What do I have to do to enter the alien embasy?You need an alien key, which you can get from certain Ethereal ships.
I know I need some codes. I still have a lot of alien storage cards.
But what do I need?
I am slowly out of money because losing countries.
1.8:
- Rebuilt alien embassies into alien colonies (easier to get in, but can't reclaim the country).
Alien embassies have been removed from the mod.
How do we stop countries falling to the Aliens?You don't. According to the mod author this intended as despite X-Coms near limitless resources, achievements and use of what could be described as outright magic, aliens are just too good at bribing government officials.
It seems counterproductive to have countries fall to the aliens without being able to either stop it or reclaim themAnd I concur that it is indeed a pretty stupid decision.
You don't. According to the mod author this intended as despite X-Coms near limitless resources, achievements and use of what could be described as outright magic, aliens are just too good at bribing government officials.
And I concur that it is indeed a pretty stupid decision.
Yeah, because toppling governments by a bunch of gung-ho commandos is totally legit. Just like KGB can totally control the American government, right?Strawman argument to be honest. Calling X-Com "a bunch of of gung-ho commandos" is misleading at best, given the lore you have established so far. Looking at the exploits of the CIA in the middle-east and south america I'd call your line of reasoning into question regardles. This is hardly the first time this has come up. IIRC you have tried to chalk this (among other things) to X-Com not being allowed to "choose" who they ally with - when in fact they have done so on multiple occasions with other factions.
Honestly, I thought you had a better grasp on reality. And manners.First off, I can, in fact, read Ufopedia entries, where it is explicitly stated that the aliens "offer superior technology" in exchange for unhindered access to said country. The country is not exempt from terror mission either as far as I can tell. The aliens bribe government officials, plain and simple.
But I've explained it so many times already...Then maybe it's time to re-examine this? Because if you have to (unsuccessfully) defend a change several times, maybe it wasn't a good one, or possibly got botched in the execution. To wit:
The X-Com is just an agency. It has literally no feasible ways to control who is in power in any state.CIA is also 'just an agency', one with much stronger competition and less versatility overall. It's got the rest of the US backing it when it comes to regime change, sure, but iconic X-Com also has all the other countries still on the Council.
Not to mention how many times Dioxine told me that I was being silly.I don't think Dioxine is a positive influence on the design of XCF. YMMV.
I'm a bit tired of Solarius's attitude of 'I know better, silly players', and haven't had a good rant lately, so...
Then maybe it's time to re-examine this? Because if you have to (unsuccessfully) defend a change several times, maybe it wasn't a good one.
This decision makes for poor gameplay.
Alien infiltration is essentially a random 'fuck you' event, one where you have zero input to the result.
He is the only one, who knows what he wants in his mod.Sure. But if he publishes the mod, he presumably wants feedback and others to play it. I have my own mods, and the few that I've published come with explicit caveats "This is a mod for me, if you don't like it, tough. You might convince me otherwise." Not the case here, Solarius himself admits he plays the thing less than he should and dismisses half the criticism off-hand. Which is why I delurked and ranted. :-\ I don't like that style of development, at all. Either keep your feedback at an arm's length like most pros, or actually engage with it.
By definition, nobody knows better than him.
If you don't like the mod, don't play it.I do like significant parts of it. But stripping out and changing what I find silly, imbalanced or just poor-quality is a major task, one I attempted once and occasionally still consider redoing. I have other projects at the moment.
He has to defend only against people who don't like it.What if Gollop told me in a private and confidential e-mail in 1995 that he considers it a mistake? :P
What if majority likes it?
Do you think there is even a slightest chance of successfully defending vaccinations in front of antivaxxers?Depends on their reasons, but generally yes for the non-hardcore ones. Those who are not into 'Bill Gates, Soros, 5G, Big Pharma, wake up!', but rather 'but I got really sick from the first jab', 'but my friend said...', 'I have condition X', 'I can't have days off', 'I only have at most a few years to live, anyway', etc. These are actually the majority, and that's why the governments, medics, WHO and the anti-antivax crowd are running their campaigns, with varying degrees of commitment and success.
