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1

Hardmode Expansion / Re: [EXPANSION]Hardmode Expansion -- General Feedback Thread

« on: January 25, 2022, 11:41:38 pm »

Disabled the psionic line of sight, and just had my first mission - lab ship with sectoids against 16 rookies (unevaluated psi strength). Lost 6, despite flying suits. Other 4 are wounded. Man, that was bad!

Quick question: the original UFO:EU had a bug (??) (ufopaedia says so, I think), where if psionic alien saw any soldier, they could attempt to capture any of the soldiers. Does openxcom replicate it? My smoke curtains have had lesser efficiency than anicipated But perhaps some of them have seen me from behind, who knows.

EDIT: okay, I just have had a guy on the roof of the supply ship psionically attacked. How is this working?

Anyway. I have had two terrible missions, one (lab ship) won with heavy loss, other (battleship) I've abandoned after 4 turns; now with the sectoid supply ship, I think I have some reasonable strategy for psionic attacks with unrestricted psi line of sight: use even more smoke, and after every encounter, when the alien dies make sure to retreat. It seems to greatly reduce the occurrences of the psionic attacks, although it's my third mission, so can't tell if it isn't a coincidence.

Anyway, hellrazor, I'm aware that this is the mod feedback thread and not a general openxcom strategy guide, so I shut my mouth now.

EDIT2:

I did a terrible, terrible mistake :[ - it turns out that i was playing on the beginner all the time! Beginner!! I thought that ironman is automatically implying superhuman difficulty, but no. I've found this out when I looked at the armored sectopod ruleset for armor and realized that it should be impossible to do any harm to it with scatter lasers. I guess this means all my observations about scatter laser efficiency against heavily armored units are trash, beginner has greatly reduced armors.

I edited my savegame now, to set superhuman, and still won a base defense mission (20 my best soldiers vs 55 muton elite guard, blue sectopods and spitters), and I still can kill sectoids with laser rifles and scatter lasers, but it feels like i have underdeveloped teams against elite aliens now - good results in the past months caused aliens to progress to the best units while I have severely underdeveloped teams. We'll see how long it takes to lose the game xD I have shitloads of plasma shotguns and sniper rifles.

BTW, hardmode on the beginner was much harder than FMP on veteran for a good part of 1999

2

Hardmode Expansion / Re: [EXPANSION]Hardmode Expansion -- General Feedback Thread

« on: January 25, 2022, 10:09:07 pm »

I am asuming your playing Version 0.99.7 from the Mod Portal?

Hi! I can't tell - I'm playing latest master branch from github, and it's not tagged (commit: f6c4255317d56e12ced4202727f2be9da6c218fe )

I found this two stage Ship Missions in TFTD a little bit too much myself, so there is only stage one. Hope you do not mind.

Yeah, I don't mind. I'm actually not a big fan of TFTD - it had its perks, but long missions had a feeling of wasted day without any progress

Drones are very small and have a small hitbox and also some armor. Having a small hitbox is the biggest strength of the drones, they can scout ahead and let the soldiers take out any enemy they spot. They also can break line of sight from enemies with their integrated smoke launcher (works well for breaking line of sight of enemies facing the ramp at turn 0).

I didn't think of the hitbox size, thanks for the hint! I may still revisit drones - the game has progressed, and I'm facing new challenges. More on that below.

I only use Scatter Laser or any Shotgun class weapon at close range (meaning up to 6-8 tiles away maximum), If i use them i wanna make sure the enemy dies, because it usually puts your soldier in a kind of exposed position.

My tactics now is based primarily on heavy smoke - I always try to keep all my soldiers inside the area that's been covered with multiple smoke grenades, and progress slowly, with scouts exitting the smoke area and returning to it during their turns. I've had numerous encounters where an alien was first seen from about 10 tile distance. I didn't even try using heavy lasers, although I admit that against Muton Elite (Guard) even multiple soldiers with scatter laser fire are sometimes not enough. Anyway, I got to plasma shotguns and sniper plasmas now, so maybe laser weapons are not so interesting any more.

When you see blue Sectopods you will know

I got them! I got a few very interesting encounters since my first post - spitter chryssalids, blue sectopods. It was very fresh to me:
- chryssalid spitters are deadly, and these bastards have insanely high reactions I guess - one of them, attacked with scatter laser fire from a distance, took down two my soldiers. That base assault was a disaster (fortunately, with my rookies squad).
- blue sectopods are mighty opponents, and a serious threat to solitary soldiers. Each time I take my chances and do some freestyle, they put me to the ground. With patient tactics though, they stand no chance. It takes at least 3-4 hits from scatter lasers to kill them, true, but when I can attack them with multiple soldiers from more than one spot, they can be stopped.EDIT: this is not true, and I made a terrible mistake. Will describe later.

