Messages

1

OXCE Bugs FIXED / [FIXED] Unranked soldier types now count towards promotions

« on: October 10, 2023, 09:18:47 pm »

Someone on the XPZ Matrix server has reported that the manual promotion feature had a knock on effect that probably wasn't intended: unpromotable soldier types (like XPZ repentia and pirate dogs) are now counted for the purpose of determining additional promotions for other units.

They offered the following repo links in support of this statement:

- https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/pull/113/files#diff-38a268ab06f7fcb5ead399d427eef51f8e31623789d4821dc1eb87ea1a2f6d8d
- https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/blob/8f1dd59ad1a27485b841f68a068556c403f72fd0/src/Savegame/SavedGame.cpp#L2436C47-L2436C47
- https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/blob/90f79de0cb01926c79b48dfce57b4515b446f2dc/src/Savegame/RankCount.cpp#L55C2-L55C2

This has a significant gameplay effect in XPZ, since it substantially increases the effective costs for unpromotable troops that are balanced around being low cost.  Since it seems like an accidental consequence of a feature addition, it seemed right to treat it as a bug.

2

OXCE Suggestions OK / Re: [Suggestion] Event shops

« on: February 19, 2023, 08:21:36 pm »

Personally I prefer the event-based approach I described, for the following reasons.

• Events are much quicker and easier to set up for mod authors than missions.  Speed and ease of use are obviously importance in themselves, but pragmatically I think this also means an event-based approach is more likely to get used.
• Events are much quicker and simpler for players to engage with – the battlescape is a very rich environment to use for shopping, with a bunch of stuff that isn't very relevant to the basic concept of handing other some sort of currency for items.  I think I'd be glad to occasionally spend 40 seconds buying a couple of weapon crates with random contents from an event shop, but that sending a craft and maybe messing with loadouts (unless I can bring rocket launchers to the market?) is another work that I wouldn't want to do this often.
• A system using events strikes me as relatively light in scope and non-invasive, while adding CRPG-like mechanics to the battlescape seems likely to be time-consuming, complex, and plausibly beyond the scope of OXCE.

3

OXCE Suggestions OK / [Suggestion] Event shops

« on: February 19, 2023, 03:57:41 pm »

Basic idea: an event can have a shop associated with it, giving players an opportunity to do things like buy unusual items or get stuff at a discount.  Think travelling merchants, a sudden glut on the market, a chance to get some military surplus from friends on the Council...

Rough spec:

• If an event has an associated shop, in addition to the button to exit the event, there's another one to open a purchase screen.
• The purchase screen shows the list of available items, along with their price in this shop and how many of the item are available to buy, if the mod author has set a limit.
• Exiting the purchase screen takes them back to geoscape with the event message still up.  This is so they can refer back to it in case the mod author put some useful information there.

Increasingly fancy extensions:

• The purchase screen can have a custom background.
• The mod author can do some randomisation of the shop's contents: (a) they can set the chance of a particular item being available each time an event using this shop triggers; (b) they can set a delta value to partly randomise the amount of an item available (like the one for enemy numbers on missions, so e.g. if the base availability of the item =4 and the delta =2, the amount available each time the shop appears will be 4-6).
• As an alternative to money, the mod author can set a shop to require some item.  The shop's prices are then an amount of this item.  This would allow things like an event shop in Piratez that requires the player to spend Mutant Alliance bounty tokens.  This is set at the shop level, not the item level – this is to reduce UI complexity.

Would anyone use this?  I'm pretty sure Dioxine would use this in XPZ.  Today he was talking about a workaround he's been considering to mimic it, that would involve special 'shopping' missions – it sounded like a complex and kind of painful workaround for the above.

4

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N1 29-Apr-2022 Every Day Is Caturday

« on: August 05, 2022, 11:28:56 pm »

I use the harvester.  I think I'm good at keeping gals alive, but I don't find it easy to get 20 uninjured ubers together to fill out a harvester for some time, and if I could, I wouldn't bother.

I run mixed crews.  Gals and clones and girl guides, mostly, sometimes with gnomes and lokk'naars.  For me, the cool and unique thing on the peasant path is that composite teams like this can work.  On the other paths, gals leave them all behind (except for syns and gnome vehicle drivers).

