Messages

121

Open Feedback / Researching sold item.. Bug or a feature?

« on: August 01, 2020, 09:00:15 pm »

Hi..

I see it still is like the original UFO game, that you can start research alien artifact, and as soon as you've created the research project, you can put zero scientists on it and sell all you have of that artifacts, but still allowing you to start researching it later..

As it still is like that, I'm assuming it is because it is not considered a bug?

I'm assuming it doesn't affect research speed or anything, guessing it's only because the game only checks whether you have item when you create project.

122

Open Feedback / Re: Calculation Research Progress

« on: August 01, 2020, 07:49:40 pm »

Which means that it's really only useful to gauge how much the average research cost is which is useless now that exact average cost is available on Ufopedia. Its good that you cant calculate remaining time from it but would be nice if it could hint to whether you had a good roll or not. (once you get passed unknow progress bit)

If you dont track how many hours youve spent and know the research cost though, you can use it to set a limit for research waste at the cost of possibly  delaying the project.

123

Open Feedback / Re: How much do you rely on graphs screen?

« on: August 01, 2020, 01:33:04 pm »

I used to ignore the graphs, thinking they were more of a way to look at historic activity. But now, in an effort to try and reduce save/load in early game to avoid game loss due to bad luck before decoders are built I use them a lot. I typically build 1st base in Europe but even so Ive managed to take on missions in Australia by inspecting the graph. Interceptors have low range so switching an interceptor with a second skyranger makes it a lot easier to have a lot of patrols.

Indeed tiresome to keep scanning graphs though. Would be nice if the people reporting acticity could notify you when new reports came in. You can definitively do best by scanning graphs often ahead of good decoder coverage but as said, just scanning to detect regions with activity a given month and then trying to keep skyranger patrols going will also help well with lower effort..

124

Open Feedback / Re: Landed Missions vs Crashed Missions for Retaliation or Base Discovery Chances?

« on: August 01, 2020, 01:13:17 pm »

But when crashing many aliens die alongside much equipment. What matters for score is score difference and I think you more than make up the extra score by the extra aliens killed and extra artifacts gotten. And you get extra money and experience to boot.

(Not sure if replying to old threads is frowned upon or not. Let me know if it is?)

125

Suggestions / Re: Optional fog of war

« on: July 30, 2020, 12:12:02 pm »

Hard to argue with you.. You know your stuff

But a fog of war based on what you would have explored if it was not explored yet, rather than true visibility, would still be helpful, and might not fall in what you consider cheating basket?

In any case, I guess I'll have to try and pay more attention as to when I do spot aliens and not..

126

Open Feedback / Re: Detailed changes from original game. Known research limits for instance?

« on: July 30, 2020, 11:29:55 am »

Aah.. Good solution with less impact on mechanics than I came up with..

127

Open Feedback / Re: Night vision and aliens - How does it work?

« on: July 29, 2020, 09:14:17 pm »

Knowing detection distance is 9 and getting to second mission when I had gotten my flares made a whole lot of difference Surprised how far and accurate I'm able to throw those flares with rookies.

128

Open Feedback / Re: Detailed changes from original game. Known research limits for instance?

« on: July 29, 2020, 07:00:51 pm »

If you want a starting point of differences (and a link to known bugs in original which are all fixed except for one) try: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Differences_to_X-COM_(OpenXcom)

Might be slightly outdated (last edit is 2018) but it is the most comprehensive list I've seen to date.

Yeah.. Thats the list Ive been reading. Just thought Id suggest trying to flesh it out a bit to state how mechanics work after change where it isnt obvious, and the list seems to lack some entries too.

129

Open Feedback / Re: Radar mathematics

« on: July 29, 2020, 03:24:59 pm »

This is covered by UFOpedia here: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/UFO_Detection

Basically, they only detect UFOs at 30 minute intervals which you can see yourself by watching what the time is every time you detect something new.

In the original game, radar doesn't stack, even though base information page seems to indicate more is better. Radar stacking have been fixed in OpenXCom (and I think also in ufo extender / xcom utils).

Not entirely sure how they are stacking when fixed, but I'm guessing they stack multiplicative and not additive, and they still only check every 30 minutes.

