Hi, I just recently beat my very long running x-piratez playthrough. In my humble estimation X-Piratez is the greatest game ever made. I saw X-Com when I was very young and played it basically since then. Playing X-piratez after having mastered the base game was like a revelation to me. Here's my full feedback spoilered so I don't ruin anything for anybody.
Spoiler:
So many possibilities of things you could do in the standard X-Com are so expertly realized. I never considered melee combat outside of the occasional stun prod play. The emphasis on live captures transformed the way I normally play. Once you can easily capture a group of enemies the metagame shifts to the most efficient uses for them, and how to efficiently process them and then you have to start to weigh options on what's best for your long game. The level of complexity and the need to constantly reinvent tactics is what makes the game a masterpiece to me.
I was on an older version (L 10.7) because when the sky ninjas update came out I didn't want to start over. I was in the final massive resource crunch to make the conqueror. Being able to buy Hellerium at that point was a god send, but at the same time raising that much money and making an industrial base that could make fuel pods was a worthy challenge. That had been my third playthrough, on difficulty 3. I quit the first two (difficulties 1 and 2) because they were too easy but in 3 I hit my stride. Finally beating the mars mission is probably my finest accomplishment.
Freshness and how quickly it decreases was also an interesting twist. It's nice to have OP flying armor, but man do you have to start going fast when you use it. Amusingly I didn't realize that there was a way to manage it with the cigars until I was prepping for Cydonia. I get why it exists but it made me afraid to use certain armors, and given just how useless an exhausted gal is made long missions truly daunting. Maybe a mechanic where it regens on kill, for either the squad or the gal?
I only did the green codex because honestly that was the type of gameplay that most appealed to me. Upgrading my slaves and having good tools to heal my gals with was good enough for me. I'm sure the other codex's have more openly good stuff though. I've never held with psionics or Voodoo so they didn't have as much to offer. Similarly I stuck to mostly using Gals, which I'm sure is the easier option opposed to messing with peasants/slaves.
My feedback is mostly limited, and probably quite outdated. A bit more insight into how the weirdgals and repentia worked, and what combat roles they were supposed to fill would of been helpful. I'm sure I was supposed to experiment but I didn't want to make a bunch of useless to me gals out of my elite soldiers. Also since VooDoo used freshness, it was offlimits with the hard cap going. Similarly while the Chort is a fantastic concept, they just didn't seem as good as the androids. Androids are friggin amazing though. With their crazy health Regen maybe they were supposed to be melee/tank? Finally getting to x-plasma weapons was cool, but they were in this spot that made them difficulty to use in my gun heavy style. I didn't want to use them in ships for fear of burning up goodies, and they were slow enough and inaccurate enough they were hard to use in field fights. Honestly I got the most use out of them as bunker busters, or to kill sectopods, which while handy is situational enough that I didn't need them that often. I found myself longing for something in-between the medium and heavy plasma, which might of been covered by the UAC guns?
I picked up via the grapevine the game is playing much differently and I really want to play it. But I gotta do other things for a while. So tragically I'll have to find out later. I'm sure it's even better.
Anyway, I hope this doesn't come off as overly negative. Thank you for making a game that I sunk thousands of hours into, and is the greatest game ever made.
Mostly, yes. But also you should've researched nobelon long ago. It pretty much negates most sanity issues.
Oh so it does! Funnily enough I missed it the same way I missed cigars back in X-piratez. I wonder if I mentally edited sanity to morale as that's close to a X-piratez item. Thanks! It's mad science time boys!
XCF is WAY nicer than XPZ, especially late patches (spartans, hirable vets). It's also nearly unlosable (past early game). That's what difficulty affects the most. That is, SH/5 difficulty roughly makes encounters up to finishing off first cults one head above their VET/3 counterparts. Past these, difficulty increase is also noticeable, but not that important. To put into perspective, SH/IM is pretty easy (past early game) if you've beat XCF once. VET/3 is the recommended difficulty. If you think you're good, /4 or even /5 should be fine.
