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Messages - Nilex

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16
Part deux because damn character limit.

Attached save is just before Cydonia (check that beautiful date), along with own 2 sub-mods to prevent error messages and whatnot. Been playing with save-scumming on middle difficulty so bear that in mind when admiring uber fantastical stats. Changed that impossible 1st SG Pogrom to DeepOnes (via 2nd most complex save edit in my entire playthrough, 1st was complete Hideout switcharoo). Scoped Magnums vs 3 angry Sectopods was kinda the determining factor. Are they fitted with that Independence Day saucer laser?

Done a lot of mini-games and self-imposed challenges for added flavor I stuck around with until the end: No one dies - Death = reload. Extreme case was death of untamed Dog which I didn't notice until after mission ended (no death popup on untamed Dogs). Repeated the same complex mission 3 times for same reason. Almost gave up upholding own rule for quarter of century across all games I played.
No unresearched weapon usage. To keep in line with vanilla, maybe breaking the rule once out of curiosity. Also didn't do large tech jumps but conform to uniform progress across available branches, in effort to replicate real world scenario.
Sensible hideout facilities placement. Loud workshops away from living quarters, mess hall close to beds, research stuff in quiet place but close to beds, surgery/meds close to Prison, Prison close to hangar but away from sensitive structures. I cringed HARD looking at other people's LPs. Jeez Christ guys. I'll spare you of many more borderline mental routines but rest assured there's plenty others for which even the strongest scientifically available meds wouldn't help prevent me doing.

To wrap this up - thank you all for being helpful pals on the forums. I enjoyed reading your stories, especially discord with morning coffee. Even found most hilarious online posts ever by one overzealous tough-guy, made a while ago... Can't remem when was the last time I laughed so hard. I'll try to find them again if anyone cares. Anyways good luck to all future Jack Sparrow wannabes and best wishes to Dixone to lay off the cigs so he could release even more glorious updates (discord teasers had me drooling like watching cooking vids)! Special thanks to legionof1 for being my guardian angel! Cya in 10+ years (unless aliens a week or two from now God damnit Gina&Jack...), take good care all.

PS
X-PirateZ has as many research topics as there are words in both of these posts combined! How about that.

17
Wrote this 4 months ago thinking I was about win but the finish line just kept moving out of reach. New goals emerged as I discovered benefits of gameplay mechanic I neglected in the past. 5 new updates game received during my 8 months long playthrough snowballed more new plans. Intended to be a brief overview accompanied by chronicles screen but grew too large too fast so please excuse lack of flow. Posting this because I couldn't find a decent review anywhere except for that 5yr old rockpapershotgun article which doesn't go into details or critique.

LIKES
Initial scope followed by immeasurable awe when research progress finally hits 1%. It's like 100 Sid Meier Civs fused into one single game. The feeling prevailed all the way up to 33% making my top 10 list.
33% to 66% is time of familiarization with all game mechanics and steady but welcome increase in complexity. Confidence grows as does planning and (micro)management.
66% onward repetition starts creeping in paired with poor UI support to handle the workload, gradually steering closer to working than playing. Unfinished WIP story arcs are encountered coupled with lesser quality of late game progress (Higher Studies+, less new goodies, just tech unlocks). Satisfaction relies on few new remaining but thinly spread missions to stir the settled waters and fulfillment of personal player goals. <- Only two updates later I'm convinced this is greatly improved already (except UI).
What remains awe worthy until the end are researched topics and is how well logically interconnected every item/tech dependency is. Even with my extraordinary nitpick levels I found only one improvement in 3k topics. As new updates came research tree kept getting subtle logical improvements which was mind boggling.

The writing I absolutely loved throughout. Whole Boccaccio's Decameron hides in XPZ deepths with ludicrous amounts of quality lore, imaginative item descriptions, and extensive gameplay mechanics explanations written in lore-style. I especially liked attention to details like Gas-Balls working only with a Pistol because they'd fall apart when used in Rifles due to increased pressure. Newer example is using 10th different armor value influence to describe effectiveness of Universal Refreshner. Innumerous more similar examples in between the two. Faction backgrounds and all that stuff are damn impressive. Whole thing does actually resemble faithful continuation of UFO/XCOM. In OG online ufopedia there's an official lore describing events that happened in between officially released games. Why for example they couldn't use Elerium-115 in TFTD, all logically explained. Easy to see how something like that would occur in our real world, giving credibility to official lore. Same quality is found in XPZ. Lots of small Sci-Fi details in there you only find in professional author's books. Loved that.

