
- save after monthly rating
- anything else I forgot