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Messages - Stone Lake

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106
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 09, 2023, 01:25:46 pm »
If they all tried, I'm sure it'd take a lot longer.
When they try, they still have to approach the cover. If they overextend, they leave themselves open, and also group up. And only few of them have grenades. That just compliments hit-and-run tactics. Think zombies, but sectoids.
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If you stacked weapon mastery like crazy, someone with like 150 Melee and 50 strength could have a slight chance of passing the rear armour. But, yeah, I overlooked the stun resist.
Still not enough.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 09, 2023, 12:18:05 pm »
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No, having a non-vanishing chance of everyone surviving both the positions from where they can run across the map and those you end up in is where the extra OP-ness lies.

Don't they shoot your dogs from long range a lot more, possibly with Blasters? There was no full cover for a lot of them in the saves.
They try, but no. First, I'm in pretty reasonable cover. It's not like I'm going extra mile for stupid shit and the entire alien squad has guns on me. It's just one or two. What, they miss their entire auto? That's just X-COM, happens to me all the time. Wow, they threw the grenade wrong and blew themselves up? That's just X-COM, happens to me all the time.
It not completely OP here. It's all of things RNG juking offers, combined, and then some.
Reasonably scumming player would just clear up here a bit with hit-and-run tactics, and then it will work anyway. Not exactly a pinnacle of thought required.

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Though maxed people in Power/Flying Suits definitely can, if not very reliably and/or from the front.
No, they can't.


108
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 09, 2023, 07:39:57 am »
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I meant middle-of-enemy-turn quicksaves. Took me half a dozen tries to get to turn 3 without any dogs biting it with regular saves.
Nope.
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If melee wasn't OP...Maybe you'd actually need tactics and ranged weaponry and pure savescumming wouldn't work.
Wow, somehow scamming a hit with a blops or heavy cannon to a turret across the map is less OP than shanking it up close?
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Brutal AI
Atm feels about as dumb as original, but in different way. The dog challenge is definitely doable against it, but maybe you're bound to lose a dog or two to grenades. Maybe not, as you can lure the grenadier to a cover and eat him.
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What precisely were you using?
Morale.
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A guy with a katana bashing alien spaceship turrets into pieces is also a considerable distance into full fiction territory.
There could be some seams in its construction. For example, he can old-school jam it with a metal rod. Or break it's sensors. It's a dumb stationary target, why should it be invincible?
And agents are superhuman hulks. They most definitely can bend metal, and rip the turret with hands. I'm actually peeved in opposite direction - you can't ever punch the crap outta sectopod, even though it's not the most stable thing and the hulks should be able to overturn it.
Anyway, you can just leave primed hi-ex next to it instead. Ever heard of K-9 sui-squad?

109
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 08, 2023, 03:47:51 pm »
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I thought there was some general advantage to doing it 'sectoid-style'.
Nope, in general that's mostly disadvantageous. That's why sectoids are chumps and dogs eat them for breakfast.
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But I meant that this number is wildly off-target.
It's not off target because it's literally not hit chance, but related. But yeah, it's somewhat misleading if you think about it this way.
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How long were you reloading your turns until no doggie was vaporised? Or did you do mid-turn quicksaves?
Not too much. Regular enemies mostly ignore you. The hardest part is getting inside the saucer avoiding turrets. I use Boo Boo to bait their fire from afar, then run through with other dogs. After that you have cover, and can start to methodically shank aliens, turrets and cyberdics. Yeah, there were quicksaves.

My headcanon is, the sectoids somewhat knew about the Earth. And thus just ignored a bunch of strays next to UFO. It's tension, X-Com landed nearby! Next up is, screaming, chaos in psi-channel - how do these bastards attack us??
So, underestimated the enemy, but it was too late...
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For some reason, I also thought Battleships had some of the big roof turrets, which would have actually been impossible.
That's terror ships. Would be still possible, if dogs could fly. Or jump.
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I guess it kinda shows that aliens do need better stats to be a big threat. Or perhaps Brutal AI. >:D
Nope, the point was that savescumming is the most terrifying weapon. You can already beat almost any late-game encounter normally, with sufficient prep, when you get to promo 2. But with savescumming, oh boy.
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It also shows how unbalanced melee damage scaling is. I kinda find it immersion-breaking when regular, non-enhanced dogs can rip out alien spaceship turrets with their plain Mk I teeth. Mine literally cannot, 0-40 damage vs 50 armour.
Just imagine they're wielding katana in their teeth. In general, dogs are a bit too strong, yes. What's more, fairly pumped dog can withstand ethereals.

