Messages

1

Open Feedback / Re: XCOM Player AI ?

« on: January 24, 2024, 05:15:33 pm »

I'd be nervous if the game was left running for months unchecked, and the alien ai & human ai began working together in-game & the geoscape showed the year is 2024, haha.

2

Open Feedback / Re: Mind Control and LoS

« on: January 02, 2024, 10:34:09 pm »

The intelligence statistic is 0 for all humans, aww!  For aliens it ranges from 2 to 8 and is unaffected by difficulty settings.  Intelligence is a number that correponds to the number of turns the alien will remember the location of your troops.  Like it's been mentioned, aliens can be affected by something after several turns thus extending how long they remember the location of your troops from how long you might expect.  Alien ranks plays a big role in-between the different species for their intellect.

The only alien combos that have the minimum 2 intellect:
Snakeman Soldier
Muton Soldier
Reaper

The only aliens that have the maximum 8 intellect:
(3 of 4 below are the only aliens to have 0 aggression too!)
Floater Leader
Floater Commander
Sectoid Commander
Ethereal Commander (has aggression of 1)

Special mention for only the terror aliens along with their intellect:
Reaper 2
Silacoid 3
Zombie 3
Chryssalid 4
Celatid 4
Sectopod 4
Cyberdisc 5

Some unique alien statistics that they get:

"Intelligence of the alien ranked from 2-8. This number correponds to the number of turns the alien will remember the location of your troops."

"Energy Recharge. This number represents how fast a unit will recover Energy lost due to movement."  The human mechanic to this a soldiers starting TUs to determine Energy Recovery & can never change for that soldier. 50TU=16, 51-53=17, 54-56=18, 57-59=19, 60=20

"VPS, The number of Victory Points X-COM will get for killing that alien."

"Aggression is a number between 0 and 2. The larger the value, the more aggressive the alien will be. High ranking aliens usually prefer to stay concealed, rather than get involved in a raging fire-fight."

3

Open Feedback / Re: 12 avalanche missiles (that HIT) fail to take down a Large?

« on: January 02, 2024, 02:00:40 am »

Imagine traveling back in time in an armoured helicopter, and a small crew of individuals of that time period shoot 12 wooden arrows at your door.  A few stick, but most slide or bounce off.  They might mess up the paint job of your army helicopter.

The men with bows & arrows down below are angry that the metal flying monster lives.  For any running or swimming beast they've encountered before would have definately died from that many projectiles!

We're just lucky that in the X-Com universe the aliens don't have energy force fields making damage thresholds even more unpredictable.  I get more agitated when my advanced plasma weapons destroy craft that I mean to crash only, following them up with an invasion party such as a very small alien ship.  I always need to keep a dedicated craft with cannons only handy.

4

Open Feedback / Re: Skyranger placement is insane

« on: January 02, 2024, 01:47:05 am »

The sounds of nervous soldier passengers could be heard as the skyranger craft began to shake violently as it was flying in a curious fashion.  The crew could hear the screams of their pilot as the large alien vessel approached quickly from the side.  Suddenly the pilot stopped screaming, and immediately both the skyranger & large alien craft began their decent in parallel, making identical micro maneuvers as if both crafts were being piloted by the same individual.  After the skyranger lands, a blank look from the pilot can be seen as he points towards the alien craft & mumbles "Take me to your leader!"

Never fly too close to a large sectoid ship or any ethereal! Perhaps we never chose to land our crafts where we find them half the time.  Choice is an illusion!

5

Open Feedback / Re: Skyranger placement is insane

« on: December 20, 2023, 05:35:12 pm »

If I was flying a skyranger, I would land on top of the conveniently flat rooftops of the UFO's!

Keep all those non-flight capable terror units away from our crew as we're exiting our craft!  Well the cyberdisc can fly but that's all.  In my nightmares, the Chryssalid climb ontop of one another to climb heights to get that Zombie bite!

It would have been creepy if aliens had the chance to occasionally spawned ontop of our craft.  As you poke your head out looking around, you witness a curious creature trying to enter your craft from above!

6

Suggestions / Re: [SUGGESTION] Window to display experience and other data

« on: December 13, 2023, 11:15:11 am »

The experience meter he made needs help with two big issues.  If anybody knows java code & can assist, oh my god I would love you forever!

#1 If anybody on your team dies, it no longer works, no soldiers show up any longer in that battle on the meter. It now reports:

All bases has been scanned.
Unidentified soldier found.

#2 If you bring a tank or vehicle with your grounding party, it no longer works, no soldiers show up in that battle on the meter. It now reports:

All bases has been scanned.
0 soldier(s) on mission found



Not sure if its because the id for the hovertank is 1000000, or because the hovertank is a unit & this script can't find its base as it's not a soldier?  Ultimately vehicles can't gain experience, so vehicles don't need to show up at all in this.  Dead people can't gain experience, so a dead guy doesn't need to show up at all either.

