That mention of how XCOM works. Its why I like Battletech a lot more. Because the units have larger health pools, you losing a unit is your fault but they still have a chance to do serious damage where as in XCOM they can be taken out immiedately and have done nothing.
The best games for discouraging save scumming are games like mount and blade, basically sandboxes where your failures really are unique and always create completely recoverable situations, and won't just send you down the loser's branch of the dev's pre-written story and potentially hurt your experience.
I've got one simple rule: "Does it cost less to save scum?"
Living with mistakes isn't something all are willing to experience, and we have to respect that.
I've tried so many times to not save scum with XCOM but that feedback loop he described is absolutely painful. It's not fun at all once you start losing a few high rank troops later in the game and it becomes almost impossible to recover again.
I've been playing Phantom Doctrine and it has made me realize how kinda unpleasant XCOM is and I just have to fangirl over it a bit because I've loved it. It's mostly the same general gameplay style but with Cold War spies, but it's just so much more fun to play. First of all a decent stealth system that means enemies actually have vision cones for spotting you and distances, there are areas anyone can be so you can be seen but still safe. Restricted areas you sneak around and you can silently eliminate guards and civilians and then hide the bodies to keep from being detected.
Then there is the pre-planning aspect to missions. On the world map in your base you will have missions pop up that you deploy agents to in order to respond to them. Agents have a travel time, amd if they have too much heat they get ambushed. But when they get there they'll figure out what is going on and if it's a mission, you are given options based on your base upgrades and the time left.
So if your agents get there early enough they can prevent the mission from ever even occuring. It pays almost not experience and gives no other resources, but it can keep your from even risking your people to begin with. Another option is to have a couple of agents recon the area first before you run the mission. If you do that you get a lot of fun options in the mission.
Reconning a mission for starters will remove the heavy fog of war the obscures even the layout of the map. There is still a light fog that hides NPCs, but you can see everything else including lockers of supplies, secret documents, and security systems and their controls. You also get the ability to have people set up in support roles from different positions. So like I could have a guy to the north who is using a telescope to act as a spotter, where he can look through north facing windows to see people in rooms and such. Or a guy to the east with a sniper rifle who can be used to silently kill specific targets that he has line of sight from. Yeah, their line of sight is important, even outside the playfield. I once thought I could be clever and use a sniper to kill an enemy agent. I put him in place and called him up, only to realize the windows I was going to shoot through were blocked by a water tower across the street. But that was my fault for not paying attention in my pre-planning but I like that it played an impact. Another support role you can get later in the game is a helicopter. Normally your escapes are done by a van that pulls up at various points near the borders of the playfield. Well the helicopter is going to come close to the middle of the map, making it much quicker to escape.
Something else recon let's you do is disguise some agents and have them randomly deployed inside the area already. They can freely run around restricted areas and won't be revealed so long as they don't do anything outwardly suspicious like disable security system or get in to combat. The only people who can reveal them are enemy agents in the area. But you can knock out enemy agents and then carry them back to evacuate and take them with you. Then you can interrogate them and do MKULTRA shit to them like wipe their memories or even turn them in to Manchurian candidates that can help you in other missions. Disguised agents however can only take pistols or smgs with them, not even lockpicks or armor so they're not ready for a fight.
In combat, your overwatch system is different, with different weapons firing different amounts of times. So like a sniper rifle can only fire once on a target in overwatch but an smg might be able to fire on five different targets in total, or like a pistol on three. And overwatch isn't just, "Is the enemy in line of sight? Fire." You have two different modes: Near and Far. Near means you can see and fire on enemies in 360 degrees around you but in a very limited range. Far can hit enemies much further away but is restricted to a firing cone. So like having a sniper watch down a hallway or out a window on far overwatch could work, but if you're trying to defend a room with multiple entry points, maybe have a couple of people with smgs/assault rifles on near. Agents have two weapon slots and can also use any weapon in the game, but you can give them training regimens that give them specializations and bonuses with certain weapons.
Also there is no chance to hit, instead everyone has a sorta stamina-like resource (awareness) for using abilities and such that they will expend to dodge shots if they have enough of it, and cover types will reduce damage as well. So your agents and enemy agents have good awareness which makes them harder to kill, while generic guards have none and go down quick. And if they get wounded they heal faster and can actually be taken out of the infirmary and deployed to the field while injured. Your agent cap by end game is also like 40 agents, maybe more.