What I loved just as same is restraint of keeping some rare but excellent maps restricted to unique 1-off events, never to be seen again (Winter Palace, Siberia Base, Terminal, etc). Great looking maps of amazing quality only to be experienced once. Made them that much more memorable although I presume was a bitch to accept as designer. I guess in school essays you actually typed out densely typed text as opposed to rest of us who spread that shit, hehe.

Storage & money handling in the long run is one of the more ingenious ideas I've seen. Who ever thought of slaves mechanics in particular has my respect. Such a practical, believable, steady and simple form of reducing space/finance worries I cannot believe it exists. Funnily enough I long delayed researching slaves even though I knew the benefits because I thought they would take up living space. Glad it isn't the case!

Sound FX are the best. Reminds me of the '90s when devs were naturally gifted in creating sounds that just worked even if they weren't realistic per-say. Skullstrider walking sounds is super enjoyable enjoyable. Of the whole package I'd change only that blue outlined Cutlass (wtf is that sound lol), and recent interception music addition which belongs in some Monkey Island mini-game instead.
Music is great just the same, fantastic picks. Normally it must be near perfect for me to enjoy it. Joyful, rhythmic and all that. In sound department XPZ nails it (props for Find the Suspicious Brainer jump scare).

Extra effort put into color coding various in-game menus with own unique scheme really added flavor and atmosphere. Colossal improvement over those year old LPs on YouTube using vanilla colors. A fine example of low effort / high reward scenario. Felt like a polished game just by that subtle visual tweak.

AI. Dunno if XPZ messed further with it than OCX(E) but it's perfect. Kudos to AI coders. Near end of my last TFTD playthrough a sad realization emerged that I'll never get to experience true vanilla AI. Ever. OG games are full of broken path nodes, deployment slots errors, enemy weapon utilization, etc... so F'd even the community couldn't fix it all. Vanilla AI was the sole reason for sticking to Extenders but after the realization and later observing how faithfully AI behaves in familiar situations I became a devoted OpenXcom pilgrim.
AI truly makes a difference in long haul mission types. Without it XPZ would be bogged down, exhausting, and suicidally tedious experience. I wonder if it actually is with "Sneaky AI" enabled, only tested for 1 turn and immediately turned it off in fear of invoking last-alien-hiding-in-closet somewhere. Ability to run greatly improves combat as well.

NEUTRAL
Pirate theme was off-putting for years before I actually bothered to watch gameplay videos (thanks Starving Poet). Realized there's little of actual Pirate themes going on (wooden ships, swords and shields, boring shit) past initial philosophy of looting and plunder. It's all about wasteland to high-tech Fallout. Which is damn great.

Nudity is tasteful so I wasn't phased or distracted by it at all. Dunno why author left selected sprite fap-material marked with pixels but what the hell, we all done crazy things when young. Some of the art looks like placeholder material and needs to become uniform but is sufficiently serviceable. Hopefully that stuff gets a face lift in time.

Mutually exclusive Codexes. As a completionist it's not a favorite but I understand. What I'd do it make it easy for player to remove locks to allow for all Codex if he wants to (possibly other minor locks too). Maybe community releases a sub-mod in due time.

Abundance of items (to say it lightly) worried me of becoming a total cluttered mess, both on management and usefulness side. To me less is more. But it became apparent it's used to accommodate all different factions and mission types. Took about a month till I was being able to differentiate between the loot automatically without loosing time inspecting stats of every single thing. CTRL+MMB helped although I was made aware much too late. Took another two stressful months to finally determine which items can be safely sold once and for all.

As far building materials/components go, availability and mission rewards yield is pretty well balanced considering the scope. I'd make Force Circuitry buyable, maybe even Stasis Pods (defo increase availability in some way, solely because Cryo Prison). Increase yields of Shadow Orbs and make a relatively common late-game mission that always rewards them, especially with increased future focus on them in raw material role (better Box reward odds would do too). Something similar with Medallion of Entropy and Golden Apple because rolling for Smuggler > Arcane > Mystery Box > rewards is tiring even with perfected save-scumming method I devised.

