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Messages - Mobling

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XPiratez / Re: Can we get Rid of open Equipment Piles ?
« on: November 12, 2021, 12:24:04 am »
The easiest way to avoid this problem is to equip your gals before the mission using the inventory button on the craft equip screen. After equipping all of your soldiers with your preferred loadout, hit CTRL+ALT+X to remove any items not currently being worn by a unit. Then manually add whatever items you might need in case of an emergency or a "surprise" encounter like zombies or whatever.

It's a pain, I know, but using saved loadouts helps. Doing this also helps with mitigating the loss from having your main transport being shot down by hunter-killers.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Weapon balance / meta
« on: November 03, 2019, 12:15:21 pm »
I have to admit, I am very much on the minigun train. The early game for me is a rush to miniguns, which you can get in around 2-4 months of research. After that, light and normal miniguns can carry me until I can equip the entire base with laser rifles. Even at that stage, miniguns are still a safer option for most missions. The only time my all-minigun tactic really doesn't work is when we get off the skyranger and see mutons or gazers. Back on the ship, boys.

I've seen many people say that miniguns aren't overpowered, and that they're just one of many types of playstyles. This is probably true. But for me miniguns make the game so much faster and (unfortunately) much easier. You can equip 12 soldiers with miniguns and 4 with special roles (medics or grenadiers or snipers and what not) and literally blast through most missions in under 10 turns, even HQ assaults. Black Lotus HQ in particular is laughably easy by just spraying a hail of bullets down each hallway and closing the doors. And any early sectoid UFO is a gimme if I have miniguns at that point.

For the sake of experimenting with other playstyles I should probably avoid purchasing a single minigun in my next campaign. Okay, maybe just one. Or two.

I admit that I have a problem. I may have to mod them out of the game to resist the temptation.

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The X-Com Files / Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« on: May 01, 2019, 04:29:44 am »
The concept is really interesting but it's questionable one would be able to recruit a regular citizen, no matter how able and experienced, into a government organization just like that. Even the most able individuals need a background check and, even more important and what's currently ignored - some idea of what they're getting themselves into.

The Screen Citizen job is meant to represent the process of background checks and carefully revealing to the citizen a sense of the scope of what they're getting into. The ones who are ineligible are represented by the sizable number of outcomes that describe their issue (a lack of discretion, a criminal background, a lack of talent). Keep in mind that the stock of citizens you're facing in these missions aren't average people off the street like the civilians in terror missions and such are—they're civilians who've gotten wind of the paranormal happenings going on in the world and have banded together into leagues of independent investigators and vigilantes. As the mod's chances are now, less than a tenth of these people are considered to be roughly equivalent in loyalty, athleticism, and professionalism to the agents you recruit from intelligence and investigative agencies around the globe.

In the second version I'll rewrite the research article to convey these points a bit better. I'll also probably make the chance of a recruitable soldier even lower, but make the other outcomes more rewarding and less punishing. I plan on bumping the engineer hours for each screening up to 120 from 72, to better reflect the difficulty of the screening process. Under these numbers, it would take a single engineer 5 days to do a background check, interview the citizen, and carefully reveal to them what they need to know.

I still think it's very important to get code support first which so the game could track face and other qualities of the person. No feature that requires external fiddling (like save editing, manual modifications) is a finished, decently working feature. Even fluffwise, brought above example of "we turned this caucasian lady into a burly black man" would be a huge stretch even if someone would try to improvise fluff for it.
Especially since the point of it is to recruit those particular individuals, not merely be able to pick them to get some other, random individual added to the roster.

I wouldn't say that the purpose of the mod is to recruit specific individual citizens. I'd say my motivation in creating this mod was to:
1. Add an interesting feature that expands the purpose and rewards of League missions
2. Add a feature that uses the new randomized production feature (which I think is so gosh darn cool)
2. Provide a mechanic that aids the player in imagining a backstory for recruited soldiers gained from the screening process

The code you're describing would first require a broad range of qualities to exist in civilians that only exist in soldiers. Civilians and enemies don't have a race or gender other than what their paperdoll, sprite, and sfx depict, and those paperdolls have absolutely no variety in facial appearance. Citizens also totally lack generated names, nationalities, and randomized stats. If code existed that gave civilians those qualities, that would be pretty neat, but I don't think anybody will take the time to write this (I doubt OpenXcom could even support this without breaking a whole bunch of things).

Long story short, the only viable way to give those faceless, nondescript civilians an identity is to make them a soldier and use the identity randomly generated for them or to manually create one yourself.

Assuming you finish the mission with no civilian casualties, you're going to be screening these captures in groups of around 4-12, depending on the particular mission. These citizens don't have a distinct identity to begin with, and you're going to be screening them in bulk, so I don't think it's a big deal.

When you screen 10 concerned civilians and only get one potential agent, and the agent ends up being a black man, you don't have imagine a white woman transforming into a black man. You can do the much, much easier job of imagining that the only member of that civilian league you recruited was a black man. And if you really, really, really wanted that soldier to have been a white woman to represent a particular civilian that stood out to you, you can make that happen with about 10 seconds of clicking.

