Messages

31

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 13, 2020, 06:59:04 pm »

@Teddybbeer
If you did not get the fugitive search orders, the nurse airbuses keep spawning until you research it. You are guaranteed to get it sooner or later. As long as you have radar, that is...

32

XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: The Newbie Guide

« on: February 13, 2020, 02:43:11 pm »

I didn't realize that about pistols, though, but maybe I was just using the cruddier ones.  There are a lot of pretty awful pistols.

Pretty much all the bounty prize pistols are good. Top tier are magnum, silver snake and precision pistol. Second tier is then silenced pistol, heavy pistol and nerf laspistol. Honorable mention to the handcannon. And the black adder is really good for it's size, perfect for infested cellar missions.

Occasions where I don't go for one of these pistols is when I need more ammo. The bording gun is my choice then. Or when the soldier has shitty aim, then it's the RCF carbine for long range.
If long range is not needed, shotguns are usually the best pick (in buckshot or AP flavor, depending on enemy).

33

XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: The Newbie Guide

« on: February 13, 2020, 02:12:48 am »

Yes, the sabre is top dog for dps in most cases, but the battle axe is a close second. The battle axe is also a good "can opener" for heavy armor, so I would recommend the battle axe as the best *all around* 1-hand melee. There is hardly a case where it is a bad choice.

Some more things to add to the guide:
If you want to capture ratemen (they interrogate quite fast), use a leather whip from a distance. Ratmen have such high dodge that you will curse a lot when you try to hit them in melee. The whip can't be dodged when used from a distance, and 1-2 hits are enough to knock out a ratman. Definately bring whips to any ratmen mission.

I just noticed the guide is not mentioning voodoo.
Bugeyes are the earliest available form of mind control you can get (posession). It takes a while to train them up though. A maxed bugeye is pretty close to the maximum voodoo power available in the game (which is about 20% more powerful), so it is totally worth training them up. For training, 11 panic attempts per mission gets you the maximum skill increase, more than 11 don't give you any benefit skill wise. Maximum voodoo skill (and power) of bugeyes is 75. To keep the bugeyes morale up, use their medipack. Each use gives 5 morale, and you can always use painkillers and stimulants no matter if the target needs them or not.
In this mod, psi resistance is also tied to morale, so lowering the morale of a target will lower their psi resistance. If you have trouble posessing a target, try lowering it's morale first. Successful psi terror attacks lower morale obviously. But you can also use any fire or plasma damage. The mind control of bugeyes leaves enough tu for a panic attack, so use the panic attack before the mind control attempt. Use about 2-3 successful panic attacks before a mind control attempt for maximum chance. Line of sight to the target makes no difference, but the closer you are to your target the better the chance of success.
Enemies with especially low resistance to psi attacks are megapol. They are the best targets to try out mind control.

To unlock psi on your gals, use a seductress outfit, which is easier to get than a voodoo school. Once unlocked, voodoo items like wands will give voodoo skill increases as well. The seductress outfit with it's seduce ability is also very powerful. Seduce can knock out a marsec power armor guy in one hit. When wearing the seductress outfit, put an exquisite lingerie in the 2x2 belt slot to help with morale regeneration.

34

XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: The Newbie Guide

« on: February 12, 2020, 09:09:25 pm »

Good guide. I'll add my two cents.

Some weapons I think are worth mentioning.
- Hunting bow with poison arrows. Sooooo useful, so wow, such damage. If you disagree, you never tried it. Reaction disrupt (enemy won't shoot back if you hit him), 2D damage roll (low chance of a dud), armor piercing, good capture chance. Especially good vs raiders, spartans and megapol.

- Double barrel shotgun. Your early "good" shotgun that is cheap and easy to get. Your early game "I need more damage" tool. A double blast from close range kills most things, and you can actually do auto-reload-auto in one round. Your best tool for tough enemies like Ninjas and Necropirates.

- Javelins. High damage, but more range than a shotgun and also useful for armored enemies. Your other early game ranged "high damage" weapon. For Ninjas and Necropirates, I use a mix of double barrel shotguns and javelins. They are 1-handed, so you can have a melee or pistol in your other hand.

