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1

The X-Com Files / Little review/aar after finally finishing the mod

« on: March 14, 2023, 06:13:08 pm »

Phew. I did it.
Took me more than half a year, because for reasons described below I really, really lost steam in the latter third of the game and basically had force myself to press on at least a couple of times a week.
Post-game said I played 1179 missions, and it sure felt that way.

First, let's get the good stuff out of the way:
- it's still X-Com, and it shows. The basic gameplay loop works just as well as it always has, and as long as all the pillars of the original formula are in place, the game (and thus the mod) is as addictive as it used to be.
- Few bugs. For a mod that changes as much as this one does and contain as much stuff as this one does, I hardly ran into any issues. For whatever reason I once failed to get the loot one mission should have yielded, I never managed to exterminate EXALT (or did I?) - at least I could've researched EXALT HQ again after already finishing them ... but besides fairly minor issues like these that can be ignored or resolved by editing the savegame, there was nothing to write home about in terms of errors.
- Visuals and sound. Sure, these are outdated by a few decades now, but the art direction is still good and the game mostly does a very good job bringing in assets that fit the mood.
- Lot's of content. I'm listing it low in the list, because it ended up also being a negative for me.

Now the things I didn't enjoy so much:
- The first phase of the game, in which you play an undercover organization, doesn't work so well. It's impressive how this has been jury-rigged into an engine that wasn't designed to accomodate it, but that doesn't change the fact that it FEELS jury-rigged. Stuff like the civilian car "aircraft" just are a little weird. And X-Com-style missions with two soldiers leave a little bit to be desired, imo.
- In I'd say about the first half of the game, there's too much reliance on interrogation. Before you get any of the advanced toys, capturing aliens with the early-game arsenal can be taxing, especially if an unlucky roll of the RNG dice have you run into mutons in a couple of the first alien waves. This phase of the game was brutal and taxing, and frankly, not fun. One way to address this would be to field mutons only in later waves, if that's possible. Alternatively, there could be a way to get to advanced equipment without relying so heavily on live captures.
- There's a couple of tech bottlenecks, in which there's hardly anything left to research before you got over a certain hurdle - for example before you get access to the final lab, which requires a complicated web of things to be captured and researched - again, this wasn't very fun, and often months had to pass before I got a chance to assault a certain vessel or somesuch.
- Finally, the last third of the game was totally and utterly barren for me. I'd completely run out of research opportunities, and had 250 researchers twiddling their thumbs. I had 80 engineers twiddling their thumbs. Occasionally, a mission spawned which granted me some long obsolete project, for example I think the last techs I researched were Dino Egg and the Throwing Axe. Go figure.
Between loooooong periods of playing the waiting game and just doing standard missions - most of which should imo have long stopped spawning at that point, such as raving mad man, crop circles, jarhead factory etc - and way, WAY, WAAAAAY too many underground cavern missions, I eventually did the aquanaut missions (the entire underwater portion of the game was undercooked and felt a bit tacked on, imo), the zombie/mummy missions (also felt like a weird addition) and the doom missions (I'm not sure I ever finished that plotline), and then it took me about half a year (maybe more, I'm not sure) of ingame time to finally get through the moon mission chain.
Afterwardy, cydonia was surprisingly easy - and, frankly, I'm kinda glad this is over. 

Regardless of my criticism, hats off to the dev(s) for creating this mod, it's undoubtedly quite the achievement and experience.
I hope none of my points offends anyone, and I don't expect any of them to be fixed just because I say so - frankly, having finished the mod, I don't care THAT much. 
But if I could write a wishlist to santa, I'd at the very least wish for a couple of guaranteed "weak alien" waves very early in the invasion and some steamlining in the end to either make the road to the endgame less time consuming or redistribute research so it isn't so terribly boring in the final stretch of the game.

In any event, thanks for creating the mod. 

2

The X-Com Files / Re: USA just signed a pact with unkown aliens. How boned am I?

« on: January 12, 2023, 01:37:14 pm »

Forgot to up the savegame yesterday, sorry.

