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Comment by thesuperbigfrog | Hacker News Reader

XCOM and XCOM2 in Ironman mode (only one autosaved game--all choices are permanent) are excellent choices to learn how to deal with risk.

Gameplay is turn-based so you can plan what you want to do calmly, but results are fairly immediate--if you miscalculate a move your soldiers get hurt or die.

You have to take risks: you must move your team of soldiers ahead into the darkness to accomplish a mission, but there could be aliens around the corner waiting to ambush them.

You can take a risk and have a soldier move ahead to grab some loot (meld) which can grant huge bonuses, but it could expose them to danger. You must decide what they will do.

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Both are vastly different games though. XCOM allows you to completely turtle though EW expansion countered that. XCOM 2 seems to overly punish safe play and reward aggression.

The downside of the XCOM games is you can lose a whole game on a 80% roll, so it might not condition you properly. The game snowballs, so if you get far enough without losing someone, or lose someone too early, you've basically lost Ironman but it doesn't inform you when.

Battle Brothers is of the genre, with similar flaws. Basically the whole "you lose on day 110 because you didn't knife enough mercenaries on day 31".

Xenonauts I think strikes a good balance. You can lose almost everyone and still continue the game. It's more strategic and less tactical, meaning that if you write the correct SOPs and use sufficient explosives, you should win.

XCOM feels a bit like chess sometimes, in that you lose because you didn't examine the map properly or positioned your sniper too far back.

If you want to learn about risk, modern XCOM is a bad choice. Modern XCOM lies to the player in order to make the player feel better

It gives a distorted view on how likely 60% really is since the percentage shown is not the same as the one used to calculate the hit or miss.

The game secretly changes the odds for sequential misses making hits more likely after misses. This teaches the player that the gambler's fallacy is not a fallacy at all.

XCOM more than any other game taught me to weigh much more heavily the consequences of the downside, even when it's unlikely to happen. Be in a position to maximize the probability of success, take the shot, and have a backup ready for when it all goes wrong.

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