NEUTRAL/DISLIKE

The single soul-crushing research topic for me was "Advanced Weapons Rumors". It came relatively early and burst my bubble of mysteries laying ahead. Bullets, Laser, Gauss, Plasma - that's it buddy. Felt awkward compared to existing mysterious writing style. What I'd change there is move "As far as we know" from begging to the end of article so it finishes with "...and those are only which we know about" (or something). It's gotta end in mystery at the very least.
In my early post I described first enemy Hideout assault in which I said I received a taste of end-game weapons the enemies used. One dude responded I ain't seen nothing yet but looking back I actually did. Eagerly expected to see more advanced stuff but what I got was bit underwhelming: basically only Plasma Schorcher redeemed itself and only against Hovertank & Sectopod. Magitech and other exotics feel too circumstantial to be of wide general use. Exception is Chort's Iron Wind which suits this gameplay style amazingly well.

Mid-game armors are kinda crappy unless TU/weight tradeoff is accepted. After Metal I only ever used Synthmuscle, Junkmaster (curiosity mostly) & Juggernaut (burning towns only), Brute shortly, then Annihilator. Problem is most other don't absorb damage well enough enemies at that time deal. As if created with sole intention to replace death with 24/7 hospital time. I later saw someone mention Assault Marine flies and has red shields which I completely overlooked so my view may be skewed somewhat. Problem is nothing tanks damage well until Annihilator. UFO has good mid armor but its problem was instant obsoletion, easily avoided in XPZ with sensible stat tweaks. The annoying thing was checking enemy armors and constantly thinking: why can't I just strip parts off and make-shift something similar? That's what Pirates do!

Vessel restrictions to certain missions was annoying as hell. Spent ludicrous amounts of time reading what the future brings so I could plan accordingly and minimize future mistakes. Constantly made me tense thinking if I made the correct call in designating a hideout/hangar for specific mission range. In the end I found equilibrium but the cost was broken immersion and dispersed mystery from all that reading in advance. Could be improved by having an updating in-game list as new vessels are researched to see which is allowed where. Getting blue-balled as I eagerly send the wrong but fully prepped ship for the first time sucks. Restrictions themselves are not the problem, lack of timely information is.

DISLIKES
Helpful #numbers topics should be revealed more uniformly, akin to "Myths: The Black Souvereign, Part 1-4" (maybe group few similarly related parts together before unlocking next batch), roughly following player's expected encounter with the mechanic (or couple months behind at most to retain some mystery and even healthy dose of frustration). For example I revealed you can turn off ship weapons well into 2nd year. Would be pissed had I not known about it prior. For uber essential stuff I'd attach a simple PDF in game folder, along with ALL keyboard binds including undocumented ones (CTRL+MMB; CTRL+ALT+H; ALT in minimap; CTRL+END; RMB on approach icon; RMB Vessel hangar reordering). It would make things much more newbie friendly without requiring any UFO/XCOM knowledge.

Prison Space shortage. Talked about it few times. Huge gripe that never goes away. I modded in 20 spaces per Prison for myself and it was perfect. Avd. & Luxury Barracks received similar treatment soon thereafter hihi. I assume it was set ages ago and not touched since but game became more complex for old prison to cope. 20 is perfect, increase building price if you must but do it.

Smooth out sudden difficulty spikes if possible. Early Bandit Pogrom are BRUTAL and can happen very early (delay Armored Cars bit later). In my game 1st SG Pogrom (Feb 2602) occurred 1 year before encountering 1st SG ship. WTF!? I wouldn't describe it as needed difficulty variety but design flaw. In case of insisting on current I'd let the player know in advance in some meaningful capacity so he could prepare by focusing research and equipping appropriately instead learning from unavoidable failures.

Accuracy predictor is the biggest lying POS madafaka ever. Accuracy varies from 100% accurate (clear LOS + no obstacles + before accuracy drop-off), down to 1% of stated accuracy (behind obstacle but shootable + no LOS but within accuracy drop-off). Turning 20% into 0.2% in worst case. It's not uncommon for the projectile to bug out and fly through the target 9/10 times depending on positioning (God forbid target is on a slope), further diving the above 0.2%. Been there OH YES I have...
I've read the explanation why this happens as well. My answer is remove the F'ing RNG firing cones then, or confine them to visible/shootable hitbox parts only. Vanilla did not have accuracy problem no matter how many obstacles there were between. The only place where OXC/E made a step backwards.