- Hammer. Your early game "I need you to die" melee weapon that does not require much research to get. Very much like a great club or barbarian axe, so I don't bother with these.

- Battle Ax. The best all around 1-handed melee weapon in the early game.

- Magnum. Most useful early game long range weapon. Better at long range than all same tech rifles in most cases. In the early game, pistols > rifles. The tech at which rifles become better than pistols is lasgun and smartrifle.

- Dart pistol + sleep dart clips. Change underwater missions from hard to piece of cake. You wouldn't know it, but this is your major damage upgrade for underwater warfare.

35

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: February 12, 2020, 08:10:46 pm »

I saw how Dioxine reacted to my proposal. I never understood that reaction and never saw any arguments why he wants it that way. I'm just curious what the reasoning is, I'm sure there is one.

The only thing I could think of was to make some units much harder to mind control by making it impossible to lower their moral by psi panic attack. If the rest is then unintended side effects, that can be remedied by selective scripts as I tried to do here.

36

XPiratez / Re: Instant lose Jan 1 2062

« on: February 12, 2020, 01:51:27 am »

I would say people that play on Jack Sparrow don't loose to negative score because they (mostly) know what they are doing.
The last guy complaining about loss from infamy was one year in, had two bases, and only the starting base had the starting radar.

No, geoscape isn't "you need to do this exactly". But you need to know what your goals are. Get brainers, get radar coverage, get production capacity. If you do zero in any of these, you will most likely loose at some point.

37

XPiratez / Re: Instant lose Jan 1 2062

« on: February 11, 2020, 09:27:45 pm »

What count as negative score?
Infamy?

Yes, score has been renamed to infamy in piratez.

38

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: February 11, 2020, 09:26:35 pm »

Are you sure it's intended specifically for the battle flag? Please post a link to that discussion, I would really like to know the arguments for why this is a good idea.

39

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: February 10, 2020, 11:49:24 pm »

I wrote a script that fixes the pirate flag morale inversion issues. Now the pirate flag will not reduce the morale of your troops with bravery >100.

Code: [Select]

items:
  - type: STR_PIRATE_FLAG
    tags:
      IS_BATTLECRY: 1
  - type: STR_PIRATE_PIPES
    tags:
      IS_BATTLECRY: 1
  - type: STR_PIRATE_GUITAR
    tags:
      IS_BATTLECRY: 1
     
extended:
  tags:
    RuleItem:
      IS_BATTLECRY: int

  scripts:
    damageUnit:
      - offset: 1
        code: |
          var ptr RuleItem item_rule;
          var int temp;
         
          damaging_item.getRuleItem item_rule;
          item_rule.getTag temp Tag.IS_BATTLECRY;  #check if attacking item is pirate flag
          if neq temp 0;
            unit.Stats.getBravery temp;  #check if bravery is >100
            if gt temp 100;
              set to_morale 0;           #prevent the item from affecting moral,
            end;                         #which it would reduce for bravery >100
          end;
          clear temp;
         
          return;
A similar approach can be used to fix similar inversions for example in fire and plasma damage. (Right now, getting hit by fire or plasma will increase your morale if bravery >100). But I don't know where this inversion is a feature and not a bug. Need Dioxines input for that.

File with script is attached, simply place it in the ruleset folder of piratez mod.

40

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 10, 2020, 12:00:06 am »

Saving and reload is perfectly legit if you are playing for the first time. And after a few encounters you will have learned that civilians, Megapol and bandits have the unique cross continent flight patterns. I wouldn't say this is too metagamy. That is exactly the stuff you would read in a gameguide or know after one playthrough.

You can go even further and deduce from the speed and type of shipping what mission it is on. I look that up in the gamefiles (that is metagaming), but you could get that information just from playing the game. If you wrote down all the speeds of every shipping you saw, you would start to see the patterns. If a couple of nerds startet to do a wiki with that stuff, you would get to exactly the same information (with a lot more work though).

41

XPiratez / Re: Regarding the proper use of some Auxilia Troops.

