Messages

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N9.7.7 12-Sep-2024 Second Coming

« on: November 17, 2024, 04:26:05 am »

I could see a midgame niche for necroplanes if smaller hangars were implemented. Only aircars and smaller UFOs require an aircar to intercept, there are still plenty of other targets and the higher quality aircars like the pirahna tend to be massive hangar queens if they get shot up and might need two whole days to repair, often more. Hence if I could keep a necroplane around in a 1x1 hangar I definitely would. Same with ground vehicles for the odd mission.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: November 16, 2024, 06:40:31 am »

Ah ok that makes sense, my first couple campaigns were two versions behind the current one.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: November 15, 2024, 08:42:49 am »

Is it possible to shoot down ninja hoverbikes? I'm pretty sure I did that randomly on my first or second playthrough, but now I'm on my fifth and it doesn't seem to be possible in this game version. 14mm and 25mm weapons blow them to bits every time. I tried mounting a secondary light machinegun to tickle them to death once the shield is knocked out by a bigger weapon, but that didn't work either.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: November 15, 2024, 08:39:37 am »

Ratmen do panic but like most enemies the panic has to be sudden and sharp in order to get visible results. Killing a high ranked leader for instance (generally there is only one) or killing large numbers on the same turn is most effective because you have to knock enemy morale down below 50% before they have a chance to panic. If you spread the kills out their morale will regen over time.

If you want to double check if something is panic immune or not, setting them on fire typically zeroes morale for humanoid enemies.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N9.7.7 12-Sep-2024 Second Coming

« on: November 15, 2024, 08:22:54 am »

The early ground vehicles and research-based necroplanes are in an awkward spot.

Ground vehicles are basically useless because the little bird exists, at the same time if the little bird and angry bird didn't exists having to use ground vehicles to start from scratch would really suck. You have literally nothing to arm them with other than your starting assault cannons because it will be months before you can make more cannons or get them from fort defences, and months further still before you will even SEE a grenade launcher or RPG in enemy hands, let alone be able to buy them on the open market. So your best hope is to load up the cannons and pray that you can loot a light machinegun or gecko from hoverpods so that you can start killing bandit cars and then get better guns for war trucks and so on. Even if you ignore the little bird it's so much easier to just buy an angry bird since you can research it very early.

Necroplanes have a similar problem in that the little bird exists and is adequate for every enemy you will actually find in the early part of the game, not to mention that the tech that enables you to make necroplanes also gives you the ability to buy new little birds, and the next tier up of enemy aircraft are all aircars that require aircar speeds in order to catch. So they're basically redundant despite being research and material intensive because they jump from superfluous to obsolete. You can get to them early if you focus your research there, but new players have no idea what the prerequisites are and I only unlocked them after aircars because better interceptors than the little bird were such a low priority.

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One thing that might change that calculus would be the addition of new hangar types. IIRC there was talk of having at least two sizes of hangar, since single ground vehicles like humvees are tiny compare to aircraft that would let you deploy more of them out of the same base and keep ground vehicles into the late game for special missions. Necroplanes should be able to fit into a smaller hangar because you are only performing maintenance there (they are not VTOLs and need a runway to take off).

Another thing would be more mission types with restricted equipment that makes sense in context. Some missions require ground vehicles or undetectable vehicles like the big bird for a "stealth" approach. Ground race missions require ground vehicles and so on. There should be more of these in the early game when your air capacity is much weaker, and later on they can taper off and be replaced by new stuff (which is how most mission types already work).

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: November 11, 2024, 10:26:51 am »

Ah ok, thanks for the offer. I'm just about to leave on a trip and I've never used matrix before so I'll have to research this later.

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XPiratez / Re: Negative score despite having a Killer month.

« on: November 10, 2024, 12:47:29 pm »

OK... thanks for explaining that to me... thats rough... Since I just unlocked the angry bird but cant buy any weapons yet to arm it to the teeth to shoot everything down  .

I figured that as long as I do all the missions that I can do it will turn out positive like the first months where I couldnt shoot anything down but, o well...

The early game is quite confusing, I've been through that myself many times so I can give you some tips, some of these are minor spoilers:

1. All enemy vehicle activity counts against your score, even if it happens in a region where you have no radar or interceptor coverage and can't do anything about it. This is just something you have to live with and won't be a solvable problem until many months later when you can afford to build and staff more bases.

2.  In the early game your biggest concern is acquiring and arming interceptors so that you can do more than watch stuff fly past your base. Try researching and rebuilding the Little Bird that comes with your base, it's an old tech helicopter like the angry bird but it comes with a built in weapon and some ammo. If you're not sure what to do next go back and read the bootypedia entries to see what your crew has to say.

3. Try to intercept highwayman hoverpods and bandit cars as much as possible. They can drop basic craft weapons like light machineguns you can mount on your craft to shoot down more bandit vehicles, get more weapons/ammo and form a self sustaining cycle. The little bird is ideal for "kickstarting" this process because it comes with a built in chaingun.

4. To improve your early game interceptor capability put aside the shiny stuff and prisoner interrogations and focus your research on things like smithing, tools and necroplane parts. "Necroplane" parts are catch all term for low tech salvaged aircraft parts from WW2 and cold war designs, researching these will allow you to recycle them to salvage weapons and ammunition you can use to arm your craft, and later on you can build new aircraft out of these parts.

5. If things seem like you are behind the curve and won't be able to beat your score deficit, don't be afraid to just start a new campaign using the lessons you learned in the previous one.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: November 10, 2024, 12:22:15 pm »

This isn't a small question but I don't suppose anyone here knows how to mod existing XPiratez map tiles using Mapview2? I figured it out far enough to install and open the program but it seems like getting it to load files beyond the vanilla game folders requires you to manually edit several .yml files and this is a bit over my head. I'm just trying to modify one map tile, the landing pad from the escape tower mission.