But yeah, that might be it. But the moon missions spawn so slowly. I mean, REALLY slowly.
There was one where you discover that transmitter array or whatever that is, and then two where I had to rescue some sort of base mostly from space nazis ... and then one other tiny one which brought no salvage at all.

I learned the hard way how over-reliant this mod is on capturing and interrogating aliens, so I'm used to doing that by now, but I haven't had any opportunity to do so, which is more the problem.

At the plasma techlevel, I'm no longer afraid of the mutons, not even the elites. Well, maybe a little bit, but not nearly as much as I used to. Dealing with them at the gunpowder techlevel was a nightmare.

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The X-Com Files / Re: USA just signed a pact with unkown aliens. How boned am I?

« on: January 11, 2023, 07:14:25 pm »

How's your research ?
You can always post a save game file. This will help us see what's going on.

You mean my progress? 82%.
I'll see about uploading a save when I get back home.

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The X-Com Files / Re: USA just signed a pact with unkown aliens. How boned am I?

« on: January 11, 2023, 05:30:27 pm »

After all this time, I still haven't finished my game.

Once I got Laser Weapons, things went a bit more smoothly. It also helped that after some more Mutons and Gazers I finally hit a period of mostly Floaters and Waspoids, which are a pushover compared to the first two.
By the time the Mutons returned, I was much better prepared.

For a while, there was relatively smooth sailing, and I was continuously making progress. Quite a few nations retreated from Xcom, but I think my actual funding never dropped.

I exterminated all the cults, captured some juicy UFOs and even a few bases/colonies, finally made it to Turbolaser and then to Plasma Weapons. I researched (I think) all vehicles, tried to deal with all the frankly a bit overdone side-theaters (underwater, zombies, UAC, cyberdudes) ... and then everything just grind to a halt.
In the last 6 months or so, probably more, I only had, besides UFO grind, a vampire queen mission (following research suggested I need to retrieve some mcguffin, but no mission spawned yet), a moon landing (following research didn't really amount to anything significant) and the capture of some sort of extradimensional battleship.
For about three months, nothing at all out of the ordinary happened. I have 250 researchers twiddling their thumbs and mechanics working hard on my fourth Avenger as well as some more flying armors ... and no idea what to do next.

I'd expect some serious moon mission to further the story now, but as I wrote, nothing seems to materialize.
What could be the problem?

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The X-Com Files / Re: USA just signed a pact with unkown aliens. How boned am I?

« on: August 31, 2022, 03:14:14 pm »

Thanks for bothing with responding Juku, I do realize I have probably already crossed the threshold into rant territory. 

Well, then you have two sets of new pals. Make sure you take some back home for partying interrogation.

The waspites were easy to kill, but I didn't manage to capture a single one. Thing is, aliens (especially Mutons) are EXTREMELY good shooters. I have folks with accuracy of 120% or something, and yet they often struggle hitting the broad side of a barn with a sniper rifle. Mutons will often one-shot me from across the map with a Plasma Pistol.

But it's a way to alleviate the tedium, the mod being what it is. If you don't want to make life easier for yourself in an attempt to play 'as the creator intended' or whatever your line of reasoning is, that's fine. But I find such an attitude kinda weird when applied to mods and especially mods in the middle of development. Mods are all about altering the game to suit your tastes, and so is changing tedious stuff via various means (save editing, submods, memory manipulation, building your own fork, etc).

You misunderstood me, probably because I didn't spell it out right. What I meant was, while such a solution (editing the savegame) might bring me recourse for now, a mod (in development, as you say) should eventually aim to make such workaround unneccessary. Apart from that, I agree with your reasoning.

Solarius's stance is that not all battles need to be winnable. The Mutons will relent eventually, you will get some captures even if they don't, etc.

Oh, I agree with that not every battle needs to be winnable. I would have an extremely hard time at the Muton base, same thing with large Muton UFOs, they mop the floor with my soldiers. It's just the lack of variety that gets me. After the Waspoids, the next two UFOs were Mutons again. Since my main squads now have at least Laser Rifles, dealing with them is no longer so nightmareish.