 I'm not sure I mentioned - I'm a big fan of heavy fire concentrated on a single opponent. With base assaults (they got much more complicated with muton elite guard bases, but still doable), I hide behind corners, throw smoke grenades generously, and spend a lot of time on camping with motion scanners.
- another day, another base assault - I got my blaster launchers this time! The mission was a big failure - I won, but took heavy losses. It turned out that making holes in the walls may not be a good idea, when I rely on the fact that I can use 6-8 soldiers during a single turn to focus on a single target, and somehow I have more than four muton elite guards in front of me.

Really they are easy? I am always scared of doing them, even when going in with a Team of 17 Soldiers and 3 Drones.
I also let them build some bases usually, just to harvest supply ships and train some troops.
Maybe making Alien Bases more of a threat score wise would balance this out, or allow aliens to make small outpost bases (40x40) for harvesting and such would be funny.
I am open for suggestions.

Since my last post, things got complicated. For a brief moment I've had an impression that the game is becoming tiresome, forcing me to take missions I don't want to take - a lot of ufos landing, lots of alien base missions, and lots of infiltration missions. I may be mistaken, but I think during last game month, I had 3 infiltration missions - each with a supply ship, lab ship, battleship, and some smaller ones. And I never know which of these ships I need to take down and ground assault to prevent the infiltration - so my rookies have had plenty of training.

But then the invention of the psi lab happened, and also first serious plasma weapons and flying suits. With that, new strategic challenges appeared:
- base layout - how to remodel my bases, so I can train 30-40 soldiers in psi-labs?
- with 150 scientists, really needed expansion, as research is progressing very slow -> moved most experienced soldiers to a new base, put 7 psilabs these, and also started building workshops there. The initial base will have more labs in the future, and will be primarily for research. But this took a lot of money!
- upgrading power suits to flying suits, and building new flying suits took a lot of elerium!!! Oh, this hurt.
- now, I'm chasing for alien medics, and they are rare. I go for the examination room -> ..... -> psi amp path, but have no medics

Anyway, the next 2-3 game monts will tell if my strategic decisions were good or not.

Snakemen do appear as in vanilla. In the lategame the chance of getting them might be a little bit lower, but it still exists. If you encounter Chryssalid like creatures in the lategame be very careful. Distance impregnation is possible.

Yeah, learned it the hard way. BTW. do I need both the Snakeman *and* Chryssalid corpse for a medikit research, or only one of them? Chryssalid spitter didn't unlock medikit research for me.

Anyway, let me see... I checked in the savegame file - since the beginning of the game I killed 4 snakeman soldiers. I don't remember seeing them. I have no corpses. Maybe that mission was a failure? Anyway, 4 snakemen during 17 months I guess I had bad luck, or maybe snakemen wave was during the time I was struggling and couldn't afford much battlescape at all?

Psi Line Of Fire makes the game way to easy, Ethereals become a joke without it. I recommend switching it off.

Will do. And we'll see if my smoke cover is worth anything then

Anyway, again, thanks for this mod!

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Hardmode Expansion / Re: [EXPANSION]Hardmode Expansion -- General Feedback Thread

« on: January 09, 2022, 08:18:41 pm »

Hi! I want to share my feedback. I've played UFO: EU in the DOS times, then a few years ago I played OXC Final Mod Pack, recently played FMP again, and now I'm in March 2000 in the Hardmode Expansion, on Ironman (I know this is not recommended, but read on).

First, let me say this loud and clear - although I think some things could work a bit better, this is the best mod I've played, and my current game is the best xcom game since ever. The. Best. Ever.

The first 9 months or so were a real struggle. I've been losing missions, losing interceptors, skyrangers, a few times almost lost the game (because of financial, or because of score). Oh, I also lost two bases. The game has been unforgiving of any mistakes, my soldiers rarely lived longer than one month, but it has been *very* enjoyable. A few missions that I remeber particularly well:
- storming my first Fighter craft. I remembered from FMP (on Veteran) that it has just two engineers inside. Man, that was a surprise!
- early-mid-game, just after I could afford to give my whole squad the Personal Armour, storming the very large craft (lab ship? Or how that's called). I've been well below a low score limit last moths, and lost some missions this month, and I've known that I lose the game if I lose this mission. These ships are very defensive, and I lost my whole squad, except for one soldier. I have known that there's just one red muton left, but I had a dillema, to retreat to the craft and abandon the mission (meaning almost sure that end of month will be end of game), or to fight - if I died, end of month would surely, 100%, be end of game. Ironman, no saves. xD! (I won, running with two pre-primed alien grenades and motion scanner, and I honestly was surprised that I ended the month with score of 4. Four points above zero)
- storming alien base just to not lose the month - late in the  game, but without power suits yet. Alien bases have become easier to storm in the mid game, more on this below.
- cargo ship massacre mission, early in the game - sniper rifles with alloy ammo vs floaters I think? Or sectoids? Not sure. I've had 5-6 soldiers left alive, pretty much for the terror mission, but I was sure that I will bail out when I go to lower decks. Fortunately, there was no lower deck (in TFTD, ship massacres were much, much longer).

