Hi!

Im making a empire builder (single-player, turn-based) similar to total war. How to avoid too much save-scamming in events such as spying, diplomacy etc?

I know i cannot avoid it fully, and that's fine i guess. But since I allow saves, should these events be fairly deterministic to avoid too much benefit of reloading until satisfied?

Lets say a spy can steal technology. So maybe not:
Higher level spy = higher % to suceed (since 20 % or 45 % spy sucessrate is boring if you can just reload until sucess anyway).

Maybe you always suceed but higher level equals more turns to complete it, or less anger from the empire you stole from?

Another idea is to have a delay: you start spying, and the sucess/ fail state is saved. But the spying isn't completed until 5 turns later. So you CAN reload if it failed but is it worth it to replay the last 5 turns? It deters some cheating but you are still able to do it.

(same with diplomacy, threats / haggling becomes boring if you can easily try anything without consequence)
(also, load or save takes about 1 second so no "help" from the inconvinience of slow load/save:) )

Remember, how it's done on Master of Orion. The spy works in the field for some time and at the end of it you get the result, however the roll for it has been done at the beginning. At the end you already have some 10 turns done and generally wouldn't be very interested in redoing it again just for one spy..

Other notion is that save-scamming is just a derivative of poorly developed feature. If mechanics for some event is so simple, then perhaps it is just minor feature not worth the attention. Or you can develop the spying gameplay further, without leaving it to random number generator.

Hi, 

I'd agree with what @Fandanguero said, however, i'd like to add that maybe save-scamming is a something that is totally up to the user. Many strategy games allow for users to save at any point and those who want a challenge tend not to scam saves, but disallowing users to do it, might not be prudent. 

Instead, perhaps offer an "Iron Man" mode, similar to Stellaris or CK2. That would disable saves  per say, and instead save at the end of each turn or choice, or just have it save automatically save at the end of each turn or choice, regardless. 

I think that having the ability (at least at first) to rollback your save because of a bad decision is great for learning the game without being penalised for learning.

Just my thoughts

I agree with your general points of savescamming and cheating in single player games.
But on topic: as I stated I still want cheating to be slightly less of an obvious option.

So it seems concerning my specific question, best options:

1. As I proposed, delay the outcome a couple of turns (but decide outcome from the start)
2. As jbadams proposes, make the randomness deterministic: e.g. store many dice rolls of a spy when that spy is created, and use these rolls in order, no matter when or if that spy levels up (which grants better success-rates). Is this what you meant?

Any other actual ways of doing it?

I think it would be best not to have randomized pass/fail events in the game at all.  Winning due to a coin flip gives no sense of accomplishment; losing due to a coin flip rightfully causes the player to blame the game and not themselves.  Gambling addiction notwithstanding, there is nothing fun or compelling in being at the mercy of the random number god.

22 hours ago, suliman said:

1. As I proposed, delay the outcome a couple of turns (but decide outcome from the start)
2. As jbadams proposes, make the randomness deterministic: e.g. store many dice rolls of a spy when that spy is created, and use these rolls in order, no matter when or if that spy levels up (which grants better success-rates). Is this what you meant?

Any other actual ways of doing it?

Regarding 2., as @jbadams noted, if the player knows that the outcome is deterministic (and they will know when they try savescumming ), they will then do another kind of savescumming: save the game, try to spy, if it fails reload and don't try to spy at all.

There is an alternative approach to this that goes in the other direction: increase the randomness (insert the insanity wolf meme here )
If spying is not the only random thing in the turn, but also resource production, battle outcomes, random events and everything else, then reloading a save will make the player lose all the good rolls that they got, just to save one bad roll (the spy roll). If you make enough rolls per turn, and make some of them be good and some of them bad, the player could get discouraged from trying to roll until they get all of the good rolls.

And another solution, one that is very user-unfriendly: make saving and loading as tedious as possible. Don't give the player any quicksave/quickload options, and make the loading be long and slow, and load the whole game state from scratch without any caching. If the player has to waste minutes loading the game multiple times just to save one spy, they will just give up

Well no I hate slow load/saves so that's not an option Also it seems too devious to add a "sleep" function just to waste the players time!

Increased randomness will be hard with my game, so I think i'll need to use one of the other solutions.

Thanks guys! (more input is always welcomed)