Also at no point does the game do the XCOM thing of, "Here are three missions, you can only do one and get fucked on the other two." At worst you might have several pop up at once that you don't have people in place to prevent in advance, but you can still handle them one at a time and get them all done. And even if shit really goes bad and you safehouse is in danger of being raised, you can always just pack up everything and move your whole safehouse to a different part of the world and keep going. But even if you don't do that and you get raided, have no money, and all your agents except your main character are dead you still don't lose because a free safehouse will be provided although already at a high risk level, and new agents will always show up from time to time to be hired, and the ones you can hire scale up with you so they stop being bog standard recruits. Also there are missions you can just outright ignore. Like enemy spies are doing recon for my safehouse, but they're looking in Eastern Europe and I'm currently set up in San Fransisco, so there is zero risk to me or my agents so they can go ahead, I don't care.
And when the game has it's doomsday events coming up, the timer only progresses when the enemy is able to complete their missions, meaning that if you are active and successful at countering them, the doomsday timer will never progress. I always hated that about XCOM, it's just a deathmarch where eventually the game will win just by running out of time. In Phantom Doctrine you can sit at any stage of the game and just keep playing and building up resources. I made a save right before I did the final mission just so that I could keep playing since there is no post-finale. But I can do that because I don't have to worry about the doomsday timer. That character and campaign never have to end. Also there are three campaigns, the third you have to beat one of the others first to reveal what it is. First is a betrayed, rogue CIA agent, the second is a KGB operative, and the last is a Mossad Nazi Hunter. And each campaign is different with a different story, characters, and missions.
I've seriously loved the game and there is a bunch more I didn't go over that would at least double this already stupidly long post just fangirling hard over it. Longstory short and brought back to topic, Phantom Doctrine is an XCOM game where risk and punishment are mangeable and survivable. You don't need to save scum really. Like I had a problem where I hired a really good agent, but they turned out to be a mole for the enemy. So I was able to brainwash them and they forgot they were ever a mole, taking care of the problem. Mistakes and failure do not ruin your game.
This is why the original X-COMs are better because they're more based on equipment progression than character progression. Both are difficult but one isn't really unfun when you're not doing so hot and one is. I never save scum in X-COM but I save scum a bunch in XCOM. XCOM is basically making you play perfectly (kill all aliens without them attacking you, share the kills with everyone, timers in XCOM 2) because otherwise your game suffers in a way that doesn't happen in X-COM. In X-COM it sucks when you lose a great soldier but if you don't lose all your best equipment it isn't game ending, if you lose a single soldier in XCOM it's a major setback in your campaign.
I feel like there can be a broader point made about success perpetuating itself. I played the Devil May Cry HD Collection a while back and one of my complaints about DMC1 was that its ranking system rewarded skillful play with loads of red orbs but leaving less skilled players empty-handed when those are more often than not the people who would need to buy recovery items, leaving them with less money to buy upgrades. Granted, DMC is an older game catering to a skill-focused arcade sensibility and it is one you can solve through memorization and pattern recognition, compared to XCOM, where you cannot solve the insurmountable consequences of RNGesus frowning upon you without loading a savegame.
they pretty much fixed the DMC orb problem in the later games by just letting players replay any mission at any time, so really good players will get the stuff they want faster but bad players can go back and replay old missions to get red orbs if they need them (as well as get better by training at the same time)
Yeah, many of the games I play are relatively open-ended and "encourage" this style of play, but in almost all of them, losses really hurt. For example, in Jagged Alliance 2 (1.13) your mercenaries take an absolute age to level up their skills; outside of the 3 custom ones you can create at the start are either complete shit or very expensive, and all of them are irreplacable characters. Not to mention how much you might invest in their gear. In these sorts of games, for every interesting scenario that happens as a result of "playing past your mistakes", there are ten which have one major failure result in the remainder of your force being rendered ineffective, and then overwhelmed in the next fight. They say "How you lose is the interesting part", but it's frustrating to lose hours, even days' worth of invested time due to a few bad rolls of the dice.
I think JA2 strikes a decent balance with its "Ironman" mode - you can reload/save in the metagame, but not battles. So if you suffer a total squad-wipe (which especially early-game is doom) you can just reload, but there will be scenarios where you have to accept some losses/injuries/damaged/lost equipment to succeed.
This is one of the main reasons I much prefer Xenonauts to Firaxis' XCOM. You can lose an entire drop of troops and still recover. It'll set you back sure, but they only have granulated stats (The most important being AP, determining how far they can move while taking the same number of actions), not important skills that are locked off.
I'm definitely one of those players that will immediately reload a save if I get caught in a stealth game. I hated earlier stealth games that immediately raised an alarm the second you were spotted. Another problem I had is dealing with tons and tons of guards after an alarm is raised, or having to sit in a vent or hiding place for what feels like forever just for the alarm to stop and the guards to leave.
I like being sneaky and taking my time, but I hate being forced to sit and wait. It's way faster to just attempt the area again from a previous save than to sit there and try to deal with your mistake.