Hmm, yeah the early game is really when the difficulty would show. Early game X-com files is the formula cooked down to the richest syrup. Where it's all about making the best dice rolls out of limited options. Close to whatever the remake was going for. I kind want to try high difficulty to prove that I am the x-com master. We will see. Thanks!
It's off topic for this thread, but amusingly because I was updating my X-Piratez install continuously and then stopped with the early games sky ninja stuff (I didn't want to start a new campaign.) I missed a lot of the updates that made the X-Piratez early game harder. I kind of want to start a new X-Piratez playthrough but I can't spend more years playing it.
Hi, I am writing to say that I am having a fantastic time playing your mod! I recently finished a long running playthrough of x-piratez and like a siren song this mod called to me. It really nails the gradual build up of power and resources that makes X-Com so great. It's fun to slowly become the X-Com we all know and love. I giggled when I saw the black ops rifle, of course that's what it looks like. It's also a credit to the campaign design that when I finally got my hands on one it was a legitimate improvement. So yeah great job!
I've played a lot of X-COM starting when I was just little, and been playing it regularly since then, and this is a great addition to the cannon.
So in my current playthrough I'm in difficulty 2, may 1999. I'm a bit ahead of the difficulty curve with cyber armor and tritanium ammo. So I can do most missions without too much risk and have strong interceptor coverage. My guess is that I'm in the early middle game, and that an x-com files campaign is about as long an x-piratez campaign. No spoilers please!
So my feedback is based on a player there. I started on difficulty 1 because mods can be really uneven, and I stopped that play-through when I realized I kneecapped myself by not doing research correctly. I'm probably going to start over on a harder difficulty because a difficulty doldrum like this suggests I'll have more fun with more challenge.
Loose feedback! (lots of spoilers)
Spoiler:
Seriously a big congratulations on how the campaign ramps up. Getting the helicopter and armored vests feels like a legitimate game changer and like you can finally let loose. I love it so much. It's also very smart to start you with the glock, it's a good subtle way to say "hey you want accuracy over power for the start"
It's fun to be legitimate g-men crossing national boundaries to extradionarily rendition fools. Especially when you get sci-fi dart guns. All those conspiracy theories were right! Similarly the messages from the factions were great because they helped to drive home just what X-COM looks like from the outside. I kind of missed them for the factions after the initial four, but it makes sense they have better security or are too loosely organized to have messages.
Coming off x-piratez it's really funny how some things get recontextualized by being back in a more mundane setting. The L-85 was just good in x-piratez but I shouted for joy when I got my hands on one here. Similarly I forgot where the standard human TU cap was, and that was a surprise let me tell you. Finally I forgot just how much armor gates the amount of risk you can take.
It'd gunk up the manufacturing screen, but it'd be nice to have a way to kill captured monsters that you can use their parts for things. Bullfrogs are the biggest one of these. The dart musket rules and is borderline essential, but bullfrogs at least on the difficulty I'm playing are the biggest offenders for getting knocked unconscious for wounds.
Similarly the webwear, so useful oh my god. But it's a real RNG roulette on when you can get it. I don't know if there's a better way to do it, but maybe 3 of 4 of any combination of spider types? Not sure the research system supports that.
So on my first play through I was difficulty 1, and I really kneecapped myself because I didn't realize that some of the research is literally trivial. I was stuck in the old x-com mode of thinking where you hit every topic with all of your scientists sequentially. Maybe a comment about how you have a lot of ground to cover and most terrestrial objects are a bureaucratic formality? (That's kind of in the manual messages but might be helpful to have in the pop ups.)
If vanilla x-com had access to knockout grenades the war would be over in four months and we'd just nuke mars. Maybe we could rig up blowers and just fumigate ufos?
The only mission I had a legitimately bad time with was the Dr. Alpha mission. It was just the most tedious thing. A one hit melee could drop from the vents and just wreck someone. Since it's mostly animals you can't win on morale. And I wound up with a low TU beetle stuck in the vents so I had to sweep the whole friggin map twice. Just a bad time, not sure there's much you can do about it with how the AI and spawns work.