Yeah, that's why xcom is the best game of all times.Vanilla X-Com has a number of poor design decisions, like being able to research plasma weapons from zero, heavy plasma proliferation, limitless mind control, plasma beams on interceptors, bughunts, just to mention a few. It's a terrific game despite these, not because of them.
Because it's full of poor gameplay decisions like this.
As intended.You have a quote from Gollop for this, I presume?
Even by designers like Julian Gollop.
I like it.This line of thought is pretty much copied from those 'antivaxxers' you so disparage.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
The only thing I can add is that you show even stronger "I know better, silly modders and silly devs" complex than what you're accusing Solarius of.I have told you why I think the way I do, and welcome actual criticism. You responded with suspect debating tactics and 'trust me, we tried'. I have strong opinions, yes. These can and frequently have been changed by reasoning, not appeals to authority.
Your arguments for "insisting it's a bad idea" are at least as bad as our arguments for "insisting it's a good idea".Then demonstrate that, show my arguments are wrong, inapplicable or misguided. You have done exactly none of that, and based on your posting history, I don't see that changing.
We are discussing these things in public, because we listen to the feedback...Sure. But if feedback goes into a black box of 'we listened to it, and liked/didn't like it', it's disincentivises giving more.
...but we (or at least I) do not accept any requests, there are only suggestions.I'm not making either, and I'm definitely not making one for OXCE. I'm posting this in the (extremely faint) hope that Solarius recognises the problems with engaging only half-way, and completely removing features nobody complained about for essentially fluff reasons.
Solarius tried it and found out it doesn't fit... end of the story.That may or may not be true. The only criteria the feature has failed so far seem to be "It's silly (from Solarius' POV)" and "Meridian likes it the way it was in the OG". These are good reasons enough to include or exclude them from your work, of course, but not nearly sufficient as arguments in a design discussion, which you're determined to make them into.
What more do you expect?An actual reason why a game feature of completely random and irrecoverable losses makes the game/mod more fun? XCF already has a lot of randomness in it, some of it practically game-altering. Infiltrations as they are are not that, they're flavour that pushes many players' buttons the wrong way. What if poker had a rule that every round, everyone rolls a die and getting a one means another player can pick a card you have to discard? No redraws, either, you continue with an understrength hand. Might be interesting once or twice as a novelty, but not long-term.
Thank you, MEridian, I really appreciate it.
Bottom line, anyone can make a submod. With country reclamation, blackjack, hookers, furries, gremlins, JoJo memes, Rick & Morty references, foie gras and Donald Trump quotes. I really won't mind.
To be clear: at this point I am not really satisfied with the mod. It is still WIP, and also I have some design regrets. But when I keep explaining with simple terms why something is bad, and I repeatedly hear the same weak arguments I've refuted many times before, then I am not even bother doing it again. Because it's madness, white noise, not "feedback".
Also, Juku, screw you and your crude metaphors. Go be an insufferable prick somewhere else.
For myself, I do this. If I destroyed the base, I edit the save and return the country...
You can instead apply tiny mod with just one ruleset line https://www.dropbox.com/s/ldm0p0npa9q85oj/Liberation.rar?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ldm0p0npa9q85oj/Liberation.rar?dl=0)Oh... It's really more comfortable that way.
Regardless of whether you disagree with him, this really isn't an appropriate response.
Oh my, look at me giving all the fucks!
I don't think you realize that this issue has long gone past any kind of reasonable discussion and has basically devolved into harassment by blind fanatics. I'm not going to take it nicely. I have already my position dozens of times, and it doesn't look like these people even bothered to read it. At this point I openly say that I have been too patient.
so im not here to convince anyone, one way or the other, i just want to say that Jan 99 was very brutal for me with almost 20 ufos of various sizes in russia, and obviously i couldnt deal with anything bigger than medium in any proper way, and at the end of jan 99, russia had signed a deal with the aliens, and this is with me having dealt with the 4 cults by mid-december 98 and having promo3 by start of dec98. It just felt like a complete kick in the teeth as id done everything i could up till that point and had positive scores, and about a months worth of IRL investment in the evenings. So when and if i get round to dealing with the colony in russia, ill probably give them a few months of just nothing and the "cheat" and edit the save to bring them back into the fold, as if they can flip to the aliens in a month, they can probavbly flip back yo humans after a few months, kinda like in UNEXCOM.
