It's probably safe to say that vanilla XCOM is a pretty great game. There's a lot to say about the concept, mechanics, atmosphere and so on that make it a game you want to come back to for more, whether you just finished losing a game or it being a few years since you last played it.
With experience however, it soon becomes clear that the aliens have other plans there are some things that just aren't worth using, and others that are too amazing to not go for right away. For this reason, I decided to start tweaking the original, to get the game that tiny bit closer to perfect that I can manage with OpenXCOM's ruleset functionality. It feels pretty modest compared to mods that add entire new races and even new factions altogether, but I hope it will be interesting enough for someone to warrant putting it up publicly.
So here it is!
Overview of changes, spoilered for easy navigation:
SpoilerManufacturing:
Motion scanners and medi kits are now bought instead of being researched and manufactured. Laser weapons require Elerium to produce. Plasma ditto.
As such, there are no longer any items that produce a net profit (unless you don't mind indirectly selling Elerium) until the very end game with fusion ball launchers. The ability to get exponentially more money from your workshops completely broke the game, so this had to go. Alloys are closest to breaking even, if your Engineers have nothing else to do.
Tanks and hovertanks can now be rebuilt if the wreck is recovered, for a fraction of the original cost. Makes them a reasonable option now that your budget is a concern.
SpoilerAir game:
All UFOs now have the same range. In vanilla, range was the most important stat as it allowed you to fight without any fear of taking damage. Now a higher range stat just means spending less time taking damage, just like with the other stats. Also makes interceptions more tense; even if you survive, each bit of damage suffered means more time in repairs...
Craft armaments are more expensive. Cannon rounds are cheap, and lasers still get infinite free ammo, but with all other weapons you have to take your budget into account when deciding if to use them. Including plasma, which now uses ammo: Plasma Beam Rounds(x10).
Lightning is now researched before Firestorm. The Lightning is still pretty lame - particularly the Battlescape aspect is unchanged, as I decided to leave that to other mods since it requires more extensive changes than just the rulesets. It's got a bit more fuel and a bit more speed, allowing it to catch up to any non-terror UFO. The Firestorm and Avenger swapped speeds, leaving the Firestorm a lategame role as the only craft capable of catching Battleships, while the Avenger is still overall best.
SpoilerWeapons:
I haven't touched auto shot, as the UfoExtender range-based accuracy option handles that well enough on its own.
Both cannons now have arcing shots, giving them a distinct role of indirect fire. It's weirdly satisfying to Heavy Cannon a Sectoid from the other side of a building, or spamming Auto Cannon shots to blanket an area in explosions, highly recommend it. Heavy is very slightly buffed (aimed shot especially), Auto very slightly nerfed; range-based accuracy probably makes or breaks this choice though.
Heavy Laser got an accuracy buff. Pretty good as a high-powered sniping weapon, though it's hard to compare to Laser Rifles getting 2 aimed shots a turn... Tank/Laser cannon got an even bigger buff, continuing the trend of later lasers being bigger, better, and more cumbersome.
Tank/Cannon ammo is now HE. Safer than the rocket tank, but useful without having to get direct hits (which is just as hard as in vanilla with the poor inbuilt accuracy of tanks).
Pistols no longer have auto shot, but the laser and plasma pistol got their TU usage reduced to that of the conventional pistol, making them still pretty spammable.
SpoilerResearch:
Research is now to a large extent gated behind interrogations. Soldiers unlock weapons for research, Engineers unlock UFO components, with Navigators being a second requirement for UFO Navigation and the three XCOM crafts. And Medics for Small Launchers. Later alien species' unlock higher tiers, so interrogating a Sectoid Engineer isn't as useful as interrogating a Muton ditto.
On top of this, some initial research - Alien Artifacts and Alien Biology - is required before you can even begin building a containment facility, and an autopsy must be done on a species before it can be interrogated. These two flavor-text-only research topics also serve to explain how the new research system works (for any player who didn't already read all this).
