Messages

1321

Work In Progress / How do I add artwork?

« on: August 02, 2016, 08:26:04 am »

I'm a little confused when it comes to adding new artwork for OpenXcom mods. I know I can use .gif images and place them in the appropriate subfolders within the mod folder, but the rulesets use simple numbers to determine which images or sounds to use. How do I know which number to choose, and how does the game sort between one mod and another which may have allocated the same number for separate images?

1322

Work In Progress / Re: How to improve the Laser weapon

« on: August 02, 2016, 08:22:59 am »

May I use your heavy laser art for the heavy auto-laser in my mod?

1323

Released Mods / Re: [SOLDIERS] Reaver's Soldier Classes

« on: August 02, 2016, 08:06:01 am »

I've set recruitment of psi-soldiers dependent on the Mind Probe research. You can change this, if you find something more suitable.
Max Caps for psi-strength and -skill is set to zero. Except from the psi-soldier class. I hope this works as intended; that no other classes can train psi-skills. I think setting max cap for psi-strength to anything else than zero leads to it being trainable, but I don't really know this. The standard XCom 1 ruleset (in OpenXCom) has set it as such, so I changed it in this mod.

Oh, and I've changed the name of the Breacher to Assault. Feel free to reject this change. I just feel it is a better name. Personal taste, you know.   
Recruitment costs are set to 60k (Assaults & Rangers), 80k (Snipers & Heavies) and 160k (Psionics). Monthly salaries are half of recruitment costs.



EDIT: Oh, and I forgot. To research the Psionic Armour, you first need to finish researching the Mind Probe and Personal Armour. It increases both psi-strength and -skill by 25. Maybe change max cap of psi skill to 115 in the mod (I haven't done this) to get a maximum 140 psi-skill. That would be consistent with some other specialists max caps.

I'm giving you creative control of the RPG Classes mod since it was your idea. The rest is up to you, really, it's yours now. I see you've done a lot already! I'll just keep the Reaver's Soldier Classes mod up at the top of this thread.

I originally allowed other units to have psionics in case you wanted to train it. I like allowing everybody to do everything, even if some are better at it than others. For instance, rangers are best at throwing grenades but anyone can throw a grenade. Maybe someone wants a psi soldier who is really physically strong and doesn't mind that their psi stats are weak.

Assault sounds better than breacher, and it's what they used in EU2012. I selected the name breacher because they're particularly good at that brief moment right after you barge in through the front door on a medium scout. Landed medium scouts can be one of the most dangerous times for your soldiers in the first few months, but I have seen many a breacher survive 3 or 4 aliens at once in the first room. Also I just wanted to distance myself from EU2012 cause I hate that game.
Call them anything you like. =)

With respect to the Psi angle. maybe have these soldiers have low psi values, but once psionics is unlocked, allow the player to hire people with high Psi ability, but shitty combat statistics. The justification being that Xcom started out by selecting elite soldiers, but once Psionics started to be a problem, started looking for random people off the street who had the gift, people who didn't have any military training.

Is psi strength connected to bravery at all? It would be interesting if Psi recruits were more likely to panic from combat losses, while trained soldiers were more resistant to non Psi morale effects.

I figure more likely psi troops would come from among military units. There are hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the world, surely some of them have strong psi potential. Furthermore, it's easier to force the military personnel to undergo psi testing to check. Civilians don't just do whatever you tell them. But taking them from civilian populations is a more fanciful idea that a lot of people will probably enjoy.

I made their bravery higher entirely on the basis of gameplay. Braver soldiers are more resistant to psionic panic attacks. It makes sense for your psi troops to be resistant to psionics. It might also be realistic, however, as a soldier trained in psionics will gain two advantages: they will be less intimidated by non-psionics, and they will be less frightened by psionics as they understand them much better. Normal soldiers might view psionics as some sort of sorcery or supernatural haunting, and it could frighten them very much.