There was very little more satisfying than getting the ADS and introducing deep ones and aquatoids to the tempo of above water combat. They were not prepared. I'm not all the way through the plot line either, but all of the interrogations telling you about TFTD monsters really builds the paranoia. If lobstermen show up, no amount of ADS is gonna save my ass. No Spoilers!
So there's three mundane weapon platforms that statistically are just about as good as a gun can get under x-com rules and they don't seem to have exact analogues in the more advanced bullet guns. (I haven't reached laser, mass driver or plasma.) These were the SVD (three accurate, accuracy boosted, three sniper snap shots per turn my god.) the L-85 (so many accurate snap shots.) and p-90 (it's compact, it's armor piecing, it's clip is huge and it's great on TU economy.) To the point where I wasn't sure it was wise to switch until I hit higher armor enemies. It'd be probably more work than it's worth but for mundane gun platforms maybe there's a research branch about making alien fuel trace ammo? You get a small damage boost, but clip size majorly suffers and it's expensive in money and traces? (it's jury rigged technology that only works because we have thousands of cartridges to try with.) It'd honestly probably be a research trap, but my guns!
So probably because I was on an easy difficulty but I took the message about when the war was going to start to mean that I needed radar and interceptor coverage by then. I managed it, but I felt super overprepared. Not sure that's worth doing anything on your part, but I thought it was worth mentioning. I sort of assumed the aliens were going to try and knock me out by launching a terror mission or two. In a way like the syndicate would eventually try.
It got introduced in the version I started on, but I really enjoy the council giving you advanced agents. It's nice to not have to train up mouth breathers and they almost always have commendations my strategy wouldn't get them. It also lets losses feel less like I need to load, an x-com agent is valuable but I can deal with losing someone good. At the same time though, something which reduces tension needs to be managed carefully in an x-com game. I like it, and it's making things easier for me but it's my choice to use it.
I'm mostly done fighting ghosts but it's fun and a great way to push the engine to do interesting things. Having to check for enemies as light sources is a really neat touch.
Similarly I very much enjoyed the arctic base mission. Would have gone a lot different if Macready brought an m-60.
Oh the company HQ mission was a test in patience because, that's a lot of stairs. like ten minutes of clicking lots of stairs, like final fantasy 7 lots of stairs. Please a hidden elevator every three floors or something. You can't get the CEO with morale so it was just annoying by the end.
I never played apocalypse, so the dimension x stuff took me much by surprise. It's really fun to run into something completely novel like that. Being limited to certain armors also really reinforces how vulnerable you are. Friggin spitters man.
I'm a completionist, at the same time X-COM files is pushing me to go as fast as I can. This is good, that's the tension of X-COM, you can play quite well but take too long and the aliens will win. The downside is that researching prisoners/aliens/corpses/animals almost always feels like there's not much reward. The x-dimension is the worst for this. Maybe a couple of Technomad files in the dimension X base so if you want to research the dimension x creatures you don't have to fish for all of them? Similarly you could get the files or corpse/captives from the expeditions. It'd be a crappy reward for the cost, but my completionism! (I just saw in a post above this one that land surveys might do the same thing?)
I'm sort of surprised you can't get gas masks, as that was how I got around Choking in X-piratez but at the same time I don't want em if it means the enemy gets em. Knockout grenades my beloved.
I managed to get a Base Invasion before 1999, which I thought was a great way to say "Oh you want to do interceptions? Why don't you say that to my face."
I never really bothered with Psionics in base x-com or VooDoo in x-piratez and I was pleasantly surprised by it's implementation here. The ghosts are great for going "Okay, guns aren't always going to be the solution." Also it was neat that things like the plasma glove have the stats to have utility outside of combat. Being able to melt doors etc, is legitimately useful. Similarly they are good for getting damage types you might need but not have access to otherwise.
Oh relatedly a message in the Osiris casenda mission about how to expect a fortified locked position would be good. I don't normally use explosives and you gotta breach. Flame glove will get you inside though.
