DB2019 - The Room Talks About XCOM and how we react to randomness 

Okay, so I’m bad at strategy games like XCOM, and I don’t really enjoy playing them, and I absolutely respect Cameron’s decision to not play it if he doesn’t want to, but I also feel like there might be something he’s not considering about the “difficulty” of XCOM, or at least he hasn’t made it clear if he has. In particular, it seems to me that Cam’s view of the goal of an XCOM mission is shortsighted. The idea isn’t to derive a single sequence of actions that will clear the objective flawlessly - it’s to take the actions that maximize the rate of success. It’s counterproductive to take a bad situation as a personal failure - things will sometimes go wrong, and the key to success is in making your strategy resilient enough to compensate for that. If you’re playing a game of MTG and your combo deck loses because your opponent plays Pithing Needle or something, that’s not the game’s fault - it just means you need to anticipate the possibility of that happening and either include some removal or disruption, or just accept that you have a bad matchup against decks with that type of card. Sometimes the best way to get out of a bad situation is to mitigate the chances of it happening in the first place, or not committing too many resources to a battle that won’t be worthwhile in the long run. The best way to stop getting screwed over by RNG is sometimes to just give the game as few chances as possible to do it, and to make sure you’re not risking too much when it does. Again, I say all this as someone who’s very bad at strategy games. Ultimately, it’s just something that occurred to me, and I couldn’t get it out of my head, so it’s here now.

Early On Comment: Totally agree that Xcom 2 is less compelling than Xcom Enemy Unknown/ Withhin, not sure why. Interesting to hear thoughts.

Xcom misses are mostly understandable, but then you have situations where your sniper has their rifle phasing through the enemies model, and yet has like a 30% chance to hit or something

On the subject of the aliens not existing until you find them in Xcom 2, they do exist, but I do get what Cam's talking about since they don't do anything but patrol around until they see you. A great thing with the Reapers (introduced in the War of the Chosen DLC) and rangers who go down the stealth path is that since they can stay hidden you can use them to scout around, so that you can try to use the terrain to your advantage without just stumbling into another alien squad. Also, with the randomness, I see it as being like in MTG, or a lot of real world strategy, you just can't control every single variable and the best you can do is stack the deck as much as possible in your favor. That being said, it is deeply frustrating when you do everything right, but then an archon just flies straight through an ambush and murders one of the soldiers you've been working with for your entire playthrough, so I won't criticize anyone for not finding that fun.

Said TNG episode was not called The Game, but I cannot remember which episode that was.

I did that with octopath traveler. i loved most of the characters, but a few i just did not care for. so when i had beaten the game minus the final chapters for the 2 characters I did not enjoy i just stopped playing. I had gotten what i wanted out of the game and did not need to force my self to keep paying a story i did not enjoy.

You have a plan that you execute the best you can and still you can lose to randomisation? That's MtG (duels) in a nutshell.

I think XCOM just needs to punish mistakes/randomness less, so for instance your characters don't die when they're killed, they should just lose some XP and stuff.