Messages

31

Hardmode Expansion / Re: [Beta][EXPANSION]Hardmode Expansion - Testplayers needed

« on: June 01, 2015, 08:51:38 pm »

Well, I've decided to give this mod a try and although I'm only nearing the end of February 1999 I'm beginning to get afraid regarding my research. My problem is that I've failed to locate the alien base I'm (going by the mod's description) supposed to raid to get much of my research started. I've even shot down two supply ships, neither of which followed a course typical for supply runs, so I do have alien food in my storage now, but I saw no base to raid for Alien Reproduction. And I've searched a lot.

So I've cheated a bit and took a peek into my savefile - there's no alien base anywhere in it. I haven't delved into the savefile too deep but I assume the aliens only have a base-building mission so far.

Uh oh, what to do now? Am I supposed to let the aliens build a base so I can raid it? And how am I to tell which UFOs are building it? And isn't that quite a lot of metagaming to get Alien Containment, especially considering I've already researched alien biology and there's alien habitat and alien food in my storage? What the heck do I even need alien reproduction for? It is not like I want to breed them...

Or should I keep shooting the aliens down because I won't need the new tech for quite some time yet? That would feel like I'm being penalized for playing well enough to prevent the aliens from building a base. Or is there something I'm not noticing yet? Anyone willing to advise?

32

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION][RESEARCH] FMP Core/Tech Tree part

« on: May 16, 2015, 06:01:35 pm »

Maybe you just were doing it wrong, Harald. Instead of taking any chances of getting MC'ed, go full aggressive, scout with tanks as much as you can and MC every Ethereal, giving them no chance to retaliate with their own attacks (as they have never seen any of you soldiers) Not saying that such a mission is much fun, either - but at least you'd have to enact a radical, unusual tactic

I've MCed my way through Cydonia so many times (though not in any of the latest versions of FMP) that this time I've decided to attack even though I haven't researched psi-amps yet. As you've mentioned, the game becomes somewhat boring once you've researched psi-amps anyway.

Plus I'm not sure this tactic would've worked as the toughest mind-controllers are unlikely to wander near deployment zones.

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Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION][RESEARCH] FMP Core/Tech Tree part

« on: May 16, 2015, 05:21:59 pm »

Okay, so I've run some numbers on that Cydonia mission and I'm afraid we're  running into those formulas you've avoided, Solarius. The reason is that unlike most of other things in xcom, psi effects are notably non-linear. I'll give you the results:

Psi Str 85 and skill 80 give psi attack strength 136. Psi defense for a soldier with those same numbers is 101 which, assuming a distance of 25,  gives the ethereal 62.5% chance of mind control. Even a hypothetical psi str 100 / skill 100 soldier has psi defense 120, leading to roughly 28.6% chance of being mindcontrolled (again, assuming distance of 25; the probability goes up when you get closer to the mindcontroller).

Multiply these numbers by the number of psi attacks the ethereals dish out and we get exactly the effects we're observing. So many soldiers get mindcontrolled that it is better to block them to prevent them from moving where they'd likely get killed and to only use HWPs to kill enough aliens to make it relatively safe to use one's soldiers again.

34

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION][RESEARCH] FMP Core/Tech Tree part

« on: May 14, 2015, 11:27:12 pm »

@Harald Grey:
Hmm, I think it was an RNG thing. The Ethereals should mostly wield ranged weapons (really good ranged weapons), the melee one shouldn't be too popular. It's weird, and I'm genuinely sorry it was disappointing, but it was pretty random. Apparently there was a fencing tournament going on in Cydonia on that day or something...
Well, at least it wasn't walking in the pie as usual.

Ehrmmm... I'm not complaining that too many ethereals had melee weapons. I'm complaining that many of them had psi abilities so strong that even my PSI 99 soldiers were more or less defenceless and I've been unable to use any of my soldiers during much of the second stage.

It felt like the enemy was cheating. I've had about the best XCOM agents can get PSI-wise and yet they've been as defenceless as rookies encountering their first sectoid leader. I've had to disarm my whole team and keep them blocked inside deployment zones by parking HWPs on the lifts so my agents wouldn't walk away and get themselves killed. There was (AFAIK) nothing I could have done to prevent those debilitating psi attacks and this turned all my soldiers into potential traitors and sources of panic.

My best agent had psi str 98, psi skill 51, cydonia was his 62nd mission. He has spent the majority of the last stage panicking or being mind controlled. So why bother with selecting, training and equiping my soldiers when I've had to kill all aliens but one with HWPs? And why design a stage in a way that turns all the player's soldiers from assets into liabilities?

