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.

[Yglorba]

Hm, the mod already sort of works around this with the random "cataloging items" event.

What if certain missions granted researches linked to a similar event, but more frequent? Or other events along those lines were linked to existing research? How frequent can events occur?  This would still spam the player a little bit with the events, but that might not be a bad things (you do want to show the player the items so they know their options, and this would at least save the micromanagement of unlocking every single item individually manually.)

eg. once you get an intro research for one of the cult factions, you regularly get events where someone on your team informs you of one of the weapons used by the cult.  Or once you have a merchant contact, you regularly get new things added to their offerings until they're all unlocked.

[CrazedHarpooner]

Depends on how the event is generated. You can have them mothly scripted like missions and have as many event scripts as needed per month and/or you can have them generated from mission outcomes (win, loss, despawn). There's another trigger that can be used when countries defect/return, but I don't think it'll be that useful for this particular topic.

[hellrazor]

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.

And why would that be impossible?
If you define a research without a cost for each weapon found at a specific site for example them Cultist Safe House and a dependecy for debriefing topic towards each and give this topic a cost, also give it a list of unlocks containing all the weapon research topics in questions and voila you got what you wanted.

E.g.:

Code: [Select]

  - name: STR_CULTIST_DEBRIEF
    cost: 100
    points: 10
    unlocks:
      - STR_CULTIST_PISTOL_1
      - STR_CULTIST_PISTOL_2
      - STR_CULTIST_PISTOL_3
  - name: STR_CULTIST_PISTOL_1
    dependencies:
      - STR_CULTIST_DEBRIEF
  - name: STR_CULTIST_PISTOL_2
    dependencies:
      - STR_CULTIST_DEBRIEF
  - name: STR_CULTIST_PISTOL_3
    dependencies:
      - STR_CULTIST_DEBRIEF

Seems easy enough or?

[Solarius Scorch]

What if the weapon is just found?
What if something else unlocks it already?
What if there are two weapons with the same clip, but unlocked separately?
I don't know how to make it better.

And also, apart from the separate acquisition projects, I don't think there's anything wrong with the system. I've played with it dozens of times, on top of actually making it, and I am okay with researching weapons one by one. It's mildly rewarding. I honestly don't understand where this issue is coming from.

[Stone Lake]

Seems easy enough or?

Seems fine to me too.
For early weapons caveat of being unresearchable until X isn't much, you'll probably get it in first hour anyway.

[Juku121]

This solution has the disadvantage of not generating research report pop-ups. And disabling 'STR_CULTIST_PISTOL_X' item research altogether.

I honestly don't understand where this issue is coming from.

I would guess repeat playthroughs where the magic of discovering new stuff is gone and it's now just checking the boxes to make the research list grow shorter? Or just a short attention span that dislikes having so many superficially similar things take a closer look at?

I personally do have a bit of a problem with the 5+ days of research, since that's both slightly non-immersive and a moderate drain on early research for little benefit. But early research is a massive noob trap anyway.

[Yglorba]

If it's for repeat players, someone could just make a QoL submod that speeds up things like this in general. That probably wouldn't need to go into the base mod.

[psavola]

I would guess repeat playthroughs where the magic of discovering new stuff is gone and it's now just checking the boxes to make the research list grow shorter? Or just a short attention span that dislikes having so many superficially similar things take a closer look at?

I personally do have a bit of a problem with the 5+ days of research, since that's both slightly non-immersive and a moderate drain on early research for little benefit. But early research is a massive noob trap anyway.

IMHO this can be daunting especially for newer players, who are used to very streamlined research trees like in the vanilla. But such is life. This is not meant to be a vanilla experience, but something completely different.

I don't buy it that this is a problem with repeat players. During the last couple of years, I have played a dozen XCF SH/IM campaigns. This "research spam" ceased to be even an annoyance once OXCE implemented the feature of hiding researches. You just hide those 50 or 100 researches you don't intend to do in the short (or even mid-) term. As for the easy 1 day research items, you just do those out of the way once you have adequate infrastructure set up. One of the charms of the early game XCF is how you most effectively milk the early cultists out of everything they know and at the same time research (at least) all the weapons that overlap with cultist research. Given that most weapons are known by at least by some enemy units, you want to research all of them sooner or later for completeness.

So IMHO the more experienced player you get, less this should bother you because you get to know how to deal with it in various ways. And if this bothers you as a repeat player, perhaps you should play the mod less.