Messages

1

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files online Wiki

« on: April 19, 2024, 08:53:19 pm »

The link above describes game engine changes that are not specific to X-Com Files. If the question concerns XCF changes to the main game mechanics, those are not really documented in any one place in a manner that would be understandable or useful to anyone. Many of them can be found in the ruleset files, for example here:

https://github.com/SolariusScorch/XComFiles/blob/master/Ruleset/vars_XCOMFILES.rul

But you'd have to look all of these up in the ruleset reference guide https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Ruleset_Reference_Nightly_(OpenXcom) to try to understand what these mean. And then there are also a lot more in the other ruleset files. For example, the sniper/spotter mechanics of many enemy units.

All in all, the amount of "changes" in XCF compared to vanilla OXCE UFO game is huge and will take quite a while to get used to. And if you don't study various threads here, it's very difficult to learn the details of all of them.

2

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

« on: April 19, 2024, 06:17:51 am »

IMHO that is clearly intended. By the time you get Enforcer-"armors", you already have trained your AI units a lot. You wouldn't even want Enforcer-"armor" to be tied to an untrained AI unit, but prefer to be able to use in the AI unit of your choosing.

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OpenXcom Extended / Re: switching between oxc and oxce with seperate executables

« on: April 17, 2024, 09:45:18 pm »

I'm not sure what you mean with your main point. Obviously you launch the executables a different way, but what else.

There is a caveat with switching back and forth. If you go from OXCE to OXC and back to OXCE, I think your OXCE-related settings are going to disappear. The same thing happens if you switch between mods and each mod forces its own settings. Based on my experience, essentially each time you switch between major mods you may need to readjust your settings. It would certainly be smoother if the settings could somehow be preserved (except by launching the executable with reference to a separate settings file for each), but I think that would cause other issues when the settings provided by OXCE change over time.

4

Released Mods / Re: X-Chronicles Release, v.0.99.6

« on: April 15, 2024, 07:56:23 pm »

How for the love of god you have 19m from council? I barely scrap by selling most of the stuff since i cant keep more than 30 scientists in July of 2021 and i just got x weapons

Note that this was almost two years ago. The mod has likely changed A LOT in the meanwhile. So I'm not sure if my earlier comment is still too relevant. (I haven't played the mod since; I'd personally prefer a mod that uses completely a fantasy setting. It is difficult for me to suspend the disbelief as there are 2000's guns and weapons available but they just don't work anymore.)

5

OXCE Bugs / Re: [BUG] Cannot hit unconscious unit if it lies beside a wall

« on: April 14, 2024, 08:15:37 pm »

I suppose you can still be on the same square and shoot down into it (by targeting the same tile as where you are)? This is something I learned from some stream a long time ago. So I suppose this issue only affects "real trajectories".

6

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.2: The Colors of Sin

« on: April 14, 2024, 01:03:04 pm »

Never mind that you can still be reasonably sure that an on-target grenade will kill an appropriate target. I've not really seen people double- or triple-tap enemies with 0-turn grenades except in cases where their effectiveness is in question - stun grenades, Mutons vs regular grenades, and the like. So in practice, this distinction of "does it kill or does it not" is not as relevant as you think. People tend to just live with the results, and these are close enough to instant grenades that they don't suffer overmuch from doing so.

In the early game, higher-tier cultists quite often don't get killed by a single grenade. For example, priest and chosen of dagon take only 70 % from concussive, and even a well-placed dynamite might not kill them. Likewise for red dawn, pioneers and red-ops take 90 % damage but have high health. I don't even bother to kill them with just one grenade, at the very least you need two or a dynamite. This is why in my SH/IM games I always throw dynamites (or hi-ex) to those enemies that are close enough (the throw range) to try to ensure they actually get killed (even though even a dynamite does not guarantee a kill) and don't wander around to spot my agents.

So even in the early game, whether a grenade kills the enemy or not is IMHO very much a thing. But I agree with you that it doesn't necessarily make the game easier. Misthrown grenades exploding on your own agents would probably make the game more difficult, not less difficult. For example in the early game when you use helicopter, grenades occasionally appear to hit the rotors of the helicopter and drop down on the ground. With non-instant grenades this is no problem if you have TUs to move and/or someone to pick it up. With instant grenades this would be lethal.

7

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.2: The Colors of Sin

« on: April 13, 2024, 01:02:00 pm »

I think the question was how do you know to which missions you can take low-PST soldiers.

You learn by experience or you look at the rulesets, and take some chances (until you have obtained hyperwave decoder).

Low-PST soldiers are far more viable than in in vanilla as the proportion of missions which they can't take is much lower.

And the low-PST soldiers are bound to die off sooner than later anyway (unless you save scum) so eventually this problem goes away. When recruiting new agents you will in later game screen out at least the lowest ones.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.2: The Colors of Sin

« on: April 12, 2024, 08:22:17 pm »

I've personally used instant grenades in vanilla and also in the mods that provide it. I think they essentially just speed up the game - no need to wait for explosions or a turn for the smoke to settle. That's why all the speedrunners also use them. I suppose one of the benefits is also that you will immediately see the effects of the grenade so you don't need to spam extra grenades at the same target just to make sure the damage will be sufficient to knock the enemy out, not just harm it.

