Messages

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XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: Extended Piratez general FAQ/Strategy Guide

« on: August 06, 2021, 04:44:17 pm »

I saw once i engage the dark ones in whatever misison, especially in "doomed farm" one, they gonna keep raiding my bases over and over again every 3/4 months, it is possible to stop them? If yes, how i do that?

Other than trying to shoot down incoming craft before they hit your base? Not really, no, there's no real way to counter base raiding. The capacity to brutalize a faction's ability to act against you doesn't exist in the engine and it certainly wouldn't work on the FORCES OF HELL even if it did.  At best, a research topic could shut off a faction's activities like it does with the Reticulans, but it wouldn't be a process of beating them in the face to make them stop until you stop beating them in the face.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: June 30, 2021, 11:21:58 pm »

Once they have any non-zero skill, they'll learn much faster just by doing something than schooling, especially those last few points. You're almost certainly guaranteed a point or two just firing a few shots at an enemy, even if the attempt is utterly hopeless (across the map, no-LoS, etc). This is especially true with Bugeyes, who tend to lack any ability to do much ELSE.

So, my question. Why exactly do I occasionally get "Dead Men Looted" with negative values? What exactly am I looting that is negative value? I haven't killed any civilians. It seems to happen most with Bandits.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: June 30, 2021, 06:31:26 am »

Yeh, Cydonia is hella-easy compared to everything you've been doing before because unlike any previous missions, you don't need to hold back anything: There will be no looting, and no prisoners. Which means there's absolutely nothing stopping you from just nuking the fuck out of everything.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: June 25, 2021, 12:44:43 am »

Making you use Lasers and Rayguns in space forces you to use expensive and rare ammunition to get anything done, and others up there use lasers so your natural armor means nothing (plus you get set on fire, or its zombies tearing you apart - so all injuries are horrific). Can still use Melee very well, and thats preferable on a space station anyway.

Well, there's nothing particularly rare about most of the energy weapons that would work. As for the getting set on fire...yeah, how DO you get set on fire, anyway? There's no oxygen for the fire to keep burning in!

Definitely automatics would have overheat issue, no convection so your muzzle would cool much slower. Albeit you'd get venting action for free from the powder gases. I'm sure someone clever has worked it all out.

Overheating would almost certainly be as bad or worse on an energy weapon, since at least a bullet-gun gets to eject the hot gasses, but many of the energy weapons don't eject anything so can only cool by radiation, and the energy levels involved are a lot higher.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention

« on: June 19, 2021, 03:12:00 pm »

This still doesn't explain WHY, though. It's like watching a car drive off a cliff and then explode in midair.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: June 19, 2021, 01:13:13 am »

Well the warhammer is an upgrade in the sense that it s a real melee weapon, the normal hammer being a psuedo ranged weapon suffers from CQC which means it's defended by a dual stat check vs just checking against evade. So more a side grade then anything.

Yes, but enemies that require hammering always have way higher evade than a CQC check. And because the normal hammer is pseudo-ranged, once it passes CQC, it always hits, whereas the warhammer won't. As all targets worth hammering at all tend to be high-ranking, they often have decent evasion scores, where the horrible intrinsic accuracy of a warhammer means they will pretty much always evade it, but the hammer will usually pass CQC and thus bypass evade and hit. Thus, the warhammer performs worse against these kinds of targets, where it's supposed to perform better. The warhammer ALSO performs worse vs. large targets that don't have CQC, so if you're trying to hammer a tank, the regular hammer ALWAYS hits because the tank has no CQC deflection or evasion while the Warhammer can still fail due to its intrinsic hit-chance under normal conditions still being sub-100.

As such, there exists no real targets where the warhammer performs better at hammering than the regular hammer. You save a single measly TU/Energy in exchange for an attack that will most likely never hit anything.

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

« on: June 19, 2021, 01:04:00 am »

Siberia Base bring back the Landing Craft.
The loot pile must be protected and it makes no sense to walk onto site - when a fast dust down and deployment has the proper shock value.

I don't think the presence of a landing craft or not makes any difference, because landing craft don't exactly have lockable doors, nor is there generally anything on the surface where the landing craft would provide cover from. As such, this is just going to cost you an extra turn trying to navigate your way out through the maze of most landing craft.

To compensate... starting at about turn 4-6 humanists start firing Mortars indescriminantly  at the bare tundra surface from offsite (timed invisible bombs). Make it 3-5 per turn. They can even tend to be centered near the ship area and anywhere strategic, as if circular error probable they drifted off target from a few kilometers away.

It's a SECRET base. The base would be really obvious if there was a bunch of artillery bases surrounding it.

Equipping Baby Nukes/DC launchers on the Stormtroopers is useless and turns them into baby-nuke-givers. In the locations they're encountered ive noticed they'll rarely if ever fire them, and at the bunker entrance that guy usually just vaporizes himself (its also too easy to just mortar the dude or hellerium grenade him). Underground the Arcing weapons dont work so well either so even a Panzerfaust probably wouldn't do the job.

