Messages

16

Released Mods / Re: [WEAPON] Terran Plasma Weapons

« on: November 08, 2013, 07:52:35 am »

Hey, so I've been playing with this for a little while now and I was wondering, Is the snap and auto supposed to take the same TU's with the Terran Plasma Pistol?  I just thought it was a little wierd   

Those are actually the default TU costs of the Plasma Pistol. The only stats I've changed for that weapon, as I've mentioned on the main post, are the ammo and the damage (power).

17

Released Mods / Re: [WEAPON] Terran Plasma Weapons

« on: November 07, 2013, 08:05:04 pm »

Nice! Once fenyo's pull request ( https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,1623.msg15821.html#new ) is in, I'd like to use these graphics to merge with my "longer research" mod which features the possibility to retrofit captured alien weapons - fenyo's work should allow us to use two seperate ways of manufacturing human plasma weapons you can either build them from scratch or use a captured alien plasma weapon.

I pondered both avenues when I was making this mod, but eventually went for building from scratch. The repurposing path otherwise made the player dependent on alien stocks, which eventually would be only Heavy Plasmas, and rifles and pistols would disappear.

If a way to have multiple manufacturing projects produce the same item is implemented, I'll consider updating my mod to add an option to repurpose existing alien weaponry. I'm not entirely sure I will, however, since it'd diminish the scratch-building path considerably, dilute the economic challenge and possibly restore the Heavy Plasma's dominance.

We'll see!

18

Released Mods / [WEAPON] Terran Plasma Weapons

« on: November 06, 2013, 09:37:18 pm »

TERRAN PLASMA PISTOL

Stat differences vs. alien variant:

• Damage: 60 Plasma (up from 52)
  
• Ammo: 18 (down from 26)

Manufacturing requirements:

• Weapon: $56,000 + 1x Alien Alloys, 3 workshop space, 600 engineer hours
  
• Clip: $2,000 + 1x Elerium-115, 2 workshop space, 60 engineer hours

TERRAN PLASMA RIFLE

Stat differences vs. alien variant:

• Accuracy: 60% auto, 94% snap, 110% aimed (up from 55% auto, 86% snap, 100% aimed)
  
• Damage: 72 Plasma (down from 80)

Manufacturing requirements:

• Weapon: $88,000 + 2x Alien Alloys, 4 workshop space, 820 engineer hours
  
• Clip: $4,500 + 1x Elerium-115, 3 workshop space, 80 engineer hours

TERRAN HEAVY PLASMA

Stat differences vs. alien variant:

• Speed: 33% auto, 28% snap, 57% aimed (up from 35% auto, 30% snap, 60% aimed)
  
• Damage: 105 Plasma (down from 115)

Manufacturing requirements:

• Weapon: $122,000 + 3x Alien Alloys, 4 workshop space, 1,000 engineer hours
  
• Clip: $9,000 + 2x Elerium-115, 3 workshop space, 100 engineer hours

ALIEN PLASMA WEAPONS: Unusable by X-COM operatives, sales price halved (not as useful to human buyers).


Localised for: English (UK), English (US), Español (AL), Español (ES)

During most of the game, X-COM operatives have their own unique equipment and weapons, save for the occasional alien gadget here and there. However, once plasma's researched, that battlescape diversity is lost, and everyone's largely using the same gear.

Not so much with this mod, which sets apart alien and human plasma weapons, creating a different late game experience. The design of the extraterrestrial firearms is not oriented towards human operators, which has led X-COM engineers to come up with their own variants. What's more, the replication process has produced particular differences in performance, compared to the alien counterparts. Not to mention Terran plasma bolts are blue!

The necessity to manufacture plasma weapons and ammo alone should present interesting economic challenges when otherwise you'd simply rely on the generous amounts of alien equipment you salvage from missions. Coupled with the statistical changes, it might even be enough to break the Heavy Plasma's hegemony and prod the player to at least consider keeping the highly precise Plasma Rifle in service as a primary weapon.