As for difficulty, I don't see why they would make the game much easier. Granted, if you kill the target it might not be able to reaction fire if it dies. But this is likely a relatively rare scenario.

As Juku said, instant grenades prevent you from using ridiculous grenade relaying techniques which I always disliked and have little basis in reality. However, you can still drop a grenade and the next guy can pick it up and throw it. But I suppose you'll just have to accept this in a turn-based game.

Instant grenades are actually more dangerous for your team, because if you misthrow it and it hits your own squad (or you your craft or whatever), it goes boom and your guys die. Which is realistic and can be nasty if you play ironman (as I always do), and with instant grenades you actually have to be much more careful with grenades.  So I'm not sure if I buy the argument that instant grenades are easier. They certainly make the gameplay faster, but not sure if it's easier or not.

9

OXCE Bugs / Re: Zigzag?

« on: April 12, 2024, 04:24:11 pm »

I'm not sure if the player should care all that much if the path taken differs slightly from the most direct path.

The issue mostly comes up if you have intentionally or unintentionally (e.g. a knocked out soldier) deployed proxy or other mines and you want to make sure that no-one will be moving next to them. Then the precise path to be taken is of vital importance. Then as a player you'll use path preview and other tools at your disposal to make sure the soldiers won't run into the mines.

In that case as a player I'd be most interested to ensure that path preview and the actual path taken would be the same. If I recall correctly, there have been some cases where the path preview and the actual path have been different, leading to nasty mine explosions.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.2: The Colors of Sin

« on: April 12, 2024, 08:55:19 am »

Personal template is soldier-specific, while the other one is general. Save+ stores (and restores) also the soldier armor, not just equipment.

If you want to use soldier-specific personal templates, you can store them with 'S' hotkey and restore with 'L'. So re-equipping the same stuff for the same soldiers would always work and be about 10-15 seconds of work if you just TAB through the soldiers and press L on each of them. If you prefer equipment templates, you can save them with CTRL-[1-9] and restore them with pressing 1-9. Likewise, you could restore everything in just a few seconds provided that you don't need to customize the equipment.

11

OpenXcom Extended / Re: Parsing soldier stats from .sav

« on: April 12, 2024, 07:34:32 am »

The function prepareStatsWithBonuses() with all the things it calls might be want you essentially are looking to duplicate. Not sure if you really want it all.

https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/blob/oxce-plus/src/Savegame/Soldier.cpp#L2045

12

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.2: The Colors of Sin

« on: April 12, 2024, 07:03:42 am »

Did you try to save the equipment you want to have (including pre-primed grenades) to an equipment template and restoring that template in the next mission? I think it should work, but I'm not sure if I used it myself. Also, pre-priming might work with alternative apoc-style equipment option, but never used that much myself.

13

OpenXcom Extended / Re: OXCE (OpenXcom Extended) main thread

« on: April 09, 2024, 10:35:15 am »

Not exactly close combat, the fact is that after activating FMPE, I began to receive such a notification “the attack was repelled by the enemy” and the soldier simply began to shoot a little away from the enemy at whom I was aiming. Then I decided to move 3 squares away from the target so that the alien could not push away my weapon and I could finally shoot him, but again he repelled my attack. In the end, I entered two commands "createsMeleeThreat: false" and "ignoresMeleeThreat: true" after which my shots were no longer reflected.

If you move away from all enemy units, this should not occur.

However, if you are adjacent to another enemy unit, that other unit can CQC you and prevent shooting at the original unit (from which you are not adjacent). I suppose that might be what you experienced but didn't notice it. It certainly can be confusing at times.

Rule of thumb: don't have any enemy units next to you if you want to avoid CQC mechanics.

14

Brutal AI / Re: Grenade shortcut

« on: April 08, 2024, 12:29:10 pm »

These shortcuts make assumptions about which grenade you take and prime. Suppose there are multiple ones (like EMP grenades, gas grenades, regular grenades, dynamites, etc.) and they have been equipped at various locations on the soldier's body. Meridian's point was, I think, that implementing such shortcuts makes some assumptions and will in many situations (if there are many options to choose from) lead to unexpected results that players will be dissatisfied with.

Now, as a player, the only thing I would like to see more straightforward would be a way to eliminate the turn counter when priming the grenade. I have only seen it used once (in Stone Lake's XCF streams) and never used anything except 0 myself. IIRC BAI already does this.

As a player, when I'm using grenades extesively I usually preprime them when equipping the soldiers. Then using and throwing them is much faster and smoother (and you can throw 2 or 3 grenades per turn). But this is often only an applicable strategy in the early game. Later, when your soldiers improve you might switch away from these tactics. And don't want to preprime grenades later on because if the soldier gets knocked down, the grenades are going to go boom. So you'll also need to be careful with how you deploy your troops. Still, a valid strategy especially with sniper/spotter mods where you'll need to avoid shooting certain enemies.

15

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

« on: April 06, 2024, 12:34:14 pm »

Terramite and titanium are not the same thing, though. They are similar and related (you could say that terramite is a special variant of titanium), but outright buying alien alloys wouldn't be logical.

Maybe sharing some tech would allow buying tritanium ammo (a bit similar to how UAC outsourcing allows you to buy some stuff from UAC)? Not sure how useful that would be in the game, but at least it could have some use depending on when you do it.