I simply failed to convince myself that X-Com would be able to influence the fate of empires.That's fine. Not entirely consistent, but what fiction is? :P The embassy mechanic was kinda convoluted.
That's fine. Not entirely consistent, but what fiction is? :P
The embassy mechanic was kinda convoluted.
My point was and is, this is not the beginning and the end of infiltration. You could just add a chance to kill infiltration if the player is able to consistently intercept and shut down infiltration missions. Then you could point e.g. ashtroboy79 to that fact, ask if he had enough air power, and say that it's his fault for not focusing on that. Even though realistically he couldn't actually have had enough, it'd give the illusion of there being a choice, and that he picked the wrong one. Not the current undertone of "Haha, so you wasted a month's worth of evenings? Just as planned!" Indeed, later on there actually would be a choice.
Edit: Or, well, ramp up the special infiltration mission's trigger chance as the game goes on. Then it'd actually be a timer, even if it's ultimately just the timer for a bad-looking funding report. :)
Alien embassy... I've just finished off STR_ALIEN_BIG_BASE -- a red square on the globe, an obsolete mission (https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,5047.msg139013.html#msg139013) that appeared as a rudiment of Alien embassies that were thrown away, I suppose. Got Tritanium knives from it. They fall into X-COM tech category of weapons. But X-COM sees them for the first time. Also a rudiment? Not a bug?
But it already works like that! (It should, anyway...)Only for retaliation, not infiltration or other missions.
TBH I don't exactly see what it's inconsistent with, but it's not really important.Well, from my POV (probably from krautbernds's as well, to some degree) X-Com can thumb its nose at the Council with just score penalties several times, pulls off wildly implausible (in anything even remotely resembling RL 90s, anyway) things to shut down the four cults and monsters, and generally messes up the aliens plans a lot. I also think that regaining a lost country needs a lot more setup, but losing one just like that, no warning, no ability to do anything about it, no messages from 'friends on the Council', no nothing... Just feels off. YMMV, obviously.
Can be done, but honestly, I don't feel like it's worth the effort.Probably true. Balancing an effective timer into a WIP project is a massive PITA.
Only for retaliation, not infiltration or other missions.
- type: STR_ALIEN_INFILTRATION
endlessInfiltration: false
Well, from my POV (probably from krautbernds's as well, to some degree) X-Com can thumb its nose at the Council with just score penalties several times, pulls off wildly implausible (in anything even remotely resembling RL 90s, anyway) things to shut down the four cults and monsters, and generally messes up the aliens plans a lot. I also think that regaining a lost country needs a lot more setup, but losing one just like that, no warning, no ability to do anything about it, no messages from 'friends on the Council', no nothing... Just feels off. YMMV, obviously.
That one just disables 'full-region' infiltration. What I meant are the 'interruptPercentage' entries in alien mission data that can completely eliminate an ongoing infiltration mission.Code: [Select]- type: STR_ALIEN_INFILTRATION
endlessInfiltration: false
This should be doing what you said...
To me, these things look far more plausible, considering the backing you have. But directly influencing heads of state goes way more beyond what the Council stands for, mostly because it's not part of the "shadow war", but relatively public.My view of this is that such things were and mostly still are flat out impossible, no matter the backing. Unless there actually is some kind of world government with powers exceeding even modern-day China. In which case there's no need for 'shadowing' the war, what the government says, goes.
Or even weirder, after you make nice with leaders in shogg they start offering monthly resources (here's some gold bars you can sell). Things like that really bother the council (that don't want you to become beholden to non-human powers) but grant you some leeway as human nations fall.