Would be nice if you could detect more often than every 30 minutes, but with current mechanic that also means you'd lose tracking of them faster when moving out of radar coverage.

130

Suggestions / Re: Optional fog of war

« on: July 29, 2020, 02:48:23 pm »

Being easily available to see the 9 distance from flares, and whether or not this fairly dark place use 9 or 20 limit seems like a good improvement at least. I might try out OXCE later ..

The game shows visibility as you move into the unexplored territory for the first time, so the information isn't secret. It would just be about making it easier available, so you don't need to track every step forwards in detail to learn all the visibility rules. Not sure why you call it cheating. Because people should learn those details? Or because noone should know those details, and you should be required to guess. Anyhow I agree it would make the information far more available, and thus make it easier to handle it, and as the information wasn't easily available before, it should at least be optional.

Not expecting it to be made, just thought I'd offer up a suggestion

I've been saving and loading too much in this game, and I'm trying to find ways of avoid it (like using activity graphs and patrolling to find UFOs rather than reloading a game because RNG lost it for me by not detecting enough UFOs 2 months in a row). Getting experience for my soldiers is a lot of fun, so I'd like to get to where I manage to keep most my troops after a battle, at least most my experienced troops, and that seems to entail learning a lot of mechanics. If I end up losing soldiers too often to what feels out of my control, then I fear load/save mechanics will still be too tempting.

131

Open Feedback / Re: Detailed changes from original game. Known research limits for instance?

« on: July 29, 2020, 02:28:59 pm »

The original had a bug that the difficulty reset to Beginner after the first mission.
You've probably been playing on Beginner for all those years and now play Superhuman for the first time in OpenXcom

Thanks for the reply.. 

I was certainly there in 94. Though later I have been using UFO Extender or XComUtil and was aware of the issues and thought it was fixed, and felt like funding nations were much more easier to say game over if I didn't see enough on the radars two months in a row. I haven't patched my steam game for my last playthrough, but saw a forum post saying that the difficulty bug was fixed, but maybe it wasn't true. But if you're saying the AI is that close to the original, I'll put it down to having bad luck with OpenXCom for the first few combat spawns.

I do like a bigger challenge from the AI, but it feels like the battlescape battles gets easier and easier as you get better equipment and tech, and psi-amps feels like cheating.. So would be nice if there was a way to ramp up later difficulty without making it even harder to begin with

I don't disagree with any of your decisions. I was just hoping for the page with differences to original game contained a bit more info. Even if it's a clear bug, a fix is likely to adjust the game mechanics in some way. For instance (I dunno how you've done it, so I dunno if the examples are correct):

- The 80 item limit for troop transports have been removed. Transports are now just limited by what can be stored in general stores on the base they are stationed. Transferring a craft with gear, will be denied if base doesn't have free space at transfer start time, but will potentially overflow general stores in target base at end time.

- Research rollover bug have been fixed. Researchers assigned during research completed notifications will never contribute hours from the previous day to the new project, regardless of whether they had spare time or not the preceding day. Use known progress to reduce effort if you want to limit the loss.

- Research now only gets to known progress after researching 67% of actual hours, rather than average hours. Known progress can thus be used to estimate actual research hours needed much more accurately.
or maybe
- Research now only gets to known progress after researching 33% of average hours AND 15% of actual hours, keeping the known progress equally fuzzy as before, but not showing it immediately for new projects.
or maybe
- Actual research hours is now just +/- 30% of the average, ensuring you never get known progress immediately.

Cheers... 

132

Open Feedback / Re: Night vision and aliens - How does it work?

« on: July 29, 2020, 01:24:55 pm »

Bah.. How did I miss the night missions page ..    Thanks for the link and info..

133

Suggestions / Optional fog of war

« on: July 29, 2020, 10:37:08 am »

It would be really nice if it was possible to enable some highlighting of the area your currently selected soldier is able to see right now. I tried to search the forum, but only found a thread in modding section for someone asking if there already were such a mod, with no reply.

- If there were an alien out on that field, would I be able to spot him?
- There's a tree 5 tiles north and 1 tile west. If there were an alien behind it, would I be able to see him or is the angle to steep?
- Is that tree trunk big enough to hide someone behind it?
- Do I see over this obstacle or is it too tall?