But they also die pretty easily and require some skill and knowledge to use properly. I lost something over 300 of them, and it was year 2.5 before I got a first dog to cap TUs.

Then I found out that you can cheese exp a little, and it became 20 maxed out dogs, 10 rats, etc. Didn't need all of those that much in the end, and yet 10 still died...
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Remember that for every hardcore player that enjoys a painful challenge there are also old people like my self who enjoy a more casual play stile. So you need to balance for the middle rather than just making challenge for challenge sake.
I feel that the strength of the aliens depends on player's knowledge. Aliens feel like a legitimate threat when you don't know how to deal with them, and then feel like worms in the dirt you walk upon. Enemy unknown and all that. I think, that makes for a nice feeling of progression and manages to cater to both categories of players.

110
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 08, 2023, 01:06:39 pm »
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For melee and thrown weapons, that means they waste their TUs on walking rather than attacking, which is a win in the total damage department.
Yeah, probably.
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And I've been getting throwning knives in the face more often than not.
If the enemy is directly in front of you, but just one tile off to the side, there's still 33% he'll hit your side armor.
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But you get the reaction shot anyway? What does that even do, except look cool and waste TU?
Well, with throwing knives you won't get to react at all, since you won't see the assassin from that range. So you'll just tank knives with your back armor.
If he goes for melee, it's far worse, so I don't do this. It sounds like an invitation to be katana'd.
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I have a suspicion that extremely low values of hit 'percent' are excessively misleading when it comes to actual hit chance.
Yep, they are. That's because it's not "hit percent", it's firing accuracy.
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Accuracy_formula
More firing accuracy essentially decreases the width of the firing cone, making you more likely to hit.

But I was talking more about how are enemy stats are garbage compared to what agents can do.

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Challenge
Beat in 15 turns. Some dogs got burned by fire, but will live. Rookies got off with a scare. If they also had smoke, this would be trivial.

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Back when I played XCF, I used incendiary mines against ninjas. Put a minefield up, then the ninjas will light themselves up.
Mines are cool. Especially gas ones, can do all sorts of cool tricks when you're immune to gas. But they have a tendency to get bonked by anyone except assassin, so I just spam them everywhere I can.

111
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 08, 2023, 03:55:43 am »
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That may not always be an option (spent your meds on a friend already, etc), or not fast enough vs bleeding.
Strategically, it's of course better to save the agent. But tactically, it can make your position worse than outright losing one.

Yes, you have to dedicate one or two people to rescue the agent. That's your duty as a commander, isn't it? And if you don't overextend, you almost always have that luxury. There's also roles for drained agent, not everyone needs to be on frontline all the time to be useful.

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I meant max damage vs Heavy Tac Suits, which you claimed was 65.
Yeah, it's 58, sorry. I assumed ninja throw to be a little higher that in the wiki, thus got 65.

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Do Assassins come at you from the back all the time? And 95*2*0.5 - 16*1.4 ~= 72, not 67?
AI tries to avoid reaction fire if it can (when walking), so it will try to attack from the sides, or back, if it has the opportunity.
Some people like to rotate back to expected frontline, get hit, and get the baddie with reaction fire, sectoid-style.
But yeah, you right, the max is technically 72, I don't know why i have taken 20*1.4 for that, I didn't intend to count the back.

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In any case, what makes melee dangerous is that they can slash you more than once due to flat and low TU costs, so max damage on one swing is not the most important metric. As you said yourself for the throwing knives. Getting into melee is always a crapshoot until you get such high armour values even a max damage hit does negligible damage.

The point is that surviving an assassin is my main concern there, and bio-exo clearly improves that. The fire is also something of a concern, but surprise - exo covers you there also.

All that's left is kinetics, now that's a true crapshoot. I play with smoke, so enemy almost never sees me, and shoots blind. And they have such abysmal stats that I wonder how do they even manage to hit sometimes.
And even if they hit, they actually have to deal damage.

It's true that there multiple tools against assassins, but most of them are crapshoots. Randomly checking on scanner? Randomly throwing incendiares? Scouting each turn to hope and see one? You can get maybe 3/4 assassins with that, but one or two bastards usually still manage to slip through and wreck a havoc.

