Messages

1

Suggestions / Re: Mortars and custom psi

« on: March 30, 2022, 10:15:48 pm »

Arcing 2 is a feature that I've been working on in the form of "artillery strikes," where an attack will create a projectile that falls down from the top of the map. Whether or not it requires line of sight would be up to the modder. Not finished yet, but shouldn't take too long for me to pick up on again.

Deliberate bump, rather than starting a new OXCE suggestion thread.  Has there been any progress on this front?  I was rather disappointed with the "mortars are just bows with extra steps" from a certain mod and wound up blowing up my crew by thinking that the mortars would shoot at a 45-degree angle or better over my landing ship (needless to say I rolled back that mission).  While it's an imperfect solution to have straight-down shots, it's still a better solution for mortars than behaving like Javelins in front-attack mode. =)

I'd still love a proper 45+ degree mortar arc that increases the arc toward vertical the closer the target is from the maximum range.  Is the underlying mechanical issue based on a tile grid problem or a projectile physic problem?  Not knowing the guts of the physics engine, I figure the low arc was a harder problem to solve than the high arc would be, since the low arc has to try to hit the collision box in the middle of the target tile, but the high arc only concerns itself with landing on the target tile at all.  (I guess the raytraced "No Line of Fire" was probably the hard part, thinking on it at bit.  That could probably be ignored entirely for the player, but the AI units might self-destruct if they didn't have that system implemented.)

2

XPiratez / Defeating camo?

« on: April 10, 2017, 10:36:42 am »

For my first playthrough I'm deliberately avoiding learning anything about the game externally, and discovered that I've done some really sub-optimal things along the way, for instance only unlocking the Workshop by mid-June in my second year (having underestimated the importance of the workshop, since it is apparently and unusually responsible for being able to contact suppliers and order any ammunition at all) -- but I'm still toughing through with rifles against Osirons with gausses and I'm not above doing a little bit of scumming here or there to keep things winnable.

However, one situation I've bumped into is camouflage -- although I probably shouldn't bother with the mission and I've got saves from shortly before the encounter to fall back on if I decide to let it go, I've got a savefile from the start of a battlescape where I'm up against a landed medium smuggler vessel.  The robed smuggler chief always kills one of my personnel in the first enemy turn, without fail: there's a low-level smuggler grunt just outside the Pachyderm who needs to be killed or stunned on the first player turn, sapping up the entire TUs of a single unit to complete the deed -- and so on the enemy turn, by the time the high-level smuggler enters sight range, he is no greater than 3 tiles away from the hapless individual and no matter how I position my gals defensively, they aren't quick enough on reactions to kill him before he rather literally carves up the poor gal (and I've got ridiculously highly trained gals, too).

I've already learned that this is a camo effect, but I'm curious: is there any way to improve sight radius of my gals versus camo?  Does ThV work against camo?

I'm starting to ponder just scumming empty terrain with suppressive fire from my Spitfire until something happens... =)