« on: February 09, 2020, 11:47:21 pm »

The history of peasants is this:
In earlier versions of the mod, you could recruit gals from the start. This was scrapped at some point and moved up the tech tree, so now you had no way to buy troops. Then peasants were introduced, as the first troops you can recruit. Them beeing worse than gals is kinda the point. So yeah, once you have enough gals or can recruit them, there is little reason anymore to hire or use peasants.
There are some niche uses however.
- Cheap, so if you need pilots for radar craft like Pigeons and Spy Zeppelin, peasants are your best choice.
- As mentioned, there are a few missions later where gals are not allowed to go. If you want to do these missions, keep a squad of peasants around. Especially those with high voodoo stat (hint hint).
- Gambling is available very early and you can get special armors that way long before you can research them. Namely frogman and space suits, but just the human version. If you don't play gold codex, you will most likely not have space suits for your gals for your first space missions. Then peasants in space suits will be much better than gals.

For slave soldiers and heroes, the gambling thing applies too of course. But they can get even more useful stuff than peasants. Crusader armor for example. Of course, you need to gamble to get these benefits (highly recommanded, gambling is a good money maker).

Gnomes (and heroes) special perk is that they can get really high bravery. Some vehicle weapons get accuracy bonuses from bravery, so gnomes and heroes make especially deadly vehicle pilots. As already mentioned, the high end vehicles can not be piloted by gals anyway.

42

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 09, 2020, 02:48:07 pm »

Air game progression is fine, actually.
When still in airbus, stay away from any shipping that has a radar circle drawn around it.
When you contact the car thieves, megapol patrols start. It's tied to that research. Now you can get an aircar and an airspeeder. With the aircar you shouldn't try to intercept anything that shoots back, and missiles for the airspeeder are quite expensive. A seagull costs more than the loot you get from a megapol patrol car. But with the airspeeder, you can take a peek at most megapol craft, because it's fast enough to run away. And the megapol interceptor and chaser are quite rare, and it's quite obvious that they are faster than your average patrol car. Megapol craft tend to fly close to or at max speed, so spotting the faster craft is quite easy.
So with an aircar, you still stay away from shippings that have a radar circle, and any seagulls you might have in your airspeeder you will save for jucier, larger shippings.
Bandit flights start in june of the first year, but with them it's the same deal as with megapol.

So you can see, trying to shoot down even the weakest hunter killers will only become actually a good idea once you get better craft. So either codex craft, a shark jetbike, or a piranha airbike. For the jetbike, the rule is: if it's faster than you, it's too dangerous anyway (fighters for example). From everything that's slower you can disengage and run away, so you can take a look before deciding to fight. Airspeeder and piranha airbike can do that as well, to some extend. All you have to do is learn to watch a shipping a bit before you intercept, to get an idea what it's maximum speed is.

So the problem of not knowing what shippings to intercept mostly exists just for the medium fast codex craft. Here the safe option is to just go after megapol and bandits. These are easy to identify by their flight path, they travel from continent to continent like civillians. If you want to do more serious air combat, get a jetbike for recon and fire support. It's not that far away in the techtree.

Bottom line: for hunter killers, higher speed = more dangerous. Pretty simple rule of thumb.


Edit:
Ok, there is one air combat "trap" you can fall into that should be mentioned. The Bandit Mosquito has an avoid bonus of 35 and the Megapol Interceptor a bonus of 30. That's high enough that you might not be able to hit them with a 25mm x2 cannon or 30mm cannon, depending on your craft to hit bonus and pilot skill.
I'm a bit unsure on the math though. Accuracy formula for a target that has no avoid bonus is: (weapon accuracy + craft bonus + pilot bonus)*target size
(target size multiplier is 0.75 for very small and 0.875 for small)
Now the question is where the avoid bonus is subtracted. I would guess it's subtracted before multiplication by the size modifier.
So lets say you fly a Scarab with a 25mm x2 cannon (25% acc) and two quad cannons (15% acc). That is some serious firepower you would think. At 70 firing skill of the pilot, you get a +6 bonus and can *barely* hit a Megapol Interceptor. You will still loose most likely, because you only hit one shot in 100.
If you go with maxxed pilots of 122 firing skill, you get +26 bonus. Vs the Bandit Mosquito, that will still be a gamble of a fight (about 60% win chance).
So these are examples where you would think you have enough firepower, but actually don't. And you can't disengage because you are not fast enough.
The Ninja Seeker with its 40 avoid bonus is the worst, but at least you can easily identify them by their large radar circle.