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This is a pretty stupid argument if you consider it on the complexity of iron man. The bio-exo suit on the manor is just garbage.
Wrong. It's evident you didn't try. I explicitly noted for you that I cleared 4-5 lotus manors on ironman superhuman, in bio-exos.
And yeah, I was also heavily skeptic about it until I tried.

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If you see an assassin, then with a 90% probability you immediately get 3-4 throwing knives.
That's the point of a bio-exo suit, it has huge cutting resist.

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If you miraculously survive, then the agent needs to be treated on the next turn, and often by two different people.
Wow, and do agents never need treating normally or something? How's this relevant? I don't know about you, but my agents don't ever go alone, always have backup and medkits nearby.

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Assassins are neutralized either by accidentally shooting a minigun, or they are put into a stupor in the doorway by a dog barking.
You can also scout them with rat or a scout drone, they have reasonable anti-camo, as well as see through smoke better then dogs.

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Any other encounter with an assassin with a 95% probability is the death of an agent.
Yeah, for you. Because you do not use bio-exos.

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It's ridiculous to assume that bio exo will really save you from meeting an assassin.
I didn't "assume" anything, that's battle tested. And with enough luck, you can survive Chupacabras.

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On Iron Man, agents with health above 50 are a huge rarity until the discovery of delta radiation.
Wrong again. All my (senior) agents were above 65 health at this point in the game, and at least two had 74, see attachment. That was my first manor attempt.
Some of the guys on this trip survived long enough to see Cydonia, hehe. There, they were max 118-130-156 health, depending on race.

112
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 07, 2023, 03:59:04 pm »
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Yeah, but that's a function of BL team composition and smokes, not any armour you may or may not wear.
Well that's on you, I didn't write that it was.

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That's true, but a solid veteran with 20 health left isn't much better than having been one-shot. He's probably bleeding out, too.
Ah yeah, brave x-com commander here prefers to lose his veterans left and right instead of just being wounded and rotated out of battle. Good call!

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More like ~58. Knives have 130% armour effectiveness. Average is ~14, vs ~8 for the Arasaka. Bio-Exo has those at ~7 for knives and 28 for Arasakas, a much bigger difference.
75^2/100 = 56.25. Well if you feel than Arasakas are more of a threat than assasins, then suit yourself.
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Melee is always a crapshoot until very high armour values. Katanas will frequently kill you no matter what armour you're wearing. And Katana for an Assassin is 91 effective power, how did you get 95? That means an average of ~23 vs Bio-Exo and ~40 vs Tac Suits. ~22 if they hit you in the face. Not a gigantic difference, really.
That's literally the point not to make it a crapshoot. Maximum damage with a 95 power katana against bio-exo is 67, but it's 119 against the side of a tac. Higher the damage roll, the more favor falls to bio-exos.
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how did you get 95?
I got into new battle at superhuman and mind probed the assassin. Numbers from wiki vary by difficulty and can't completely be trusted. He still had 75 throw tho, as I think it's not affected.
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And no matter how you slice it, the non-covered area is not 5% or even 10% of the globe, i.e. 95% coverage with 6 bases.
1/6 of a cube is 16%. If overlap is fixed, can't say there's enough gaps to fill a whole 1/6. So yeah, 95% coverage.
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Building extra radars means using base slots I have other uses for. One radar get both advance warning and covers any potential sneakiness going on outside radar range.
But you will half the amount of time UFO flies in relevant zones, undetected. All that for a single tile per base! To me, "halving" sounds way more important that whatever is between 16% and 5%.

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So you're saying my super-secret Elerium storage and 'two hundred aliens in containent tanks' Antarctic base is not necessary, then? Nor the mass laser rifle manufacturing facility? What kind of slapdash secret alien-fighting organisation are you running there?
No, you can run all in one. Except containment, that goes to research.

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100-200 Elerium, turret corpses, lots of Alloys and other swag? Alien Commanders?
You can get most of that unnecessary crap from other, easier encounters. I got commander before I got any leader, from a lab ship. Doing it once, for fun should be good though.
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All right, challenge uploaded. Feel free to save and reload to your heart's content to win the attached mission with zero losses. Post your results - preferably intermediate saves, like one per 5-10 aliens - when you're done.
Give me some dogs and I'll try. I wonder if they can bite high enough to get the turrets, though.
Even if not, in principle doable with baiting alien fire, but sanity will be a problem. I can almost imagine it - rookies win by doing nothing.

