61
Open Feedback / Re: Few UFOs showing up?
« on: October 22, 2014, 02:09:59 am »
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62
Fan-Stuff / Re: A haiku
« on: October 21, 2014, 08:48:49 pm »
Ten shots at a Xeno bug;
Nine miss, and one teammate shot;
The rookies are doomed;
EDIT:
Crap you are correct,
my one is six-six-and five,
but easy to fix.
Nine miss, and one teammate shot;
The rookies are doomed;
EDIT:
Quote
I love the fact that
Most of these don't follow the
five-seven-five rule.
Crap you are correct,
my one is six-six-and five,
but easy to fix.
63
Tools / Re: XCOM-Intelligence
« on: October 20, 2014, 07:42:30 pm »
Is this available anywhere other than the mod site? I'm thinking about a project that would have effective radar be a late game discovery and was thinking this may provide an effective alternative for giving players info about the alien missions but I'm not totally clear on how it works and of course didn't think to download it till now.
64
Work In Progress / Re: Max base map height is 2?
« on: October 20, 2014, 07:32:19 pm »
There wouldn't be a simple way to add layers underneath would there?
65
Programming / Re: Palettes?
« on: October 19, 2014, 08:46:24 pm »
This thread (https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=1557.15) has the most useful info on pallets I could find.
The color pallets in game are internal, the game only cares about the index numbers you are drawing with, not the color your photo-editing program is showing you.
The color pallets in game are internal, the game only cares about the index numbers you are drawing with, not the color your photo-editing program is showing you.
66
Suggestions / Re: Suggestions (illustrated)
« on: October 17, 2014, 10:12:45 pm »I'm interested in mod making, but I'm not too sure how hard it is, would you say it's hard to make something like a stand alone sectoid mod?
I was thinking maybe divide the sectoids up into 3 parts, heavy soldier/vanilla/leader and give them reskined lazers or alternatively just plasma. (I edited my design a tad)
Do it! Not sure how comfortable you are with coding, but the rulesets are human readable and if you aren't trying anything too radical pretty easy to work with. The other hard part is graphics and...
Quote
You seem to have a pretty good start on that!
67
Work In Progress / Re: UFO/TFTD hybrid game discussion
« on: October 17, 2014, 10:06:43 pm »Regarding the missions, you could have two flags for aliens: LivesOnLand (true/false) and LivesInWater (T/F).
Most TftD aliens would have both true, except the obviously underwater ones. All UFO:EU aliens would have LIW: false.
Like the idea, but I don't know that all the UFO aliens should be LIW: False. Snake men may be better swimmers than their cumbersom land movement, maybe they are closer to Eelmen we never saw it because we weren't equipped to go check. Maybe they can't breathe, but can hold their breath for days. They would need some weaponry adjustment tho, and not just sprouting sonic weaponry. As for Chrysalids, have you ever tried to drown a bug, it's not easy and they need to be stuck in the water for a long time, they may never make it to land but they'd be alive around the crash site for a while.
68
Offtopic / Re: Base placement and other mechanic nitty-gritties
« on: October 17, 2014, 09:54:55 pm »
Not sure about stacking smoke density, if you overlap the blast radii the space in between will be more well concealed but that may be a function of it being further away from an edge of the cloud. Also when hiding from elevated shooters if you have multi-level explosions you have smoke stacks/clouds on the second and third levels to take into account blocking LoS.
69
Offtopic / Re: Base placement and other mechanic nitty-gritties
« on: October 17, 2014, 04:50:49 am »I know its prob been said but does radar stack in open xcom? I know the original game did not and some mods do or don't.
Yes. Multiple radars multiply your detection chance.
As for placement, I go somewhere near Liberia, it gives you early game coverage of both N.Africa and most of Europe and globally interceptors can be effective everywhere except Australia from there. Then first radar base either in S.America or SE.Asia depending on where I see UFOs. Activity is weighted, basically the more population and/or funding countries in an area the more activity, look at the rulesets for spoiler level breakdowns on mission selection tho.
70
Work In Progress / Re: Agents used in manufacturing
« on: October 17, 2014, 04:26:16 am »The problem here is that game mechanics and plasma weapon stats make armors weaker than personal armor nearly useless.
Agreed and thanks for the breakdown, this discussion has helped me hash out where the gaps in the armor repertoire I'd like to fill.
I can understand why the developers would make the human armor all about increasing your chances of getting away unscathed given how much of a hassle wounded soldiers are, at times it can be worse to have a wounded badass than a fresh rookie. Where it's cool for the aliens to be susceptible to sustained firepower.
So what I'm going to work on is a set of armor options that feature lower armor values but have resistances and stat adjustments that make them helpful in improving overall survivability but not as all protective as the personal armor set.
71
Work In Progress / Re: Agents used in manufacturing
« on: October 16, 2014, 08:14:34 pm »a player has to kill way more aliens than he can lose soldiers.
This may make an interesting playthru option, eye for an eye see how many soldiers i can feed to the meat grinder and still win.