An in-game solution that is elegant would be nice, but this is working at the moment as long as no tanks/hover come along & nobody dies.

If the developing openxcom team could make an exp tracker Ingame either having a meter similar to this one the OP shows, for the entire team in the corner of the game that can be turned on if you wanted.  Or a page just like the stats at the end of a mission, except instead it shows the primary actions so far of the team which you can view at anytime during the mission.  Give the gamer the tools to improve the team's progress/growth/levels, instead of not knowing and blindly hoping for stronger soldiers over time.  Or work on your favorite hero's weakness & track their progress to that golden goal of 11 actions.

7

Suggestions / Re: [SUGGESTION] Window to display experience and other data

« on: December 13, 2023, 04:33:45 am »

It's a shame when half your squad get 10 hits and not that 11th, or half your team never hit one guy or performed any action.  When you have three soldiers next to each other, who do you pick to take that final shot at the last alien?

You can choose to ignore the current battle exp progress, but it's very nice to command your team with the intent for experience improvement!  I wish Openxcom had a built in experience meter or a chart to view when a hotkey is pressed.  The gamer needs to see which soldiers need to perform more or less so that they gain experience faster or at all.  Counting hits in your head or writing them down instead is too hard.

One action (hit landed, one reaction, melee, or psy) means you have a chance at 0 or 1 point improvement, but all your secondaries will go up all they're going to (TUs, health, strength, energy/stamina)!  The big cutoffs are 3 primary actions rewarding you randomly with 1-3 points at the end of the mission, and the maximum reward which is 11 primary actions rewarding you randomly with 2-6 points.  Performing more than 11 actions won't cause any more increase.

I can't post links so go to ufopaedia and search for "Experience" to learn more.  Also "Kill_Modelling" to learn how many hits it takes to kill a creature or for your own men to die on average.  On the edge of the standard grenade damage, some creatures are invulnerable.

Something I discovered last week, is that an alien taking up four spots actually rewards you with 4 primary hit actions when hit with a single grenade!  If you hit a cyberdisc on the edge of the standard grenade's 10damage (10+10+20+20) they are invulnerable on every difficulty making them a faster way to get 11 hit actions before mind control options arrive later.  Just three grenades gives a soldier 12 hits, especially nice for the recruit with bad firing accuracy to improve faster!  On games above beginner difficulty with the increased alien armor bonus, if you hit a cyberdisc with a standard grenade directly instead of the edge it takes around 23 direct hit grenades to kill too.

8

Suggestions / Re: [SUGGESTION] Window to display experience and other data

« on: December 13, 2023, 03:54:22 am »

This is how I made his java openxcom experience meter work in windows!  Steps 3 & 4 might not be needed, but I recall I had to do these:

1. Copied the 234 lines from his pastebin link into notepad.  Can save it as any file, just change the extension to "all files" and add the .java at the end.  In my case I called this file exp.java

2. Right click the java file you just saved, and click edit.  This opens up notepad so you can edit this again later if needed. On line 6, it says "D:\\Games\\Open X-COM 2021 FMP 2.8e\\user\\xcom1\\TACTICAL-0.sav" in his example, you must change this to point to your openxcom location.  You can have it point to a network location on your home network by mapping a drive in windows easily.  My favorite saved game to monitor is _quick_.asav as I hit my quicksave binding key often & have autosave turned off ingame.  Remember, your saved files are located in OpenXCom\user\xcom1

3. Download java development kit from oracle & install: (can't post links here I guess, it's easy to find on google.)

4. Open up command prompt, go to the folder where your exp file you made in step one, in my case I had named it exp.java.  Now type in: javac exp.java

5. Open up command prompt, go to the folder where your exp file you made in step one, in my case I had named it exp.java.  Now type in: java exp.java


(optional) To autorefresh, I opened up notepad and pasted in this bit at the end and saved this file as exp.bat putting this in the same folder as the java file. When you run this, it will automatically refresh your teams experience hit counters every 10 seconds!  You can change the 10 to however many seconds you wish this to refresh:

:start

java exp.java

timeout 10

goto start

The End Result for myself:
Everytime I click my quicksave hotkey, whenever I see my command prompt auto refresh it shows my entire teams bravery, reactions, hits, throws, psk, pst and melee actions!  Having this run on a spare laptop, or better yet having a cheap tablet screen share this box lets me see the team's status separately so my game can run fullscreen.  This allows me to make sure everyone gets one hit, be efficient in helping that one or two guys who really need the help hitting better or getting brave!

In the classic original x-com dos game, I did a similar monitoring but with the program HxD with the dat file, but it was hard to view & get the names of the soldiers but it did update in realtime.  I dislike not knowing who hit too many times or not enough (or not at all!).