Messages

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 26, 2025, 04:12:26 pm »

If you need something to help visualize melee attacks stretching over one square, look up greatsword use on youtube.

But we have melee attacks stretching over one square like spears. We even have greatsword in game. But spears and barbaric sword have attack range of 2 cells. If enemy near your gal, she can step back and completely avoid chance of deflection. Chainsaws have 1 cell range. In normal situations you cannot avoid deflect mechanic. But for some reason in specific cases, like when you on lower, or upper level deflection doens't work. And i still don't understand is specific cases a bug or limitation or intended behavior.

And i don't have a problem with visualization in my head. This is a game. Some level of abstraction is fine.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 25, 2025, 08:38:04 pm »

Purposefully ignoring such cases as 'enemy might be armed' or 'enemy might deflect your hands or your whole body, not your blade' because they don't sound ridiculous.

I'm not trying to purposefully create a straw man.

I don't even have an argument. I'm trying to figure out how to use chainsaws by design.

Okay, deflecting an attack in close combat is intended behavior. It displays situations where the opponent has captured the arms, body, and so on. Good.

What about attacking through a cell and attacking from a higher or lower level? In these situations, the enemy cannot deflect the attack? Or is it a bug or a limitation of the core game mechanic?

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 25, 2025, 01:12:10 pm »

Another rather strange behavior of weapons that haunts me is chainsaws.

There are three scenarios.

1) A close-range attack. The opponent can deflect the attack completely. How to deflect chainsaw blade with hands is to our imagination.

2) Attack an empty cell by pressing CTRL. The enemy doesn't deflect attacks, but evasion seems to be working.

3) Attack from above. The enemy can't do anything at all.

What is even the intended behavior?

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 25, 2025, 12:40:44 pm »

a guy got dropped by a minigun volley in the middle of the junlge, with no one else to see it

Silencers not only make the sound of the shot quieter, but also remove the muzzle flash.

The way I see it, regular weapons should immediately spot an invisible unit for snipers, regardless of the damage done. The unit remains hidden if it fires a weapon with a silencer, a crossbow, a bow, a pistol with darts, and so on.

But such a change is not a five-minute fix. It will take a long time to think about how to change the balance.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 25, 2025, 10:07:01 am »

That is because they ARE, under the hood, Ranged weapons square-pegged into Melee ones.

And it's ok. But I think this better to be explained in game tips.

PINUP 122
The ability to fire at unseen units is not unique to us. Properly trained enemies can do that as well. If such an enemy spots one of our units, she remains spotted for some time and enemy snipers might attack her. Note that hitting a spotter automatically makes you spotted, even if the hit resulted in outright kill. The only exceptions are melee kills.

Do you think this is good tip?

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 25, 2025, 09:25:57 am »

Huh. Melee killing a spotter shouldn't make you spotted. That sounds like a bug.

Only indicators on stealth suits behave strange. Actual spot doesn't happen.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 25, 2025, 12:38:58 am »

I did some tests in dev mode. I assume that the dev mod does not affect the enemy's AI.
All the turrets on the map are snipers and spotters. Ninja gal is also a sniper and a spotter. I ran all the tests several times.

But generally, 'stun' damage doesn't get you even 'seen', so feel free to Stun Bomb the enemy.

Any range damage to the spotter makes the attacking unit a target for snipers, if spotter wasn't neutralized in a single hit. Lethality or damage type doesn't matter.
So far, everything is working as described in the game. But spotting indication turn red on any range damage.

Any melee damage to the spotter does not trigger snipers, but the indicators behave strangely. Killing will switch the indicators to red mode. A melee knockout will leave the indicators in blue mode.
Spears and other types of weapons with an attack radius of 1 square or more are considered ranged weapons.

It's quite strange that bursts of shots count as one hit. It turns out that in order to remain invisible, it is better to use, for example, a minigun or multi-shot rocket launcher. While a pistol with a silencer is clearly not the best choice.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 24, 2025, 01:54:34 pm »

The shooter does get 'seen', but not 'sniper seen'.

I swear, the way stealth works is the most obscure mechanic I can remember from all my years of gaming experience.

I found out that the maximum standard visibility is 40 cells during the day, after a couple hundred hours in the game.

I still don't fully understand how stealth works in close combat. Why is it that when I hit with a shock baton, the indicators remain blue on the stealth suit. And when I kill an enemy, they turn red.

Does the silent weapon category have any effect on stealth?

And now I learn that "seen" and "sniper seen" is two different concepts. What's the difference between them?

Please, can we have a full explanation of how stealth works to the camouflage technology description.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N11 22-Mar-2025

« on: March 24, 2025, 11:47:34 am »

v.N11
- Enemy Spotters won't spot you if they're neutralized in a single hit

What it is even mean? When your unit deal damage to anything it's spotted for all enemy snipers. Spotter or not it doesn't even matter.

10

Brutal AI / Re: [SOURCEMOD] Brutal-OXCE 7.12.1

« on: August 10, 2024, 02:02:53 pm »

Aggressiveness now can be set from levels 0-3 and choosing option 4 means aggressivness is inherited from unit-aggression.