Or was I too hasty setting out for Cydonia? Is there some tech I could have researched that would have protected my agents?

35

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION][RESEARCH] FMP Core/Tech Tree part

« on: May 14, 2015, 07:47:04 pm »

Okay, so I' ve just played through  the Cydonia mission, using FMP1.2.1. And while the first part was okay, the second makes me ask what the fsck?!?

My *weakest* soldier had psi 89 and I've spent most of the mission blocking all my soldiers inside the deployment areas using two of my HWPs! I've had aliens mindcontrol some of them since trun two! So I won the mission by first hiding in my deployment zones, dropping down to take shots from my lascannon hovertanks at any aliens passing by and then *very* carefully exploring the base with two of those hovertanks while the remaining two had to stay back and block the lifts so my indcontrolled/panicking soldiers wouldn't run away and get themselves killed.

It was only say two thirds into the mission that I've dared to let two of my soldiers leave the deployment zones and join the fight and one of those panicked once too.

And what my complaint is? Well, I'm not complaining that the mission was too hard. Yes, I was quaking in my boots at first, waiting for that blaster launcher shot that would kill half my squad. But after a while it dawned on me that none of the ethereals wield those, in fact most of my enemies only had melee weapons, so the mission was not *that* hard. My complaint is that the stage has made all my efforts to put together a good squad pointless.

I could have taken a bunch of random rookies in jumpsuits to that stage instead of my hardened veterans in flying suits and the result would have been the same. My veterans, some of them with dozens of mission under their belts, have managed to kill *one* alien during that whole stage. Oh, and one of them blew the alien brain to pieces by plasma blaster fire. But they've spent the rest of the stage hiding, panicking and being mindcontrolled.

So what the heck is the logic behind this? Okay, I get it, Ethereal top brass is supposed to be psionic badasses, but the gameplay sucks as a results. UFO is largely a squad-based game and discovering one's veteran squad is basically irrelevant for the final stage of the game is both disappointing and infuriating. I love this mod but this last stage was mostly frustrating and boring, with an undertone of fear caused by the fact that having one HWP destroyed more of less halved my mobile force for much of the stage. So what gives? And could we please go back to a design that lets us *use* our soldiers? 

36

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION][RESEARCH] FMP Core/Tech Tree part

« on: May 04, 2015, 05:55:14 pm »

depending of your sistem of assault.

i use the shotguns with alloy ammo. i never assault in open. i try ever hidde my troops. and i prefer close combat(discover,move,shoot,hide), now i discover gauss weapons 5 months later. i know but shock a engeneer has been hard in this party for me XD

miniguns are perfect if you use a defensive base, similar to the hmg and lmg, when you have a soldier ready for use you have more advanced weapons to assault.

incendary........ light in nights only

and the fusion i dont have experience

and the general tactic, explosions explosion and more explosions XD..... when no have missiles shotguns XD

Like I said, different playstyles 
And I'll concede the shotguns to some degree, truth is I've used them for some base defences in the past.

However, I don't like CQB. Reaction fire can be a pain in the posterior and the RNG is a vengeful god. So I roll in with a HWP in a scouting role, drop some smoke and try to shoot the aliens from beyond their visibility range.My preferred CQB weapons are high explosive, LMG and multilauncher. So I don't have much use for SMGs or shotguns. But I'm *happy* that they're there, they do add more options and require no research of their own (unless you do want to use them).

But miniguns? Too heavy to give to regular troops, too low power to give to those few soldiers who can use heavy weapons because I need those to carry more hard-hitting weapons like rocket launchers, multilaunchers, sniper rifles etc. Much better to defend my bases with proximity grenades, high explosives, HWPs and whatever my regular weapons are at the moment.

Incendiary? Flares are light, require few TUs, last the whole fight unless blown up and all soldiers can use both flares and damage-dealing weapons. Giving a soldier incendiary weapon means he's basically only useful for illuminating the battlefield and in some terrains he's unable to do that on most of said battlefield because most incendiary weapons are direct-fire. So I remain unconvinced.

And I do agree about the explosives. In fact I'm still thinking about modding in a light mortar, something like L9A1. But I'll take grenades, high explosives, rockets, proximity grenades and grenade launchers too 

37

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION][RESEARCH] FMP Core/Tech Tree part

« on: May 04, 2015, 12:59:58 pm »

I'd appreciate some more info on this. Right now I have no idea what exactly is wrong.

I'm doing whatever I can to make all weapons different, and it's not like I'm taking whatever modders produce. Of course people who are ultra-purist will consider some of them superfluous, but I can't really satisfy them and I'm not planning to try.

