Messages

31

XPiratez / Re: Stuff I'd love to see in XPiratez!

« on: May 30, 2021, 08:26:58 pm »

While the AI does ignore hands being filled, it does Not ignore tu costs.

I was explicitly told that the AI completely ignores the extremely large TU costs involved in moving a grenade from your inventory to your hand before you throw it, which makes it practically a free-to-use weapon the AI can spam quite recklessly, and he does. If you try to do this, it will eat up so many TUs that you won't be able to actually move into throwing position to actually use it, to the point where it's cheaper to do crazy unrealistic antics like "grenade relay" than to just pull the pin and throw the grenade like a normal person.

The AI? No such limitations, because he can freely teleport the grenade to his hands, he ignores the 30+ TU costs involved in putting your gun away, using the grenade, and then putting your gun back.

But carbon is still better in pretty much all aspects, NV, spot, mass, inventory, TU...

Better than what, Chainmail? Sure, and it damn well should be considering its MUCH higher prerequisites and tech level, being that it's practically at the end of T2 tech.

Why would you not have printers in late game, just for sake of runt workspace if for no other reasons? I have one in something like half of my bases.

Yes, and they're all very BUSY bases.

Yes Blitz is better, and I use them if i have them hanging around, but they are hassle to make, require entire chain of prerequisite armors.

It is mildly more complicated, but on the other hand, those prerequisite armors are things you already need to be churning out, or would be acquiring en-masse as loot. Swiftsuit production is needed to produce Drone Herders anyway.

What would make Carbon better is if it wasn't a dead end, but actually went somewhere, so became a component of upgraded carbon, like, say, flying or even shielded Carbon. As it stands, Carbon normally only producible mid-to-late, it is slow, cannot fly, and thus the protective value of it is mooted by the fact that anyone wearing it will not be participating in the battle. When you're lagging 30 TU behind and cannot fly on top, you're not a participant in this fight.

32

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: May 29, 2021, 10:52:23 pm »

Crystal Skull's effect is that it drains HP/STA when you trigger it. It's not the Iron Wind that's damaging you, it's the Crystal Skull. Not a bug.

33

XPiratez / Re: Codex Choice

« on: May 29, 2021, 10:48:39 pm »

The thing with having to axe your way through fences is that this eats up an awful lot of TUs due to how abundant they are, and this can often make or break your charge. Walls, too, are frequently annoyingly placed, but that's not a thing that flying armors help you with either. Especially when you can only chop these things facing dead on, never diagonally.

The main obstacle to the Purgatoria armor is that it competes directly against Blood Axes for your demon corpses. Make sure you execute all of the Pink Demons except possibly the one live specimen for research: A live one is otherwise useless to you, you need them to be dead, and can't kill them after the fact. This tends to require a pistol shot to the head, although a peasant with a spear can also perform this task.

Of course, the blood axe will run a regular pain train on these guys and leaves very few survivors.

Recent readings have made me curious if blood axes stack, since one of the peculiar quirks of them is that if you wield a blood axe and some other weapon, the other weapon also gains the benefit of the blood axe. But what if you dual wield bloodaxes? Do you get double the leeching? Or maybe dual-wielding it with vampire swords...

34

XPiratez / Re: Codex Choice

« on: May 27, 2021, 09:49:19 pm »

Have to say, I did really enjoy getting the Aggressor suits early on.  My first campaign as well, so I have no idea of the various niches of the higher level armors, but it might be fun to have a "codex-flavored" (and restricted to that codex) higher level armor.  Of course, that may already exist, I just may not have found/seen them yet.

Red has Purgatoria unique to it. It's fast, good resists, has a red shield, and grants stun recovery on hit, so it has a good synergy with the Blood Axe. It also counts as Exosuit...but cannot fly, and thus cannot into space. Its inability to fly is, however, a major drawback, since both waist-high fences and flying enemies exist in great abundance.

35

XPiratez / Re: Question about wall-breaching

« on: May 24, 2021, 12:22:25 pm »

Chainsaw is better for scrub melee, though. Same TU cost, 5 hits instead of 4, and lower damage so you're less likely to kill your target early.

36

XPiratez / Re: Stuff I'd love to see in XPiratez!

« on: May 24, 2021, 12:12:08 pm »

I have to disagree on utility of carbon armor. That thing has plasma damage modifier of 50%, and that fact alone makes it worth the effort as plasma is most frequent and most dangerous damage type in late game.

Yes, but Chainmail already comes close to that with the (S) version having 60%, while NOT being vulnerable to the resulting secondary fire. This hardly matters, anyway. Even at 50%, from the front, a plasma rifle will still pen. This means you don't have adequate protection anyway and will still be using the standard methods.

Also, plasma is never the most dangerous damage type, it's always concussive. Only Plasma Scorchers even come close to the threat level posed by AI grenade cheats, as the AI doesn't have to pay TU costs for actually pulling a grenade out of his inventory and can use it with no hands.

Other advantage of carbon armor is that it has good night vision an thermal vision, has no TU penalties (i acutely  avoid using power armor on my best gals as I hate TU penalties on anything I use for melee)

No +TU modifier *IS* a TU penalty.

and is simple to produce as it has only chemicals, life support and optronic parts as components

...and requires a printer, which is means you have to have fully established a printer base just to print second-string armor that only comes into being at the very end of its tier.

