Messages

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Hardmode Expansion / Re: [Beta][EXPANSION]Hardmode Expansion - Version 0.71 repack - Testplayers needed

« on: May 09, 2015, 11:00:19 pm »

Tried the mod, a few comments:

- You get wayyyy too much money with all of these combats and enemies. When I have 100 scientists and 3 bases by february, something feels wrong. I'd suggest reducing the sell value of plasma weapons, say by 25-33%.
- Increased monthly cost of personnel is really annoying, because you get so much money from weapon drops but your monthly funding doesn't go up with it, so every month you end up taking a 3-5 million net loss due to all of those extra personnel and facilities you built. I'd suggest reducing the monthly salary back to normal, or increasing average funding.
- Not a fan of the new base layout, if the vanilla layout was an option I'd appreciate it. I know some people like the chokepoint strategy, but I like surrounding the aliens and dropping explosives in every hanger on turn 1 more.
- Maybe make it more clear in the readme what is required to research Alien Containment. I had to check the files to figure out the requirements, since normally in X-Com you sell that stuff immediately.

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Work In Progress / Re: Experimenting with firing mechanics

« on: June 21, 2014, 08:30:35 pm »

I agree this is an annoyance with the current accuracy system.

If I could make a different, possibly simpler suggestion: Change absolutely nothing from the current system except the attempted aiming point.

Currently the shooter always aims dead-center (I think, correctly me if I'm wrong). Instead, have the aim be at a random point inside the enemy's hit area. If said area is blocked by cover, you'll hit cover on a "good" shot.

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Troubleshooting / Re: Without any equipment, weight is 6?

« on: October 21, 2013, 02:04:15 am »

I'm glad that my insistence led to fixing a bug that had remained unresolved and contested for over a year. You can argue about my methods, but not my results 

Sorry if you felt offended or that I went over the line. I'm only here because I enjoy X-Com.

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Troubleshooting / Re: Without any equipment, weight is 6?

« on: October 20, 2013, 03:02:13 am »

off-topic
last time I checked, this qualifies as a personal attack.

Wasn't intended. Just saying that "you can mod it back so you can't complain" is not a reasonable response. That's a critique of a doctrine, not a person.

seriously, I can't understand the obsession with "100% vanilla" behavior. if we wanted a game that was 100% vanilla, we wouldn't be here today... okay, I'm kind of stretching that, but still, I guess we all agree that there were things in the original that were just plain wrong.

It's not like there is any especially good reason to change base soldier weight from 0 to 6. If OXC suddenly doubled the cost and construction time of living quarters and said that anyone who has a problem can change it back to vanilla values themselves, wouldn't that be silly?

Anyway, if we wanted to be 100% slavishly devoted to vanilla, we'd be demanding that soldiers get a free no-encumbrance clip every mission. But instead players can see why fixing the pre-loaded ammo weight bug is justifiable. Adding 6 weight to each soldier has no justification based on the vanilla X-Com.

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Troubleshooting / Re: Without any equipment, weight is 6?

« on: October 19, 2013, 09:33:46 pm »

well, i've done extensive research into the topic, using the source code as my reference, and i've come up with conclusive and definitive results.

however, i'm not going to share them or make any code adjustments, in case you fall under the misguided impression that this kind of attitude will get you anywhere here or indeed anywhere else in life.

I have yet to make any personal attacks. I am not judging you or the (considerably large) amount of work you have put into this project. I am stating the facts as they are available, to which every available research by multiple people points towards 0 base encumbrance.

If you would like to put forth evidence supporting your decision you are free to do so, and if it is compelling I will retract everything I have said. As it is, you are either intentionally withholding evidence to spite both me and the rest of those who are in this thread, or you have no evidence to support your claim and are dismissing our claims entirely out of hubris. Either of these is you acting childish. And that was a personal attack.

Please, just load up the save I posted earlier. It's a single soldier in a skyranger entirely empty other than 4 rifles. You can easily pick them up and compare encumbrance. There are no possible problems I can find with this test.

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Troubleshooting / Re: Without any equipment, weight is 6?

« on: October 18, 2013, 07:13:48 pm »

This is not a matter for debate. Subtracting 6 weight from all units is provably wrong, and anyone who loads up a vanilla X-Com game can plainly see so. Until it is fixed the game is broken. Forcing players to modding to get the original weight limits is supremely moronic.