I'm thinking more about options between the Armored Vest and personal armor, but I'll check yours out once the mod site's back up.
The vanilla armors are definitely a balance within their limitations at the time decision, but that shouldn't stop us from going further.
72
Work In Progress / Re: Agents used in manufacturing
« on: October 16, 2014, 07:55:18 pm »I'm not really sure that using alien corpses to manufacture armor is a good idea, given that the only alien tougher than a power suit is the Sectopod. In fact all aliens except Sectopods and Ethereal Commanders are less armored than personal armor.
This is a fact about the game that I'm not terribly fond of. It's neat to have the awesome armor, but it's too dramatic a transition and never made sense that humans would be able to suddenly make armor that was better than any alien design as soon as they discovered the new material to make it... also not a fan of the Heavy plasma is better than any other gun in every possible way mechanic. There's very little usage of strong damage resistances too which seems a shame to me. The main appeal of OXcom is that you can fill in those gaps and make it more of a complex strategy game
Quote
Mmmmm... Come to think of it... I guess it is time to create a mod that would rip the lascannon out of the Sectopod wreck and rebuild it into a man-portable superheavy laser. Say Power 100 and weight 20, so it is both weaker and heavier than a heavy plasma plus all the ammo you can shoot during a sensible mission. But it would still make a good endgame laser weapon....
So something like the improved heavy laser... except weaker, and heavier.
73
Work In Progress / Re: UFO/TFTD hybrid game discussion
« on: October 16, 2014, 03:14:47 am »So, don't get all excited...
Excitement contained.Quote
A) Serial - after completing Cydonia an finishing UFO the game continues but now in the TFTD storyline.
B) Parallel - both UFO/TFTD take place at the same time.
I have been thinking a bit about creating a serial campaign, and how to make what you did in one carry over to the next one thought I had was:
Upon finishing the Cydonia(or other end game mission) you load up the new ruleset which redefines everything you have turning accumulated items into a bunch of sell able artifacts. Another option would be to give you weapons from UFO when starting TFTD but they have a limited ammo supply that can't be replenished as you won't be getting any more E-115.
As for soldiers there is a 40 year lag according to established plot lines, would there be a way to randomly pick say 10% of troops that you had at the end of Cydonia that you get to keep as your starting TFTD squad, the ones who were young enough and stayed healthy enough to still fight would be the first people called when aliens show up again anyway.
Alternately for a merged campaign, starts as a vanilla campaign but each time a UFO is shot down there is a chance of awakening the TFTD, much higher if they crash in water. Once the TFTD alien are awoken both groups will be attacking in full force. If you manage to get to Cydonia without waking them up the destruction there will do that. This way if you take your time going to Mars you risk being overwhelmed by the combined forces, if you rush you won't have a much time to accumulate an arsenal(the usefulness of which is still questionable) and having wiped out the Mars base you won't be getting any more Ellerium.
74
Released Mods / Re: Crypto's Vanilla MinMods - Slower Research, Battletanks, Cyberdiscs are Bull****
« on: October 15, 2014, 07:12:55 pm »Sorry for participating in going wildly off-topic and taking the chance to discuss the strategic choices of the original game and origins of Sectoids...
The weapons research parts look good, it's always interesting to see different people's solutions to similar complaints.
75
Released Mods / Re: Crypto's Vanilla MinMods - Slower Research, Battletanks, Cyberdiscs are Bull****
« on: October 15, 2014, 04:46:44 am »
Sect- : Cut, segment, sector(pertaining to sci-fi regions of space are delineated by sector names)
-oid : like
so sectoid may be segment like? they don't look like they have segmented bodies/limbs but maybe this was originally going to be the name for the now Waspites and they kept it for the Sectoids because it sounds like a good alien name. Or it may refer to sector in that they resemble aliens from a certain sector or don't resemble beings from this sector?
-pod : foot
Sectopod could refer to there cloven hooves(two-toes feet). or if it refers to sector it could be related to sectoids.
Personally I agree with Dioxine, the Cyberdisc is the WWI era Zeppelin of Xcom, it dominates the battlescape pinning down your soldiers until you get weaponry that is effective against it and learn some good tactics after which they are much more minor a threat. I also like that both forces have a mix of flying and pedestrian troops as they have intrinsically different AI behaviors because of the movement options.
-oid : like
so sectoid may be segment like? they don't look like they have segmented bodies/limbs but maybe this was originally going to be the name for the now Waspites and they kept it for the Sectoids because it sounds like a good alien name. Or it may refer to sector in that they resemble aliens from a certain sector or don't resemble beings from this sector?
-pod : foot
Sectopod could refer to there cloven hooves(two-toes feet). or if it refers to sector it could be related to sectoids.
Personally I agree with Dioxine, the Cyberdisc is the WWI era Zeppelin of Xcom, it dominates the battlescape pinning down your soldiers until you get weaponry that is effective against it and learn some good tactics after which they are much more minor a threat. I also like that both forces have a mix of flying and pedestrian troops as they have intrinsically different AI behaviors because of the movement options.