My favorite faction to fight was the red dawn, yes I'd like free reasonably good guns and durathread. My most annoying was black lotus. Friggin ninjas man. On the flip side the red dawn HQ mission was a real wall in terms of difficulty, which I enjoyed. It was nice to see someone smart enough to bring armor to the fight and having to scrounge up anti-armor before I could buy it.
After my first run I found the best strategy for the initial factions was to move up in mission difficulty for all factions at once. On my first run through I put myself in a cult-de-sac by leveling up the black lotus chain too high before I had access to anything bigger than a helicopter. The avatar mission is not kind if you don't have good guns and a good number of guys.
It’s a very minor note, but because I was sure the aliens were going to come out swinging I wrapped up the enemy factions as fast as I could and then missed being able to do safehouses for free briefcases of money. Not sure that’s worth addressing.
I was sort of surprised you couldn't cut a very expensive deal with the Black Lotuses patron. You want to defend humanity, she kind of wants to defend humanity, friendship! It definitely wouldn't be the most morally ambiguous thing you do in this game. Friggin Neoderm. Similarly given how plot lines and monthly events work, it'd work well if in exchange for access to avatar forms you pay in monthly score events. (I wouldn't take the deal and I'm not sure it could be mechanically balanced but it occurred to me.) Things could resolve in the middle/late game when you double cross her. (But then people might feel like they have to for completionist reasons? I really hate being locked out of content myself.)
The kitsune is a really big gift to the player. Which I don't mind, I love that thing. But before that I had been building bases entirely to get within osprey range of HQs. A big, fast "go anywhere" troop transport for free is hella useful. I’d be surprised if it’s given in higher difficulties.
I'm gonna wait until I beat the game to ask how it works, but I am so curious how events and missions spawn within the x-com geoscape framework. It's fun system, I love that there are events happening that you can't know about, really ties into the feeling that you are trying to manage slowly spiraling chaos. Similarly it's fun when you get a good event, I'm hoping it's tied somehow to your level of intelligence capability so that investing there has subtle effects.
I liked the syndicate is angry plot line. It really felt like they were a rival actor who knew exactly the levers to push to make me lose in a smart way. They don't need to kill me, just my support.
Oh I thought making alien alloys a rate limiting material was inspired. Coming off x-piratez where it was per faction enemy drops, it seemed like a nice way to simplify the system while still making you have to carefully conserve resources. Do I want better ammo for the guns more than I want better armor or stuff for labs? I'm guessing tritanium ammo will get superceded by laser, but getting to lasers takes knowing the tech tree pretty well.
Making progress gated behind high research projects is an interesting touch. For me it seems to incentivize knowing the research tree and figuring out how to get the most labs in a single base, and then building smaller research bases for things like interrogations and autopsies. I think this is the desired behavior?
Similarly it's interesting how certain high research things are effectively traps for a new player. "Surely researching an MIB agent won't take that long?" (<someone about to have a bad time.)
The final note I have is just as someone new to the mod, it's interesting how much of the management comes from trying to manage storage. Partially this is bad habits I picked up from x-piratez where taking captives could manage your storage problems by generating negative size items. I might need ancient guns eventually! I like to run teams from a central base, so keeping all the kinds of armors, and various guns is running up pretty hard against storage limits and items I need to research. I feel like this is working as intended to make you commit to moving up the tech tree and sell things you legitimately don't need anymore, but it's annoying at times.
So I've got a few questions that I don't really want spoilers for, but I could use the advice of someone who is familiar with how the mod progresses. 1. Transformations seem to be a big part of the intended design. Coming off x-piratez it's been humbling to have to deal with puny purebloods again, so I'd love to upgrade. At the same time in the version of x-piratez I was playing (an old one about 2 years out of date.) Freshness, the sanity analogue; was the stat I was working around in the end game. The high level armors sucked it out of Gals, and late game missions were all freshness draining. So basically any transformations which limited freshness made that character useless in the endgame. A veteran Gal, in high level armor became basically useless after 20 turns, and that was without freshness reductions from stat boosts. (There was an item to get around it at an HP drain but I didn't realize that it existed until I was trying to get onto mars.)