1324

Released Mods / [UFO] Reaver's Air Weapons

« on: August 01, 2016, 09:31:12 am »

This mod alters aircraft weapons and adds a few, making the choice of aircraft weapons less decided and more strategic. Every weapon is useful, and no weapon is an I-WIN button. UFO attack ranges are also increased, so you'll be getting shot at more often during interceptions.
This mod is compatible with all other Reaver's X mods.


Version 1.1
See post #2 for details and download.


Mod portal page: https://www.openxcom.com/mod/reaver-039-s-air-weapons

video showing laser beam and pulse cannon





AIRCRAFT WEAPONS

Cannon: I increased its accuracy and damage, so it has decent DPS and can deal many times more damage than stingrays or avalanches before it runs out of ammo, yet it's still weak enough per-hit to safely crash land small scouts. Still probably won't be a popular weapon but it's not as terrible, and it's more of a backup just in case weapon. Ammo is now half price as it comes in units of 25 instead of 50.

Stingray: now more accurate than avalanche, making it a reliable weapon as well as giving it significantly higher average DPS than avalanche. These only outrange medium scouts.

Avalanche: made slightly less accurate to make them more erratic. This gives more reason to use stingrays. These still outrange everything but battleships.

Pulse Cannon: laser tech weapon, short range, high accuracy, and fast firing. It can crash land small scouts but has a low chance of destroying them. It has the same range as a medium scout.

Laser Beam: laser tech weapon, long range, high accuracy, and slow firing. It can outrange the medium scout, abductor, and harvester.

Plasma Autocannon: plasma tech weapon, short range, rapid firing, high damage. It can only outrange the medium scout and abductor but it can take a terror ship out of the air fairly quickly. You must manufacture ammo for this weapon.

Plasma Beam: plasma tech weapon, long range, slow firing, high damage. I decreased its fire rate and increased its damage to make the weapon more erratic. It will sometimes destroy medium or large scouts. I also reduced its ammo capacity to 10, so it's powerful but won't always have enough ammo to destroy the largest ships. Terror ships and battleships outrange the plasma beam. You must manufacture ammo for this weapon. The plasma beam is now called "plasma beam" instead of "plasma cannon" in the research list.

Light Fusion Ball: fusion tech weapon, long range, very powerful. This missile launcher has the same range as a terror ship, carries 5 missiles, and deals 350 damage with 100% accuracy. It will generally destroy any small craft and can take out mediums easily, though it has a chance of destroying even those.

Heavy Fusion Ball: fusion tech weapon, long range, extremely powerful, expensive. This missile launcher has the same range as a battleship, outranging all other craft. It carries two missiles which deal 900 damage apiece, and cost 16 elerium to manufacture. They will easily destroy medium craft and can even destroy terror ships.




So essentially there are four tech levels of weapons at two different ranges. Long range weapons are more erratic and often weaker than short range weapons. They may deal more damage per hit, but the short range weapons tend to fire rapidly and destroy craft quickly.

Conventional weapons are weak, but you have cannons in case you're desperate to take out something big in the early game.

Laser weapons are powerful and reliable, and can stay with you to the end of the game. They cost no special materials and they don't cost anything to fire.

Plasma weapons are very powerful and are a reasonably efficient way to spend elerium on taking out alien craft.

Fusion weapons are devastating but expensive to fire, and will burn through your elerium reserves almost as quickly as they burn through alien armor. With all other weapons, you strive for maximum power, but with fusion weapons it's about restraint. The aliens can manipulate containment fields which they can use to propel plasma or fusion charges and also control powerful explosions. The original blaster launcher demonstrates this, and I demonstrate it further in this mod as well as my Ground Weapons mod. We could have shot full scale nukes at the aliens from the get go, but that would have caused tremendous damage to the Earth's biosphere.




ALIEN CRAFT CHANGES
I increased the accuracy of most alien craft, especially the supply ship. It now outranges stingrays and even the laser beam. Plasma beams will outrange it but even two of them may run out of ammo before downing a supply ship. It will be a bit harder to take supply ships out now.

