Messages

1

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.6

« on: June 22, 2022, 11:57:22 pm »

Thanks Nord.
I've taken a look at the changes (via WinMerge), and unfortunately there's nothing in there to address the tedious grind aspects. Per my previous posts, there are simply too many geoscape events and too many enemies at those events with far too many hitpoints. But maybe that's just me.
It's a shame, your TWoTs mod was incredible and excellently balanced. I fear I'm going to have forgo continuing this mod. Ah well. Thanks again.

2

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: May 10, 2022, 10:18:38 pm »

But have way better range an damages target energy.

I don't know about energy, but while I do love the dart rifle (for the accuracy), the point remains that they're pretty ineffectual against the armoured enemies.

A large UFO landed and the mission seemed brutal. Something like a dozen of warriors with 80(?) shields and some mages with 120(?) shields. So the former take about 8-10 hits from the grenade launcher, the latter even more. Appears to be impossible unless you save/reload to get a very good starting position where they don't kill most of you at turn 1 and from where you can deal with them just one by one. Are you even supposed to be able to deal with them? How?

Yeah, I know that feeling. :-( Especially as I had a terrible start.
I did it with copious amounts of save-scumming. The mages are fairly easy to kill with conventional weapons (if you survive their attacks). The warriors (legion footmen I guess) are a tedious annoying grind; they're why I simply gave up doing any mission that didn't have something worth capturing. I'd suggest waiting for the balance pass before continuing; I am.

3

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: May 09, 2022, 08:55:06 pm »

What about dart pistol/rifle?

dart pistol/rifle do *less* damage (11) than a tazer (15)!
It's why I said previously that even mid-game enemies are somewhat impervious to all ranged capture tech.

[Spoiler]

4

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: May 06, 2022, 06:36:41 pm »

Generally agree with your points about balance psavola. Orcs were a huge pain early on, but I'm afraid it only gets worse later on with new enemies. Fortunately Nord's reply earlier implied there may be a balance pass coming so might be worth waiting.

Except, now, there is a new mission, "spirit hunt" and these don't seem to be able to deal any damage.

They're basically impervious to almost everything (as in 0% damage!). Incendiaries (fire) are the way to go (revolver shotgun!). At the risk of too many spoilers:

Spoiler:

there aren't many of them in the battle

The point about chainmail is not accurate. If there's an insulating layer below the armor, e.g. padding, then the electricity will travel preferentially through the metal of the armor, not the body. For example, safety gear for doing performances with Tesla coils includes what amounts to a full-body suit of chainmail.

Duh, of course yes! Silly me! I've even seen people wearning the (grounded!) chainmail suits playing with giant Tesla coils.

5

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: May 03, 2022, 12:32:16 pm »

Logic dictates that this is correct. The taser has small harpoons that conduct electricity, so if they don't penetrate the armor, the electricity probably won't work.

Afraid I must disagree. What if that armour is made of chainmail? High cutting defence (in the real world), and a fair kinetic defence but you're going to be enjoying several thousand volts if a tazer hits you.

Similarly a (sufficiently hot) fire-blade would cut straight through armour that has very high thermal conductivity in the same way a hot knife goes through margarine. And a freezing knife would dramatically increase the brittleness of certain materials making them more likely to shatter even if the damage is applied via cutting (doesn't matter if the knife cuts through the armour, only that the armour has high thermal conductivity to facilitate removing of the heat from the target's body). This is why there is type-specific damage ratings for the armour.

And again, from a game-play perspective (which is more important):
a) The tazer sprite is showing electrical damage.
b) It's necessary to facilitate capturing by having other types of capture damage.

6

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: May 01, 2022, 11:13:54 pm »

I haven't gotten that far myself, but as I understand it, you are trying to take on midgame & lategame enemies with early game/early midgame tech (you get X-rifles in the latter part of the first year) and regular operatives. That's not a balance issue, but the issue of either the RNG/bugs screwing you over or you missing something about the mod mechanics.

I see where you're coming from and it's a good point, but I'm at about the same level as Skybreaker ( https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,10233.msg145681.html#msg145681 ) both in time and tech-level. So if it's either the RNG or missing something, it's not that uncommon. The balance issue specific to the archmage is that it probably shouldn't appear that early. Easily solved with either an increase to the "firstAppears" months counter, or (better) add a research requirement for a tech that can handle it (battlemages?) or both (best).

7

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: May 01, 2022, 04:14:38 pm »

Tazers - real-world they're electric. Game-wise it would make sense too given:
a) the current animation is electric (same as thundermage and the electric wand).
b) it would give an alternative way to stun things rather than relying on kinetic.

Use spells. If you dont have spells, dont try to beat Archmage.

It's a balance problem because the Archmage can appear before you have battlemages (or even the hint of them!). I've captured just about everything I've seen except the blessed-footmen group things because they only appeared on one mission (about a game-month ago) on a large UFO and I was massively outclassed, them being almost impervious to x-rifles after all, and all the stunning weapons.

