Topics

1

Released Mods / [WEAPON] Terran Plasma Weapons

« on: November 06, 2013, 09:37:18 pm »

TERRAN PLASMA PISTOL

Stat differences vs. alien variant:

• Damage: 60 Plasma (up from 52)
  
• Ammo: 18 (down from 26)

Manufacturing requirements:

• Weapon: $56,000 + 1x Alien Alloys, 3 workshop space, 600 engineer hours
  
• Clip: $2,000 + 1x Elerium-115, 2 workshop space, 60 engineer hours

TERRAN PLASMA RIFLE

Stat differences vs. alien variant:

• Accuracy: 60% auto, 94% snap, 110% aimed (up from 55% auto, 86% snap, 100% aimed)
  
• Damage: 72 Plasma (down from 80)

Manufacturing requirements:

• Weapon: $88,000 + 2x Alien Alloys, 4 workshop space, 820 engineer hours
  
• Clip: $4,500 + 1x Elerium-115, 3 workshop space, 80 engineer hours

TERRAN HEAVY PLASMA

Stat differences vs. alien variant:

• Speed: 33% auto, 28% snap, 57% aimed (up from 35% auto, 30% snap, 60% aimed)
  
• Damage: 105 Plasma (down from 115)

Manufacturing requirements:

• Weapon: $122,000 + 3x Alien Alloys, 4 workshop space, 1,000 engineer hours
  
• Clip: $9,000 + 2x Elerium-115, 3 workshop space, 100 engineer hours

ALIEN PLASMA WEAPONS: Unusable by X-COM operatives, sales price halved (not as useful to human buyers).


Localised for: English (UK), English (US), Español (AL), Español (ES)

During most of the game, X-COM operatives have their own unique equipment and weapons, save for the occasional alien gadget here and there. However, once plasma's researched, that battlescape diversity is lost, and everyone's largely using the same gear.

Not so much with this mod, which sets apart alien and human plasma weapons, creating a different late game experience. The design of the extraterrestrial firearms is not oriented towards human operators, which has led X-COM engineers to come up with their own variants. What's more, the replication process has produced particular differences in performance, compared to the alien counterparts. Not to mention Terran plasma bolts are blue!

The necessity to manufacture plasma weapons and ammo alone should present interesting economic challenges when otherwise you'd simply rely on the generous amounts of alien equipment you salvage from missions. Coupled with the statistical changes, it might even be enough to break the Heavy Plasma's hegemony and prod the player to at least consider keeping the highly precise Plasma Rifle in service as a primary weapon.

Kudos to Chiko for the original design of the new plasma technology, which I later modified to some extent.

Mod's attached to this message. Extract it to your OpenXcom's data folder and enable the TerranPlasmaWeapons ruleset in options.cfg. Enjoy!

2

Released Mods / [CRAFT] Firestorm Restyle

« on: October 26, 2013, 02:37:40 am »

Localised for: English (UK), English (US), Español (AL), Español (ES)

Since I've always sort of disliked the plain, rather unimaginative saucer aspect of the default Firestorm, I decided to restyle it to give it a more advanced Terran look. Had to redo the UFOpedia entry text to accommodate the new design, and following the line of other craft, the base sprite takes some liberties when it comes to colours: I chose the Avenger's colour scheme for the Firestorm's new look.

Download the attached package, extract it to your OpenXcom's data folder and enable the FirestormRestyle ruleset in options.cfg. Enjoy!

3

Open Feedback / Alien sight range annoyance

« on: October 19, 2013, 01:39:16 am »

I've found something weird and annoying about alien sight range. Even in the day, they seem to be able to see at least 1 or 2 squares further than X-COM troops, and that's already cost me a handful of lives: shots from the fog of war in broad daylight, from a place the soldier was directly facing.

I'm not sure that's how it worked in the original. As far as I recall, during the day, if they could see you, you could see them if you were looking their way.

