Messages

46

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: September 01, 2016, 06:39:19 pm »

It's kinda funny how you regulars find convenient excuses explaining the quirks of the mod.

Anyway, I'm content I had to phase out bows, it's fine in the context of the game as-is.
But, as I've outlined earlier, I think it'd be way cooler to focus on different things in a playthrough and on others in another.
Like, you can follow gunpowder weapons and eventually get to the kustom blunderbuss etc., or follow plasma weapons and get to the BFG etc., or follow bows and get explosive and stun arrows.
However, unlike currently, you shouldn't be able to do ALL those things. It just leads to the bloated list of 25 shotgun types you're never going to use and 25 armor types that were outclassed the second you researched them - and having to scroll for 25 pages before you get to the thing you REALLY wanted to produce.

If Dioxine doesn't want to do that it's fine - his mod, his rules. I'm just saying I think it'd be cooler that way.

The only things I really think have to be adressed are the lighting issue (discussed in another thread) and the pacing issue (dead end if you haven't researched the right stuff at the right time).
Everything else is purely a matter of taste/preference to me.

47

XPiratez / Re: Any way to make your gals emit light on night missions?

« on: September 01, 2016, 06:29:04 pm »

I played (very) many more missions since starting this thread and have basically come to avoid night missions if at all possible.
IMO, IF I was doing that, it should be for reasons like in the original X-COM, where night missions were just considerably harder.
In PirateZ, first and foremost, night missions are hard on my eyes. Were it not for the interface, I'd be hard pressed to tell whether my monitor is turned on or not.
At least before I create some illumination with flares, flames or whatever.
I still call bullshit on the idea that this somehow increases immersion or whatever. It's ridiculous and should be rolled back to the way it was before if no way can be found to make everything properly lit without alerting the enemies to you.
Call me an idiot, but I want to be able to actually SEE the game I'm playing.

Note that on some map types - like arctic or desert - night fighting is usually not a big deal, due to the high contrast (background is yellow or whiteish), but still.
All recommendations found herein are like when I go to the car dealership because the lights of my new BMW don't work and he tells me: Don't drive the BMW at night then...

48

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 31, 2016, 07:58:49 pm »

I dunno, I'Ve kinda grown to like them as an alternative to firearms.
I still retired them for the most part, mostly because bows are mostly useless against well armored foes.
There are no explosive arrows with dynamite, no stun arrows tipped in tranquilizer, not even fire arrows for bows other than the hunting bow. (Btw., I also thought it was weird that ammo was completely incompatible between bows). The Longbow takes too much TUs compared to it's increased damage (I suppose it has increased damage) already offset by reduced accuracy.
No bows other than the Hunting Bow have a snapshot option, i.e. they have no reaction fire.
And, of course, bows are pretty useless in closed quarters.
Still, with some improvements, they'd remain a viable choice far longer, but I dunno if that is desired or not.

Btw., when I started this topic I had a little less than 20 million in the bank. I just surpassed the 100 million mark with almost twice as much income as costs (8.1m income vs. 4.7m mainenance) - I still pay my brainers for sitting on their hands, and my Runts mostly churn out Grog or (if I have apples) Chateau De La Morte for sale, because they don't have anything better to do with them.
I have now enough power armor parts to build a single loader armor (yay!) and managed to snag some stuff from my first mansion invasion (these things take WAAAAAAAAY too much time for the gain, not going to do another one unless I have to).

49

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 30, 2016, 08:17:41 pm »

Otherwise most techs would be optional, and what I consider shitty noob traps - like the whole Gauss line in TFTD, wasted research. And I don't like wasted research.

Well, obviously you much prefer let players run into dead ends, the only hope of salvation being potentially years of grinding. 
If a line of research leads to the most powerful weapon or armor in the game, extremely potent stunning, a poweful support unit, a great fighter or whatever, can it really be described as a shitty noob trap?

Ah, yeah. But it's hardly a "primitive" weapon, quite the opposite. Also it is the most complicated recipe of all weapons.

I swear I didn't select this on purpose. It's just a weapon I ran across browsing the tech viewer. If this is an unusal outlier, just imagine I hadn't mentioned it. 

So you a) don't like throwing and bows being lumped together, or b) do you feel like your overspecialization lead you into some trouble? Because a) unavoidable, number of skills is strictly limited, b) exactly as intended.