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The X-Com Files / Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« on: April 29, 2019, 04:05:51 am »
Hello and thank you for deeming my mod deserving a submod.
I don't think it's a bad concept, but one thing is bothering me: you can't set and properties on the produced soldier, so recruiting a white woman can give you a black male agent... :)

Yeah, it's a shame that we can't do this (or if we can I have no clue how to).

Luckily, the race and gender of a soldier is tied to the face, and anybody who is really bothered by the lack of continuity between captured citizens and recruited soldiers can manually change each soldier's avatar by pressing M or right-clicking on the paperdoll while in the inventory screen (this only works in the base, not during a mission). And of course, you can change the soldier's name and nationality within their stats page.

It's a bit of a hassle to do all that manually, but then again I think a commander who would go the extra mile to do all this would develop an even stronger attachment to the soldier in question, which is essentially the purpose of this mod anyway. :D

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The X-Com Files / Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« on: April 28, 2019, 04:10:19 am »
All of the outcomes of the screening process only take up the prison space of the concerned citizen that they are made from. If you wanted to, you could end up imprisoning a citizen with a negative sell value for the entire game if you don't need the prison space and don't want to pay the cost of selling them.

The citizens that you can screen for recruits are the Concerned Civilians found exclusively in missions like League Apprehensions. These can be somewhat rare to begin with, especially during the first year when money is the tightest. The research option for Screening Citizens is locked behind Promotion II, since it's unlikely for someone to encounter these missions and want to use this option before that.

The recruitment process requires the Intelligence Lab facility (a requirement that the X-Com Headquarters facility also fulfills) as well as engineers, so I don't think the Promotion II requirement is too restricting.

The outcome of "manufactured" citizens are negatively priced to outweigh the value that a soldier, scientist, or engineer has. You can turn a civilian capture with a 15k sell price into a potential recruit with a value of at least 40k that can be sold instead of recruited. Additionally, the most common result of screening citizens are currently Inept Volunteers which have a sell price of 0, so you can get rid of them immediately without a second thought. You can also get a few non-recruitable results that have a positive sell price, such as minor criminals or bottom-tier cultists.

The numbers still need some tweaking. Right now, you're almost certainly better off selling concerned citizens for 15k a pop rather than gambling on screening them if you're short on money. However, if you like random chance manufacturing, or just the idea of turning a nameless citizen into a unique soldier, it's an option worth trying out.

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The X-Com Files / [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« on: April 27, 2019, 02:53:57 am »
Hi everybody. This is my very first mod, so feedback and criticism are welcome.
This mod allows you to screen the concerned citizens that you capture during League Apprehensions and similar missions for potential recruits to your X-Com personnel. Those pesky independent investigators can put their snooping to good use as dedicated X-Com agents, engineers, and even scientists, so long as they have the physical or intellectual talents necessary for the job. Most citizens you screen will either refuse or be unfit for recruitment, and ridding them from your prison cells can be a financial burden. A few may even be low-level cultists.

I am famously bad at explaining things on forum posts, so I'll try to let the images speak for themselves.

Spoiler:




To install, unzip the package and place the "Recruit Concerned Citizens" folder in your mods directory, usually located in /OpenXcom_XFiles/user/mods/.
As far as I know, this mod should be compatible with future versions. If it isn't, send me a message and I'll try to fix it.

Please let me know what you think, and tell me if you think I should add to or remove some of the possible production outcomes. Thanks!

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Have you tried changing the language to en-us?

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I always distinguish my starting six by removing one of their names and putting = around it. So somebody like Groovy Esmeralda or Metal Bang would become =Esmeralda= or =Bang=. I also replace the first name of the first gal to level up with "Captain" so I can pretend that the person running everything is out there on the field with the other gals. Silly, I know, but it helps my immersion.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions
« on: July 15, 2017, 04:28:31 pm »
Those missions should spawn with an unconscious but alive gal/government agent. Are you killing them by accident via friendly fire? Maybe you're taking too long and they're expiring from stun damage?

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions
« on: July 13, 2017, 07:55:55 am »
How useful are suppressed pistols? I'm thinking about changing up my playstyle to use camouflage gear more often but I'm not sure if suppressed pistols are worth the precious mutant alliance tokens

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions
« on: April 15, 2017, 05:04:38 pm »
Are camo paint and guerilla gear useful at night before you develop night-ops? Or are they best for day missions only?

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Here's the artist of that poster, so that credit is given where it's due

http://margenal.deviantart.com/

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports
« on: November 01, 2016, 08:11:42 am »
So the game crashes when I complete my first giant spider hunt. Attached is a save before the last spider is killed.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports
« on: October 31, 2016, 10:47:03 am »
Hello world, this is my first post on the OpenXcom forums. Props to all of you guys active in developing, supporting, and contributing to this amazing mod. But to cut to the chase, my game crashes immediately before the funding screen at the end of the first month. The error message indicates it has something to do with the new underwater treasure missions. 

Attached is a screencap of the crash and a save file shortly beforehand. Forgive me if I am not reporting bugs the right way.

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