Within visible range
     Visible range for X-Com soldiers is 20 tiles during the day and dawn/dusk, 9 at night
     Aliens are not subject to the lighting penalties and have a 20-tile range at all times

4

Released Mods / [GRAPHICS] Helm-off Power Suits (inventory screen)

« on: October 16, 2013, 05:18:19 pm »

This mod basically changes the inventory screen sprites for troopers wearing Power/Flying Suits, following the later Terror from the Deep helm-under-arm style that preserves the individuality of each soldier.

Actually most of the graphic work is Bomb Bloke's, so big kudos to him. I just adapted the whole thing to OpenXcom and fixed some tiny pixel inconsistencies.

As usual, extract the .zip file to your OpenXcom's data folder and append options.cfg accordingly. Enjoy!

5

Released Mods / [CRAFT] Improved Interceptor

« on: October 14, 2013, 09:54:37 pm »

Research topic: Improved Interceptor (requires Alien Alloys and UFO Navigation)
Manufacturing requirements: $200,000 + 25x Alien Alloys + 1x UFO Navigation, 32 Workshop space, 5000 engineer hours

Localised for: English (UK), English (US), Español (AL), Español (ES)

While playing on Veteran level, I figured it'd be nice to have a mostly conventional stepping stone towards the Firestorm, given it takes a while to be able to develop and more importantly maintain an Elerium-powered fighter craft. The Retaliator is a fairly modest improvement over its Interceptor cousin, performance-wise, but its primary advantage is that it can be built in X-COM bases and therefore not incur any rental fees.

Tested most of the graphics and even an interception in debug mode. Everything should work correctly, but some testing of the research requirements wouldn't go amiss.

Attached the mod. Extract it to your OpenXcom's data folder and enable the Retaliator ruleset in options.cfg. Enjoy!



PS: Yes, I later read the name "Retaliator" is used by one of X-COM Apocalypse's aircraft, but boo to that!

6

Work In Progress / Quick manufacturing question

« on: October 14, 2013, 03:46:18 am »

I've come up with a small tweak to make plasma pistols more viable to X-COM: remove their Elerium-115 manufacturing requirement.

Thing is, how can I remove a material requirement like that without having to modify the main ruleset directly? The best I've managed is giving it...

Code: [Select]

manufacture:
  - name: STR_PLASMA_PISTOL_CLIP
    requiredItems:
      STR_ELERIUM_115: 0
And while it works just fine, it's rather unseemly as the game tells you it needs 0 units of Elerium. Ideally, the whole "special materials" section wouldn't appear, like when you produce items such as motion scanners or laser rifles, which only cost money. Thing is, if I don't specify something in requiredItems the game unsurprisingly just reads the missing data from the base ruleset.

Using "-1" doesn't get rid of the special materials section, and I fear going ahead with the manufacturing would net me clips AND free Elerium.

Any tips?

7

Suggestions / Improving civilian behaviour

« on: October 14, 2013, 12:49:14 am »

As it stands, at least on Veteran difficulty, civilians are 95% free points for the aliens since it's impossible to save them unless you're willing to take massive losses among your own men. And sometimes not even that is enough to save an acceptable number. I understand civvies work no different than in the original game, but the alien AI has been substantially improved since then, and I think the former require some attention as well.

There's not really much unarmed humans can do against alien soldiers, but they should at least show some instinct of self-preservation instead of wandering around aimlessly, oblivious to the extraterrestrial attack and waiting to get facial plasma surgery.

I don't suggest changing the way they spawn, but wherever they appear, they should...

1) rush (or stay) indoors and find some place to hide, among furniture and/or away from windows.
2) run away from any alien they spot, or at least try to break line of sight.

8

Work In Progress / Always visible soldier psi stats?

« on: October 13, 2013, 10:48:49 pm »

Xcomutil had a nifty feature which allowed the player to see any operative's Psi Strength and Psi Skill without screening them with the Psi Lab. Is there any way to mod the ruleset to allow that or should I put up a suggestion for an advanced option somewhere? I tried modding the soldier Psi Skill minimum, raising it to 1 since that's the trigger to have the psi values show in-game, to no avail: freshly recruited agents still had their psi stats hidden.