I decreased medium scout HP from 200 to 180 to separate it more from the 250 HP large scout. Avalanches will occasionally destroy medium scouts.

I increased harvester HP from 500 to 600 to set it apart from the 500 HP abductor. The harvester is bigger than the abductor and carries more aliens.



FUSION DEFENSE
To go along with the huge fusion ball buff, I altered the fusion defense a lot. I wasn't able to make it cost ammo, so I changed it into Fusion Beam Defense, a brand new technology created by X-Com and adapted from alien fusion and plasma technology. It requires enormous power and must be a ground-based weapon but it is devastatingly powerful. Even one of these facilities may be enough to defend your base, or at least you won't need much more than it. It has a hit ratio of 100 and a defense value of 4000 so, if my math is right, it has a 75% chance of destroying the incoming battleship in one hit. At best, the battleship will have a third of its HP remaining. But this fusion defense is extremely expensive to build and run, and it takes a long time to research.

The missile and laser defenses have much higher hit ratios, effectively buffing them to usable levels. Plasma defense is still your bread and butter defense though it is less accurate than they are, and more expensive.

Plasma defense: I increased the defense value slightly and the maintenance cost a lot. It's not super expensive, but with a bunch of them it can add up. If you can spare the space, missile or laser defenses are the cheapest option. But if you can spare the money, fusion defenses are the most compact option. And plasma defenses are sort of in the middle, fairly efficient overall but erratic.

1325

Released Mods / Re: AP Weakness - so HE isn't the only answer

« on: August 01, 2016, 12:16:07 am »

Thanks!

I am eager to see what you're making!

1326

Released Mods / AP Weakness - so HE isn't the only answer

« on: July 30, 2016, 09:59:33 pm »

This mod alters the AP and HE damage profiles a bit along with adjusting some of the armor values slightly. The goal is both to remain more true to what the UFOPedia entries say regarding alien weaknesses, as well as to ensure that both AP and HE are useful in some situations and not useful in some. This is not a rock, paper, scissors mod, so your favorite weapons will still be generally effective at exterminating the alien menace--even if your favorite damage type is HE.





Definition of Armor Piercing:
Armor piercing rounds are heavy metal slugs with a pointed tip and a long powder cartridge, typically fired from a long-barreled rifle. They have high muzzle velocity and fly fairly straight and non-erratic. They excel at punching through rigid materials like tough armor, glass, rocks, bones, skulls, and concrete. They aren't so good at shredding soft tissues and may lack the stopping power of lower muzzle velocity blunt-tip rounds.

X-Com has scoured the globe for high-powered military AP rifles of varying sizes to ensure that their troops stand a chance of penetrating alien armor. Old WW2 rounds with modernized long powder cartridges are a favorite, and difficult to find in production because modern rifling allows much smaller ammunition to punch through even the sturdiest Earthbound armor.



Changes made by the mod:
* Cyberdiscs are a bit more resistant to HE, as is stated in the UFOPedia. You can still take them out pretty easily with a rocket launcher, but the autocannon probably will struggle with them. On the flip side, they are slightly weak to AP damage. Their armor is too strong for rifles to be very effective against them, but heavy cannons using AP ammo or cannon tanks can be reasonably effective. With vanilla settings, powerful explosives are still the easiest way to take these out, but with more powerful AP weapons from mods, you might find AP to be particularly effective against them.

* Chryssalids and Ethereals, which are heavily armored units, are now quite weak to AP. Rifles will do a tiny bit of damage to them but heavy cannons easily take them out.

* Snakemen have strong armor, but I'm assuming it is fleshy like the Mutons. I gave Snakemen a slight weakness to AP, and it helps rifles kill them but you're still better off with laser rifles. I also adjusted snakemen armor values a bit to smooth them out. They were a bit erratic between ranks.

* I gave Reapers a strong resistance to HE. Due to their low under armor and large size, HE is still highly effective against them. In fact they still take more damage from explosives than smaller units do.

