Randomly generated maps sometimes achieve weird results

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VoidWalker
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Feb 18, 2017 8:27 pm

Randomly generated maps sometimes achieve weird results

Post by VoidWalker »

I'm nearing the end of my first veteran/honest-man(mostly) run and I'm really enjoying the mod so far, but there are a couple of times where I've felt that there have been some maps generated for a few of my missions that resulted in some serious gameplay/balance issues, a few times even prompting me to have to load an earlier save on my honest-man run just to get a new map seed that didn't massively screw me over. I'll list some of the weird, probably unintended map issues I've run into below (please note, I do not have any map mods installed/active):


1.) On a full-retaliation mission (the type where you have to wait 8 turns for extraction), I had a soldier spawn on top of a fire, causing him to start the match with the burning status effect and, since I was still on basic kevlar armor, nearly killing him in the process (Not to mention being unable to take any actions for 2-3 turns other than move).

2.) On an extraction mission in the city tile-set, a soldier spawned on a balcony with no possible exit point-- if I had chosen to continue the map, I would've had to leave her behind. I had to restart from an earlier save and reload the mission with a different map seed.

3.) On a 'protect the datapad' retaliation, I had a pod start the map almost immediately adjacent to my haven rebels and the pod activated on turn 0 before anyone got to move. Apparently they were on yellow alert, and one of the mutons took a shot at my cover-less haven rebel and instantly killed him, causing 2 of the 4 remaining rebels to immediately panic in an open field without cover. Since the data pad was also about 3 miles away from my X-Com squad's starting position and over half my rebels were either dead or panicking before the mission even started, this map was completely unwinnable. Again, I had to reload from an earlier save and generate a new map seed.

4.) My most recent supply raid generated a ludicrously small map size for the type of mission. Since supply raids almost always are detected with very little time left, you're generally forced to engage them at swarming levels of enemies. I've handled several of these no sweat before, but this time around the map was so small that almost every single pod on the map was within blue/yellow movement of my squad's starting point in every direction-- I started in the south western corner of the tiny map, and with 2 pods to my north, 2 pods to my north west, and another pod immediately to the west, there was no room to maneuver at all. A gunner accidentally tripped a detection on a blue move, and suddenly I had 5 pods breathing down my neck on turn 1 with almost no cover available. From a narrative point of view, this doesn't make any sense-- why would my sky ranger drop my troops off less than 40 feet away from 50 aliens? I feel like supply raid maps shouldn't spawn such a tiny map since these maps are inevitably a slug fest of you vs dozens of aliens. The map I was on honestly felt like a clown car.


I think there were a few other 'weird' instances of unfair map generation, but those were the few that really stuck out to me. The mod is awesome and I'm massively enjoying it, but I think the map generation could use a little more polishing to weed out some of these kinks.
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