Is that true here? Can I use transformations without making soldiers so sanity limited they are basically useless after 20 turns in the end game? It's a real bother to have to play the whole game to realize you crippled your best soldiers a hundred hours ago.
2. So I'm probably going to start over my campaign on a higher difficulty. I beat x-piratez on 3 and I thought that was a fair challenge. X-piratez is much more of a power fantasy though. At the same time this is hopefully the last massive X-COM mod I'm going to beat like a drum. I need to play other games, to touch grass. So I might go up to 4.
Is difficulty 4 manageable if you are good at X-COM but don't know X-COM files like the back of your hand? The nature of long campaign mods like this means that you can screw yourself over and not realize for dozens of hours. X-piratez got around this by making the game basically unlosable past a certain point, I’m doubting x-files is as nice. I'm not touching 5 or 6, I'm neurotic enough about losses, higher difficulty is going to make that worse.
3. Is sneaky Ai recommended? Given the way TU economy works, enemies taking cover around corners does actually make things a lot harder. At the same time it might mess up animals/zombies?
Again thanks for making a really great mod! It's so fun to see how people are pushing the engine in ways I never thought possible.
Howdy, I'm a big fan so I hope this doesn't come off as overly harsh.
The changes to the bootypedia weapons entries make them a lot harder to read. The sides and the green thing are distractingly bright, which combined with the fact the text often goes over both makes it hard to read some of the text. The fish lips in the middle don't help either.
If you make the sides a little darker it shouldn't be so bad. Or maybe changing the text color? The ideal solution for those of us who are change resistant might be to make the new background toggle-able, but I'm sure that's technically difficult.
Anyway, really like the game and I'm looking forward to the new content.
X-piratez suggestion: I’d like to see a bigger use for enemy trophies and alchemy.
Enemy trophies: I think it would be fun and thematic if you could fashion enemy bits into protective gear. This would increase the number of strategies in the early to mid game as you try to capture enemies to make moderately useful gear from them. It would also synergize well with the newly added gear slots in the inventory screen.
Examples: Reaper hide vest which is heavy, but also increases your resistance to piercing slightly while simultaneously making you more vulnerable to fire. There could be a monster eye necklace which increases your night-vision slightly Monster teeth to create jewelry which slightly boosts your TUs. Reaper brains to boost your resistance to voodoo. The remains of a cyberdisk fashioned into an enormously heavy shield. Ratman tails to increase reactions. Vampire teeth bracelet which leeches energy on melee hit. And things like that.
None of these effects would be very powerful but it’s a fun way to give more variability to early loadouts while simultaneously pushing the player to try different strategies. Also, it’s wonderfully thematic for a bunch of pirates to go into combat wearing trophies of their defeated foes.
Alchemy: So we have alchemy in the game, but no potions. This seems like a missed opportunity to me. I don’t know much about balancing voodoo so take these all with a grain of salt.
The purpose of potions is to super charge weirdgals while simultaneously tanking their other stats, particularly freshness. This is balanced by most of the potions being quick to use and easy to keep on a character’s person.
I envision them being used by weirdgals who have gone a couple rounds of magic and are drained as result. They drink one or two and can fire off more spells. Then spending the next couple of turns regretting their life choices.
I think drugs sort of fill this role, but these would be a bit more specialized and hey they are potions!
Probably need an energy potion, morale potions and freshness potions. The energy potion would hit morale and freshness. The morale potion freshness and energy. The freshness potion takes a long time to drink, inflicts enough stun to put a gal into overstun and is so big it’s hard to deploy. Similarly, you might have a TU potion which has side effects bad enough to make the gal useless the next turn, but I generally avoid messing with restoring TUs.
There might be two variations to each potion, strong and weak. With the weak version taking early game ingredients and strong taking late game ingredients.
I hope these two ideas are good for a laugh if nothing else. I really like the way things are turning out development wise and wish you the best of luck going forward.