XPZ excels in making players adopt to multi role situations and yet the ships are cramped AF! Lets us build a proper Avenger/Leviathan for Christ's sake. Fast, armed, durable, and F'ing spacious. Factions fly whole cities worth of crew and we have to scrounge with a deadly dozen on average. No bueno. Early-mid should remain as-is but there no reason to keep it cramped for entirety of the game. This is further worsened by issue immediately bellow.

Player ships have the most illogical soldier ordering system compared to base listing order. I can't believe an actual human sorted this out. Every damn ship is affected except those 1-piloted ones where it's impossible to fuck up. Truth to be told haven't tried them all but of 80% I have, Devastator takes the cake as biggest offender. Read Discord explanation for this some time ago (occupying windows first) and I have to say it's crap for two reasons: you don't win by camping; Freshness was devised to prevent camping. Nuff said. Occupy spots by distance to exit door/ramp like in vanilla... Let the dumb player figure out which spot is by the window. In case player decides to bring 3 soldiers or less then the mission is easy enough no to warrant sniping. Fortuna is the only vessel with logical ordering, only because it has no F'ing windows.

Roll range of weapon damage becomes increasingly frustrating with time. Examples: Custom Lasgun [48] vs Acd. Drone - 6x consecutive hits resulted in no damage (happened twice). Heavy Laser vs ~10 armor Human - no damage (happens 33% of time). Eerie similar to enemy berserking with one-handed weapons, hitting your soldier every time across the map even though there are over 1000 viable targets (incl. random empty squares). Makes me believe faulty code is at play. I'd set all player weapons to never roll bellow 50% (100% for snipers) while leaving enemies as is. Should fucken level the playing field.
Seen Meridian go crazy over two consecutive no damage rolls in far more benign case in his LP. I swear on my mother he'd become a full blown serial killer in my shoes. No exaggeration. And people wonder why I save-scumm, lol.

Freshness cost of Gray Codex items and caveat use of available FRS restoration items. Before I said nr1 design flaw devs make is adjusting balance according to vocal top one-percenters who know how to exploit for all imaginable advantages. Result is always ruined gameplay for regular players. No better example than F2P crap where player retention is God. Can't remember what it was all about when I mentioned it but anyway it's not a biggie in XPZ if player knows what he's doing.
What is though is another design flaw: introducing a hail-mary item, long sought by the community as a burden lessening tool, only to finally come with its own set of caveats that greatly limit use. As if balanced just against itself, ignoring the whole picture why it was needed. There's no shortage of such items in XPZ, fixes one thing but instantly breaks another or that very same thing. Previously mentioned Universal Freshnerer is good example.
Gray desperately needs its on unique Freshness problem resolver. An item, a facility, or both. I only ever used FRS based items to train VS, and rarely out of curiosity. Nothing more. Heavy Plasma handles same situations 10x better and with 0 recovery days.

And finally (you know what I'm taking about)... the 99%/101% armor resistances. Yuck. I'd rather see the whole damn list with color coded green/red values for resistances/vulnerabilities. Allow a key modifier to show whole list while pressed if wall-of-text seems ludicrous. Leave straight 100s default colors. Shit kept messing with my head until the end.

* * *

That's about it. Other negatives stem from UI inability to handle the scope as progression expands available gameplay options, despite OXC/E devs' best efforts. A week in I was already becoming worried if my mouse button would break down from so much repetitive clicking. Thankfully Logitech makes great 5€ mice.

Hope no one takes dislikes close to heart, just my view after all, and I do get little salty thinking about them. If I could change only one thing it would be RNG projectile cones to behave as accuracy predictor shows. In the end Dio has my deepest bow of respect as he puts himself up there among indie elites. Borrowed asset usage makes no difference, it's how you use it. And is as close to perfect as we could expect. Not to mention lots of custom tweaks under the hood to make it all uniquely fit in.

18
XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention
« on: July 03, 2021, 03:04:06 am »
Finally finished ;D

Final two stages took some 4-5 hours together. Expected an easy massacre but both stages proved challenging enough. 2 Chorts /Dispersed were decisive on the surface while 4 Sorcerers made a huge difference underground. Glad I made the switch from Ghosts. Gray Codex FTW!