I use it as main armor type on my B team that i don't want to bother equipping with relay fancy and exotic armors. It is simply the best late game filler armor for cannon fodder and line grunts.

I use Blitz for that role because Carbon penalizes you 30 TUs by comparison, and is easily thwarted by a waist-high fence. It does not hurt that at late game, it USED to be the primary line armor, so it has already been produced in abundance and is now being partially phased out in favor of Assault and Annihilator (but never entirely, it's just that good).

On secondary troops who don't have maxed TU and medals that grant more TU, losing 30 TU effectively immobilizes you. You will eat so much more fire simply because you can't get back under cover, and Carbon can still be penned by the vast majority of enemy types...while Blitz has a shield, which means you can always freely absorb some of the most dangerous threats that can't be dodged, so you won't get penned by even a bazooka trying to exit the ship. And it, too, has decent NV and ThV.

It doesn't help that the primary threat profile of second-line troops is generally not plasma-based, since you don't send second-string units out to fight plasma.

37

XPiratez / Re: Stuff I'd love to see in XPiratez!

« on: May 23, 2021, 06:48:12 pm »

I wouldn't say Carbon is gated behind RNG: It's got a very clear and very predictable path: You'll get it right after the Siberia Base Mission, because that's when you actually encounter the guys who drop it. It's got a HUGE number of production prerequisites, and is a technological dead end, though, as that particular research goes nowhere. So even if you managed to acquire the tech early somehow, you'd have no means of producing it without building a complete base that, at that point, would probably only be capable of producing it.

On top of that, it's only slightly better than chainmail (w/o shield) from the front (same from the sides, worse from behind), which was armor of the previous tier, and shares all of its deficiencies (can be penned by most opponents, bad TUs, considers waist-high fences to be their archnemesis).

As a human armor, it might compete favorably against Doom/Doom2, as male humans have very bad medium armor choices all throughout the game (your only medium armor options are Doom and Batman), and the peasant medium armor options are nonexistent.

38

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: May 23, 2021, 04:33:45 pm »

Well, the Harbinger and Loader cannot into space because they cannot actually fly, so if put in space they would just float there uselessly. That logic thus seem apparent. But the Cybermage has no such limitations, so the logic of why it cannot into space is unclear and not explained anywhere.

39

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: May 22, 2021, 11:24:54 pm »

It's the thing which just makes you go "STOP EXPLODING, YOU COWARDS!".

40

XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: What do you do with Dr. X?

« on: May 22, 2021, 11:24:12 pm »

Admittedly, at the level you're at by the time you have access to those options, it's really more a small chunk of score rather than a hefty chunk of score, you're probably pulling at least 15-20K score on a slow month, so 2K isn't so much "hefty" anymore.

41

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: May 22, 2021, 11:21:06 pm »

True, cant shoot from inventory is an engine limit.

Probably, but the inability to even put it in a shoulder slot definitely isn't. If the item is to be made viable thematically as written, it should probably have no firing cost, since the TU cost of firing would be subsumed in the engine-required limitation of moving it to a hand slot and then back.

Does sound like an oversight to me, but it might have to with the flight mechanism. Outside a gravity well you can't fly with just bending gravity. Maybe it has no thrust mechanism? only dio knows

That doesn't make any sense either, since the same mechanism for flight is used by other suits that can into space. Plus we never actually leave a gravity well, the gravity in orbit is actually only slightly lower than it is on the surface, and certainly higher than it is on Mars. Since other exosuits that can fly can into space, why not this one?

42

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: May 21, 2021, 08:45:26 pm »

Shoulder Launcher, although it is says it goes on your shoulders and is flagged to fit in shoulder slots, cannot actually be put in any shoulder slot because for some reason it is 2x2 and thus too large. Probably also can't be fired from such a slot as implied, but this might be an engine limitation.

Also, Bugeye Cybermage Armor, despite being both an Exosuit and Flight-Capable, cannot into space?

43

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: May 20, 2021, 10:56:36 am »

Do weapon mastery and similar medals where you can get them for multiple different items stack, or does only the highest one count?

44

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: May 19, 2021, 03:56:34 am »

Fallout has turn-based combat because of X-COM. Tim Cain said so. I suspect combat was going to be more tactical, but things changed when they lost the GURPS License and had to improvise.

Tactics was nice, even CTB was nice, but its agreed that RT combat was a mistake and they should have focused on a deeper turn-based experience. Its also a very linear game and lacks environment destruction.

Fallout had turn-based combat...but it only has one controllable unit, so the meaningful benefits of turn-based combat were pretty much entirely lost. You picked your one move you had built into your character and you spammed it. That was basically it. Then you waited for all of the enemy units to take their turns one at a time. It wasn't actually great. Since you could not control ANYONE else, you were mostly twiddling your thumbs because turn-based combat is not actually a good fit for a single-unit game with relatively low action complexity.

Fallout Tactics apparently saw how the combat actually kinda flopped in the original, so they made it real-time, and thus it flopped for the entirely opposite reason now that you actually had multiple units to control.

45

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L9 30-Apr-2021 Personal Attention

« on: May 15, 2021, 03:26:48 pm »

I remember that particular thing from OG X-Com, too.