Three things I'd like to see in x-piratez, assuming they don't break too much stuff.
1. A mid-late game tech that lets you buy a super expensive accessory you can carry into battle that gives a sense 1-2. My preferred strategy for mansion missions used to be to rush "ye old magic store" so I could give my gals acolyte robes and use the sense 3 stat to make it go faster. Now that takes weirdgals which I'm a bit more hesitant on. I get that aye-phones exist but the real use for sense was telling you if you missed a unit above or below you.
2. A condemnation for a each mission a gal gets mind controlled. It doesn't need to give stats or anything, it's mostly a way to remind forgetful commanders which unit got mind controlled so they can switched to base defense duty.
3. The ability to set the scroll wheel to increase by increments of five as opposed to 10. This would mean I'd have to scroll a bit more but it would be a lot more granular.
Thanks! I tried a few in game months later with a more experienced group of peasants and it went a lot easier. The tipping point was probably being able to over stun by wrestling, that wouldn't have occurred to me.
another little question: Does the factory have printer capability? It seems like it should, even with luxury barracks it's going to be a struggle to staff it as is.
Does getting the contacts: reticulans remove their shipping from the Geoscape?
Also hints on the reticulan vats mission? I have a batch of 12 well trained but inexperienced peasants and despite a good effort they didn't cut it. I get the feeling I was doing something wrong. I managed to take the center room and tried to hold out there, but they kept coming and the knocked out ones got back up.
Upload your save here so that we can have a look if it's a real issue or if you're just missing something. Most likely you're just still missing something.
The event chain for voodoo initiation is first "wasteland priestess" and then "seek out the desert witch". The "wasteland priestess" event spawns without prerequisites at 23% chance per month. "seek out the desert witch" is not actually the second event but the research you need for it to spawn (50% chance per month once researched). So you can type that into the ingame tech tree viewer to see what you are missing.
If you are missing the "wasteland priestess" event, you can edit "Piratez_events.rul" and look for "str_blessings" there to set executionOdds to 100 to reduce the waiting time.
Huh, if that's how it works then yeah it might just be a run of bad RNG on my end. An ingame month takes me a long time to get through just because I'm doing most of the missions. I have the wasteland priestess and the research done. Looking back through my saves the research was done in December, and it's March now. So assuming everything works it should just be a matter of time. Thanks!
The event leading to Voodoo is unavailable for campaigns with the lowest difficulty level. So if you play on Cap'n Kidd, you are not supposed to access this part of the tech tree.
Neat feature, but nah I'm on blackbeard. My biggest take away from playing cap'n kidd was that the gals were actually just very aggressive paramedics who would shoot people so they had an excuse to practice medicine on them.
Looking more into the tech tree, I have "ye old magic shoppe" but not voodoo initiation. This is likely a side-effect of being from an old version. Should I just save edit myself into having voodoo initiation? Or is there a internal check that should correct itself?
I joined the forum just to say that this is in my humble estimation probably one of the finest games ever made. I grew up playing original abandonware x-com. I loved the hell out of it. Then I found this mod and the world shifted for me so to speak. I have probably put 200-300 hours into it, across several games. It just keeps getting bigger and my mind is not prepared for that. Thank you so much dioxine, for making this mod. The fact that it exists continually leaves me amazed.
I'm also here to report a possible bug. so I'm about 2/3 of the way through the game. It's march 2603. I have hellerium munitions, smart guns, civilization and nightmares. I still don't have voodoo. I got the first 2 events in what I think is the voodoo initiation event chain, but I can't get the third one. It's so bad I'm thinking of save editing just so I can get my hands on saucy magic. Am I doing something wrong?
The campaign itself is from multiple versions ago, which I keep updating as I go along. I got saves back to January of last year, so it's probably a side effect of a too old campaign. What makes me think something is messing up is that I have gotten the mad scribblings quest twice, despite managing to use the mad scribblings once. (On a related note, it is borderline painful to find any consumer goods past the mid point of the game.)
Is there any legitimate way to solve this problem? Or should I dabble in dark arts?
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