I like that with the harvester, I feel able to send gnomes to missions in something other than a car or tank or loader suit.  I'd be nervous doing that in trucks or the Fortuna.

I agree the peasant path is extremely powerful, if you know the game well enough to keep your gals alive.  I think the gal route is still better for a new player.  But before the peasant path came out, I played male touch without bothering to hire any SS, just because I preferred gal scarcity.  I don't play the peasant path because it's powerful: I play it because it's the coolest and most fun.  It's a single-player game: if people want a challenge, they can up the difficulty.

5

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N1 29-Apr-2022 Every Day Is Caturday

« on: May 23, 2022, 12:08:53 pm »

There is a chance to stop the mission if you shoot down the early craft, but once the final wave appears, it's too late.  At that point, the best you can do is assault them while they're landed and carry off their loot.  Just one of the large or very large ships will earn you more than the swayed coutnry would have paid you all game, and you get it up front...

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: May 23, 2022, 12:06:44 pm »

Which difficulties have all content available?

Basically, anything from the second difficulty up.  (There are some bad events and the like you can only experience at higher difficulties.)

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: May 14, 2022, 11:42:03 am »

Hmm... does game options > advanced > change values with mouse wheel help?

The UAC vaults limit was eight, not five.  I don't know for sure if it's still that, but it hasn't sounded like there were any plans to make them unlimited (but some mention of making their finitude clearer somehow, instead).

8

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: May 07, 2022, 11:49:10 am »

If you finish the mission too quickly, you won't see them.  Try leaving a few zombies alive and waiting several turns.

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XPiratez / Re: Stuff I'd love to see in XPiratez!

« on: May 02, 2022, 11:48:27 am »

It's a high tech solution for a low tech problem, but – if you can get stasis grenades from somewhere, like gambling, throwing one at a downed hyena gal should buy you a few extra turns to finish the mission.  (They don't fix fatal wounds, but do restore HP, and should have a bigger effect on hyenas, due to hitting multiple tiles.)

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XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: Help! I am losing games because of score! [Guide]

« on: May 01, 2022, 12:36:41 pm »

A small correction.  Despite the exclamation marks, !Socializing! does not actually unlock any missions.  The party mission is unlocked by Party Dress.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: January 08, 2021, 12:36:09 pm »

Are there any good ways to acquire an arc welder, ideally before Back to School?  It's blocking all vessel construction.

I saw you can get it by researching engineers, but they're fairly rare and can give so many different things when you research them that the odds seem bad that way.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: April 23, 2018, 02:14:19 am »

I run B-rank bounty missions and have never seen a fat zombie as of now.

The nomads are in undersea missions.

Oops, thanks – misread the Red Mage's first BootyPedia article as indicating I'd need to finish the research chain to get missions.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: April 22, 2018, 05:24:22 pm »

I've come back to the mod after a year or so out, and have a few questions.

1) Is there a way to find out which techs unlock new buildings?  They don't show up in the tech viewer; often it's easy to guess what will work from the name of the tech, but I'd like to build armoured vaults, and the only obvious tech is the early game one which gives you their BootyPedia entry.

2) Are there any good sources of Zombie Fatmen?  It looks like they're the bottleneck on unlocking B-rank bounty hunts.  I didn't run into any yet in this game (except at a mansion I reloaded to avoid – neither hunting down every last one with aye-phones nor running everyone to the roof is fun for me).  There have been several excavation ships with zombies in Africa, but they seem to contain every kind except the fat ones.

3) Where can I find Deep One Nomads?  I've raided a couple of their temples, but don't think there were any there.

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XPiratez / Re: [MOD] Streamlined Armor Manufacturing 99h1

« on: September 21, 2017, 05:13:33 pm »

Thanks!  I anticipate that this will save me quite a bit of pain.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: September 10, 2017, 02:02:55 pm »

I finally found some last night, on a church destroyer I shot down.  It's a shame I have better guns (XG weapons) now I finally found some – being able to make a handful of guns that punch above the weight of your standard armaments is a cool idea.