Messages

1

XPiratez / Re: [TOTAL CONVERSION] Piratez Extended - 0.95 - 27 Sep - Combat Stress

« on: October 01, 2015, 01:09:36 am »

I'm no longer talking about the timed decay of morale Combat Stress, I'm talking about the newer one. The way it waves back and forth adds a certain realism that picks my interest up and I would love to see it added to the enemies that make sense. A soldier is a soldier, he's not going to start panicking easily, but his non-battle buddy? He will have a harder time, he was never trained for war like the soldier was, he's a mook, a rookie.

And while one could expect to be ransomed for money, how they know that's what is actually going to happen? And the Guild's pilot, in the lore it says how well they take care of their ships, since losing the ships could make you a Debt-Slave to the guild. I would be jumpy if I were on his shoes.

On the Raider's case, they are as much outlaw organizations as we are, and are Fractured. Raider is the catchall term here for all the groups that go around pillaging and attacking people, reinforces from another Raider Sub-Faction is not likely. The local Gov't would strike back sooner or later with how they keep going after their civilian zones (which is why we don't go around striking random civilian zones and carefully shot down their ships every once and while) and with us in the battlefield means more time spent on said war-zone then getting out with the loot. Of course, our gals would be jumpy too if the Gov't thought WE were the actual raiders.

Yeah I can add this new Morale handling to enemies as well, for the sake of general consistency, just warning: this is going to make them to persistently panic much harder, as there are no enemies with Bravery below 60; Guild Bodyguards will be basically guaranteed to never panic with their Bravery 90 (it was almost impossible to make them panic before, maybe when a Bodyguard was one of the last few remaining enemies). Naturally I can also reshuffle the Bravery of enemies from 60-100 to 50-100 scale... But this is more work.

As for the release, couple of days I think. Depending on my time and energy, I want to add some other stuff as well.

Could you give me some insight in what the work you need to do would be like? Not just with the current subject but in general too, but no need to put too much information on it, just the bullet points.

2

XPiratez / Re: [TOTAL CONVERSION] Piratez Extended - 0.95 - 27 Sep - Combat Stress

« on: October 01, 2015, 12:29:27 am »

1. I can use the same argument... it is a game rule that you suffer battle stress and they don't. Btw. they actually lose morale... even more(!) than you... because you are killing them! The average expected result for an average battle for even a below-average player... is victory with 100% losses on alien side and not more than 30% losses on Xcom side. After killing just a few of the aliens and a few turns... it would be basically instant victory for Xcom with all remaining aliens panicking in the corners.

Talking about humans and mutants that make sense to here, like people not really trained for war like The KKK Humanists, Academicians, Engineers, that sort of people, not the aliens, boy.

2. This will sound harsh, but it is really the only thing I am able to say... if you want them to panic all the time, maybe you should try playing Solitaire instead and let us have fun. I don't want Xcom to become Solitaire... please for the love of Cthulhu, have mercy.

Wow, calm your fingers down and relax. I'm not going to hack into your PC and github and change all the files and rulesets so that all the versions of xcom you have is "Solitaire". Take some time to breath, there's no need to get this agitated over my comments or my opinion. Forcing other people to play something the way you want it is a silly thing to do, right?

That new formula you are suggesting sound better so all the gals under 50 have to be trained (I wouldn't sell this abuse at this point, bravery is hard to raise). Then there could be morale raising abilities.

And we do not want this mechanic on enemies, not with the current formula. They'll drop their weapon and move all the way to the other end of the map and we'll end with both sides disabled.

God, no. The new formula sounds better by mileages, it's something I'm looking forwards to. Just saying, having the enemy also suffer from it would add in a certain balance and "filling" to the mod, a rather nice touch I'd say.

3

XPiratez / Re: [TOTAL CONVERSION] Piratez Extended - 0.95 - 27 Sep - Combat Stress

« on: September 30, 2015, 10:22:24 pm »

Would you enjoy playing against crippled and after several turns completely impotent enemies? If yes, then why yes?

PS: the answer is of course no; actually they lose even less morale than in vanilla OpenXcom (which is a feature of OpenXcom Extended, not PirateZ)

Because it's a game rule? Why is it okay for mutant pirates to panic for taking too long to finish a mission but the same should not be applied to the enemy? From a in-lore point of view, it would make sense that the rather frail and non-war minded Academicians castes, along with other low-ranking enemy units like Humanists Activists or Raiders. They also would prefer to live to see the next day like the pirates would prefer to live to get the next day's booty.

Your ship was just shutdown by criminals mutants, who want to kill you and take your treasure or take the treasure AND you back to whatever hell-hole they crawled from.

Or your are in a raiding/pogrom party, killing (and looting) civilians (and mutants) when out of nowhere an ship lands and from it a sizable enemy force disembarks, intent in stopping and killing you. You have no way to escape as quickly as the new enemy reinforces arrived. Why not panic? The mission has gone Awry for you.

And when the last standing enemy is hiding, running around in the shadows while a force of +10 Pirates are searching for him. How is he keeping himself calm?

I would rather not have to try and herd a force that's going to end up crippled and several turns later become completely impotent unless the AI is also playing by the same rules.

There's an equilibrium point equal to gal's Bravery, and Morale always increases/decreases to hit this target. So only gals with Morale 40 or less will panic on their own now... but there's much less Morale buffer for everyone else, so even losing a single hand can send others panicking. Otoh, high-Bravery gals now recover from very low Morale (eg. caused by psi attacks) really quickly.

This sounds quite balanced and a lot more stable ground for a soldier's morale. This seems more like Combat Stress, your more constantly going up and down during the battle, doubts and hope coming quickly as they fade.

From my limited experience, it rather creates 2 ways of fighting - first, go in with guns blazing and be immune to mass panic through keeping the morale very high; second, if you play carefully from the start, you can still do so, but you need to be even more careful than you were before. Naturally, your low Bravery gals (40 or less, although 40 takes a LOT of time to panic, at least 10 turns) will eventually panic none the less.

[...]

...Going back to Sanbella's question, this mechanic can be added to all enemies as well - it would be somewhat detrimental to the player, since bog-standard enemies have Bravery of 80, and the biggest cowards - 60. It'd be a bit easier to break them, but they'd pretty quickly stop panicking.

And this adds a good tension to the game, it becomes a game about hunting the hunter. I really enjoy how Combat Stress seems to works now. ETA for a new download?

4

XPiratez / Re: [TOTAL CONVERSION] Piratez Extended - 0.95 - 27 Sep - Combat Stress

« on: September 30, 2015, 12:55:56 pm »

Do the enemies also take Combat Stress? If not, then why not?