Kudos to Chiko for the original design of the new plasma technology, which I later modified to some extent.

Mod's attached to this message. Extract it to your OpenXcom's data folder and enable the TerranPlasmaWeapons ruleset in options.cfg. Enjoy!

19

Suggestions / Re: Alien sight range

« on: November 06, 2013, 06:12:00 am »

I believe it'd hardcoded, but yes, it'd be nice if it were moddable in some fashion.

20

Open Feedback / Re: Psi-Panicked alien has Reaction-Fire

« on: November 05, 2013, 08:59:55 pm »

Except for the fact that the mind-control pop-up does always provide you access to the alien

Ok, no prob. Just means I will mostly go for mind-control as I will not need a mind probe to check my success. This is especially true since the usage of mind probe also uses up TU.

Well, the pop-up appears when the attack was successful, so if you're familiar with the alien stats and the impact each panic strike has, you don't really need a mind probe.

I personally prefer psi-panic as opposed to mind control, since the latter tends to be quite overpowered.

21

Open Feedback / Re: Psi-Panicked alien has Reaction-Fire

« on: November 04, 2013, 09:52:43 pm »

I used PSI-AMP panic on him until the popup occured. Then moved some guys (seemingly) outside of the aliens perception area and finished my turn. I thought the popup was the indicator that the alien has panicked ?! At least my soldiers are out of TU after "panic" or "berserker" popups.

As it stands, the pop-up appears when I psi-panic is successful, but it's a bit misleading since it doesn't necessarily mean the alien will have trouble acting on its turn. You generally have to use psi-panic attacks in conjunction with a mind probe, so you can tell whether the target has a chance to panic properly (Morale below 50).

It usually takes 2-3 successes to produce a good chance of actual panic in the alien's turn. But it's important to point out no amount of successes will have an impact on the current (your) turn, so you can still get reaction-fired upon by an alien whose morale you brought down to 0 just then.

22

Work In Progress / Re: Manage Alien Containment UI

« on: November 02, 2013, 05:19:11 pm »

Third picture is probably the most appropriate. Second one is just too crass.

23

Released Mods / Re: Firestorm Restyle

« on: October 29, 2013, 04:22:55 pm »

Shadow has already done that here https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,1628.0.html

Bingo.

24

Troubleshooting / Re: Alien Base, unreachable territory -> last aliens

« on: October 28, 2013, 07:58:34 pm »

Might help to know which version OpenXcom you're using, or nightly build if applicable.

25

Released Mods / Re: alloy ammo

« on: October 28, 2013, 07:54:40 pm »

(...)entirely removing the need for alien alloys for the pistol ammo would kind of defeat the whole concept, wouldn't it? I mean, yes, that makes them disproportionally expensive, but manufacturing alien alloy ammo without alien alloys would be kinda weird.

Yeah, it's tricky business. I ran into a similar matter trying to balance Plasma Pistol Clip production, which costs Elerium by default, and making it viable.

I guess one way for you is to keep the Alien Alloys requirement but increase the bullet count per clip (say +50%), so you wouldn't need to produce as many.

oh, and I thought that maybe I would remove the necessity for manufacturing the craft alloy cannon clips entirely, instead relying on using the alien alloys directly, much in the same way that the plasma beam uses elerium. I'm still trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for that, though maybe the cannon manufactures its own ammunition pellets from the alloys, and uses magnetic acceleration to propel it or something.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with having to manufacture Alloy Cannon ammo in x50 chunks. That's how the standard craft cannon works, and it's fine to mimic that behaviour.

And Plasma Beams don't consume Elerium to rearm, by the way.

I also made a sheet of battlescape items you can use.

26

Released Mods / Re: alloy ammo

« on: October 28, 2013, 06:39:49 pm »

The research time is only long until >100 scientist are on the project. If a player makes a big research team a priority from day one, not much can go wrong.

That's not much of a justification. You shouldn't need over 100 scientists to research such early tech in a reasonable timeframe. Let alone something that, as it stands, is weaker and less accessible than lasers.

