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[Spoiler]

1

The X-Com Files / Re: Spartanism

« on: March 06, 2025, 01:29:36 pm »

The next is

Spoiler:

Research (on the base with Lunar Control Room) stuff up to Lunar Satellite Launch \ Observation. After this, next month is moon outpost and somewhat linear chain of battle / capture unknown Ethereal / research new battle / battle... up to Cydonia, where you board Avenger, and button "go to Cydonia" appears (like in original, not mission site).

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The X-Com Files / Re: Spartanism

« on: March 06, 2025, 07:28:42 am »

Hyper-wave decoder is irrelevant to alien bases, it just allows to discern what mission UFO (limited by decoder-in-base radius).

You can fight alien base when one is randomly constructed.

If you're looking into getting to endgame, it starts with interrogation of a lot of aliens (getting Alien Vocabulary), and MiB commander, which can be found in e.g. MiB strike ship / MAGMA reactor attack missions.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.6: Exotic Energy

« on: March 04, 2025, 04:48:21 pm »

Do I understand correctly that the only thing that matters for getting Alien colony mission is if the Alien Base ufo wave generates at the start of the month?
Shooting down UFOs or mission success doesn't matter?

No, but yes. Colonies are generated by Alien Infiltration mission.
The mission can be generated "just because" at 6% per month and also by embassies or golden academy towers at some small %.
Once is starts, it doesn't matter what you do, the mission will eventually succeed, lose you a country and spawn a colony.

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OXCE Suggestions NEW / Re: [Suggestion] Option to hide current month from the graphs

« on: February 27, 2025, 04:56:07 pm »

Looks like a decent suggestion. It's nearly impossible to lose in some mods on any difficulty as long as you don't give up and know what you're doing. Part of which is keeping the score alive. This change could introduce an element of paranoia and spice things up a bit.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste

« on: February 21, 2025, 03:33:00 pm »

I'm guessing you've installed new OXCE to a different folder other than your old installation, and thus you can't access them from your new OXCE, that expects them to be in a different folder.
So you need to locate your old installation and copy the saves from there to your new OXCE. They usually live at ...OXCE/user/x-com-files, or sometimes in user documents.
If you have no idea where old OXCE is, do a drive-wide search for "x-com-files" and/or "*.sav" files, which should help locate the saves in general, or search for "OpenXCom.exe" for old installation.

Also russian VK x-com-files community may be better equipped to help with this.

6

The X-Com Files / Re: Why are the mansions so pumped up?

« on: February 21, 2025, 02:38:51 pm »

Bombing mooks is fun, but manors are still boring. Because, well 1) repetitive when you clear like 10 of them 2) no decent reward. It's made like a chore, so it's a chore, like "OK, I'll do one per month". Shouldn't be surprising, no? I try to clean cults ASAP just to NOT deal with manors. And yeah, they are roughly HQ-hard.
Embassies and such are boring for same reason.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.6: Exotic Energy

« on: February 21, 2025, 04:55:56 am »

Where can you find the Tritanium Matrix? I can't seem to get one anywhere.

Alien colony (multi-level assault), geoscape mib base if you can find one.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Plot cost-benefit ranking (light spoilers)

« on: February 05, 2025, 06:31:08 am »

Smartgun is comparably better damage than macro SMG, so a pretty good weapon. The only nitpick is that only-autos can be a bit annoying to deal with.

it was the leading cause of deaths for my tanks (due to friendly fire), so it definitely can pierce pretty heavy armor.

Case in point.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Cyberweb heist map

« on: February 03, 2025, 11:18:44 am »

I don't see problem with stairs per se. You can move the rat above ground and over stairs. It has psi vision of 1-2, but it's "infinite" in z-direction. Meaning, rat can see anything under or above it. Used together with motion scanner, it makes most mutli-levels layouts, such as HQs, stairs, bases, this one, etc., really easy.

Sadly, mechanisms / robots are invisible to psi, and that's when it becomes find-last-bot circus. Most annoying map in the game, given the robotic faction, that is also fairly annoying.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Terror ship laser turrets

« on: February 02, 2025, 03:32:25 pm »

Also, shrapnel explosives.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.6: Exotic Energy

« on: January 31, 2025, 09:24:55 pm »

Radars won't help you detect the manors. The best way to find them to use a flying craft and wander around, triggering their interceptors if you hit the  manor detection range. LITTLE BIRD or CF-ARROW are best early game crafts for this, though helicopter is also workable. (Various cars are undetectable i.e. won't trigger interception so they don't work for this.)  Then you know you're close and you can investigate the area better. A second option to try to spot them with craft radar coverage without knowing the area (e.g. CF-ARROW). But usually the spawning hunter-killers is the easiest way to find the whereabouts of a manor. You should also watch out for cult crafts or certain special missions like cult infiltration. This typically means a manor is somewhere close by and has spawned the mission.

