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Messages - Markus Ramikin

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76
"Tanks don't have hands to open doors. "

And yet tanks in both vanilla and openxcom can generally open doors. How?

So can sectopods and cyberdisks for that matter, which don't have hands either.

Probably doors use some motion/proximity sensor that opens for tank-sized objects... but it doesn't matter what the imagined mechanism is. Whatever it is, IF tanks are allowed to open doors in all other situations, I can't see a reason why not in this one.

77
Right-clicking doesn't seem to work. Only driving through.

And if there's, say, a sectopod on the other side, I can't open it at all. In vanilla I could, because the game would let me /try/ to drive through that door as long as the tank didn't see the sectopod. It'd still get me nowhere, but the door would get opened.

Am I missing something obvious?

78
Suggestions / Faster "movement speed"and "Fire speed"
« on: January 24, 2015, 10:44:10 am »
Could we by any chance get a higher max speed of soldier movement?

One thing I liked about the (otherwise annoying) "speed depends on CPU" bug making X-com superfast on modern computers was that that soldiers moved instantly, and moving 14 or 26 soldiers around was less of a chore. Would be cool if openxcom's fastest setting replicated that, or at least was much faster than it is now.

Same with shooting, actually.

On a somewhat related note, is there a way to speed up the Hidden Movement phase? When things are happening that I can't see, are they taking so long because sounds need to play out, or because the program is taking genuinely this long to calculate paths etc?

79
I know that if aliens spot even one of my soldiers, my whole squad is vulnerable to psi attack.

My question is, is this just for that one round, or does my squad get permanently flagged as "detected and open to psi attack" for that whole battlescape session?

I'm asking because it seems to me that I've been subject to psi attacks when there was no way in hell any alien saw me during their round. But maybe I'm just missing something.

80
Troubleshooting / Re: Aliens pick up weapons?
« on: January 23, 2015, 01:21:32 pm »
Hm yeah, I can see MCed aliens using X-com weapons, but not natively, for the same reasons we can't use theirs without research.

81
Troubleshooting / Re: Aliens pick up weapons?
« on: January 23, 2015, 01:02:25 pm »
In this form I don't think it even worth bothering. I believe the logic should be updated and expanded to be used in all possible cases, without looking back on possible exploitation and baiting. The alien who does have weapon or grenade doesn't care on other lying weapon. It care only when it's entirely unarmed. And in this case it doesn't even matter baited it or not. If alien was mced and under mc disarmed, why it should worry about baiting? For the God sakes, it was already mind raped. It should take any opportunity even desperate into work!

Agreed. It sounds like a potentially great (optional) feature if it did what it says on the tin.

I'm not sure that currently it even works with panicked aliens. I keep running into aliens who panicked during "hidden action" because I was killing their buddies, and who don't have weapons. I guess maybe they ran out of "attraction" range when they panicked...

82
Troubleshooting / Aliens pick up weapons?
« on: January 23, 2015, 11:10:18 am »
Is that option supposed to be doing anything? I've always had it on and never seen it work. I even threw a heavy plasma to a group of disarmed floaters, and none of them picked it up, not even the one under whose feet it landed. (Err, not that floaters have feet...) Does it only work under specific conditions which I am not aware of?

83
Released Mods / Re: [CRAFT] Air Combat Rebalanced
« on: January 22, 2015, 05:48:22 pm »
Really liking this mod. I am generally cautious about adding mods to my games, but this one won me over easily - it's one of only two mods I'm using currently.

I most like the increased fuel efficiency on the Firestorm, good reason to use it more.

And the new interceptor is very useful.

Still, the mod has its problems. Sorry if this is going to be kinda detailed, but I like this mod and I wanna shore up what I see as its weaknesses.

To put it brutally, it's a nice change of pace, but at least in craft weapons it ends up replacing one kind of fake variety with another. Previously it was Avalanche and Plasma Beam, now it's Craft Cannon and Laser Cannon.