Only the second real mod I ever played (after "Doom the Way id Did" which sucked) and already hit the longest largest game I ever played. Of what I know only Gary Grigsby wargames surpass XPZ in size and complexity but are far less user friendly. XPZ showed me a mod can be better than the base game it sprouted from. Immeasurably better. Last night I sorted moddb mods by top order for the first time and saw it's a dangerous place one could lose his whole life on. As an old TIE Fighter fanatic TFTC is eye watering :'(

Only thing left to do is to post a summary of my thoughts/review/feedback/rant hybrid and pack my bags. Tomorrow though, in own topic. Need to recharge my freshness now. Just wonder how close was I to getting side-tracked with yet another update I know I wouldn't be able to resist.
Thank you for everything Dio, I hope glory and riches find you. Huge thanks to infinitely patient legionof1 as well for his extensive, quick and accurate help throughout.

19
XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention
« on: July 01, 2021, 04:50:28 am »
Yeah you are right, I even got Sectoweed. I just call everything psychedelic a Pink Desert coz that's where I first learned about it. I meant the same thing tho. Also, now that you've mentioned it, I've been getting it on Parties far more often than anywhere else.

20
XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions
« on: June 30, 2021, 11:44:53 pm »
Yeah I know but... I refused to send him on a mission just for that because all noob crews were carefully used & abused to have exactly 25 missions. If I bump one to 26 then all would have need a bump to 30, the next nice number. Well shit, I guess he ain't the only mentally impaired lol.

Btw I'd also like to know more about "Dead Men Looted" negatives. Never bothered to fully understand it since penalty isn't high. I just assumed it simply applies to all civvie-looking enemies (non-faction members like Sharp Girls, Fat Guys, etc). Maybe Hoes are non-Bandits so they count as civilian?

21
XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention
« on: June 30, 2021, 11:24:40 pm »
It's a regular day-time Bandit Town mission that happened to mix with Pink Desert environment (like Radiation but much rarer). No filters or anything. I'd guess Pink Desert has only 1% chance of occurring and to me only happened in jungle maps, and one time in that high Demon Tower, until now. Still haven't moved since yesterday coz I don't wanna ruin it.

22
XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention
« on: June 30, 2021, 10:35:24 pm »
Had this short but beautiful epic moment last night: my first and only Pink Desert farm map, with added bonus of equally epic old-skool Tristram music notes undertone. Pretty cool to stumble upon such a nice looking/sounding combo, when I long since thought I had already seen everything.
Like with the flying Tomatoes cluster months prior I was again taken aback and had to finish the playing session for the day. Let it finish on a high note!

23
XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions
« on: June 30, 2021, 06:54:35 pm »
Since OXCE 7.0 it's only possible to raise VS from initial 0 via Voodoo School facility. Astrosensorium from Gray Codex would also work. First gains take the longest to occur (1-2 months) after that it's calculated hourly I think, while gains become smaller and smaller the higher VS becomes. Trick is to exercise patience as it often seems like it's not working initially.

I had a very unique and very annoying extreme case scenario where out of bunch of BUGEYEs, all reached their peak in reasonable amount of time, except for one who got to 72 VS and remained there for six in-game months (vL9)... before reaching 73 and max soon after. Just so you know things like that can happen. I'd finish weeks ago if that little bug wasn't mentally impaired :)

24
XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention
« on: June 29, 2021, 12:16:29 am »
@RSSwizard
Check Discord, he came back from vacation recently and teases us with upcoming stuff. I gotta wrap up before new patch hits or I'll never leave this place...

@Brittanicus
I mean Dioxine. As far I gathered the code is present in OXCE but disabled for use in XPZ. Cannot be enabled by a simple user option. But it could go even further, meaning removed mechanically from XPZ so even if re-enabled it wouldn't be of any use. Best to make peace with the fact it's gone forever.

I'll send you detailed save edit instructions in PM as I don't wanna pollute the topic with that. It basically boils down to: open file, change few logical numbers, save changes, reload and continue. Gimme a few mins.

