Messages

91

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 26, 2016, 10:56:38 pm »

I have smashed it with a hammer multiple times before, it did not seem to do any damage to my unarmored gals

Yeah, my first encounter I hammered it. Been doing it ever since, never seen a point of damage.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 25, 2016, 12:30:36 am »

There's still 24 letters to go.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 24, 2016, 05:53:11 am »

It's something that you rarely, if ever, had to do in vanilla, kinda more of a bonus feature. Firaxis never bothered including it in the reboot.

You can also use the minimized mode to shadow a craft, wait until they get over land, or just wait for them to land.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 23, 2016, 05:03:13 pm »

Oooh i did not know that. Does that mean that pilots will basically be crap on the battlefield (since they're trained to be pilots, not soldiers) so you're encouraged to use them for utility out of combat (such as a medic, manning a mortar or using a probe)?

They are soldiers. You assign one of the gals on the ship to pilot it. If the ship engages in combat, she still deploys as normal. If it's a dedicated fighter it works the same, only you probably don't want to do a solo deployment, so you just head back to base at which point you could swap her onto your troop transport if you need her.

You want your good hands flying because their stats translate into combat improvements. Firing accuracy increases the accuracy of the craft weapons, very helpful if you're firing expensive stuff, while reactions gives you increased chances to dodge,  which is always good. Bravery allows you to bring the target into weapons range faster and can make all the difference in catching ships with a higher top speed than you.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 22, 2016, 11:57:44 pm »

This probably question for normal OXC, I do not touch anything in fonts and Meridian probably too didn't. If it working in recent nightly then it will work in OXCE 2.5 when I merge it. If it not work in nightly then this is standard behavior of OXC an OXCE works same.

I'm not aware that it works in OXC either, I'm just curious why the font bitmaps and data include glyphs that the game won't actually use. Maybe it's a DOS behavior. I thought I'd seen a way to add some handy icons to the game.

If anyone feels like making OXCE use them, there's a good 10+ completely unused extended unicode characters in there just waiting to be shiny icons. I don't want to steal the accents or touch the Latin or Cyrillic characters because it would mess with translations.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 22, 2016, 09:08:48 pm »

Say, anyone know why OpenXcomEX ignores all of the blank spots in its fonts? I was experimenting with icons for the extractions, disassemblies, robberies, and slavery to make them look prettier than ASCII, but even though ¤, ¥, ¦, and § are defined in font.dat, but not drawn in fontsmall.png - and thus unused in the default game - the game ignores them even when they are added to the appropriate blank spots in fontsmall.png. It just prints nothing, not even the default single pixel that represents each unused glyph.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 22, 2016, 08:23:13 pm »

A question: are pilots benefit something from piloting? XP or some stat growth? Or it isn`t work that way yet?

Not that I see, but since they fight in the tactical portion as well, you can just swap a good pilot in if needed.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 22, 2016, 06:01:34 pm »

I'm finding that a strong starting strategy is to spend your starting cash on two more brainers immediately.  Go ballbats and flintlock pistols on all hands, and beeline the black market upgrades. You can get a hold of domestic shotguns very quickly, and score a lot of research points in the process. Using the ballbats will net you quite a few captives without playing games with capture equipment like the rope. Early cash flow from science experiments and especially raids on the Church of Sirius can get you a second hanger and the aircar within a month and a half. If you get lucky early and find a stun baton to research you should be set for captives, otherwise just keep swinging for the fences on raids and use the shotguns to down most any of the early opponents with ease.

Early game ransom is highly valuable. Just keep an eye on upgrading your arsenal because this setup beats just about everything for the first three months, then falls flat against armored foes.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 21, 2016, 03:59:39 pm »

It's more than just the money. You aren't really self-sufficient, the governments know who you are and are ignoring your actions because you are beneficial to them. The Mutant Alliance sees you as a useful tool, therefore they provide cloaking devices and presumably perform maintenance on the same. If you cease to be useful to them, all those blind eyes turn towards you and you get swept away.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 21, 2016, 01:13:27 am »

Yeah, the RNG was trolling me. Now I have 600 points halfway through January, real handguns for all my gals almost immediately, several shotguns, and I just raided the Temple of Sirius (now that brings back memories) so I'm month one rich.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 20, 2016, 06:52:55 pm »

Another thing: until you research "contacts: mutant alliance", pogroms do not carry a penalty for not showing up. By showing up without winning, all you did is provide yourself as a scapegoat to blame the deaths of all those civilians on. That probably messed you up more than anything else.

This more than anything then. I'm used to the older versions where you start as a member.


And Cunning is the one thing I still haven't done from the initial research. 

I should start over then. I got a pretty crappy starting six anyway.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 20, 2016, 06:12:50 pm »

You can easily offset that with research. I was afraid of such issues, but in my current test playthrough I was getting constant 500+ score in early months, despite bagging only 1-2 missions monthly and not doing Pogroms.
And yes, you naturally lose for constant negative score/negative money. No point in prologing the agony, is there any?

I'm not sure if the RNG is trolling me or what, but I did every mission available to me in January, completed all but one Ratman Rodeo (I did kill a bunch of them and take loot home), researched a bunch of stuff (which I do recall being worth a lot of points in earlier versions) and even landed at the pogrom and shot a few guys until the tank showed up. I was at around -300 before the pogrom, and after research bonus I was still -250 in the hole at the end of the month. Then something in the first week of February knocked me down to -200 right off the bat.

The charts indicate quite a bit of shipping activity in areas I can't see, but the score penalties seem unusually high. About 95% of shipping that I could see was civilian and never landed. The rest were larges that outran the airbus and went about their business.

I'll reinstall when I get home, maybe I copied the wrong UFO files.

@ivan: I have no option to buy any craft. Maybe that's an issue in and of itself.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99B - 18 Aug - Sky's The Limit

« on: August 20, 2016, 03:28:23 pm »

Do you still lose for two months of negative score? I finally started a run on 99b and while the early game feels great now, without weapons on the airbus completing only ground missions and the occasional landed shipping doesn't come close to offsetting the score loss over the course of the month. Even winning the pogrom, which I didn't,  wouldn't have gotten me to zero.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99 - 7 Jun - First Impressions

« on: July 20, 2016, 06:42:13 pm »

Must be that soylent diet, maybe they're too poor to afford meat?

You winky that, but several characters in game imply that that's exactly what ADVENT Burgers are.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99 - 7 Jun - First Impressions

« on: June 10, 2016, 08:34:15 pm »

X-Piratez isn't a mod though, it's a total conversion relying on specific settings for a proper experience.  When all of the units and items are balanced around calculations working a certian way, they kinda need to be set that way. This is especially true since people don't read. You can put all the warnings you want in the largest font you want right on the title screen and there will still be people who didn't read it. Sadly it's just easier to have things work out of the box.