I love the balance, which in the early to mid game was always forcing me to do very difficult decisions. This mod is difficult, challenging, and very rewarding.  My wife has been killing me, telling me that I must stop playing this, but I just couldn't. And ironman - you can't compare this to superhuman, there are no difficult decisions to make if you can just save before This mod has really forced me to play the best xcom campaigns ever, and I know that I was never even close with the quality of my game.

I have only one minor remark about the balance in the early game: tanks and drones. I have never played them well, although I tried. I know there are players who do well with tanks, but... they're much, much more expensive than 4 rookies, and certainly have less possibilities than 4 rookies. I lost my tanks often, and kept on repairing them, but when I lost both without recovering the parts, I just didn't buy them any more - and the game become easier. Sure, a tank may survive a single hit, which an unarmoured soldier would not... but most often my tanks were anyway going down after a single hit, or two.

Anyway, now, in the mid-late game, I have two strike teams, I use scatter lasers almost exclusively, and most often fight muton elite and sectoid elite, sometimes ethereal. The game become easy. I am not sure, if this means that it's unbalanced, or could be improved, or it's just is what it is, with better tech I get easier gameplay? Anyway, my observations:
- scatter lasers are not a bad weapon for long range. You can kill ethereal or sectoid from a long distance quite easily. With muton elite, well, you better cover, but still I often force close combat, even in artic/desert missions.
- scatter lasers are *extremely effective* against cyberdiscs and sectopods. I'm not sure it it is not a bug? I'm pretty sure I saw sectopod go down after a single hit.
- power suit saves lives pretty well in the alien grenade blast area. Also, killing a cyberdisc from 0-tile distance will kill the soldier, but a bit further - not a scratch. I kill discs in alien bases from 2-3 tiles away, with a single scatter-laser shot.
- muton berserkers were a pain in the ass, until I've found out to set up traps for them and kill them with reaction fire.

Perhaps I can make my game more challenging if I just stop using scatter lasers, not sure. Maybe I will.

Alien missions - I feel like alien base assault is one of the easiest mission types now. When I storm alien base with 16 people, all with smoke grenades, motion scanners and scatter lasers, I most often lose 3-5 soldiers, and gain millions in sales, and at least 1000-1100 points. I seriously started allowing aliens to build bases, just to be able to storm them later. The ground assault missions are still hard, sometimes. I definitely prefer to raid a base than to raid a battleship or a terror ship. Although... I think at least with some ship types, there's a deployment problem: I think I've won at least one supply ship assault, and one lab-ship assault (or was it a battleship?) without even leaving the vicinity of the dropship. The aliens just kept coming, till there were no more. But anyway, often when I have a decision to make - to assault a large ship, or not, I decide not to. I'd lose more people than in alien base, for much lesser rewards.

I haven't seen any snakemen yet - do they appear late in the game?

Anyway, I keep on playing. I'm about to fight my first ethereal base (I play with psionics line of sight, I guess this makes ethereal much less dangerous; I didn't ever like psionics though, it's just too easy in the late game, and screening and firing weak psi-strength soldiers is too easy when ethereal appear). I'm not sure where to go from here now, but I love this mod. I haven't expected so rewarding gameplay, and I really can't complain that the game becomes too easy. Maybe it's just experience. I still lose a lot of people in my second strike team - this is a rookies cannon fodder for small and medium ships, just with personal armour, survivors get promotion to my primary team.

Also, I sell almost all alien weapons, but keep all blaster launchers and eggs. I'm going to try scorched earth scenario on some missions when I finally research blasters, and if that does well, do this on Cydonia. Not sure how far I am from Cydonia (can research the martian solution, but no elerium-based crafts). Plan for now:
- try some new tactics in ground assaults, maybe they *could* be won at lower costs than alien bases?
- disable psi-line of sight if ethereals are too easy
- stop using scatter lasers maybe
- hunt for medics and engineers, I think I need them for some research

Again, in last words: this mod is great!