There's now 4 distinct levels:
0> Camper
1> Ambusher
2> Skirmisher
3> Zealot

I want to tweak the aggression level of the units in XPiratez. The aggression level in the .rul file goes from 0 to 8. How does inheritance work?

Is 0 - camper, 1 - ambusher, 2 - Skirmisher, 3-8 - Zealot?
Or is there another formula?

11

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N7 16-Dec-2023 Flying Tiger, Hidden Tentacle

« on: February 22, 2024, 03:18:28 am »

Is there a way (through save files or otherwise) to see what you need to promote a soldier?

https://xpedia.netlify.app/##STR_LOOT_DISTRIBUTION
One Boss per 4 Gals, one Mistress per 3 Bosses, one Princess per 2 Mistresses. One Queen per 69 total crew and never more than one. So say we, the crew.
For other units, the ranks are distributed the same way, just the names are different.

12

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.2.3

« on: February 20, 2024, 08:16:41 pm »

In a case like this isn't it even smarter for the AI to force the player to be more active and prolong the mission?

Sometimes, it's actually pretty smart for AI to play the defensive role. Especially since Brutal AI is so good at finding cover.
But is it always fun for the player to play on the offensive side? Well, for some people, it might be. But personally, I like a more balanced approach.

There should still be the option to set the Aggressiveness of the enemy-AI to "Inherit aggressiveness". But in a situation like on the screenshot above I'm not sure how much this will do.

I tried tweaking the aggression levels of units in the .rul files, but I didn't notice much difference between 1 and 8.
Maybe the effect of the aggression parameter should be bigger.

Another problem is that the enemy does not use numerical superiority when acting defensively.
Here is my current mission in the screenshots (1.png 2.png).
My squad is made up of 9 good quality fighters
The enemy has about 8 dogs, 25 low tier infantrymen and 2 machine-gun armored cars.

On my first turn, I take out a couple of guys in the open field.
Then the enemy takes up positions in the houses.
I'm just storming through houses 1, 2, and 3. Meanwhile, all the other enemies are sitting in their homes and not fighting.
Sometimes the thy can find a nice spot by the window, but usually they just wait.

So, the mission ends up turning into little skirmishes where the quality of my soldiers isn't balanced by the amount of enemies.
If the enemy were actively moving towards houses 1, 2, and 3 during my assault, I'd have to figure out how to respond to that.

I could probably bring back the forced-modes. But I need to make sure that people are aware that these weaken the AI and don't complain about dumb AI-behavior as a result of it.

Maybe some settings could be done not through the in-game interface, but just through an options.cfg file instead?
It's doubtful if it's possible to balance all the mods. And the more customization you can get for a specific mod or even mission, the better.

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Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.2.3

« on: February 18, 2024, 08:40:32 pm »

@Xilmi:
Thanks for such a quick bug fix.

Can I make a couple of suggestions?
The AI is too passive in 8.x.x version for Xpiratez mod.
The game design in Xpiratez is such that the battles should be quite active.
The player's units lose morale every turn if they don't kill enemies. Also, their Freshness decreases every turn.

Another problem is that there are mortars in Xpiratez. In some missions, you can blow up houses from afar without taking any risks at all.

In my opinion, in version 7.13, when enemies thought they were stronger and attacked, it was almost the perfect AI behavior for the Xpiratez mod.
Maybe a little too aggressive, but only a little.

Now, if I put my squad under AI control, then both sides will not clash in battle at all (1.png).
Every turn, units on both sides look out and then hide back.
I understand that in this example there is an almost bare field with two crafts.
But still, I would like the battle to begin.

Is it possible to return scale of aggressiveness from power-balance as an option in the settings?
Or make a new option in the settings, so that in the absence of violence, the AI would start acting more aggressively after a few turns?
Or make AI more aggressive in general, as an option?

14

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.2.1

« on: February 15, 2024, 05:50:02 pm »

Or are there also ways that this could negatively impact player-units as well?

For the player-units, the effect is minor.
Some of the player's armor also has built-in items generated at the start of the mission.
Example https://xpedia.netlify.app/##STR_DAMSEL_ARMOR_FURS_UC

The items are not overwritten, but simply moved to the general inventory. This is normal behavior, just the order of slots in which things are added is different.

The "Wierd thingie" here is speshial item - glamour. It is kind of resource from a Xpiratez. With normal behavior, it should not be visible in the inventory. If you manually move it from the units's hands to another slot, it will disappear, but it will be in the loot list at the end of the mission. If glamour was generated not in hands, everything would work as it should.

15

Brutal AI / Re: XPiratez Built in weapon sets bug

« on: February 15, 2024, 09:33:32 am »

Can you elaborate a little bit more what I'm seeing here?

Okay, let's take a Skyforge Engineer as an example.
https://xpedia.netlify.app/##STR_SKYFORGE_ENGINEER
He has a set of list of items he can come pre equipped with. In this case, it's just a valuable loot, like coins and arc welder, not a weapon. The main wepon and other items generation code is somewhere else.

The problem is that these items replace the weapon he has to hold in his hands. If I load the B1_geoscape.sav in Xpirates without Brutal AI and start the mission, all items will be spawned, and he is holding weapon in his arms.

It looks like items spawned by the Built-in weapon sets are being added to the wrong slots, starting with the hands and overwriting the weapons that should be there.