Engineers and Navigators now unlock research on UFOs and alien missions respectively instead of giving one random choice of those for free, as the functionality for that ("getOneFree") caused a bug where autopsies could be skipped. Medics also had to get that functionality removed, but sadly couldn't get a replacement in functionality. Terrorist aliens are still useless.
Elerium remains researchable on its own, being a simple element rather than a complex alloy or piece of equipment. Gives the player a second track of research, as it unlocks Alien Weapons, which is Laser Weapons renamed. It too gets some flavor text, explaining the elerium requirement and accuracy changes to new players.
Psi amps and blaster launchers were crazy OP and as such now require interrogating an Ethereal Commander. If you can manage that, the game might as well tell you to hurry up and go and fight the final boss already!
However, Psi labs are still researched as normal, so you can still winnow out your troops or decide on who to bring on Ethereal missions from relatively early in the game. Hyperwave Decoder also requires psi to be researched now.
Whew.
I'm still undecided on whether the aliens themselves should be changed - make sectoids smarter but weaker, bravery not always at 80 so psi panic isn't useless, that sort of thing. For now they're unchanged. If anyone has any criticism, I'm all ears.
A few of the effects in the intro are different from the version I remember from my childhood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX0Cm3N_n6k This doesn't seem to change when I set audio version to 1.0, so is there anything I can do?
Assuming there isn't an official version being worked on behind the scenes, what does the community think of starting to work on making the ruleset for TFTD? I'd recommend copying the structure of the Xcom1Ruleset folder with its individual .rul files for each major category, which would also allow anyone who wants to contribute to start with any of the .rul files at any time.
I'm pretty sure the game mercifully spawns UFO missions near where you set your first base, but I started a few new games recently to test starting craft equipment without ever seeing any more than 1 in the first two months->terrible score->game over. Any chance radars are affected by the new timer system?:
Quote
openxcom_git_master_2015_02_12_0912.zip - built 2015-02-12 08:16
Warboy1982, Thu Feb 12 09:11:00 2015 one timer to rule them all
fix timer desynch by removing all the timers from dogfight state, and unifying them in the geoscape.
the geoscape's dogfight timer handles updating all the dogfights at once, and all dogfight functionality is handled sequentially from there, rather than tying them all to seperate timers on different intervals.
this commit also changes some underlying functionality in dogfights to bring them in-line with vanilla, most notably: escape timers run from the moment the interception begins, rather than starting when a combat stance is selected.
relevent ruleset values have been updated to reflect this change. mod authors: double your ufo break-off times and reload rates for both ufos and craft weapons.
Is it possible to give a firearm with an arcingShot:true a specific force for its shot so you can get higher or lower arcs, and a resultant maximum range?
I decided to delete the HC-I and AC-AP rounds, and generally this works fine, but when trying to open the Auto-/Heavy Cannon UFOPaedia entries the game immediately crashes to desktop. Not too surprising, but I'd like to fix it. I guess I should redefine the STR_HEAVY_CANNON_UFOPEDIA text? But how do I keep the old ammo on the side entries?
So I'm fiddling with balancing the game by requiring more interrogations to progress, and wanted to get a Snakeman Soldier captive for plasma rifles -> craft plasma beam, but bumped into a weird bug.
In the attached save, a snakeman soldier and a navigator lie stunned. Ending the mission gives score for 2 live aliens, and there's no message of dying to lack of containment, plus there's at least 3 spare slots in it anyway, yet with the attached mod active no Snakeman Soldier is in the base! The navigator is correctly recovered, but not the soldier. With the mod off, this bug doesn't happen.