Another method is figuring them out from alien activity charts (per country?) and patrolling near cities there.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste

« on: January 24, 2025, 06:15:57 am »

...plasma is the only reliable way to deal with mid to late game enemies like the upgraded sectiods, mutons, turrets and ethereals aside from packing enough cheese to be declared legally French. Leaders don't grow on trees, so if you are at the stage where you have a limited number of captured aliens, "leaders always first" won't always be the fastest option

I have no idea what you're talking about. Plasma is endgame weapon, gated behind advanced lab (and IIRC delta radiation, of all things), and these are endgame-ish enemies. You don't need plasma to steamroll through midgame, neither it's required for dealing with mutons / turrets. Upgraded sectoids are semi-optional enemies altogether.
And if "leaders don't grow on trees" for you, then you need to focus on them being so. Pretty easy to minmax on capturing leaders - most races have colored leaders, you can filter medium UFOs, and so on.

You do you, but 25% is greater than 20%, this is math not XCom shooting odds

First, that's just asspull number, not "math". Second, it's not 25% per leader, that's 25% per that one tech, and it becomes 20% again, because junk / good ratio decreases as you've removed good tech from the pool. This means you pretty much need to exhaust research pool to get something reliably done.

Third. Where does this "odds increase" even come from? Most leader's tech are leader's only, meaning you get them from leaders and can't mutate junk/good ratio by researching other aliens. And by leaders-only I mean, they have 17 early techs (all junk besides medkit). Then there are ~9 techs, gated behind alien vocab, that give you adv lab and other good stuff. Getting vocab is the first step. Out of 17, 8 are medic's tech, 6 are engi's techs (5 of 6 needed for vocab) and 4 are leader's only ships.
Now, 8 medic-shared tech are the problem. There's about 45 medic techs, of which ~40 are junk autopsies. So manipulating leader's tech by researching medics is negliglible.
So effectively 12 of 17 leader's tech are leader's-only. Maybe 10, if you're lucky with medics.

You may "optimize" 5 leftover leader-shared vocab techs by researching 10-20 engineers and 0-10 navigators (to reduce engi's ships). Which means you'll also have 10-20 leaders, depending on your battlescape success.

After you unlock vocab, you may start getting lasers or progress towards adv lab. Which is best done through leaders, as engis have too much extra junk and autopsies mixed in. And at this point you'd have 10-20 leaders, enough to exhaust their entire pool. So you might have started working on them anyway beforehand, and unlocking vocab faster in game time.

And if you focus on just leaders from the get-go, you'll get to adv lab in minimal lab time. Not necessarily game/RL time, but this depends on how you pick and proceed through your encounters. For some alien races are hard to capture, so blanket capture is not an option. Thus you focus on capturing none of them, or some of them (guess who).

tldr: you need to exhaust leader's research pool to get to good stuff, which means getting to late game after 30 or so UFOs, a few steps from the end.
There's no lottery involved because to exhaust leader's research pool you'd need to research almost everything anyway. And you'd get core techs to combat aliens way before that.

That's pretty reasonable midgame progress model. You don't progress due to luck, but due to quantity, and each engi/leader counts.

Also, this seems unpopular, but I'd say midgame is pretty fun actually. It's just differently structured than early game, and some weird slog missions appear, like, second half of cyberweb (3-4 almost 1-1 sam-y missions with 100 enemies), zombie arc (3-4 almost 1-1 sam-y missions with 100 enemies), etc. Early game is full of short, fun, tech-wise profitable missions. Likewise some medium-and-below UFOs can be short and sweet, and you can choose if you want to battle larger ones.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste

« on: January 23, 2025, 06:10:57 am »

One pull at 20% isn't great and early on leaders aren't easy to come by, so if you interrogate a soldier or two first, then the navigators, then engineers, you might get those odds up to 25 or 30%. If you are swimming in Leaders, sure, but an early hit on one of the important techs can improve survivability in the mid game substantially, so I do my best to maximize the chance on early pulls of the wheel.

This is exactly the erroneous thinking that won't get you anything. 20-> 25% is like nothing. No, leaders need to be prioritised if you need techs - e.g. a lucky laser pull, and progress to adv lab. Granted, after researching at least one engi / nav, etc.

Survivability is not really the function of the lucky techs either. Most core survival techs (PSI, tanks, advanced soldiers, extinguishers, medkits) are alien independent. Some good late armor can be looted from captures.
And to produce those armors, you need advanced lab = ALL the techs, not just a single lucky one. And that means exhausting leaders.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste

« on: January 22, 2025, 03:26:24 pm »

The optimal way to interrogate aliens is capture 10-20 leaders (there's 1, or 2 in some medium UFOs), and interrogate them. Almost every topic they give is useful, and they can be quickly exhausted. The inverse (saving leaders for last) leads to said lottery. Interrogating engis/navis/medics is mostly wasting brainpower, and should be done after you get good tech.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste

« on: January 01, 2025, 03:56:59 pm »

If you don't have ghost tank, you won't see live captures at debriefing. You should see something like "there's no containment, so perp is dead". In new battle it's treated as if you have empty base, thus no captures (probably configurable through editing new battle related save).