It was a good decision from Moriarty's part to insert Alloy weapons before laser technology. Laser is too boring, we have been playing that for almost 20 years. Every new weapon type is super exciting, I think.

Therefore Alloy weapons are an excellent way to slow technological progress and infuse / enhance lowest tech human weapons with alien Alloy tech.

Game-wise, unless alloy ammunition is a solid competitor to laser weapons, there's not much point in using it unless you purposefully want to make things harder on yourself.

But overall, it's a neat concept and that's why I presented my suggestions to help it find its place in the game's balance.

27

Released Mods / Re: alloy ammo

« on: October 28, 2013, 05:04:14 pm »

feel free to post suggestions for balancing issues like damage, cost, production time, range and speed (for the craft weapon) and so on... I mostly tried to guesstimate decent values, but may be completely off balance-wise

From my point of view, there's just not enough room for this technology to be an intermediate step between standard and laser weapons. Alloy ammo should compete with lasers, probably dealing somewhat more damage, which is balanced with the fact there's a logistical need for ammunition production.

You should revise the costs a bit, compare with existing items (even Gauss ammo from TFTD) whenever you can and try to scale with some degree of accuracy, but not too much. I only skimmed the ruleset, but it seemed the Alloy Cannon's cost was too high at $300k, if you consider the Laser Cannon's only $182k and needs no ammo.

I'd also possibly remove the Alien Alloys cost from Pistol AA clips, since early in the game it may nudge a player with a limited supply of materials to just move on to Laser Pistols.

28

Suggestions / Re: New UFO Type: Recovery Ship

« on: October 27, 2013, 06:50:54 am »

First is to fix the UFO up enough to have it slowly fly off -- feasible for multi-engine ships

Second is to cut apart the UFO into pieces if it's too badly damaged (all power sources blowed up); like with smaller ships -- basically junkyard stripping it and crushing it into a cube.

Third is to obliterate the entire crash site with a UFO laser -- I'd imagine unfeasible for any of the larger ships; plus the huge flash of light and explosion would attract attention from human authorities.

Fourth is to pick up the damaged unflyable ship with a bigger UFO

From my point of view, first of all, it's important to remain consistent with the game's design, any UFO targeting a crashed spacecraft like that should appear in the Geoscape and behave like any other UFO: following a mission (i.e. Alien Recovery). I see three viable options, chosen at random when the mission is generated, which require different types of UFOs:

1) Repairing the crashed craft would require a special Recovery UFO (I'd make it Medium size, since those are rather uncommon), which would swoop in from space, land on the same spot as the crash site and 'erase' it and take off after a few hours.
2) Salvaging the crashed UFO could require a Supply Ship (or something else, since those are prized targets to catch landed, and the mission could be exploited). If it were a Recovery UFO, this case would be no different than the previous one. This variant would take approximately the same time as 1), perhaps a bit more.
3) Obliterating the crash site would likely require something like a Terror Ship for medium-sized and smaller wrecks, and a Battleship for larger ones. The mission craft wouldn't land at all, and instead hover over the site for probably less than an hour, 'erase' it and fly out.

The fourth suggested case seems pointless to me, since a damaged, air-unworthy UFO would either be repaired or salvaged. Not to mention the fact I doubt the aliens would go through the trouble of dispatching a large UFO to haul away the average small/medium (the only kind I see being hauled) spacecraft. And at any rate it'd work like the third case, since the transporting craft probably wouldn't land to grab ahold of the target via tractor beam or whatever.

Finally, of course, the aliens would gain points whenever they successfully complete any form of this Alien Recovery mission.

29

Playthroughs / Re: My LP / Genius Level + Ironman + Night Missions + No 'First Turn Wait'

« on: October 27, 2013, 02:31:25 am »

Why so many tiny videos instead of just one or two? What's wrong with YouTube?

30

Released Mods / Re: Firestorm Restyle

« on: October 26, 2013, 04:54:53 pm »

Thanks for the kind replies!