25
XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention
« on: June 28, 2021, 07:35:22 pm »
It was done by using CTRL to move facilities around but the feature was removed permanently because I guess it posed no gameplay challenge. I wasn't around back then to fully understand this decision but as a devoted OCD gamer I suffered greatly in its absence. To me there is little challenge in unnecessary delaying the inevitable which ends being optimally placed facilities. But like I said I don't fully understand and some grief is crucial to good gameplay I just don't like the source of it.

Besides functionality my hideouts simply must conform to some aesthetical design (research and leisure close to living which is clumped together, manufacture complex far away bcoz noise, radar in the centre, medical close to living/hangar/prison, storage close to manufacture, and so on lol...). With game constantly throwing new facilitates at you it was impossible to cope in satisfactory way. Just when you thought you placed everything perfectly another one messes up the order. Only in the very end game was I able to finally rest happily when the unknown became known. Couldn't stand to watch YT-ers gameplay videos where they place stuff on first available space, such hideous hideouts.

You aren't the first nor will be the last person to ask but the author is pretty adamant in the feature never again seeing the light of day. What you can do instead is change individual facility coordinates by editing save file. Coords are stored not long after individual hideout names and are relatively straight forward to edit. You gotta weight between immersion break or suffering hehe. I wasn't of the suffering type :)

I could also showcase you my endgame hideout types with screenshots (or savegame), to help you plan ahead if you wish. 2 research, 4 generic all-in-one, 2 factory/heavy production/income types. Pretty much min/max'd to perfection if I do say so myself. Spoils the living shit out of everything, including your own snese of accomplishment, but that's the price you gotta be willing to pay.

* * *

My suggestion would be to bring back the feature but locked behind mid-game techs. Some shadowrealm ability that lets you teleport matter through their dimension or something, for a price of course (hypno panels? millions? both?. Since the number of facilities only increased since then while hideouts dimensions remain forever fixed some kind of bone thrown in our direction defo wouldn't hurt.

26
XPiratez / [SUB-MOD] Nuclear-Powered AP Lasers
« on: June 26, 2021, 07:15:49 pm »
Little parting gift after 8 months spent with XPZ. Smol but packs a punch. Fits nicely in end-game as bit of a fixer upper while being lore-friendly. Don't wanna spoil more than I already have in the title so feel invited to explore it for yourself.

Installation: Unpack into \XPirateZ\User\mods folder, run XPZ and activate the sub-mod. Easy peasy.

I can foresee sub-mod breaking given enough time solely because listOrder IDs of new stuff I added start eventually getting used by XPZ itself. There are gaps in numbers thoughtfully put in to account for future retrofitting but those are not envisioned to get filled by random 3rd party sub-mods. All IDs were carefully chosen except one where I had little choice (12881). Should buy some smooth years hopefully. Could have put it all at the end of a long list and be done with it but I would never break order aesthetic like that. Maybe there's a better way to avoid future listOrder conflict but I haven't found one yet.

Feel free to rip assets and use however you desire.

Mild spoiler
Spoiler:
Note that to access this content in your own playthrough you will need to have practically all technologies researched. As the key to final vanilla tech gate this sub-mod depends on can be found only on downed end-game Marsec ship patrols (Viper or Gunship), it is entirely possible and even more likely to win the game on Cydonia before ever finding the key. As such sub-mod is oriented toward those rare purist completionists among us. New research content (8 topics) accounts for roughly 2%.

Backstory and more spoilers
Spoiler:
Sub-Mod started coming into fruition right after an exhausting Space Freighter mission, where vanilla Battle Laser sparkled too many times on naked skins of some very fortunate Traders. Just as so many times before. Tipping the RNG into the realm of sanity became an obsession despite overwhelming lack of experience and motivation. Sparkles proved highly persuasive though so after two grueling days of ups and downs on steep learning curve I finally got it to load without errors and operational. All that remained were the finishing touches.

All was good until after just one night worth of sleep... I had a hellish vision of someone asking me to apply AP ability to other 6 NP lasers, after months have passed, when I naturally forgot all about this. Having been there before (hate that) but also thinking it would be a good idea I went on and expanded AP to all 7 NP lasers. When it rains it pours, right? It should give them some more utility next to Plasma Pistol and the likes.
Gave a short consideration to matching defense facility but it proved completely redundant at that stage of the game. Besides, tech's two main benefits (infinite ammo, AP) are nullified in such form. So never gonna happen.