None of the two, actually. As I wrote, it's relatively easy to get out of the "trap" (this ain't the new XCOM) and I fully understand you had to pick a skill and it made sense to pick throwing. No arguing. If anything, I was surprised just how powerful bows were when compared to anything else I could field at the time and for many, many months after.

I can't do anything about OXCom engine being glitchy (because miss at 125% is always caused by a glitch - you'll never miss it if you have a clear line of shot, just sometimes game thinks you have a clear shot, while reality is that you have no possibility of hitting), or about the vagaries of pure randomness.

Yah, I wasn't trying to put the blame on you, it was merely an observation. Even gals that had been using it for a while can only get two or at best three shots with the bow off in a round, and it'll take quite some time before this won't exhaust their stamina post haste. So there's some counterbalancing, no doubt- especially with further improvements to LOS recently made.
Still, it was funny how much I loathed seeing trees on a map during that time, because they'd block the arcs. And still there was nothing like not even leaving the Buenaventura, just climbing on the roof, spotting with parrots and clearing the map with archery fire. Fun times.

50

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 30, 2016, 07:28:39 pm »

Well, you might call it railroading what I'm advocating, but I think it's a bit harsh to use that term on it.
I already described what I meant with "impossible to miss", too.

I propagate defining a set of mandatory techs in each phase of the game (such as the one during which there are Megascorpion Hunts) and making sure the game only moves on to the next stage when you have researched all those techs. I.e., you don't have Animal Poison yet? The game can't progress to the phase where, I dunno, Reticulans start appearing or whatever.
The stages of Piratez are much harder to decipher than those in X-Com.
There can be tons of tech that you can permanently miss, but it should always be nice to have stuff, nothing that can stop the game from going on.

If "basically every more or less basic tech is required to finish the game", too many techs are mandatory and you should cut back on that ($0.02).
Why must Schood Graduation require Chateau De La Mort? Why must Advanced Chemistry require Heavy Flamer, Durathread Armor, Smoke-Ops gear and the Contact to Crazy Hanna (plus seven other things)? The tech web is full of such overly complicated relationships.

About complicated recipes, I think I was talking about the Kustom Blunderbuss, which requires like 2 Military Shotguns, a CAWS and a Blunderbuss or something like that.

Regarding bows, throwing is COMPLETELY the wrong skill, since archery should be a different (much harder to train) skill altogether. 
I do understand why the decision has been made as-is, but if - like I - you're heavily relying on bows for like a year or more of ingame time, transitioning to something with more oomph (which likely will be a firearm) will be harder since your gals aren't trained with firearms. It's doable, though - and you have options like the Dojo and stuff, or just using weapons that cause area destruction or fire rapidly.

There's a seperate thread for that, but it's just astonishing how often you can miss a 125% aimed shot with a sniper gun at medium distance while hitting an altar boy your gal can't see herself in the head across all the friggin' map was (and still is when I unpack the old trusty bows) a routine thing in my game. Unless I misread the visibility thing has been changed in the meantime, but I'd rather have seen firearms being made more accurate or something. I always wonder how the AI units do it. The Sectopod has like 50% firearms skill, but boy does he like to one-shot kill crouched rookies in camouflaged armor a footbal yard away on a roof behind a fence in thick smoke. 

51

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 30, 2016, 12:26:30 am »

I'm not sure the tech tree has to be trimmed per se - I love that there's tons of things to discover - but I can only repeat myself, crucial tech should be impossible to miss, no matter your playstyle.
It'd be totally cool for replayability if there'd be entire lines of tech relying on such exotic circumstances, but it's very frustrating when you run out of stuff to do and don't know why.

Maybe also make some stuff mutually exclusive (or failing that almost so by having very time consuming "gate technologies")?

For example, I feel that the entire line of age of sails type gunpowder weapons is nonsensical. The early versions are too weak and inaccurate (especially in the hands of early game rookies) and by the time I got access to the later version stuff I also had access to plain better "modern" weaponry.
And if I thought something sounded like a fun thing to try, it had anti-thematic production requirements (this blunderbuss requires a modern military shotgun and two assault rifles to construct) and/or some extremely rare stuff.
Also, all this crap just fills up lists and makes the game harder to play. More of a good thing isn't always still a good thing.

But if you'd concentrate on ye old gunpowder weapons (and get good ones) OR specialize on more modern firearms OR on energy weapons etc., with maybe some super exotic stuff available only when you run across a rare mission variant or something, that'd be totally great when replaying.

