Sorry, I wasn't accusing you of bragging. Ironically, though, I was pointing out that it's not really feasible to figure it out without looking online unless everyone has the what-we-designed-on-paper experience you had, where the various ticking events are nicely spaced out so their effects are consistent and can't be conflated with each other.DaviBones wrote:I wasn't trying to brag by explaining how I figured out, I was just pointing out that it is in fact possible with the tools they have given us to figure it out without looking online.
I don't know what the best answer is, but I don't think I'd advocate for just exposing the Vigilance mechanics. Without context, that becomes just another mystery word in a jumble of words that are all closely related in English but mean critically different things in-game. My approach would be more like: ensure that players can not suddenly lose the game due to hidden mechanics they don't necessarily have a chance to understand how to interact with. You can achieve that by making the mechanics more explicit, but you can also do that by giving the player more chances to recover, slowing or smoothing out the Advent-is-winning-more curve, making the effects of the interactions more isolated, or something similar.
I agree that letting players reason about the mechanics using real-world logic is awesome, but I don't know that the Strategy layer in XCOM is sophisticated enough for that. "Vigilance" and "Strength" and "Threat" are abstractions that capture an arbitrary subset of factors a player would think about when trying to reason about real-world guerrilla resistance. The reason why Dwarf Fortress works like that is because it models so many factors so concretely (as in: non-abstractly) that it feels comprehensive. XCOM2 and LW2 is not like that. Is it easier or harder to pacify / liberate a highly-developed region like Western Europe vs. an under-developed one like East Africa? It isn't, and regional differences in economy - the #1 factor in reasoning about control on a global scale in the real world - is a non-factor here.
Even understanding the model that LW2 is using, I can't reason about it in real-world terms. How does my rescuing one sniper from a jail cell slow down their global R&D? The answer is: abstraction. Which is totally ok, but then as a player I need to know more about the abstract factors that are modeled in order to reason about them.