Besides, everything in the FMP is meshed together, so you can't really install "things from FMP" any more than "things from TFTD".

Okay, I'll bite...

 I'd guess that these feelings have several causes. One of them is the sheer scope of the mod and the time it takes to research all the options. Many weapons are obsolete by the time a player researches them. However, I see no remedy for this, because if you do want to offer various options to suit different playstyles AND you need to keep the research slow enough to keep the game reasonably balanced then there'll will likely always be weapons a player will skip at first and find useless later on.

Another problem is that of micromanagement. The more weapon types and loadouts one has in a squad, the more time it takes to manage it all. And even one dead/wounded/sacked/transfered soldier can lead to more micromanagement and even soldiers becoming stronger with experience can lead to yet more micromanagement. Logistics of it all add even more micromanagement when a player has to track stocks of five or ten or more different ammo types.

And some weapons have do very narrow niches or are next to useless. If I was to select a few examples, I'd pick these:
- miniguns; they are defensive weapons but the game is mostly about assault missions
- HMG; the same problem as with the minigun, plus sniper rifles are usually much better alternative
- SMGs and shotguns; short range firefights are to be avoided, so short-ranged weapons are a problem
- incendiary anything; the flame damage is so low as to make them next to useless damage-wise, flares suffice for nighttime missions that can't be avoided
- fusion weapons; too specialized to be worth their weight for most of the time

38

Work In Progress / Re: [ARMOR] Stealth Suit - armor that makes you harder to hit

« on: April 28, 2015, 05:27:33 pm »

Have I explained my answer? Or am I still being too incomprehensible?

Thank you, that was perfectly understandable and thorough enough. Sorry for that jab about geometry, I was feeling like I've failed to make it obvious I do understand at least some of this, even if I've never read the actual code. Soooo....

If I do understand this correctly, this should lead to the following:

At close ranges, the effect of thinner loftemps will be less pronounced. This is caused by several factors. The unit's height stays the same. 5 degrees at four metres is only about 0.4 m from the aimpoint and that is about the maximum possible deviation for a "hit" so many of those will hit even the thinner targets. "Misses" can go so wildly off the target and are so frequent, at least in early and mid game, that this random noise drowns the whole effect. Use of burst fire at close ranges also drowns this effect, as one-hit kills are frequent and most players are unlikely to perceive how often it was the second or third shot that hit because the TUs are wasted anyway.

At longer ranges, the effect of thinner units should be measurable but not overwhelming. "Misses"are likely to miss both thin and normal units and "hits" are less likely to actually hit the thinner units. E.g. a shooter with 60% displayed accuracy has a 25% chance of hitting a normal unit and, roughly speaking, 13% chance against one that's half normal width. And low hit rates at long ranges are perceived as common and their relative rarity leads to both psychological and statistical consequences.

Yes, I do like the results. Stealth suits based on loftemps 1 or 2 offer reasonable protection at longer ranges and very limited help at close ranges, which makes sense. Suits based on loftemps 85 offer far better protection but lead to various glitches. Some other loftemps, like 78, 65 or 96, might also lead to both interesting results and glitches.

39

Work In Progress / Re: [ARMOR] Stealth Suit - armor that makes you harder to hit

« on: April 28, 2015, 10:35:14 am »

i couldn't give you a fixed % as there are too many factors to take into account, range being foremost among them.

very long answer:

Is it too rude to tell you that those graphics were unnecessary because I do understand basic geometry?

I was not asking for exact %. You could say I was asking whether the shot deviation angles were evenly distributed between zero and maximum for a given situation or whether the function in non-linear.

Even distribution should mean that once the hit probability against a normal-sized target on flat and empty terrain drops to say 40%, a target half as wide has roughly 20% hit probality. So this would mean that lower loftemps provide non-negligible drop in hit probabilities, say something like the 30%->20% scenario.

If the angle distribution is uneven and more shots have minimal deviation (say one fifth of the shots in a given setup have zero deviation and the rest are evenly distributed between zero and maximum) then lower loftemps are less helpful. Should say 20% of shots fly into the aimpoint voxel, and the rest with a random deviation, we would be getting closer to Dioxine's 30%->29% scenario.

And I guess there's no need to deal with the fact that this is about voxel space instead of an abstract continuous one. The differences in results should not matter much.

Have I explained my question? Or am I still being too incomprehensible?

40

Work In Progress / Re: [ARMOR] Stealth Suit - armor that makes you harder to hit

« on: April 27, 2015, 09:42:23 pm »

I'd rather say, you'll get, like, 29% or so instead of 30%, from what I've seen, that's why I said it does nothing (even if technically it does something - certainly helps hiding behind objects). Although this is based on my observations only, which might be faulty.