52

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 30, 2016, 12:00:28 am »

Yeah - I obviously went into the game blind as well.
I tend to be a collector in these things, but the Piratez early game is more than a little overwhelming for the new player.
There's tons of new things to discover - in general, but also when it comes to tech. And many familiar things aren't there to rely on.
You usually have like 20 items to research to chose from with no way of knowing that some of them actually belong into a different phase of the game (like when you accidentally run across a Doom, a mercenary or a Star Gods pogrom early on), some are totally useless crap, some can safely be put aside for a while, some lead to absolutely essential discoveries that will otherwise prevent the game from continuing properly etc.
Like I wrote earlier, from a newbie player perspective, I feel that the main game progression tech branch should be impossible to miss.
If you absolutely have to pull off stunts like making an esoteric interrogation mandatory for progression, I'd suggest you only progress from that phase of the game to the next when this mandatory operation has been performed.

Anyway, when it comes to capturing live specimen ... it doesn't help that you don't have reliable access to potent stunning options early in the game.
It took me a good while to get Stun Batons, which aren't reliable enough to make use of unless constantly save-scumming. Same goes for the Cattle Prod. Stasis Grenades are also a mixed bag and are unsuitable for unexpected situations cause they take an eternity or two to prime (I'm ok with that, just saying).
In this phase of the game, I generally used bows - which are also a bit of a newbie trap, as they train the wrong skill (throwing instead of shooting), but are just immensely powerful otherwise.
With many enemies, you end up accidentally stunning someone sooner or later with the bow, but appearently it was always lethal to the Megascorpions.
I was also overly cautious I guess, as I hadn't yet discovered that melee appearently doesn't work at all in the mod. No creature I encountered has ever performed a melee attack.
I even cornered a Chrysallid between a fridge and a door and prodded him with the Stun Baton for like 50 turns in a row (captured him alive in the end too). He never even snapped at me.
Had I known this earlier I'd surely have captured a Megascorpion alive.

Is there such a thing as a non-crucial capture? Who wouldn't want to capture and interrogate everything and everyone? Would that be any kind of proper play? You say strange things.

Btw., the mod even seems to encourage players not to always attack everything. For example, many bootypedia entries suggest to hold back for fear of reprisals (if we shoot one of those down, there will be consequences, we can attack these, but it will seriously hurt our relations etc.) - I never found a way to check such indivdual relations, and I ended up ignoring any such suggestions and just doing all missions whenever possible.

53

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 29, 2016, 08:38:27 pm »

In my case I need Poisons & Acids though. And there doesn't seem to be a way to get it this far in the game.

Is there even a chance for Bandit Pogroms or more Megascorpion Hunts at this point?

54

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 28, 2016, 07:16:36 pm »

Well, obviously I haven't seen a bandit pogrom in a long time then either.

I stil don't think I'm educated enough to join in the higher tier discussions elsewhere on these forums, but, just an honest innocent question, wouldn't it be thinkable to make "Cave Hunt" like projects to net you the most basic techs neccessary to progress in the game?
They could unlock only after you progressed way down an alternative research branch, but extremely basic stuff like Animal Poison research shouldn't stop the progress of your game in it's tracks (unless the RNG gods provide you with just the right type of mission, which might happen in 30 seconds or in 30 years of ingame time), should it?

55

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 28, 2016, 06:26:25 pm »

Indeed. Must've overlooked it - this mod (for better and for worse) just has way too much content for the good old X-Com UI to deal with, even with the improvements that have been made.

I ended up parsing the savegame itself, and as it turns out, what I'm actually missing is a Ghoul interrogation. Now, where the heck do you even encounter Ghouls?
Are they part of the Doom-themed pogroms (I only had a single one of those in three years of ingame play)?

One of the gals that have been with me from the very beginning says in her kill log she killed two Ghouls, but that's all the reference I can find about them.

Do I read the tech-parser right, I should get Poisons & Acids "free" when I interrogate a ghoul, but alternatively I can research it from Primitive Weapons and Animal Poison.
For that, I lack Animal Poison. For many months in the early game, Megascorpion Hunts were a staple, and I still have about 50 corpses stashed away - how comes this never netted me the Animal Poison research? Or do you get it from someplace else?

Edit: Ah, from checking ingame, it seems I'd have to have captured a live specimen and got it from butchering it. Looks like I never managed to capture one of 'em buggers alive, and now I haven't seen one in two years. 