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OXCE Support / Re: [QoL] Mass transfer all equipment from one craft to another

« on: November 09, 2024, 02:09:11 pm »

Ah that's wonderful, I knew about those shortcuts but I had no idea they applied to craft equipment too, not just personal equipment.

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

« on: November 09, 2024, 01:49:53 pm »

Aye that would be ideal but I don't have any flying armours yet. It just struck me as unnecessarily annoying. If I deal with all of the enemies at ground level immediately, then there is nothing stopping me from just running up the tower, it just takes several turns of tedious clicking to get from the bottom to the top.

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

« on: November 09, 2024, 12:37:16 pm »

I've done the escape tower mission a couple times now and I think it could use some improvement.

The current tower is hard to deal with because of the single file stairs. If you want to move multiple units from the bottom to the top you have to repeat a process that goes something like:

1. Tell soldier to move to the top of the tower
2. Tell next soldier to move 1 tile behind the first soldier
3. Tell next soldier to move 1 tile behind the second soldier

And so on. You have to do this multiple turns in a row just to get your soldiers to the top of the tower and you want to move them in exactly the same order each time, clicking on soldiers in descending order and always forcing them to move to the tile just behind the previous soldier. If you do anything else you get a deadlock because the game complains about there being no valid path.

Hence my suggestion is to modify the level geometry of the escape tower to make the stairs two tiles wide, or if not the entire staircase then at least the "flats" between the staircases at the corner. I get that the length of the stairs is supposed to make the map difficult because you are on a timer, but this wouldn't make the ramp any longer. All it does is allow you to move any number of units up the tower each turn simply by clicking on the top. Soldiers will automatically sidestep around each other as they move up the tower and no longer get jammed up in single file.

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XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: Melee training tactics for gals?

« on: November 09, 2024, 11:47:35 am »

If the enemy has high enough armor and cutting resistance, then Ripper can train you very fast.

I see why you recommended rippers having just unlocked them for the first time. Three attacks per swing, lots of swings per turn, 30 cutting damage with no power bonus from skills. As absurd as it sounds this may be the least lethal weapon my gals have against heavy armour. It's not an electric weapon so it doesn't bypass armour, cutting resist is the most common/strongest from what I've seen, and again no power bonus from skills so it doesn't scale to superhuman levels.

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OXCE Support / [Solved] Mass transfer all equipment from one craft to another

« on: November 09, 2024, 11:15:25 am »

The idea is to have a way of taking all the equipment assigned to a craft and moving it to another craft present in the same base, ideally with a single click. This would save substantial amounts of player time compared to manually removing all items and re-adding them to the second craft.

This feature is aimed at players using total conversion mods because the variety of vehicles is greatly increased compared to vanilla and different vehicles are often required for certain missions. For instance in the 40k mod gear is expensive and mostly comes from crafting, you might need to move your limited equipment pool between drop pods and a thunderhawk multiple times a month until you can afford to craft two whole sets for each vehicle. XPiratez is the extreme example of this because it has many different mission types that require specific vehicles. For instance urban city missions might disallow especially wide vehicles because there is nowhere to land, aquatic missions require special submersibles, space missions require vehicles that can not only reach space but maneuver there too and so on. Some missions are stealthy infiltrations that don't allow aircraft at all and force you to use ground vehicles to maintain your cover. Hence the need to mass transfer guns and other equipment to and from specialist vehicles occurs on a regular basis.

What I'm unsure of is the best way to implement this, ideally the player could use this feature with as few clicks as possible. Maybe you could add a Transfer button to the ship equipment screen in one of the top corners, clicking on the button opens up a dropdown list of all other craft at the base, and selecting a craft moves all of the equipment from the current craft to that one.

Another possibility that fits within the current UI is adding craft to the sort list on the equipment screen. For instance if I have two skyrangers at the same base upon opening the equipment menu I could select the other skyranger as a sort category which displays only the equipment loaded onto it. If I transfer any items it removes them from the other skyranger and loads it onto the current one, just like moving stuff between bases through the transfer menu. No single click functionality this time but it would still be substantially easier.

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OXCE Suggestions NEW / Re: [QoL] "Equipped" sort option for the HQ buy menu

« on: November 08, 2024, 12:14:58 pm »

True, but in this case, you will always get also a "Not enough equipment to re-equip craft" message (and have the option to order more stuff directly from there).

And you'll anyway need to manually add/increase the equipment on the craft afterwards, so manual effort is unavoidable.

Yeah exactly, this idea is the missing "second half" to the current feature. Instead of warning you if you run out of something after the fact which requires you to order more of that thing and then manually (re)load it onto the dropship when it arrives. This makes it easier to preemptively order more of things you expend on a regular basis to stop that from happening in the first place.

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OXCE Suggestions NEW / [QoL] "Equipped" sort option for the HQ buy menu

« on: November 08, 2024, 11:32:39 am »

This suggestion is to add a new sort category called "Equipped" to the buy menu accessible from the base purchasing screen. "Equipped" means any item currently loaded onto a dropship or any other craft, this sort option is already tracked for individual craft, so you would only need to add together all of the "equipped" sorts from every craft in service to determine what is currently being used.

The use case is very common, as a player I often need to (re)purchase equipment multiple times a month, especially consumables such as grenades, medical supplies and ammunition. This would give me a way to quickly shorten the list of purchasable equipment to only those items which I am already using.