I'm not disproving your claims. Like I said, I've never had the patience to test this, because reloading a game several hundred times and writing down the results seemed too time consuming. And I saw no other method of testing this.

Which is why I'm bothering Warboy about this, as simple logic (which might not apply here) tells me that the difference in width should lead to non-negligible difference in hit probabilities. Sure, there would be no dramatic drop in hit ratios. The difference between 20% and 30% means the shooter needs, on average, 5 shots instead of 3.33 and we're all used to even longer streaks odf misses. I was *expecting* that the effect would be subtle. But in the long run, thin units should be harder to hit and I would like to know whether we're dealing with the 30%->20% scenario or the 30%->29% one.

Edit: I should add that I'm mostly talking about targets at longer ranges, as good shooters with good weapons will fire the majority of their shots within such a narrow angle that they'll hit even thin targets with high probability. But at say 10+ squares, the spread should be wide enough to cause said non-negligible difference.

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Work In Progress / Re: [ARMOR] Stealth Suit - armor that makes you harder to hit

« on: April 27, 2015, 09:11:11 pm »

Thank you for the clarification. I think that none of us considered thinner units safe, this was about hit probability. My understanding of the algorithm was that when a unit fires, the game rolls pseudorandom numbers based on skill and weapon accuracy and these numbers (which can also be zero) determine the angle and direction relative to aimpoint. So a good shot hits the place it was aimed at and an exceptionaly bad one goes wildly off the target. And since this is based on angles, targets at a distance are easier to miss.

So the idea is that a thinner unit is harder to hit, the probability is say 20% instead of 30% for a standard one. Which is why Dioxine's results confused me and I'm glad to know that the thin units (alien, in the case of my mod) are indeed harder to hit.

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Work In Progress / Re: [ARMOR] Stealth Suit - armor that makes you harder to hit

« on: April 27, 2015, 04:56:45 pm »

using loftemp 85 is a really bad idea, from an engine perspective. this number not only represents the loftemp index but ALSO the radius width of the unit in voxel space. this number should not go above 3 or 4. using 85 will bug out a lot of the calculations. seriously i cannot recommend anyone do this.

Ummm... Since you know the code, at least I guess you do, could you let us know whether changing a unit's loftemps makes it easier/harder to hit?

I never had the patience to reliably test hit percentages so I've *assumed* that my mod would make the stealthsuit less visible and harder to hit. It seemed logical, based on what I read about hit calculations, but now that Dioxine claims it has no effect I'm a bit torn about this. Can you enlighten us?

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Work In Progress / Re: [ARMOR] Stealth Suit - armor that makes you harder to hit

« on: April 26, 2015, 12:05:10 am »

@Harald_Gray: My apologies. I have underestimated your mod. It is a shame that your finding did not get the attention it deserved.

No harm done :-)

BTW, imagine my face the first time I've tested this with loftemps 0. My plan was to test whether the alien would stay vulnerable to explosive rounds. I was thinking maybe I could call this a deflector field to explain why some alien has to be killed by HE fire while bullets and beams seemingly pass through him. Turned out he was *invisible* and I had to aim my shots by observing where he fired from. I could drive a tank a meter from him in broad daylight and he'd *stay* invisible because loftemps 0 meant there was no part of him the code would consider visible.

What was even funnier was giving loftemps 0 to my own soldiers. This time it was the aliens who were unable to see their enemies. I was able to walk right next to an alien and the AI would ignore me. However, I saw no sensible application for either of these two extremes, as invisible aliens are too hardcore and invisible operatives too munchkiny to my taste.

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Work In Progress / Re: [ARMOR] Stealth Suit - armor that makes you harder to hit.. help playtest plz

« on: April 24, 2015, 11:08:09 pm »

There was a stealthy alien in the mechtoid race mod earlier, although it was only graphical. You can also play with the height to make the target area smaller.

Yes, I know this thread is quite old, but I wasn't playing OXC for some time now...

No, that stealthy mechtoid was not just graphical. I've run into the same kind of problems this design has, namely that using too empty loftemps leads to the unit becoming invisible and untargetable. So I gave that stealthsuit loftemp 001, the smallest possible one that remains reasonably targetable. It made him slightly harder to hit but not that overpowered.

45

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION][RESEARCH] FMP Core/Tech Tree part

« on: January 09, 2015, 05:30:56 pm »

Yep, that one should work. The latest one I know to work with FMP is openxcom_git_master_2014_11_17_1232.zip