I think the whole issue around "playing past your mistakes" is that your mistakes would need an easy remedy for it to be tolerable and the whole idea of "losing is fun" makes no sense when you're actually trying to win. Dwarf Fortress is a fun game to lose because there's no point to it other than building up your fortress and seeing it thrive and come down crashing in a hailstorm of bizarre occurences, eldritch horrors and psychotic breakdowns. What makes it fun isn't that it happens but how insane it gets when it happens.
The way turn-based strategy games try to implement an element of risk and only adding a source of immense frustration makes me think that risk and turn-based just doesn't mesh well. Risk in a game is like playing chicken, the ability to pull out at the last second is what makes risk managable and what makes prevailing rewarding. In a TBS game you have no ability to pull out, when you walk on those train tracks, your feet are planted there and the train will come and you've effectively only signed your death warrant. Applied to general gameplay it would mean realizing the predictability of the AI, that its highest goal is hitting you where it hurts most so the best counter to that is minimizing the damage the AI can do. In XCOM terms that would be moving 5 tiles and going into overwatch but Firaxis hated that so much they put in a turn limit to force you to let the AI punch you in the dick.
The reason risky play works in OG X-COM and Xenonauts is because death has an easy remedy and because the TU system gives you the control you need to walk onto the train tracks, shoot someone and walk back off without any special unit abilities. Since you can take 12 soldier on a mission, what's the price of one casualty? Well, in UFO Defense it's 20 thousand bucks, your monthly budget hovers around 1.7 mil so you can hire quite a lot. Losing an experienced unit still hurst because experience gives you better overall stats but the weapons also have stats attached to them that make even rookies not completely worthless coupled with weapon damage more often than not being so high that any hit is a kill.
I feel like its less about the losing and more about the fact that the perceived loss might have consequences too dire to afford experimenting. Additionally, a lot games that have these harsh loss scenarios tend to leave everything to things entirely outside of player control which make sit frustratingly annoying.
XCOM is the epitome of save scumming and while the games themselves are great, the bullshit RNG and unforgiving punishment is awful game design that holds the games back from their true potential
Noone likes losing their A squad and B squad and when they are all gone what do we have left? Nothing. Darkest Dungeon has a great thing where you can get higher level characters to appear for immediate recruitment and they aren't dogshit useless like XCOMs rookies are
I'll actually save-scum far past when it would have been easier to just move on. I almost view strategy games like a puzzle where I have to find out that perfect sequence of moves.
Any game that locks content or achievements behind "don't let anyone on your squad die" or "silent assassin" or "Foxhound rank" will inevitably cause me to save scum. I'm not losing 20 hours of progress by starting from scratch, I'll just save scum.
I've even saved scummed in some rougelikes; if I was so close to achieving something, but die to a simple mistake, I exploit to not lose progress. It's just that completionist mentality I have. I try to avoid Ironman modes for that same reason but if unlockable content is behind it I will brute force it sometimes just to get that content.
These are single player games and I don't want to feel like a game is a stressful chore where one fuckup ruins everything, I get enough stress IRL so having that in my little amount of leisure time is frustrating.
The focus on individual soldiers and their skills in Xcom 1 and 2 really feels like it limits game design a lot. Because each death can be such a massive step back in progress, especially if you get a bad mission with your A team, the enemies can't have abilities that really single out specific soldiers to take them out. Strong abilities such as Mind Control, high single target damage or strong damage over time effects need to have an easy way out or otherwise the game just feels like bullshit. On the other hand if you're rolling in with a squad of 10 dudes, each one relatively expendable, the pool of possible enemy abilities that work suddenly is a lot bigger. It doesn't feel horseshit if you have an ability that almost guarantees a death in the mission if those deaths are expected in the game's progression system.
I guess another way to do this is to have a much larger distinction between your cheap and expensive troops. If you're rolling into a mission with 9 meat shields and one superdude, you can justify those strong abilities and still have a progression system where you get attached to your squaddies and can have interesting stories form from their actions.
I saw heat signature in there and I think it has a really good system. Getting shot with lethal rounds doesn't kill you, it just incapacitates you until they jettison you into space and you slowly bleed out while your ship tries to save you. The more you get shot and the longer you bleed out in space, the shorter your bleed out timer gets until you have exactly three seconds to save yourself. It lets you work for the long term goal while the mistakes you make put you in another situation where you have to change your strategy.
Another thing I thought it did well was alarms. When an alarm is triggered, you can escape and fail the mission, kill the pilot and hijack the ship, or stay on the ship and get captured. When you are captured, you can play any of the other available characters and sometimes get a rescue mission for that character ensuring you don't lose the progress.
Of course the entire game is framed around character stories and restarting, so it doesn't bust your balls as hard as some roguelikes where progression is long and loss from death is extremely high.
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