---

Balance: Yeah, that's a tricky one. Designing difficulty is a completely different skillset from putting together all of the parts. You're clearly great at putting it all together, but (and I mean no offence), balance isn't your strongest area. ;-) (for my part: I absolutely cannot do art!).
And that's before we get to the difficultly of designing difficulty modes. Heh.

The good news is that it's a thing that can be learnt much more easily than art/programming and there's a ton of blog posts and youtube vids out there on balance and difficulty.

My suggestions:
Geoscape: Think up how many events there should be a month on the geoscape and how many of them the player should feel they need to do. I'd say 3-5 missions per month.
Then balance the appearance of different things so that the geoscape events ramp up to ... say ~10 things a month (middle difficulty), though again with the aim the player isn't doing all of them as missions. Maybe create a spreadsheet to help keep the number-of-events at whatever the target is by including the research/month filters and percentage chances (who doesn't love a good spreadsheet ;-) ).

Tactical: Not sure sure how to fix this one, but having to shoot out ~80 points of shield on a legion footman with an x-rifle is tedious (manipuls even more so!). And when there are ~10 of them on a ship and they're the primary antagonists for a sizeable number of months... :-o

Probably smaller squads to allow lower health on the enemies. Skymarshal is a massive 18 after all (do love the doors!) and I've had that forever. The downside to a larger squad is that you end up with more grind: Either more enemies or stronger enemies. At least with more enemies there are more dopamine hits as you take them all down. :-)

Think about the original XCOM: bullets kill Sectoids in 2-3 hits fairly reliably. Same with gillmen and harpoons, Plasma weapons kill Mutons in 2-3 etc. One or two more hits for the terrorists generally (cyberdiscs and bullets = :-( ). I'd suggest that's a good balancing target. I think it's similar with the newer (firaxis) xcom's.

My 2p. :-)

8

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: April 30, 2022, 07:51:56 pm »

* Tazers do kinetic damage; should be electric

* Balance: Archmage castle - I don't know if it's because I'm inept, but I've researched just about everything I can at this point (32%), then this turns up. There is -100% chance of me being able to even get past the courtyard. The knights have absurd shields and looking at the specs, 20points of armour too (on top of 50% kinetic resist and 80% melee), so just about no weapons will work against them either (and certainly no reasonable way to capture one). I tried a stand-off in my skymarshal but they eventually swarmed it and all I'd done was kill a single reaper.
The blessed footmen are similarly unreasonable given their armour is higher than almost all damage you're likely to do when you meet them. No idea how I'll catch one given their armour ignores all the stun weapons..

* Still no sign of a rune mage; just swarms of tedious legion with a hint of invader. :-(

Honestly, at this point I think I'll just give up; there's far too much grinding. :-( Sorry.

9

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: April 29, 2022, 04:34:22 pm »

Thanks Nord.

You can use pyrokinesys by any battlemage.

In that case:
a) It should probably appear on the "spells" tab of ufopedia
b) Should it not have "battlemage" as a requirement? Same for all spells?

[antidotes] Maybe later?

Antidotes are replaced by poisoncure it seems, so there is no "later" as I've had them for ages too. Glass spiders are the only things that anti-poison stuff is useful against so far.

[revolver shotgun]It is not a bug, just all pellets missed and fly out of map, without hitting anything. Engine limitation.

I'm not convinced. It only happens with that particular gun and there's no shooting sound-effect either when it happens. Also, given the extremely limited range of that weapon, how are the pellets leaving the map anyway? But I don't know the engine, you do!

[missing projects] - Read ufopedia. You need HQ to research important projects.

Oh yes. I read that a month ago when I started this game.

Incidentally:
* Glass spiders are an interesting concept but *really* annoying to find. I've had missions go 80+ turns against them. Bughunt doesn't start as there are more than 3 left (I've upped it to 10 now in the script).

* I've fiddled with missionScripts.rul in the /mods/XCHR/rulesets directory to change all of the

Code: [Select]

executionOdds to be much lower. Unfortunately it seems to be getting ignored (to test, I deleted the entire script apart from the first 11 lines and stuff still appears). When does it get applied? New month? I really don't want to start a new game to reduce the geoscape-event-rate.

10

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: April 26, 2022, 07:40:57 pm »

Attached save; right next to "Shota Baratashvili" there's an invisible unit. You can only see it from one angle. Even trying to walk into the square doesn't find it. It's to the square directly to the left, adjacent to the door. One of those flying things.

11

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: April 26, 2022, 06:13:36 pm »

Excellent job Nord! Some bugs/feedback:

* antidotes seem to be pointless. Except maybe one mission, never had a soldier get poisoned. They just die same-turn.

* There's a bug with the Revolver Shotgun. Sometimes you fire and nothing happens. It takes the TU's but there's no sound, not hitting anything, and nothing gets set on fire (incendiary ammo, but also happens with stun ammo). Happens maybe 1 in 20 shots?