Honestly, giving nukes to the AI is an exercise in either hilarity or frustration in pretty much every scenario. In a situation where one of them spawns in a position to instantly kill you if you try to even move, so you immediately lose the game regardless of what you do, it's purely frustrating, but in nearly every other situation, it's just hilarious, because the AI invariably causes more damage to itself than to you. There is NO scenario I have ever encountered where the AI equipping a nuke posed a legitimate, non-instant-turn-1 kill threat that didn't involve it obliterating itself in the process. The AI just can't use these.

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XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: Extended Piratez general FAQ/Strategy Guide

« on: June 19, 2021, 12:57:46 am »

Assassinate or execute?

In the mutant alliance kill missions you have traitor mutants you're told to kill. But if you capture them, you can take them to base, give them a fair trial and execute them. Which one is preferable? You get assassination trophy for kills but execution gives beanie points too.

Taking them alive seems to consistently give better rewards, because killing them in the field only gives you what's on the corpse (the assassination trophy), but bashing them over the head and dragging them back to your base gives you what's on the corpse AND whatever you'd get by subsequently trading them in via any number of options.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention

« on: June 19, 2021, 12:54:35 am »

Wait, you instantly lose the entire game if you run out of turns on a Supply Ship Raid?

That seems weird and doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would you lose the entire game? I never ran out of turns before, but I figured that it was just the timer for when enemy reinforcements would start showing up or something. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason for why there would be such disastrous consequences for failing to clear out a supply ship within only a few turns. Even in a scenario where the entire ship will explode, that doesn't seem like a game-ending disaster (nor is there any logical reason why a supply ship would explode when far more important targets don't).

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention

« on: June 18, 2021, 09:46:40 pm »

You made the point for exactly why it was removed. The execution made no provision for a unit that should be immune based on physiology, when multiple mods had robots, various cybernetics, or extra dimensional life. It was just click to deal infinite arbitrary damage for flat cost. It also ignored alot of other rules like self destruct, or overkill.

Well, if that damage had a type, then having huge amounts of a damage type would still mean a thing immune to that damage type wouldn't be affected. Otherwise, you could absolutely destroy a robot or a cyborg that lacks the ability to resist you with a knife that you wouldn't otherwise be able to kill in combat. Take an HK. An HK, you'd think, would largely be invulnerable to knifing in combat, and for the most part, it mostly is, having enough resist that all but the luckiest and strongest knife attacks simply bounce off. But if the thing is DOWNED, you could now stab it in the wires. Because now you have plenty of time to precision-target cracks to reach components you couldn't otherwise have hit under combat conditions.

Something like a ghost, on the other hand, might just be straight up immune to being stabbed, period, so whether you're doing 20 stab damage or 20000 stab damage, 100% immunity gives you zero damage.

As for overkill, overkill results in this game are already weird. I can, apparently, disintegrate a Sectopod with a MAG Rocket, which is basically a kinetic strike and thus should not really have the capability to vaporize an opponent.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: June 18, 2021, 09:38:07 pm »

The hammer isn't even all that clunky. I figured the "warhammer" version of it intended to be an upgrade would somehow be more accurate, but it turns out that, against pretty much every foe, the warhammer is actually LESS accurate than the standard hammer and so the warhammer is actually total junk, as it does the same damage, for the same TU, at far lower accuracy.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention

« on: June 18, 2021, 05:28:11 pm »

I like some of the changes that have been made. The new Shipping Crate is a nice touch. And I agree with the switch to Plasma Rockets for Supply Ships, since the baby nukes are illegal and not even the traders should be fielding them (a baby nuke is also sorta hard to use).

Honestly, enemies equipped with nukes are more of a danger to themselves than you, as they recklessly discharge these weapons without regards for how many of their own guys will be caught in the blast. The result being that they will discharge these things into the side of your dropship, killing half of their entire team but failing to actually harm any of yours.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: June 16, 2021, 01:29:53 am »

this is a side effect of how ai location finding works, the AI logs the tile location of the units it sees, and keeps that value stored for a number of turns equal to there intelligence stat. This does mean that a spotter will keep you tagged for all the snipers present for many turns.

It's worse than that, the AI will be aware of your exact location, even if you run all the way across the map, after killing everyone who saw you. The only defense is to hard-break line of fire, and even THAT doesn't work against grenade spam.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention

« on: June 16, 2021, 01:26:35 am »

To be fair, unless someone is completely immune to being stabbed, executing downed opponents with a knife, through heavy armor, is actually historical. The knife would not have otherwise been effective in a live combat against said opponent, but once downed and you can target any opening or weakness at leisure, you could thus execute them in this way.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: June 04, 2021, 02:54:08 am »

Does anybody else think map on 3rd level of Aurora castle is atrocious buggy mess? There are passable corners that look like they should be impassible, 1 square alcoves that can be entered thru those corners and can hide enemies that are then impossible to attack.

That tileset has a few glitches in it, too, like the destroyed walls that don't visibly look destroyed, so you knock them down, and then walk through the apparently still solid wall.

General map design is irritating AF, endless dead ends or doors that look like dead ends

Yeah, I kinda hate those stupid maps in general, where there are a bunch of walls where there's supposed to be doors. I just axe for it to be changed, though.

You should see the resulting path I take through some of these levels, where I've just taken a straight line through it demolishing every obstacle in my path.