113
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 07, 2023, 01:46:21 pm »
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Well, that's not really a feature of the armour, is it?
Yes, but that means kinetics shouldn't be an issue.

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Also, Witches with Arasakas say "Hi!". About 70% as bad as SVDs, so can still one-shot you if the RNG doesn't like you that day.
They literally can't if you have 70+ health, and practically won't if you have 65+ health. Which you should.
Now, how about those knives with ~56 power? Max damage to heavy tac's side can be 65, about the same as arasaka, but knives are thrown in a succession. And then there's katana with 95 power...

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50% isn't quite total protection.
But it's not 50%, it's 0%, so total protection. Gas damage type is choke.

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I just tried to do this '6 faces' rather randomly, and was left with a giant continent-sized hole and at least another 10% in gaps. See for yourself.
I see there's much overlap between radars, so you can cover that giant hole. And then there's maybe 10%, maybe 5% in gaps, it's hard to tell exactly. They're further decreased when you build hyperwave decoder. Also detection chance is just 20%, so you can as well just build extra radars.
Then again, sure, you can roll with 7 bases, they aren't harder to defend and don't cost too much, they just are not necessary.

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And that requires early warning, since radars are not infallible and landing windows are something like 2x4 hours, tops.
I think the main problem with these windows are that UFOs land at night, not that you can't detect them.

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And these aliens game here to mess with us, I'm getting each and every one of them I can. I play this mod to shoot aliens in the face, not to win with least effort expended.
Well I certainly don't envy the arduous path ahead of you. My patience ran out on about first year post-invasion. But that's also was my second complete playthrough of XCF. If you really want to take down and assault every UFO up until landing on mars as you say, that's probably a year or two of IRL effort. Good luck!

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About the bio suite, it's not even clear if it's a joke or serious.
I'm serious, they're one of the easiest. You probably just had bad luck with them.

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Battleships and other saucers with turrets can still be stormed only with delta radiation research and heavy weapons. There is only to put up with it, there is nothing you can do about it. I lost three countries like that (guess which ones?)) In this game, I got all this only after 4 years of playing. If I were starting over, I would have gotten it all in the first six months after the invasion.
You lose countries no matter what you do, and no matter how many ships you take down or assault. It's just RNG script. It's been like this since vanilla.
So you don't even need to assault battleships in particular, I did it just once for fun and that's it. Same with terror ships. There's just not much to be gained from them.

114
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 06, 2023, 10:44:08 pm »
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But Ninjas and their friends also have guns, while Bio-Exo has no kinetic resistance. Not to mention balls of flaming plasma and, uh, fire. I doubt it's as game-changing as heavy tac suits vs regular cultist firearms. All it does is defend from sudden knives in the face.

Well, I cleared 4 or 5 lotus manors in bio-exos without a single casualty.
Bio-exos protect against your own gas, which you should use against ninjas. Or any human enemies, really. But it works just fine with rifles and smoke.

Kinetics: Lotus have no hard-hitting snipers like red dawn, so kinetics aren't one-shots. If using smoke, you mostly don't even get hit. And if you do, just rotate troops.
Fire: Same as above. Also, bio-exo has incendiary resist.
Plasma: Usually one-shots, but is somewhat inaccurate and requires Witch to be in 13 tiles range. She's usually dead before she gets there.
Knives: Easily the most dangerous stuff from the bunch. Assassins are almost invisible, can't always be detected even with aggressive scouting, throw multiple accurate, very damaging knives from up close or go for melee which is fatal.

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Six bases covers six out of seven continents, but UFOs can spawn pretty much anywhere, and you need your warning as early as possible unless you want to let some UFOs slip through or get shot down.
If I imagine globe as a cube with 6 faces, 6 big radar bases in centers of those faces should give like 95% coverage.

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Which you apparently do?
You have to ignore some flyby strikers or battleships anyway. Why would I care about a single slipping scout or something?

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You also can't manufacture anything in bulk with so few bases, especially with three of them being strike bases. And I want every team to have at least four of everything.
Well that's just someone's OCD speaking.

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Well, I would be ashamed if my campaign came to that. YMMV.
We'll see. When there's nothing to be gained from encounter, like new researches or money that you don't ever need, or exp, and the alien menace just keeps growing, why bother?





