What's up with the research spam?

[Stone Lake]

I think grouping weapons by mission would be more "natural" solution than arbitrarily grouping them by tiers.

E.g.: you win a safe house. You'll get "safe house debriefing prereq" for this. Researching "safe house debriefing" would automatically research all weapons that can be in hands of cultists there. Barring some arbitrary exceptions, like cult-specific weapons (QBU, Wakizashi), that you'd research manually.
Doing this for apprehension, safe house and outpost for each cult (12x missions), I eyeball you'll be in ballpark of 50 weapons researched. This is not much, but honest work looks noticeable. Same could be done for farmers, initial apoc encounters and such.

Issue 1: As Solar said, I'm not sure OXCE allows to freely grant multiple researches for a single research. Except in interrogation manner, where you have to repeatedly research same topic, which defeats the purpose. Maybe it could be done if this research block that grants weapons is a single dependency for the weapons. Maybe you can tie weapon researches directly to completing the mission, but I think it's same issue you can be granted only one research for winning.

Issue 2: Interrogation pool for many captures contains common weapons. As such, it will be shortened now. I'm not sure how this affects the balance, probably not much.

Maybe OP would be interested in making a submod for this.

[psavola]

True, apparently OXCE engine currently does not allow granting multiple researches upon completion of a research item.

Expanding on Stone Lake's idea, this could with current OXCE engine still be accomplished with Alien Deployments "unlockedResearch". That is, successful completion of certain missions (like cult safe house, outpost, forward base, HQ) could automatically grant you research(es). You wouldn't be spammed the research articles either. If you wanted to give the player some explanation, you could also define "successEvents" and make for example a QuarterMaster pop-up and say that we learned some weapon lore from the cultists.

[Juku121]

@Solarius: I thought purchasing and research were separate because otherwise there'd be no looting advantage? I.e. you loot it, you can now buy it. Otherwise, you could have 'requiresBuy' just reference the item itself and there'd be no research chaining problems.

@psavola: A mission's 'unlockedResearch' is still a single research, how would that be an improvement? By 'auto-completing' repetitive small researched as new mission types pop up? Are there even enough suitable mission types to make it work?

@duendeinexistente: Research chaining can work, but it's a pain to implement without messing up some dependency. You also lose the pop-up reports and have to go hunting in the Ufopedia yourself. Kinda undermines the fun of discovering new guns, but I guess if you already find the current arsenal tedious and uninteresting...

Spoiler" Semi-offtopic nitpicking":

As to gun studies, perhaps you shouldn't try to 'refute' things you don't understand nor care about?

Terminal ballistics is what the bullet or other projectile does when it hits stuff. Usually humans or equivalent. This is relevant because arguably the most important single Ufopedia stat is the rather precisely quantified 'damage'.

Terminal ballistics is a very complex thing and ready-made data sheets don't exist IRL. You can't just ask a gun manufacturer to fax over studies they never did.

You'd need to perform very rigidly standardised tests to get comparable numbers (i.e. the ones in the pedia) for even very controlled gun&ammo combinations. Small things like ambient conditions, ammo manufacturer (the other two data sheets you linked), barrel length (lots of handgun models in particular come in several lengths), your target and bench setup, etc can lead to variance. And that variance is intrinsically huge in the first place. Hence all the 'stopping power' wars waged over internet and other places.

X-Com would need to either set up their own ballistics lab or get a long-term contractor they can quality-check - neither of which takes only 5 days. Granted, after all the work is done it'd take less than a day per gun, which is why I'm not quite sold on the 5 days we have right now.


Also, you don't research buying crowbars. You 'research' ways to avoid the red tape that says 'Only standard issue Glocks and knives, no crowbars allowed!'. Early XCF is largely about the nascent X-Com fighting to survive the NWO factions who would gladly strangle it with red tape and leave the corpse hanging.

As to UI, I don't think the research UI is that bad. Yes, it could be better, but it does its job - especially now that you can reorder research. Click to research, right-click to ignore, simple. Scientist allocation is the big inconvenience.

IMO, the worst UI in the game is multi-base logistics. Which doesn't exist and you have to do it one base at a time. That, and restocking items you haven't run out of yet. If I remember it right, Starving Poet got so fed up he resorted to writing his own save management tool to get around that when streaming.

Also, those 300 topics are actually 150 topics doubled, and a whole bunch of those can only be done once. I don't think I've ever researched a Magnum instead of Magnum acquisition, for example.

Finally, what's the point of having researchable weapons if the player just ignores the research results? If you don't care about some particular weapon, just hide the research.

[psavola]

@psavola: A mission's 'unlockedResearch' is still a single research, how would that be an improvement? By 'auto-completing' repetitive small researched as new mission types pop up? Are there even enough suitable mission types to make it work?

I thought that you could define multiple researches by putting them in square brackets. But not sure if it would work, i.e. the engine supports multiple researches.

IMO, the worst UI in the game is multi-base logistics. Which doesn't exist and you have to do it one base at a time. That, and restocking items you haven't run out of yet. If I remember it right, Starving Poet got so fed up he resorted to writing his own save management tool to get around that when streaming.

In a recent change, multibase item management just got a little bit easier: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=12043.0

I have usually avoided the headaches by only having one assault base while the others sit empty or have only minimal crew and equipment. If you don't shoot down UFOs you won't get retaliations against those bases either, so no base assaults. And/or you shoot down only those UFOs you want to trigger (e.g. MIBs but not aliens).

[Juku121]

OXCE doesn't indeed support lists for 'unlockedResearch'. I mean, if it did, regular research should be able to reuse the same logic and we wouldn't be having this issue in the first place, no?

[Stone Lake]

Main issue with common weapon researches is distracting and confusing noobs, no? For first playthrough, research UI is fine.
For consecutive ones, though, it's pretty bad. Mainly because of said research allocation. And removing knives and baseball bats wouldn't make a dent there.

[Juku121]

This mod is one giant noob trap, a few dozen Makarov and baseball bat reports won't make much of a difference.