I guess one way to do it, was for daylight mission to make light outside your vision a bit darker, and for night time missions, make the visible area illuminated a bit more.. Or maybe a ground texture on visible tiles would be simpler and work for all light conditions. Doesn't matter if the visualization is pretty if it's only shown while you press a key or something.

Should of course be optional to use it.

134

Open Feedback / Night vision and aliens - How does it work?

« on: July 29, 2020, 10:25:45 am »

When playing the game, it feels like the aliens see better in the dark. However, UFOpedia seems to state that they should not have an advantage here, but that they can remember your position for later, so the spotter might have moved out of range, and he might not be the one shooting back, so it may appear so. Another place I thought I also read that the alien AI did not take advantage of spotter/sniper tactics.

My experience in the game seems to indicate aliens ignore night though. If they had no advantage, I would expect to be able to walk towards an alien, and as he sees me, I see him, and we're mutual surprised and he thus don't get a reaction shot.

- Do aliens see in the dark so they have the same vision as in daylight?
- If not, do aliens spot me easier if I'm close to a light source like a flare or a fire? If aliens are affected by night, how are they affected? What is a light source for the aliens? Why do they seem to spot me before I spot them?

In my turn, the map lights up around my soldiers. Does that mean I'm carrying a light source making me easily spottable by all aliens? Or is it just a practical visualization enabling the player to see the area around the soldier?

Would be very nice to have a light source with a parachute I could shoot out, which would give some illumination to a large area

135

Open Feedback / Detailed changes from original game. Known research limits for instance?

« on: July 29, 2020, 12:15:09 am »

Hi..

Just checked out the original game again after I found it on Steam, and I found this awesome project. Way to go. I really like some of the quality of life improvements, like for instance being able to see radar coverage when putting down a base, or see how many movement points I'll have left if I let the game pick where to go over to some square. I see you've been conservative in what is enabled by default and have gone for being close to the original by default which is great.

I'm used to managing the AI on superhuman, but the AI here seems to make it considerably harder, at least initially. Doesn't help that I've been forced into night missions. Seems to be higher probability of aliens being close to Skyranger and facing it (last one on purpose I read), and while aliens seem to wonder around aimlessly by themselves doing whatever they might be doing in the original game, in openxcom they seem to be more likely to have a friend close, and actively attack X-Com soldiers. I'm hoping I will like this change, just have to find how to cope with early missions first

But I know quite a bit about the original game, and there's quite a lot of resources on the original game in ufopedia for instance, so I found the wiki page on differences with the original game a bit lacking. Could it be possible to flesh this out a little?

For instance, I've noticed that I've yet to start a research progress where I get known progress from the start, which was 1/6th chance in original game. Why? Is it just hidden at the start to avoid people reloading to retry? Or have limits for known progress changed, or has random part of research time been changed, so you never get down below 67% of initial value?

It's nice that you have removed the 80 item limit, but it doesn't really sound like a bug that the Skyranger has finite storage for gear. Certainly worth mentioning on its own, and possibly also being able to still have the limit. When the content counts against base storage, you get less storage than you had in the original game. Is there any limit at all for what you can bring in the Skyranger now? Item count limit? Item weight limit? A bit strange that items in your Skyranger is removing space from the general stores, though I guess it's a practical workaround to a too restrictive 80 item limit.
 
Research rollover. It sounds like a bug that you get to use all the scientists for a new project, especially as it happens only if you choose a new project that is later in the order. But maybe you should get to reuse the extra resource capacity you didn't need? In the original game, you wasted half the scientists on average but if you chose new project on random you'd have a 50% chance of being able to use all of them a second time, so if you didn't try to take advantage of it in particular, the end effect would be that you would reclaim about the same amount that you had overflowing. I'm guessing that you don't get rollover of either required or extra research hours used in openxcom. Might be closer to the original game to let overflow research roll over, but to any new project you assign them to. Does anything overflow in openxcom? Not a big deal, but as it is debatable what is a bug and what is a feature, and there might not be one single obviously correct way of getting around it, it would be nice with some more info.

Also I didn't find a list of known issues with openxcom, but it has been dead stable for the testing I've done so far, so I'm hoping that means there's none

Anyhow.. My comments are just nitpicking.. Thanks for the great effort of this project