9

Open Feedback / Observations: UFO activity and zombies

« on: October 11, 2013, 02:20:12 am »

I started a campaign on Veteran using a nightly build from a couple of days ago, and updated to the latest nightly (2013_10_10_2011) just now, to tackle a nocturnal Snakeman/Chrysalid terror mission in Australia.

Problem 1: There was something strange about the Chrysalids and the civilians in the aforementioned terror mission. I killed a lot of Snakemen and a good bunch of Chrysalids, but only a single zombie I saw wandering down the street. This is the thing: I heard a lot of bwarghjhbl noises from zombifications coming from the fog of war, but barely saw any zombies (nor civilians) with my men's eyes. After a while, the town fell dead silent, and alien turns became very short. There was this Snakeman panicking and berserking sometimes, somewhere, and the mission ended when I found and shot it.

I got an Excellent rating, and I should've taken a screenshot of the results screen, but I can't remember seeing mentions of civilians besides reporting two had been killed by aliens. No "civilians saved" line that I can recall. The only explanation I can guess for that is that there were a bunch of zombies largely inactive in the shadows, and that they were considered neither alien nor civilian. So killing that last Snakeman ended the mission potentially before the surviving zombies had been dealt with.

Problem 2: I set up my initial base in Europe, and haven't expanded yet. I have one small and one large radar system operational. It's early May and I really haven't seen more than 5 or 6 UFOs, while I've already "attended" 4 terror sites. I made some mistakes, and allowed my interceptors to engage a significant portion of those UFOs over water, so I've really only recovered a couple. Russia whined a couple of times, and Australia once, so there's the possibility I'm just unlucky, and that the aliens are having fun elsewhere on the planet.

This is actually my first time playing on Veteran ever, so I hesitated to report this low activity as a potential bug. Maybe it's normal, but it doesn't feel like it. Graphs show considerable spikes of activity in Siberia, Australasia and Southern Africa to a lesser extent, which is mostly coherent with the whining I've gotten from the funding council. But are they really pouring everything in there? Shouldn't activity be higher across the globe? This is just my first OpenXcom game, but I remember much higher UFO traffic in the original game. On Beginner at least, but...

Anyway, I've attached my current savegame, and config file, just in case. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.


EDIT: Reading around the wiki, I found the following quote from Julian Gollop:

Quoting from Julian Gollop's at 'Classic Games Postmortem - XCOM: UFO Defense' at Game Developers Conference 2013:
"The way this worked was very simple. Basically, if you did very well on the last three previous tactical missions and you absolutely trounced the aliens, the aliens would ramp up their end technology level and deployments more quickly. If, on the other hand, conversely you did very badly, the aliens wouldn't throw in some extra stuff. It kinda adjusted the difficulty as you went along."

That might be related to the low activity I'm seeing. When I played the original on Beginner, it was easy to thrill the council, and I consistently got Excellent monthly ratings. Maybe I'm used to unusually high activity levels because of that, because the aliens ramped up their appearances, being affected by my performance. In my current, Veteran, OpenXcom game, my monthly evaluations have been average, barely positive, which is something I'm not familiar with. It's possible my lack of resounding success is considerably impacting UFO activity. And I think it's making the game even harder (not to mention less enjoyable, admittedly), since I don't get much chances to acquire UFO technology. To give an example, I think this is the first time ever I've been forced to actually manufacture alien alloys.

10

Work In Progress / Modding the Psi-Amp

« on: October 07, 2013, 08:19:48 pm »

Hey, guys, long-time X-COM veteran here!

In an effort to perhaps balance psionics a bit, I'm looking into ways to modify the Psi-Amp some, and I've come up with a couple of ideas based on what I read on the wiki.

1) A maxRange variable is mentioned in the documentation, but I've found no instances of it in the actual ruleset. If it actually works, maybe imposing a range limit of 15-20 squares would be a good idea.
2) I figure there's probably some way to make the Psi-Amp a direct line-of-sight weapon, and might be related to its battleType definition, but I'm not sure. Would appreciate some insight into this matter.

While combining both ideas may diminish the item's effectiveness too much, I suppose that used individually at least, the changes should produce interesting results.