There are actually two tiers of plasma research. Right now, your scientists are at the phase of "these be weapons, but damn if we know how to activate them". Kinda makes sense for an interstellar polity to make their weapons not easily accessible. Then you get to use captured weapons, and finally you get to build your own.

(...)

I think your biggest problem is that the mod is predicated on the player getting regular captures, and you failed to do that because Mutons. It's a somewhat rare and mildly interesting scenario.

Yeah, the mod relies on captures - things are far from reliable even with captures, I think I'm now stuck on Delta Radiation and Alien Gravity Generator, both of which you can get from a number of captures, each of which has it in a long list of random topics you might get otherwise.
What really should happen is that you ought to be given longer ranged and more reliable capturing methods. I've had Small Launchers for ages, but you cannot research and thus not use them.
Why is there no stun grenade ammo for the Grenade Launcher, Rocket Launcher, Milkor etc.?
All I have is Knockout Grenades, which do jack shit far too often and are very TU intensive to boot, and Dart Pistols / Rifles, which suck against Mutons (but they might suck against Sectoids, too, due to the energy shields). Thus the strategy I've been employing to get captures at all is to use maximum firepower, and if, as it happens occasionally, even that leaves the opponent injured instead of killed, I try to rush a soldier over and heal him up. Then I leave a guard with a dart pistol in case he wakes up again.
That's a PITA, but the mod is far too unforgiving for anything else. I'm not afraid to reload a save every now and then, but I don't want to savescumm ALL THE TIME.

RNG can be skipped by save editing. When I first played XCF back in 2017 or so, I meticulously made lists of random missions for the month by reloading several times, and then edited in a big combined list to make sure I get a variety of missions every month. Made for more interesting mission sets, but yeah, not something a sane person would do.

Definately an unconventional strategy. 

You would, but this has been the biggest criticism levied against HWPs for nearly three decades.

I might have criticized that myself at some point, and I do enjoy the idea of tanks gaining XP, but I don't really see why nobody just made a code change to allow tanks to gain XP. It's not like we're stuck with XCOM's codebase now with OpenXcom, right?

Besides, the purpose of HWPs in the original game was to have a frontine unit which wasn't so painful if you lost it, and now those alien crystals are FAR MORE RARE than good soldiers, so you can only have an extremely limited number of tanks, and ... what happens if one is destroyed, if the AI lost for good?

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The X-Com Files / Re: USA just signed a pact with unkown aliens. How boned am I?

« on: August 31, 2022, 11:25:17 am »

Well, them Gazers are your new pals for the month, then.

They aren't. Just faced some Waspites. Yay. At least they were reasonably easy to kill for a change.

This excessive variance is both something a mod can't do a terrible lot about (without insane scripting, that is), and is also intentional to boot. If you get really fed up with it, go look for 'alienMissions:' in your save and change the race back to Sectoids, or Floaters, or something. Actually, Sectoids are kinda badass, too, so maybe not them.

If a game (mod) forces me to edit the savegame that's a bit of a failure in my book. Maybe I'll write a review of sorts once I'm done with the mod (either by finishing or by getting totally fed up).

Eh, this is one change I quite like. The OG tech tree where you research plasmas in a few months was really silly.

I agree in a way, but also. The OG was aware of the fact that the player was in danger of facing Mutons and needed a way to deal with them, and also the idea that I'm sitting on hundreds of plasma weapons and none of my scientists is able to figure out ANYTHING about them is beyond silly as well.

500 is rookie numbers. I have over 3000 Elerium (and several thousand alloys, but these come and go) at the moment, and I'm not even a year into the invasion.

Oh, I agree, but I AM a rookie - this is my first time playing the mod, after all. And I haven't played XCOM for like two years, then it was XPiratez.
My point wasn't to "brag" about the numbers. The point is: is stuff is just collecting dust. I crafted the titanium gear I wanted, I don't use any Elerium based fighter yet (I have one researched, I think), so off to the shelves it goes. In my opinion, I'm in a spot a player shouldn't get into. I have only some minor crap left to research (after completely running out previously), I have tons of loot I can neither use nor research, and I have nothing I can do to press forward except playing the waiting game for the RNG.