Here's a save which makes it abundantly clear what the weight limit is. 3 Rifles (8 weight) with no ammo on a soldier with 24 strength = 0 encumbrance.

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Troubleshooting / Re: Without any equipment, weight is 6?

« on: October 14, 2013, 11:15:36 pm »

according to ufopaedia's notes, getting down to zero weight by unloading your initial weapon and then dropping it is actually exploiting the Weightless Loaded Ammo, listed just above the Displaced Ammo Weight, in fact it says in the description of the bug that this is the case.

i'm going to say there's no right answer on this one, and leave it as it is, but...

THIS should settle the issue once and for all. the weight now comes from the armour, and is defaulted to 6, rather than being hard coded. you can very easily remove this by adding "weight: 0" to the armor's entry in the ruleset.

That's not how weightless loaded ammo works. The ammo is weightless because it's still thought of by the game as on the ground. Soldiers who unload the weapon are correctly tracked as holding ammo (INCREASING their weight, because the ammo is no longer weightless), and dropping it resets their weight to zero properly. Dropping the weapon as-is without unloading it resets their weight to zero, but then when another soldier picks up the gun they don't gain the correct weight (because the ammo is still "owned" by the ground). But if that soldier unloads it, the ammo is correctly tracked and increases their weight as before.

Load up a vanilla X-Com game and check. If you check the save game (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=OBPOS.DAT) you can see that unit weight = the sum of items that they are the "owner" of. The only issue was tracking who owned what item. There was never any hidden encumbrance.

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Suggestions / Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.

« on: October 14, 2013, 07:35:20 am »

Either it's not pure luck or I've been incredibly lucky. I've never had a defecting nation in the dozens of games I've played other than the first few times I was doing really, really poorly. And this includes all of X-Com, TFTD, and OXC. And I always play on Super Human. As for bases in general, the only time I've seen them is when they are constructed during the first 2-3 months before my interceptor screen is up or when I intentionally let them land because I just don't care.

Get a worldwide surveillance network with matching interceptor support ASAP. It's the most important milestone in the game. No more terror missions, no more bases, nothing but tactical missions that are on your terms.

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Suggestions / Re: Improving civilian behaviour

« on: October 14, 2013, 07:27:11 am »

Civilians should be armed according to census data. Which means that the average man in the US would be dual wielding a rifle and pistol together 

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Troubleshooting / Re: Superhuman difficulty -aliens number problem

« on: October 07, 2013, 04:30:42 pm »

Ahh, OK. I was using the nightly build but I didn't realize the problem was fixed just yesterday, so my nightly was a day out of date in my previous tests.

Did a test with 20 each of OXC and vanilla to compare enemy spawns. Looks good. Sectoids/Floaters all spawned @ 12-14, terrordisks/reapers spawned at an average of 4.5 for OXC and 5.2 for vanilla, which is reasonably close considering the differences in maps generated and # of spawn points on each.

Didn't realize that X-Com nerfed terror spawns that much. Probably been playing too much TFTD, with its huge maps there tends to be enough room for everything 

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Troubleshooting / Re: Superhuman difficulty -aliens number problem

« on: October 07, 2013, 12:01:43 am »

Here's a terror mission in which I count 10 floaters and 2 reapers. I don't think spawn points limit us this far.

If lack of spawn points are the problem then there must have been some method of spawning excess units in X-Com that OXC isn't replicating.

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Troubleshooting / Re: Superhuman difficulty -aliens number problem

« on: October 06, 2013, 11:15:48 pm »

This seems to be the case. I haven't explicitly tested, but I don't think I've encountered a terror mission with more than 5 terror units. It would seem that Super Human is simply using the high range of the Beg/Exp alien appearance column rather than being randomized on the superhuman column values.

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Troubleshooting / Without any equipment, weight is 6?

« on: October 05, 2013, 09:24:08 pm »

Previous thread:
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,1107.0.html

I'd like to reopen this.

I'm quite certain that this is incorrect. The base weight for an unloaded soldier should be 0.