* Sectopods have half the under armor but take only half the explosive damage. The result is that mid-size explosives are still just as ineffective against them, but now blaster bombs deal less damage to them. It'll make them a lot more scary when you find it usually takes 2-3 blaster bombs to finish one off. (Or you can use lasers)

1327

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION] Final Mod Pack (FMP)

« on: July 30, 2016, 01:32:16 am »

I have tried to use incendiary in the original game and even when aliens catch fire they seem to take no damage from the fire. I'd seen a reaper (supposedly weak to incendiary) take multiple hits from incendiary and then walk around for multiple turns on fire and still require a few AP rounds to finish it off. That basically means the incendiary didn't even hurt it, since it only takes a few AP rounds to kill it from full health.

More recently I made a 90 power rapidly firing small launcher with incendiary, and tested it against reapers. They definitely took damage. The first shot knocked a reaper out cold but that was clearly a fluke as further shots failed to cause significant damage to the reapers and no reaper ever died from incendiary alone no matter how many times it was shot. They also never caught fire.

In the original game, a unit passing a turn while standing in fire, if they were still standing in fire at the start of their next turn, they would be lit on fire. I only observed this once, but one of my own soldiers lost half of their health and gained zero fatal wounds during a single turn while on fire.

-------------------

I have noticed that several of the units have weaknesses or resistances and these are often mentioned in the autopsy reports. You can use this information to defeat some of the harder aliens with conventional weaponry if your weapons technology is behind the curve. There's just one problem:

. . alien . . . . weakness
cyberdisc -- explosive (despite its explosive resistance, this is the best ammo to use against it)
reaper -- actually explosive (it has no explosive resistance and is a 2x2 unit)
snakeman -- no weakness
chryssalid -- no weakness
muton -- explosive if anything (resistant to AP, low under armor)
silacoid -- explosive
celatid -- other celatids
ethereal -- no weakness
sectopod -- laser https:// slight secondary to explosive

The problem is that if it has a weakness, it is generally weak to explosives. Explosives can and will defeat any alien. AP will not always work, lasers are not always a good option, and plasma will not work well against sectopods. But you can win the game using only explosives. The only units that actually resist HE damage type are 2x2 units with low under armor, meaning you just need a bigger bomb.

I haven't played FMP yet but I was thinking the aliens need more variety in their weaknesses. There should be some creatures resistant to explosive that are weak to AP--especially armored units I think. AP stands for armor piercing, after all. I think I'm going to write up a mod like that.

Food for thought.

1328

Work In Progress / Re: Need Firestorm to have alien Scout's battlescape appearance

« on: July 29, 2016, 11:16:30 pm »

Someone should probably make a super easy mode for people with difficulty playing under normal conditions. I sure could have used that when I was younger. Maybe I'll make such a thing.


Several years ago, I used an attribute editor for Warcraft 1 to make the game playable--I buffed the stats of human units slightly and nerfed orcs slightly. The only tough part at that point was the mission where your humans go up against other humans, but I was able to beat it when I realized the human AI over-uses clerics and ignores archers, so I buffed archers and nerfed clerics.

1329

Work In Progress / Re: Need Firestorm to have alien Scout's battlescape appearance

« on: July 29, 2016, 01:10:46 pm »

The crash happens because the game can't place any XCom units on the map.

It's because the floor block isn't calibrated to spawn XCom units.


I fixed it by swapping the tile out for a Skyranger tile. You could alternatively edit the characteristics of the purple tile to make it able to spawn Xcom units, but you'd want to make a copy tile because if you edit the original tile like that you could have soldiers spawning in the alien ship, or cause a crash.

Here's a working mod using the Skyranger tile:

1330

Work In Progress / Re: Change UFO crash percentage?

« on: July 29, 2016, 07:44:11 am »

Well, that makes it even harder to destroy them. Thus all the more reason to want to shrink the margin.

1331

Work In Progress / Re: Change UFO crash percentage?