Yeah. But it's either that or tanks that don't advance in stats.

I'd take the non-stat-advancing tanks. I thought first the awakened AI stuff was some take at androids or somesuch, seperate from the tanks, which is also why I didn't even think of having the scout AI thing I had "wear" a tank.

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The X-Com Files / Re: USA just signed a pact with unkown aliens. How boned am I?

« on: August 31, 2022, 10:25:29 am »

Well, yeah. Once you roll a bunch of Muton missions, they can fly these for a while. You should be getting a chance (or several) at a new race every month, though.

Unfortunately, it's been more than a year at this point. I have seen a single sectoid ship early on, a few (say three) Chaser ones and just recently one with Gazers (not much better than Mutons honestly).
Since fighting the Mutons with sub par gear sucks so hard, I've taken a habit of trying to shoot down UFOs over the ocean so that I don't have to deal with the landing site. My base stores are filled to the brim with fancy Plasma weaponry the mod doesn't allow me to research due to bad tech tree pacing and I have >500 elerium and alien alloys stashed away. So I'd rather not go through the hassle of dealing with all 'em Mutons. Every now and then I can't wait for one to get over water, and then it's almost always still Mutons.

OTOH, count your blessings while Japan and Germany are still in.

Like I wrote, I'm swimming in cash. The Muton base has been there for like a year and a half now, haven't seen any other attempts at taking over any country.

You mean Alien Codes? It doesn't specifically need a Navigator, but the alternatives are worse. You should have gotten a Sectoid Navigator early on, though.

Well, I didn't. Like I mentioned above, I've seen one sectoid ship, and there might have been a Navigator on it, but it isn't always viable to take a specific enemy down non-violently. Don't remember the specifics, though.

Well, at least it's aliens who are supposed to be unfair. I felt the same about MiB, who are meant to be a mirror org of sorts, but can jump you with endgame armour even before the invasion proper starts.

Yeah, I had one mission like that very early on. Ridiculous. But since then, the MiB have been rather quiet.
I got a bunch of laser weaponry from that mission and it took me a LONG time to be able to build laser stuff myself afterwards, mostly due to the Alien Codes requirement I guess.
At least it's been better than with all the Plasma stuff I can only use as door stoppers still.

Sentient alien crystals to 'wear' them.

Thanks for the advice, I've gotten it to work. I'd have never expected it to work like that, what a ... weird mechanic.

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The X-Com Files / Re: USA just signed a pact with unkown aliens. How boned am I?

« on: August 30, 2022, 11:31:39 pm »

The same thing happened to me, the US retired from XCOM funding first. RNG really screwed my over (I presume it doesn't HAVE to play out this way), as 95% of all UFOs I'm seeing are staffed by Mutons.
I've been fighting an uphill battle trying to fight them off. It sucks, because the mod has several bottlenecks that require specific captures, most importantly I was struggling with capturing a Navigator - it's hard enough suriviving a battle with the Mutons, I mostly relied on incendiary grenades and stuff. Sometimes the flaming fist for storming, but they are useless for the "open battlefield" due to severely limited range.
But capturing them obviously requires stunning them, and they seem very resilient against knockout grenades or other typical stun gear. I managed to eventually capture a navigator and now have Laser Weaponry and Mass Drivers, which at least helps a little bit. But larger UFOs are packed with Annihilators or what these tank thingies are called, it feels beyond unfair and has soured me on the mod a bit.

I'm losing my will to continue playing. I believe my research is FAR behind the curve, but what can I do, I ran out of research topics several times now. On the other hand, though, only the US dropped out of XCOM so far, I'm swimming in cash (closing in on 100 mio and have a monthly surplus of about 20 mio) and none of my bases has been contested so far. So maybe not all is lost yet?
Btw., what is required to be allowed to field 'em tanks? I've built a dozen laser tanks, but none of my craft are allowed to carry them...