To delay obsoletion of clipped AP lasers, which become available for research practically at the same time, I put handful of intermediate prerequisite techs (each weapon has its own research). Not that's gonna matter much I figure. Progression balance wise my options are limited and to remain somewhat lore-friendly, overall cost of manufacture is also marginal. But to hell with all that. It's the end-game, balance is secondary, and domination is your hard earned right!

Image spoiler
Spoiler:
Are you really sure? Don't be a fool.
Spoiler:
Final warning.
Spoiler:
There are only dick pics here...
Spoiler:
Just play the game you gaylord.

27
Help / Re: [SOLVED] XPZ sub-mod, !add to commendations' killCriteria?
« on: June 22, 2021, 06:12:02 am »
Got something more conclusive. Setup: XPZ vL8 + OXCE 7.0.12 + my own 2 sub-mods from before.

Landed on mission and immediately aborted so all commendations update. Reloaded and completed that same mission so I can examine the differences.
Used only XG Rifle because it doesn't fall into my sub-mod, but shares commendation category. Wanted to see how non-included guns affect rewarding.

Now the interesting part. Loading quicksave and ending turn usually completes the mission, but reward "Grunt" is not the same in two cases bellow (Piratez_Globals.rul) although it should be:

Code: [Select]
commendations:
  - type: STR_MEDAL_RIFLEKILL_NAME
    criteria:
      killsWithCriteriaCareer: [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24]
    killCriteria: !add
      -
         - [1, ["STR_sub_modded_gun1", "FACTION_HOSTILE", "STATUS_DEAD"]]
      -
         - [1, ["STR_sub_modded_gun2", "FACTION_HOSTILE", "STATUS_DEAD"]]
Gives "Grunt" for using XG Rifle.

Code: [Select]
commendations:
  - type: STR_MEDAL_RIFLEKILL_NAME
    criteria:
      killsWithCriteriaCareer: [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24]
    killCriteria: !add
      -
         - [1, ["STR_sub_modded_gun1", "FACTION_HOSTILE", "STATUS_DEAD"]]
      -
         - [1, ["STR_sub_modded_gun2", "FACTION_HOSTILE", "STATUS_DEAD"]]
      -
         - [1, ["STR_XG_RIFLE", "FACTION_HOSTILE", "STATUS_DEAD"]]
Gives higher "Grunt" ranks for some reason.

This is confusing the hell outta me and makes me nervous that commendations got broken in 7.0.12. Maybe this is helpful, maybe the opposite...
Kill numbers are in 15-24 so the "Grunt" rewards properly trigger on semi-experienced soldiers, for testing purposes.

2 sub-mods and 2 saves sent via PM (quicksave & pre-landing) for troubleshooting. Good luck.

UPDATE
After this somewhat dramatic post it has been determined the behavior is intended and normal actually. Double the entry - double the rewards. Who knew. Since XG Rifle was only used to test against same commendation category and won't be included in the final sub-mod this topic can finally rest for eternity.

28
Error is in XPZ vL9 "Piratez.rul".

Gave XPZ vL8 a shot using OXCE 7.0.12 executable and it finally worked as desired in my 2nd post. No more freezes.
I'll assume commendations will sort themselves out in new XPZ version and mark this as solved. Thank you for help!

I would however suggest to please test the changes yourself, when you find the time. When I tested to understand what did you mean by "`commendations` it always overwrite EVERY thing" I ended up in a very deep dark rabbit hole. Conclusion is 7.0.12 calculates sub-modded commendations more accurately but I dare not be more specific than that. Finding a definitive answer proved far too complicated for me...

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XPZ refuses to load (oxceModValidationLevel: 1) with this error:
Quote
Error for 'STR_BOUNTY_HUNTING_CHALLENGE_MA': wrong node type, expected a map at line 112613

Tried deleting what felt like 4 unneeded lines around that spot but same error occurs. Level: 0 also spits out same error. That's as far as I got I'm afraid.

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I would test but not sure how to merge 7.0.12 with current XPZ since they come together. Just plop new OXCE exe in there and hope for the best? Does XPZ come with 32 or 64-bit OXCE version?
Memory leak is beyond what I can test (XPZ runs as usual even on my potato with changes above), but freeze fix and new tag workings would be simple enough.

Just letting you know in case it's expected that I perform the test.

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