Messages

1

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis

« on: June 24, 2024, 07:45:56 am »

Nah, i just got bamboozled by eyeballing how many missions i get.

Hey, would you humour me with the grand plan on pirates? I've heard some time ago that you'll add 6 or 8 endings, there's also stuff like hellerians, white dragon, ranks that imply we'll be fighting shadowmasters...
Is that the plan? You have those ideas planned out and you'll eventually implement them?

2

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis

« on: June 19, 2024, 06:44:59 am »

How are piratez balanced, in general? What's the idea around difficulty?

On one hand, if you savescum, you can get insanely op units that capture everyone - veteran catgirls(should've been called catgals really) in grav boots have 200 tu and insane reactions, i give each a stun baton and they stun entire map on second turn. If you encounter armour you just use medical slicer or a wand of pain. You just have to be careful to not go below 40 tu when someone not in melee range can see you, to not eat reaction shots. But you still have to savescum, it's pretty much mandatory, since there's no way in ufo interface to know whether you missed an enemy. A room might appear revealed, but there was actually a guy with a shotgun hiding in there. This isn't even a tu/skill issue, but a fundamental issue with the engine itself. And it takes A LOT of time to get your recruits to the point where they can do this, you could feasibly put new recruits through the art of trouncing/mma+gladiatorial training, but that's like a month of downtime. And recruits themselves are capped(except peasants). In the original ufo we all just bought a shitton of rookies, and had a gunline with good stat laser guys sitting inside smoke, while rookies walk around the map and scan everything with motion detectors, but you had easy access to lasguns, rookies, and you could bring a lot of bodies to a mission. I would lose 2-4 soldiers with bad stats per typical mission.

You could say "well just shoot everything like this is ufo", but the game seems to heavily incentivise live capture of pretty much everyone. Your infamy bonus is barely enough to pay for brainers, council payments are a joke, and then every new facility costs upwards of a mil, and stuff is just expensive or takes a long time to manufacture in general. AND you need a metric shitton of live captures for your research. AND you have random uninterceptable assaults against your bases, so you need at least 30 peasants at each base. AND the game advances at a rather rapid pace, you need larger transports on day 1, you need better armours or guns, you need motion scanners, smoke grenades, etc. Also the guns are pretty crappy, while one catgal can stun 4-5 bandits per turn and jump into cover, a good shooter with a good gun will still take an entire turn to kill one bandit. A bad shooter will just die to reaction fire. Maybe i could give everyone metal armours or heavy suits, but by the time i get this stuff enemies will be packing lasers and plasmas. And there's stuff like turrets, which can only be feasibly destroyed via pre-primed explosives, a lot of setup with an rpg, or a smartly moving top-tier gal with a hammer. Or mercenaries who are only vulnerable to poison damage. Or enemies like mongorns - a fucking APE, first time i saw them i just stunned a few and stood in the open, well they threw rocks over half a map and killed half my team. I mean what are their stats, when even my veterans can't pull off shit like that?! Also each mission is absolutely swarming with enemies(i'm on the middle difficulty). And just now in my savescum campaign i had a raider invasion into my main base, and the raiders had 6 blaster launchers. If it wasn't my main base, this would've been a base gone. Or, another example, i had an etherial ufo with sectopod in it. 3 Cagals with sabers and medical slicers made short work of the thing, but how the hell would i deal with it if i had just a bunch of noobs with default guns? This is in august or so mind you, but i was getting a rank up every month, maybe etherials and blaster raiders are tied to your captain's rank.

I wanted to play ironman like a normal xcom, started a few games and i'm either outmatched on tactical level, where i don't have enough soldiers and or tus to stun the enemies carefully and not lose gals, or i'm going bankrupt on geoscape. Are you just meant to sit around with your 3 brainers for months or what?

3

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis

« on: June 16, 2024, 03:55:14 pm »

There are no fucking "mission slots", will you people drop this dumbass myth already?!
Seriously, who's coming up with this shit? And why do people believe it? That's beyond me.

Can you explain how GeoscapeState:4037 works? There are region slots there. Seems like more mission types would exhaust the list faster. If missions are pure rng, how come you get sameish amount of them per month?