56

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 26, 2016, 08:53:48 pm »

Lol, so I grind samey missions for months and months until, finally, the Academy shows up with a Passenger Transport mission.
And 'lo and behold, three Osiron Security onboard, of which I can capture two.
But NO NEW RESEARCH PROJECTS. 

Fun fact: In the meantime, I have however researched Kustom Power Armor. Isn't Carpace Armor supposed to be a prerequesite to that?

57

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 21, 2016, 05:21:43 pm »

This mod hates me. 

So, one of my bases was half-heartedly attacked, and the attackers brought ONE powered armor dude. Got the right research, yay!!

But still no Graduation. Why? No Advanced Chemics. Why? No Security Carapace Armor. Next armor to grind for ... 

58

XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 21, 2016, 03:10:16 pm »

Well, since people wrote you ought to get the parts even from dead bodies, can you really say I missed those opportunities if they never even presented themselves?

I can't shoot down most large ships per se - my fighters tend to get shot to pieces - but I've done plenty of large and very large ship missions. The church's sway government missions involve very large ships, for example, and I've done at least half a dozen of those. Problem is, the chuch doesn't have 'em power armor dudes, they sport matrons and maidens and altar boys.
The other large ships I did - as I wrote above - was a mercenary vessel, just loads and loads of 'em flying dudes, no power armor.

I used to get frequent raider missions in Australia, but no longer - haven't seen a raider ship in many many months now. I have not seen the Academy in years. The Guild makes an occasional appearance with a freighter, but only comes with low-level dudes.

"You have to try" is a funny suggestion when there's nothing I CAN try. For half a year, I did almost every mission, the only exceptions being a couple of two person civilian skycars and some heavy mercenary missions (as I wrote, I did the first and decided it's not worth it).
And it's not like I never interrogated anyone. I have done loads of interrogations, everything from Savvy Guys to Star Gods. I have the church's Cydonia codes and their Bible translation.
I have interrogated Government operatives and a General. I have interrogated corrupted Doom soldiers and a Chrysallid ... and so on and so forth. I may have missed some specific types, but I have done plenty, rest assured.

I have almost full global radar coverage, only antarctica and the tip of south america are missing.

Like I said, I don't know if I have what it takes to grind out months doing mundane missions that are just samey, dull and boring at this point just for a chance to maybe, MAYBE get that piece of tech that stupidly locks away all the game's progression.

What this mod would need (I realize this is strictly a pipe dream as it's beyond the current capabilities of OpenXCom and adding it no small task) would be a REAL black market. Where what's on offer is in constant flux. Check frequently, or you might miss that old fighter hull. But if you check frequently, you can get most anything if you're willing to pay. Especially power armor parts should be a no brainer.  Also tank wrecks. I researched all those fancy tanks an eternity ago, but have never been able to build even one because it requires you to have a wreckage that you'll only get in specific and pretty rare circumstances. But again, I realize this is probably impossible to implement - some other solution has to be found for the mod to remain enjoyable and not force it's player into a many months long hiatus in which nothing interesting happens.

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XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 21, 2016, 01:43:54 pm »

I'm not sure I have it in me to grind the same missions over and over and over and over and over again for months or even years before I can get by sheer coincidence the type of enemy I need.
IMO, it's just bad game/mod design to have this requirement. The main tech progresssion path should basically be impossible to miss, whilst the tons and tons of more exotic weapons and lore can be hidden away to make replaying more fun. $0.02 and all that.

I've played another three months by now, and I got a few reticulan trading missions which netted me a few nonconsequential techs and I managed to translate the bible thingie, which again had no further effect. I lost some of my best soldiers on a mercenary mission, these chimps are just too powerful for me just now. But I already have their crap researched anyway back from when I still got mutant pogroms (none occured in the last three months, just crap like Ratmen Rodeo) and even have three rotting away in my prison cells.

I just don't get it, there are so many other things in this mod which you can just blackmarket or for which there are special "missions" (manufacturing projects ala cave hunt), why not for this crucial piece of tech? If power armor pieces are even dropped from dead enemies, I seem not to have encountered ANY such enemies in my game so far. That's kinda ridiculous.

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XPiratez / Re: So ... I ran out of stuff to research. What now?

« on: August 20, 2016, 01:41:46 pm »

Well, that's at least a lead.
None of the enemies I actually researched allow me to rob power armor parts, it's all personal armor parts.
So how do I find a Marsec Bodyguard?
I listed all mission types I get in the OP.

Btw., why is it that nobody but the church builds new bases? That normal?