What could possibly cause this? I haven't touched the captives or corpses in the items part of the ruleset, or anywhere except research:
- name: STR_SNAKEMAN_AUTOPSY unlocks: - STR_ALIEN_BIOLOGY - name: STR_SNAKEMAN - name: STR_SNAKEMAN_SOLDIER dependencies: - STR_SNAKEMAN_AUTOPSY unlocks: - STR_PLASMA_PISTOL - STR_PLASMA_RIFLE - name: STR_SNAKEMAN_ENGINEER dependencies: - STR_SNAKEMAN_AUTOPSY unlocks: - STR_ENGINEER_INTERROGATED - name: STR_SNAKEMAN_NAVIGATOR dependencies: - STR_SNAKEMAN_AUTOPSY unlocks: - STR_NAVIGATOR_INTERROGATED (I thought it might be the empty "- name: STR_SNAKEMAN" definition and tried removing that, but that had no effect)
EDIT: Discovered that removing the dependency on autopsy causes the soldier to be captured properly, but why the heck would that happen for the soldier only? EDIT2: Discovered that with the bug happening, the Soldier is killed - there's one more Snakeman corpse in the base than without the bug.
I'm trying to make researching the alien grenade prerequire researching Elerium. I've got a savegame where I researched Elerium and have a grenade stored, but it's not showing up as an option. https://imgur.com/onylTRR,UreNdsG,3OX7lz9#0
Or, "things original X-Com could have done better".
Alien Retaliation:
Some sort of mechanic for the part where the facility defences fire - maybe like what interception uses - so it's not just a binary hit/miss for each defensive facility (x2 if grav shield).
Should be able to happen early in the game but use weaker UFOs, which also means it's not 3000 damage or bust for your facility defences
Maybe even multiple UFOs at once? Well, let's not overcomplicate things...
All damage to the base should matter and cost you, even mere plasma-scorched walls (a little bit), but without the "destroy an entire facility module and via it everything connected through it" mechanic
Tactical:
The accuracy mechanic always felt a little awkward; most shots would either be wide misses or perfect headshots. Replace with a (much narrower than current) cone of fire. List accuracy as degrees of deviation.
Multiple shots in flight at once to make auto shot/burst fire less awkward
Reaction mechanics probably need a second pass; the mutual surprise mechanic generally works well, but it looks really dumb when a sectoid walks out of the UFO, spins 90°, headshots a guy, then walks back inside without any return fire. Maybe something like a "focus on this area" which gives a soldier a x2 Reactions stat bonus vs any target that appears inside it and ignores the mutual surprise rule...
General balance:
(Various weapons, crafts, items and so on are all over the place balance-wise and need finetuning obviously, but this is more for deeper changes than ruleset mods can do)
Research options that don't do anything useful (autopsies, most interrogations) ought to, even if it's minor
Manufacturing stuff (without using irreplaceable alien materials) purely to sell it probably makes the player too independent of the funding countries, which feels awkward narratively even if the game balance wouldn't be affected much due to the massive amounts of loot. Increase the funding they'll give X-Com, if need be.
Gotta say the XCOM EU/EW way of restricting races to weapons feels like it works well for gameplay progression, though some flexibility for each race would probably improve it (Sectoids/Thin Men using pistols early on, rifles mid-lategame)
I notice the openxcom.exe file is about twice as big in the nightly as the plain 1.0 version - is this just optimization being left off for convenience?
Saw a recent nightly build added an energy recovery stat to units, does this mean tanks will always have 100% energy at the start of a turn as in vanilla?
I made https://openxcom.org/bugs/openxcom/issues/394, after noticing that the rearmRate for cannons was 100 instead of 50 in the default ruleset while I was tinkering with my own mod, and though it says resolved, it's still got that error in there.
I've added an ammunition requirement to the Plasma Cannon, but while the cannon is at the top of the list of manufacturable items, the ammo is at the bottom...
I've got this mission, my squad vs a single Muton, and at some point crested a hill with the last of my TUs only to get reaction fire sizzling through my hair. Next turn however, I only got a single auto-shot volley - then the green guy just stood there, apparently waiting for me to make a move so he could shoot via more reaction fire instead of using his TUs to kill what he could already see. This seems a little too nice...
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