4

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis

« on: June 16, 2024, 03:37:05 pm »

I've looked at the sources, and the game seems to be spawning finite number of missions per region. You also get more rng checks per missions types.

So, while you will get more missions overall as you unlock new ones, at some point crap missions may be taking up slots for the good missions. I'm not sure from sources, 'cause the engine is typical OOP spaghetti, but from looking at the save file for my old campaign and for this one, it does seem that crap missions take up slots.

5

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis

« on: June 16, 2024, 09:27:35 am »

Why are so many mission types just a way to kneecap youself? I just hide the relevant research, now that i know what's what.

Like, take zombie bait. What's the actual point of researching it? I'd much rather game generates an academy mission for me, it's much more profitable and i don't have to deal with peasants vs zombies bullshit.
Underground missions. So i spend research to have to maintain a compliment of lokknars that are useless for every other mission type? Why would i do that. Demon god altars only give you dream library, which is a good building, but by the point i can rng a scroll of night, i would've wasted a lot of mission slots on those ratman caches. Underground missions seem to just contain a lot of junk. Metro can absolutely fuck your crappy small units and wipe the entire contingent along with all your gnomes. I'd rather not do these missions at all, which i can do by not wasting research on them. Win-win.
Cruising counsellors. Awful mission, isn't difficult just extremely bloody annoying. And it gives you... a counsellor(useless for research), and maybe some thralls, if you're willing to spend an our stunning every last unit. The loot would be worthwhile, if the mission didn't take 200 turns of flying around that awful ship level. Then again, i can get the same amount of cash from any other mission type. Oh and ALSO you have to buy and sell a rail pod for it.
Mansion invasions, guild rep mansion - okay loot, but i can get same loot from a normal mission, and without the restrictions bullshit.
Highway star - does anyone actually ever research this? A restricted underwater mission with gnomes specifically... why would i do that to myself?
Highway house - a crappy mission that only serves to get the ability to shoot down civilian cars early, and it will stick in the mission roster forever.
UAC missions - no good loot, the level has explosive barrels on your spawn. Again, if it had some decent loot, but it's just crap, i would much rather the game would just spawn a guild warehouse(where i also won't explode my entire team). The end reward for UAC missions is the megachaingun which is just a piece of crap at the time you'll plausibly be able to research it, since all tough crafts have high armour.
Underwater/space missions - these are just bad but required to progress. Space missions are just about moving to 1 building, across the bad UI, underwater missions are basically normal missions but you're gimped. AND you have to pay for extra crafts and extra equipment in research&maintenance on geoscape. I postpone these as far as i can, since i just don't want to play space missions, there's nothing interesting about them, they just have bad UI.

Also, as i understand it, the game generates a finite amount of missions, so every new crap mission type you research detracts from the amount of actually good missions you'll get. So not only did you waste research to unlock a crap mission, you'll also detract from good ones.

I think these missions should have much better loot that would actually make them desirable, be in their own category(let's say you get 2-3 special missions per month), and get disabled after you ran them a couple times. Similar to siberia mission, which is a cool challenge, gives you extremely good loot, and doesn't overstay its welcome.

A lot of high tier rng in piratez suffers from this "gambling is bad for you", if you don't savescum. Like the mystery boxes for example - you waste a ton of research on it, then open it to get a slime invasion and cripple yourself. Also there's a tiny chance to get an orb that will allow you to possibly create an okay weapon for shadowrealms, but why would you risk this? You'd either just sell the box, or hoard them and then open them super late game.
You also have this situation where you have a clearly better option and an overcomplicated, worse one. Like, why would you build a casino, when you can build a factory instead? Or why would you hoard chips to invest in a mint, when applenomics are so much better? Or why would you spend an eternity researching advanced firearms and spend alliance tokens on m-crafted parts, to get crappier weapons than the lasers that everyone carries by month 8. Even bulldog&ripper cannons are crap compared to the cannons you loot from ufos. Entire branches of research are better off hidden, since it takes so bloody long to go through them, and they just give you a marginally better version of a worse weapon(a version that you have to build through workshop! With ammo! I only these advanced guns ran off the normal clips), and by the time you get to that weapon you have a better tier of weapons available. It's all just a noob trap.

I do love the xpiratez setting though, this is possibly the best setting in any video game ever.