* Only the main base can research "special" technologies, i.e. Reports, pyrokenesis, etc. Nothing to transfer to the secondary research base.
Edit: I got "report: Queen of the nest" from a mission and transferred it to my secondary base: still couldn't research it

* Koas moving make the walking sound. I think the floaters do too.

* I got a "shaihulud overview" from a goblin shaman (it's in my ufopedia). Then shaihulud's come along and I can now research both the autopsy and the live specimen. Sure enough, when I research the corpse, nothing pops up. - attached save - base: "2 - Russia"

* My main base has a large detector. Shouldn't that be a large radar?

12

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: April 26, 2022, 06:09:52 pm »

I did research the Outcast mage completely. The only other mages I have seen are Wizards and the Priestesses or something like that.

There's spiritualists too (they're the ones that look like ethereals), thunder priests, and fire priestess + fire servant.

That said, I have now researched "pyrokenesis" the blurb of which implies it's a spell but no idea how to use it.

On the other hand, my "spells" page on the ufopedia lists "psi-pulse" (from "savage psions" it seems) and "blizzard" (from the frost demon apparently) . No pyrokenesis on there (it's under "XCOM Research". And no idea how to use any of these either.

27% research

13

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: April 25, 2022, 12:42:44 am »

Am I doing something extremely wrong or is the balance still a work in progress?

I'm in March 2022, multiple Magics researched, but no way to cast them. Almost 50 research topics with 90 scientists and each take at best 5 days, usually vastly more. The strongest weapons I have are still HMGs and X-equipment, and it takes a ton to actually take someone down, not really sure how to take someone in alive except for luck (police batons, darts and tasers are not even close to useful). In my last month I had 34 landed UFOs, a camp, a nest, 2 forts, over 20 other missions and at least 40+ UFOs that didn't land within my borders. I've researched outcast mages, pirates, orcs and goblins completely, with a lot of legionaries, wizards, barons and similar also researched. I tried just skipping a month to see how long it would take, at this pace it would literally take me thousands of hours to get through an in game year. All of this is with China start.

Interesting. December 21 here; also china start. Mostly the same tech level (not bothered researching HMGs), just started training the psi's.

I agree research is very slow - currently have 140 scientists across two bases and just started research base 3! Researched just 23% of the tech tree. About 50hrs of play time to get here!

Also agree that some of these enemies take forever to take down with their shields; kind of like goblins and then orcs did at the start (goblins should've been easier!), though they (goblins) now die fairly nicely with x-rifles.

Also also agree that too-much happens in a month. I don't have numbers quite as high as you, but I can easily end a month with a score of 4000 or so.
(Crashy savegame in previous post is this game)

14

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.5

« on: April 25, 2022, 12:32:22 am »

Infinite loop? 0.99.5

0) Load attached save
1) Select batbayar
2) Rotate to point to the legion manipul
3) Take a snap shot

Game freezes just before the projectile hits (but doesn't crash-crash with the crash dialog).

15

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.50)

« on: October 18, 2021, 07:40:25 pm »

Hadriex kept saying that the worms hiding in the holes on the island were obnoxious and not fun. I think the exact mechanics of the island could use some tweaking, but the ambience of the place is great!

Agreed. I only had one mind worm island mission; probably my very last mission before t'leth. So I had MC Armour which made finding the hole aliens easier once I figured out they were a thing. I'd have failed had I not had MC capable folks though (wouldn't have survived long enough to find them all, or had MC Armour that could "see" into the holes easily).

Agree on liking Jellys (their entire mini-story) and mind worms.

And agree with your thoughts on the Leviathan.

But if you don't expect players to necessarily jump straight into T'Leth the moment it pops up, then you should add some post-T'Leth content on the geoscape to give players a reason to delay it

That's an idea, although then you need to give the player the motivation to do those missions. And a in-universe reason why there's something even more important than stopping the entire invasion outright.

[sub equipment] I felt that their drawbacks were too drastic since they are also taking up a weapon slot. Based on their bonuses, they would be reasonable to use if they took up a weapon slot and had no drawbacks beyond that. However, if various craft were given one or more slots which only fit equipment items, then the drawbacks would be far more balanced.

By the time you get the equipment you also have cannons that aren't useless (gauss). Sure I skipped the accuracy equipment, but the shield in place of a torpedo that you never fire (because you only use cannons) is a no-brainer. At least, that was my craft play style. Note: My craft even at end game were a mix of morays/baracudas with just two deep angels. None of the advanced ships.

Hadriex was very... ignorant, and uses at maximum 35-40% of mod possibilities.

Possibly, but you have to remember: there's far too much content for everyone to use all possibilities. I did the entire game playing with only at most 20% of the equipment options, and definitely a different set to what others use. I never built / used whole suites of equipment, armours, and craft. Everyone's going to use different stuff that suits their play styles.