115
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 06, 2023, 09:11:03 pm »
On the difficulty of the Iron man manor, these are very difficult missions. Before the appearance of the blue ttb, I could not cope with the lotus manor and the red dawn manor.
You can steamroll lotus manors with bio-exo suits and 10+ man teams on ironman superhuman. The suits have plenty of cutting resists to screw up ninjas.
Red dawn and dagon can be taken with regular armor, with maybe 1-2 accidental casualties from gillmen/jarhead one-shots.
Now Exalt does feels the most problematic without heavy suits due to numerous grenadiers. But you can rush into buildings and camp inside them just fine.
The most I hate about manors is that they usually can't be quickly dealt with and linger for at least 20 turns. Especially upgraded ones, with their reinforcements.

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When you play on the complexity of iron man, you are ready for terrible dramas and any consequences.
There's drama but not much consequences really. Post-invasion there's just infinite money so you can rebuild bases from scratch each month. Pre-invasion it's just ludicrously easy to repel attackers.

Also having just 6 guys on the defensive doesn't exactly spell "ready" for me. I usually have at least like 10 dogs and 10 rookies, train them, then rotate into the main base to replace casualties. Soldiers and dogs are dirt cheap compared to scientists anyway.

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That still leaves well over half of the globe without radar coverage, and without the ability to get to landed UFOs before they take off unless you get lucky or some advanced craft.
If 6 bases give almost full coverage of the globe, how come 4 + dark star leave "over a half" without radar coverage? Something doesn't add!

I agree with Akamashi, 4 or even less bases should be plenty. After you get enough alien engineers, you skip almost every uninteresting encounter anyway.
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but it's not really doing your job of defending the Earth properly.
Before I finished my latest campaign I was doing my job so unproperly, there were somewhat 25 alien bases on the globe and about 10 countries left the council. And they still paid me some millions to "fight" the aliens :D

116
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 06, 2023, 05:03:45 pm »
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I've never gotten a cult to attack me. Probably because I kill manors about as quickly as they spawn. I don't think there are any other sources of cult retaliation?
Same, didn't get attacked by a cult once (or anyone up to year 4, really). I think it's about intercepting their strike crafts. If you have some air game, they won't ever get to you. Can't intercept battleship at full speed, sadly.

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The building and shrapnel were very much affected here. But it was necessary to rebuild half of the base, because the fighting unfolded in earnest.
Doesn't sound like an "easy" defense.

But overall, yeah, 4-6 experienced guys is plenty against most invaders.
Or most post-invasion encounters, really.

Maybe next time I'll try playing 3-man teams or something. Commend stacking really allows you to create monstrosities.

117
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 06, 2023, 10:48:11 am »
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I am surprised to read that the bases need air defense.
Main bases don't. Secondary research, manufacturing and radar bases - why not? Definitely less effort to build some defenses than to buy dogs, rookies and prepare equipment for them.

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With the proper construction of the base, the protection of the base is always an easy walk.
Depends on the enemy. Sectopods at promo 2-3 tech can pose significant challenge for inexperienced commander. I think that's mostly removed now, though.

118
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« on: January 06, 2023, 08:58:34 am »
This is just laziness on every level. You can just lose the base and rebuild it if you're too lazy to defend it, attacks are not that often.

And you aren't even required to do that in the first place. There's enough research power in a single base to quickly cover important topics and the rest is either gated or just fluff.

All that extra research would do for you is make you research fluff faster.

I actually suspect that limited scientist count is designed in to prevent inexperienced commanders from staffing 200 scientists and eat themselves from house and home while being too stubborn to fire them.

I think what would be helpful is a feature that would help you to differ important topics from fluff. Like, basic color coding. For example, green - stuff leading to new medkits, blue - crafts, black - promotions, etc. Or its functional equivalent, piratez-style exclamation marks.
But still, not helpful enough for the amount of work it would take to implement.

119
The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste
« on: January 04, 2023, 08:01:28 am »
My guess is, he just has to scroll levels on the map to see the VIP, as it shows particular level.

120
The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste
« on: January 03, 2023, 08:06:22 am »
Scorpoids have "stealthy" in their description, but don't have camo.

Also, every single Shogg encounter is rendered almost null by having flying gear - spiders, scorpoids, antmen, zombies. Strixes, stingrifles, and antmen spit do spice up things a little, but it's still pretty bland.
Maybe add some flying variants or straight up gift them a couple of gauss rifles?

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