9

The X-Com Files / Re: Raided the Black Lotus HQ but didn't get the PSI Generator

« on: August 26, 2022, 10:40:42 am »

I played on for another month and, sure enough, the mission spawned again.
Re-did it and this time around I got the PSI generator without an issue.

So yeah, I'm not sure how that happened, either. Can it be destroyed somehow? But I don't even have energy weapons in the field yet neither am I using any explosives or grenades in this mission. Just boring old assault rifles. This time I uncovered the room where the statue stands during the mission, last time I didn't get so far, the remaining enemies surrendered before I had a chance to explore that part of the map.

Ah well, everything turned out as a non-issue. Sorry for the hiccup. 

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The X-Com Files / Re: Raided the Black Lotus HQ but didn't get the PSI Generator

« on: August 25, 2022, 09:49:27 pm »

I can't say I understand what happened much better.

It was exactly as I've written. I researched the HQ tech that causes the HQ quest to trigger - which it almost immediately did. Then I played the mission and finished it successfully. Nothing indicated anything was amiss.
The HQ mission hasn't respawned so far.

But last session I played the Red Dawn HQ mission respawned, despite me having retrieved the code cards or whatever you got there AND done the research on them. I haven't destroyed the Red Dawn yet, but I could have and was kinda surprised when that happened.

I guess sooner or later the Black Lotus HQ would have to trigger again as well. Weird setup, but okay.
So, despite the glitch with not getting the PSI generator thingie, appearently I didn't have any reason to worry in the first place.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Raided the Black Lotus HQ but didn't get the PSI Generator

« on: August 25, 2022, 05:12:13 pm »

Well, that was much easier than anticipated, just added a line with STR_BLACK_LOTUS_PSI_GENERATOR to one of my bases ... seems to work.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Raided the Black Lotus HQ but didn't get the PSI Generator

« on: August 25, 2022, 02:31:19 pm »

Sadly, I don't think I have a savegame exactly from the mission anymore. Like I said, it took me a while to realize what had happened.
All I'm asking is for a way to fix that in my ongoing game. I would play the HQ mission again if I had to, I just don't want to roll back my entire game wholesale to a much earlier save.
Thanks
rezaf

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The X-Com Files / Raided the Black Lotus HQ but didn't get the PSI Generator

« on: August 25, 2022, 12:52:16 pm »

What I said in the headline, I researched the Black Lotus HQ, the mission spawned, I finished it ... but didn't get the PSI generator. I'm assuming that you SHOULD get it, looking at the tech tree it appears to be required to terminate the Black Lotus, and I'm pretty sure that's what it said in the mission description as well.
What am I to do? Is there any savegame voodoo I can perform to just give me the darn thing?
Took me a while to notice this, and I'm not really keen on falling back on such an old savegame now.

Thanks
rezaf

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XPiratez / Re: Stuff I'd love to see in XPiratez!

« on: August 05, 2018, 11:51:02 am »

Complaints aside, here's one thing I would really like to see but fear is impossible to realize without significant changes to the game code: "Wandering merchants".
That is to say, trading opportunities where you can get stuff not readily available at the global market (which could be scaled down in return).
These merchants would have limited stock (i.e. 3 Anti-Grav Harnesses or 1 Old Fighter Hull or or 57 Bandages) and would only buy certain wares from you.
Their pricing would vary wildly, sometimes being much more expensive and sometimes being much cheaper. They could also have faction allegiances.
Like I said, I would presume this idea to be a non-starter for technical reasons, but I thought I'd still throw it out there. 

15

XPiratez / Re: Newbe questions

« on: August 05, 2018, 11:44:06 am »

I find the contact: something buyables rather underwhelming. Especially the  overpriced eurosyndicate stuff, which I suggest you should completely ignore.

Pricing ceases to be much of an issue at some point, but otherwise I agree. It's easy to fail to get the contact of the area where your main base is located.
In my game it's almost 2604 and I have yet to unlock the Death Realms contact.