1. Laser is the new plasma.

TBH this is my only real problem with the mod: Plasma Beam seems near-useless now. Laser has higher DPS against everything except Very Large ships, where it's kinda equal. UFOs with < 35 range can be shot down safely with lasers, while stronger UFOs have too many hitpoints for plasma anyway.

I could maybe see using plasma on multiple firestorms to chase down Supply Ships, but that is too narrow a role, and still multiple firestorms with laser cannons will do just as well with only a little repair time. Besides, we don't shoot down supply ships, we let them land to seize their Elerium intact.

Plasma is supposed to be the pinnacle of beam technology, requiring researching the weapons of an alien, superior civilisation. How about give ship weapons the same balance as ground ones? Think about the difference between Plasma weapons vs laser rifles. Could do the same thing with the Plasma beam: make it strictly superior, but cost precious Elerium to rearm.

That way you might want to have Ravens/Firestorms with laser cannons for Elerium-efficient shooting down of small ships, and Avengers with plasma beams for the dangerous targets. There, real variety for good reasons.

2. Craft Cannon is the new Avalanche missile.

I just end up using Craft Cannons every time. 15-20% accuracy missiles are a joke. Even more so after you count in ship size penalties, difficulty level penalties, damage variance-based reductions, and when the Avalanche clip has a size of 2 and a greater cost than a Skyranger. It's very possible to send both of your interceptors with a total of 24 stingray missiles and fail to down a Medium Scout, after catching up to it 3 times because it keeps outrunning. That's not fun!

But if I use solely craft cannons, I can get by just fine until laser cannons, just gotta be cautious and pay attention, and withdraw when damaged. The rare interceptor loss I could manage just fine (hasn't happened yet in two games).

Of course you could "fix" this by making the cannon worse, but if using this mod required me to build a 4th hangar to be able to deploy enough missiles against a single Small ship, I'd give up on it.

BTW, I like the idea of Avalanches being powerful-but-costly. That's good enough for balancing reasons, as early in the game you're not exactly swimming in cash, unlike later. So there's room for higher accuracy  - or a larger clip (more cost to arm!).

3. Improved Accuracy tech doesn't work out that great.

I end up ignoring it every time. Two main reasons. One, craft cannon works okay and laser cannons are just around the corner. If I first beeline to Laser Rifles as I usually do, from there it's just an average 880 man-days (18 days with a 50-man laboratory) to Laser Cannons, and 450 man-days (9 days) to Improved Accuracy, a mere 9 days difference. So there's no point producing all those Tuned weapons when you can have laser cannons soon enough.

They just clutter up the Manufacturing screen for the rest of the game, which is my other reason: I hate that clutter. Though that's mostly the fault of the interface, inefficient use of screenspace by the manufacture list.

IF the research was much shorter (100 man-days? And maybe have the research require just the Navigation item, directly, not Navigation researched?) AND if you could make it so that it doesn't require manufacturing new items, merely change stats on existing ones, then I'd see use for it. But I guess that can't be done. So what i'd suggest instead is removing the Accuracy research and just giving the starting Stingrays and Avalanches their "improved" stats.

I know this is an old topic and there's a chance the author isn't reading (let alone going to be convinced). But for anyone else who would like to try these ideas, here are the changes I made in my own game:

Plasma Beam:
* performance back at vanilla values (52 range, 140 damage)
* 24 ammo (up from 10)
* requires 6 elerium to fully rearm

Stingray missiles:
* start with "tuned" accuracy (50%) and costs

Avalanche missiles:
* start with "tuned" accuracy (40%) and costs
* clip size increased from 2 to 3

Fusion Ball launcher:
* clip size increased from 2 to 3

Improved Accuracy:
* research no longer available (disabled in a dirty way, by adding an impossible requirement, as I didn't want to clean up the whole file)

Ruleset file attached. Install Istrebitel's original first. You'll need the Resources. EDIT: updated due to Nightly build changes.

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