The source of confusion is that Vanilla X-Com suffers from bugs tracking ammo weight. Scroll down to the section for "displaced ammo weight". Basically whenever you dropped a loaded gun you would still be incorrectly tracked as carrying the ammo for weight purposes. This would make it appear that you had extra weight even when stripping yourself of all inventory items. Unloading the gun before dropping it would update your weight correctly and you would end up with 0 weight for an empty inventory.

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Fan-Stuff / Re: Tactics to survive early games

« on: October 03, 2013, 04:37:30 am »

My early game:

- Select my two best Accuracy recruits. They are my Snipers. What is the sniper weapon of X-Com? The Rocket Launcher, of course. A crouched recruit with high accuracy will easily hit around 90% hit rate with these, and quickly reach 100% hit rate. Even missing, you're probably going to take out anything early on, and you can easily hit enemies around corners or place a rocket through a window, cleaning out any area you don't want to deal with. These soldiers should never be near the frontlines and should never even have an alien see them. Put them on a corner of the map with a good vantage, lay waste to everything, have a big stack of rockets in the skyranger with someone throwing more ammo over constantly.

- Select all of my recruits with good Reactions (50+). These are my capture crew/grenadiers. They take pistols and off-hand grenades or stun rods. They are kept in reserve when out in the open, being used for throwing their grenades over the backs of my front line and for gunning down aliens when I don't want to use explosives (i.e., when another alien has been dropped and I don't want to destroy the loot). Obviously, they are used for capturing aliens as well.

- Everyone else gets a heavy cannon with HE ammo. For the most part they are dispensable. The HE Heavy Cannon is a superb general-use weapon even throughout the mid game. These are on the front line and are the typical cannon fodder. Have some extra AP ammo to be given out if the soldier can carry it, for usage whenever explosives aren't a good idea.

- Bring a tank. A rocket tank. This is your primary scout. It has a ton of TUs, and its front armor is pretty god damned tough against Plasma Pistols and even Rifles to a lesser extend. Ideally this should be the first and last thing any alien should see before you call in the close air support sniper team. Once you've taken a good position outside the skyranger it's perfectly reasonable to spend turns 5-15 just moving around the map with your tank to scout while your soldiers provide cover. Also this thing can fire 2 rockets in a single round. Pretty awesome when push comes to shove (say, you land and multiple aliens are facing your skyranger entrance). When breaching UFOs to capture aliens, have this thing out in front to draw fire from aliens exiting while your troops hang to the sides, and make sure to exhaust its TUs so it doesn't reaction fire at your squad or aliens you are trying to capture,

For research my priorities are Medi Kits, Armor, Motion Scanners (manufacture and sell), plasma cannons and the hyper wave decoder (once you've got the hyper wave decoder and plasma cannons you've basically won the game). Research the mind probe if you find one and you don't have the alien navigator captured yet. I ignore laser weapons early on since frankly they just aren't needed, especially in openxcom where their infinite ammo is a lot less desirable thanks to the removal of the 80 item limit in the skyranger. I also skip early plasma weapons, going straight to Heavy Plasma. Stun launchers are cool, research them and capturing the navigator or psionic aliens are a piece of cake.

At first I invest just about everything I can into research. Build a lab, storage, living quarters, Large radar and Containment facility, then build another living quarters when possible. Ideally you'll be able to have a total research team of 80+ scientists early in February, if not the full 100. From there I invest in manufacturing. Ideally around March I'll have plasma cannons and Hyperwave Decoders, at which point I go back and get Laser Weapons, churn out the laser cannons to pay for bases everywhere on the map and around mid-April the entire globe is under perfect UFO defense. Everything less than a battleship has no chance and even battleships can usually be killed with 4 plasma cannon-equipped interceptors without taking losses (and usually you don't even need to engage battleships, merely shooting down their earlier UFOs will make them fail their missions). At that point the world is your oyster.

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Troubleshooting / Bug with Stun Rods/Stunning Aliens

« on: September 23, 2013, 11:39:28 pm »

Open Xcom seems to not be properly checking whether Aliens should enter a stunned state immediately after being hit with a stun rod, instead waiting until the Alien turn comes up or after the Alien acts (i.e. reaction shot). See attached savegame. The soldiers on the right can poke the alien as many times as they like, but it won't collapse until it either fires a reaction shot at the soldier/tank on the left or the alien turn starts. Using latest nightly build.