« on: July 26, 2016, 08:26:32 pm »

You can mod weapons to fire quicker and do less damage, or fire slower and do more damage (adapat the ammo accordingly). This will make it easier/harder to force UFOs to land without destroying them.
Note, in the interception window, OpenXcom lets you click a weapon to disable it temporarily. This lets you send an interceptor armed with missile and gun, and decide what to use.

I actually wanted to shrink the window between crashed and destroyed. I've been editing the damage values of weapons but I'm finding the only way to make a weapon have a decent chance of destroying a UFO is if a double set of the weapon will down it in one shot. It leads to the weapons being slow firing high damage finicky weapons just to get a few UFO destructions in there.

1332

Work In Progress / Change UFO crash percentage?

« on: July 26, 2016, 06:27:51 am »

Normally, a UFO will crash when it sustains 50% or more damage without being destroyed. Is there a way to increase this percentage? edit: this can be done by giving UFOs shields with OXCE



Extra question: can I add more sets to Alien Item Levels, beyond the 0, 1, and 2?

1333

Work In Progress / Re: Multiple HE projectiles

« on: July 26, 2016, 06:06:49 am »

I have a hypothesis that it may have something to do with projectiles leaving the map. Try giving it an arced shot so that all of the projectiles are more likely to hit the ground inside the map.
edit: Arcing shot does not work with multiple projectiles.

1334

Released Mods / Re: [SOLDIERS] Reaver's Soldier Classes

« on: July 21, 2016, 07:59:31 am »

But if I add that, it'll automatically relegate the armor to those classes only, shutting out other classes that may be added by another mod.

Why not just let the hybrids use the armor? You could do like X-Com Apocalypse and make the armor encumber a soldier. If it reduces strength by 10, most soldiers won't be hugely inhibited by it, but hybrids could be very weak and thus have much difficulty wearing it.

Just a thought.

1335

Released Mods / Re: [SOLDIERS] Reaver's Soldier Classes

« on: July 21, 2016, 03:56:38 am »

Here's a quick write-up for the RPG classes mod. I set all of the soldier costs to the same as the basic soldier: $40,000 to hire and $20,000 per month. Each class has advantages and disadvantages. Breachers have the highest reactions and health, but lowest firing and throwing accuracy. Rangers have the highest time units and stamina, with other stats either higher or lower than other classes but with no major attribute holes. They have particularly good throwing accuracy. Snipers have very high starting firing accuracy and can train it particularly far, but they suffer from low time units and health. Heavies are sluggish units with low reactions but high strength. Their firing accuracy is weak but has plenty of room for growth.


I added Psionics as a class, but I can't find the mod that makes them available later so I don't know how that's done. For now, they're available from the outset and pretty useless in the early game. Psionics have generally low attributes, especially time units, health, and strength. At best, they can probably carry a pistol and psi amp, and you'll want to keep them safe and not have them traveling around the battlescape more than necessary. As a defense, they have moderate firing accuracy and reactions, albeit with poor growth potential. Psionics have 60-80 psi strength and can grow their psi skill all the way to 125. The rest of your soldiers have 0-50 psi skill and can grow their psi strength only to 50, and it grows slower in them.

I normalized bravery a bit, giving each soldier 20-50 bravery. There will be fewer liabilities due to bravery, so you can focus on building a cohesive unit and worry less about weak links in the chain. On the flip side, their max bravery is lower. They can still train it to 100, but the Psionics start with 30-60 bravery and can train it all the way to the alien value of 110.

I reduced the psi-amp weight from 10 to 3, and the mind probe weight from 5 to 2. I also reduced the psi-amp's time unit cost from 25 to 20 (Psionics can use it 2-3 times, just like soldiers in vanilla), and I reduced the mind probe's time unit cost from 50% to 40% to make it easier to use twice in the same turn. A Psionic with 66 time units (max 65-68) can use a mind probe once, and then use a psi amp twice. Most of your other soldiers will eventually be able to use a psi amp 4 times in a turn, but it's of limited utility given their weak psi stats.



I haven't tested this mod at all, so I hope it works.
I wonder if I could simply add a section in Psionics giving them technology requirements.