43

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 08, 2020, 04:01:13 pm »

Just be thankful radar circles are drawn for hunter killers. At least this way you know it is one before you approach ^^

As I said, early game solution is to get a shark jetbike. It can run away from most small hunter killers, so with this craft you can peek at the siluette.


By the way, megapol are quite easy to identify by their flight path. They travel from continent to continent like civillians.

44

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 07, 2020, 11:27:18 pm »

@Reaver of Darkness
Apologies then. I have only looked at the piratez implementation of shields so far.

Regarding identification of hunter killers:
Just take a close look at the speed. A speed that is not the maximum will always be some odd looking number, like 2115. You can follow the shipping outside of it's radar range and then wait for it to go to full speed again. A shipping always arrives at full speed and will leave at full speed. If you can't catch it when it's at full speed, it is probably too dangerous anyway.
Also, shippings follow a set pattern. Greep mentioned getting trashed by a Raider Fighter. The Raider fighter is not the first shipping of a raid mission, the first shipping is the Raider vessel. So once you see a Raider vessel, you know for sure a Raider Fighter will soon follow in this area.

One more example: Identifying a Fighter that comes with an Alien Terror mission. Alien Terror missions spawn with a 35% chance each month once you are in the mutant alliance.
The mission starts with a sequence of three Fighters, which all follow trajectory P0. They don't land, and the speed sequence of P0 is: 100%, 74%, 28%, 47%, 100%.
So these three Fighters will only fly at speeds: 4500, 3330, 1260, 2115, 4500.

Conclusion: if you see a small shipping flying at 2115 speed, it's 100% a Fighter.
(I haven't actually checked if no other trajectory + small shipping can produce this number, but the chances are pretty slim.)

I could go ahead and write out all the possible speeds of each shipping. The Raider Fighter for example only flies with the PX1 trajectory (100, 75, 60, 50, 30, 45, 70, 100). But this will most likely just lead to Dioxine adding a random factor to trajectories and speeds (quite easy to do).

45

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 07, 2020, 03:47:06 pm »

Regarding hunter killers:
You can unlock the shark jetbike quite early in the game. That thing has 4k speed. If your craft is faster than the hunter killer, you can still look at it and run away.

Here is a list of the small and very small hunter killers:

Mostly Harmless
Megapol Dropship - small, speed 1000, 280 HP, 39 DPM
Megapol Cruiser - small, speed 1500, 220 HP, 47 DPM
Bandit Wasp - very small, speed 1600, 100 HP, 71 DPM
Megapol Patrol - very small, speed 2000, 100 HP, 39 DPM
Megapol Chaser - very small, speed 3000, 80 HP, 47 DPM

Somewhat dangerous
Raider vessel - small, speed 1800, 200 HP, 85 DPM
Bandit Cobra - small, speed 2400, 240 HP, 78 DPM - high hit bonus
Megapol Interceptor - small, speed 3000, 200 HP, 63 DPM - high hit and avoid bonus
Bandit Mosquito - very small, speed 3000, 100 HP, 83 DPM - high hit and avoid bonus

Quite dangerous
Nazi vessel - small, speed 3000, 400 HP, 81 DPM
Gunboat - small, speed 3000, 550 HP, 111 DPM
Ninja - small, speed 3000, 240 HP, 80 DPM - more dangerous than you think, because of really high hit and avoid bonus
Light Gunboat - small, speed 3300, 420 HP, 77 DPM
Raider Fighter - very small, speed 4000, 300 HP, 94 DPM
Sentry - small, speed 4500, 300 HP, 91 DPM

Really dangerous
Fighter - small, speed 4500, 350 HP, 173 DPM
Viper Fighter - small, speed 5200, 660 HP + shields, 252 DPM


Edit: Now that I look at that list, 3000 speed is the magic number. If your craft is faster than that, you can run away from most dangerous engagements. Too bad the Airspeeder has 3000 speed and thus can't run away. The bounty prize Piranha Airbike has 2750 speed. If that would be buffed to a little over 3000, it would be much more valuable.