Do you savescum?

[Malevolence]

Savescum: The art of repeatedly reloading a saved game prior to a random event until a favorable outcome is achieved.

In other other games I have committed savescum.

I don't feel the need to savescum in this game. I think mostly everything is deterministic or gives you a very good sense of a successful outcome.

I don't mind two bad opinions, but I would recommend removing impossible odds (0%) before offering them to the player via the UI. It tends to be a kick in the groin to see.

Do you savescum? When and why?

[Laiders]

Impossible decisions actually have merit I recently realised. Taking them, assuming you can endure the inevitable failure and the strong possibility of a critical failure, makes the character rolling use that skill and this in turn increases the odds of them allocating EXP to that skill making you less likely to fail next time. Plus influencing values etc.

I startscum a lot but I have never savescummed in this game. Actually for the opposite reason. I view this game has pretty chaotic (ultimately a deterministic system but one for which is it non-trivial or impossible to consistently predict outcomes) and as such see no point in savescumming. I am more likely to savescum in strictly probabilistic games, assuming they are not fixed seed, or much more deterministic games where I obviously made a wrong move in hindsight and a single change can fix it.

In general, I try not to savescum too much in games though.

[Krisam]

With shame I have to admit I did it a lot.[:'(]

Sometimes to cheat, and sometimes to test things.

By far the most I've abused of this is to get good leaders with the stratagems, I also cheated quite a lot to get good rolls for decisions and other stratagems.

I've also tried to see if I could cheat and get better models/techs from one turn to another, and I noticed it works with techs but not with models. [8|]

To my defense I'll say that until now my games have been mostly to learn how to play and test things.
Like you, when I was doing this savescum thing I thought about this, and I think a Ironman mode would be the best choice to play this game, since this won't let you abuse of this shameful practice, and dumbasses like me will spend more time enjoying the game and not cheating with the rolls.[8|]

[Cornuthaum]

Shamelessly and relentlessly, because the difficulty dice ranges vis-a-vis reasonably achievable roll modifiers are at best slanted against you and at worst ludicrous (difficulties above 220 aren't even uncommon)

[Laiders]

I don't mind impossible rolls but I really do mind the random difficulties now you mention it. Like a lot. It's really infuriating when you have an easy roll that you somehow double low roll on (low roll skill and high roll difficulty) so you get a critical failure for something that had, from rough estimate, over 50% of succeeding.

Having the difficulty roll before you make the decision would be a great change to allow the players to feel a little more able to make accurate decisions. That or bring the variance down from 2d100 to more like 2d20 or 2d10 so it is more manageable. Sure we might underestimate the difficulty but most of the time my underlings appear to willfully refuse to attempt to estimate the difficulty in good faith.

[Cornuthaum]

It's the old-edition D&D problem, in that I strongly disagree with game design where the static bonuses required to succeed at a regularly-occurring task at least 66% of the time swiftly have to be larger than the actual range of the dice used. 50+4d40's average difficulty requires almost a +100 on the roll for that already, and the Unrest events - which pop every turn in every city that has any unrest - are usually 50+2d100, which means that even a highly skilled capability 5 governor (in and of itself incredibly rare) will have a 50% chance to succeed if the difficulty is a *mere* 152, with the likelihoods of success dropping meteorically if there is any deviation into the upper 50% bound of the difficulty curve.

Flattening those curves out to a difficulty range of 60-150 - say 50+10d10 - would allow for non-democracy, non-autocracy playstyles to be able to actually be possible long-term

[KingHalford]

In a game like this, savescumming is a helpful tool in learning.

After I've learned the ropes of a game, I don't generally save-scum, I find I play more carefully if I don't.