Messages

16

XPiratez / Re: Reusable (and painful) deep 'surgury' kit RENDers mushroom beer redundant

« on: January 04, 2017, 12:51:38 pm »

We might also adopt the system from Firaxis XCOMs: on the mission you can patch yourself up however you want, but the resulting recovery time will be based on the minimal health level during the mission, not the final health level.

Obviously it will require an engine patch, but it's quite a nice approach - also with it, medkit items may be rebalanced to restore meaningful amount of health, as it won't be prone to abuse any more.

17

OXCE Wishlists / Re: Solar's wishlist

« on: January 03, 2017, 01:58:36 pm »

In Piratez you can shoot down their cruisers and battleships and the only answer to something clearly threatening to their reputation is an anemic hideout raid.

Even if crackdowns become automatic losses, it won't make them resistant to abuse.
I can easily imagine that people will simply build dedicated "attack bases" (hangars/barracks) and will do all the raiding from those, quickly transferring stuff out in case of imminent crackdown. Losing only ~25 days of construction time at best.

This is hardly a good solution for increasing game difficulty. At worst, it can make it much more annoying (because, as people mentioned, sometimes crackdowns are the only sure-fire way to obtain high-rank enemy units).

A more proper solution would be to make crackdown missions appropriately hard (always scaling with actual player's progress), while at the same time removing all instakill heavy ordinance from the game at all (chinese dragon, baby nukes, etc), because instakill weapons trivialize crackdown missions way too much. At least all replenishable instakill weapons.

Scaling missions might be way too much work for the OpenXCOM engine as well. Not to mention that at best you can scale enemy quantities and their equipment; but any equipment gap between the player and the AI that you create will be eventually closed.

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OpenXcom Extended / Re: [OXCE+] Meridian's resources and mods for (not only) X-PirateZ

« on: January 03, 2017, 01:32:23 pm »

Question: do we have a hotkey to remove all equipment from a craft?
I found out that I'm spending way too much time managing craft's inventories (especially in times when you mass-upgrade your equipment).

19

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99E.3 - 21 Dec - Dead in Space 3

« on: January 02, 2017, 10:51:52 pm »

Good replayability is IMO exactly that: returning to a game after 3, 5 years and finding/trying something new

I totally agree with this. My previous playthrough attempt was about a year ago, it went quite far but ended prematurely due to real life, and after a while I returned back to it and was immediately drawn in due to "hey, look at all this new/improved/added stuff!".
But once PirateZ go through release phase, where there won't be major content updates any more, bits and pieces of hidden content can stimulate replayability in the same way that updates do.

While I could object to huge mutually exclusive campaign branches, I'm absolutely fine with the current approach - the campaign is largely the same, but you need to choose between different late-game packages.

20

XPiratez / Re: Thoughts & feedback so far

« on: January 01, 2017, 01:43:52 am »

Organ grinder is either "grab stuff fast and get out" mission, or - just get Smoke Ops armor, it is quite sufficient to carry you through the mission with minimal problems (oh, and better do it during the day). Any chem-resistant armor above Smoke Ops is obviously great as well. Some hover armor works great for early reconnaissance and hounds-removal before the entire map gets filled with smoke.

Ghouls have pretty bad reactions and their weapons are mostly short-range, so rushing them or shooting them from far away usually works great and isn't overly risky.

21

XPiratez / Re: Thoughts & feedback so far

« on: December 30, 2016, 07:36:08 pm »

BTW, domestic shotgun with rubber slugs is quite crappy. You need to shot at least 2-3 times to a guy to take him down. The TUs and the distance required invites you throw the gun, take the club and go personal.

Domestic shotgun serves quite unique role of being a sustainable ranged stun-gun - so you can go for captures while raising ACC in the process. Yes, it's crappy, and yes, melee stunners & the whip are vastly superior, yet they won't allow you to train firing accuracy.

22

XPiratez / Re: Thoughts & feedback so far

« on: December 28, 2016, 01:12:28 am »

On economy:

With latest versions, I'm thinking that the game is very close to a sweet spot. Early economy is mostly loot- and ransom/slavery-based. I've crunched numbers for possible manufacturing options - and indeed, as other people already said, they aren't really practical. You'll be looking at ~1 month building time, ~2 months for 100% RoI on a new base not including monthly expenses, and over 3 months with monthly expenses. And that's the even with the best early option (X-Grog). And of course this means that you're basically delaying your main base progress all the time.

I find it much more important to focus on tactical combat results and training gals so that you'll have your strong "core team". This allows you to cut your expenditure (less dead gals -> less expenses on recuits), have WAY more captures (100% capture rate on missions like Temple Raids is quite dangerous with newbies but extremely easy with experienced warriors), and tackle harder missions which give more loot. Researching all coin-related items allows you to start stockpiling some good coins so that later you can use those with Mint for great profits. Researching captures allows you to enslave those who are applicable, and slaves are required for some pretty good economy-boosting options that will come slightly later.

Expanding for radar coverage is decently viable as well, but doing it too early is ill-advised - it's quite pointless to expand unless you can capitalize on it reliably, and that requires an attack craft good enough for civilian traffic (Aircar is good, but Shark Jetbike is better, as it can easily get 100% interception rate on any civ traffic for very low Hellerium cost), a craft gun & ammo, and an experienced pilot to tackle those missions solo (sending your main team on very small civ crashes is an extreme overkill).
Not to mention that you don't really need to expand for radar coverage for purposes of winning or not losing the game. You'll definitely need more bases after a while due to base grid size limits, but there's not many reasons to speed up expansion just for the sake of it.

23

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99E.3 - 21 Dec - Dead in Space 3

« on: December 23, 2016, 07:30:25 pm »

Trying to build my bases "defensively" with segregated hangars and firepit hallways is the dumbest thing I've done in this game. Every base defense mission is a nightmare as the enemies stand around in their starting positions and make 4 accurate reaction shots a turn.

Blindfiring heavy ordinance into hangars usually solve that problem very nicely. Camo also works quite well.
Hangars in the middle may cause a slight problem where AI suddenly decides to attack (usually at least half of enemies are on the attack, but sometimes they all are) and one side gets swamped.

24

XPiratez / Re: Alternate Graphics for Piratez Extended - For XPiratez 0.99E2

« on: December 22, 2016, 08:03:35 pm »

Dioxine just released XPiratez 0.99E-3 - it now has +16 new Avatars

I've downloaded the latest version - will hopefully have an update ready by Jan 1st.

Many thanks in advance - your mod is quite awesome.

25

XPiratez / Re: Self-imposed restrictions

« on: December 21, 2016, 05:05:15 pm »

I think that I'm going to limit my teams to 8 or 10 gals. More than that makes battles too slow and unmanagable, and too easy.

My answer to big teams is to complement them with dedicated support gals - with mortars, sniper rifles, medkits, etc. They won't be participating too much in a combat (often completely sitting it out on smaller missions), but occasionally they become very crucial and useful. So you'd have ~10 front-line gals to command and 3-4 support gals that will be mostly just moving around in the back.

This also helps to train them, as least experienced people will fight on front-lines to get most XP while veteran gals will stay back as specialists.

PS: But even back in days when we started with Bonaventura, I don't think I ever used more than 14 gals in a team.

26

XPiratez / Self-imposed restrictions

« on: December 21, 2016, 02:33:21 pm »

I can't be the only person doing some "roleplay" and enforcing certain rules, even through it's not restricted by game mechanics to behave otherwise.
So, what rules you people are using, if any?

My typical to-go list for any difficulty (although I rarely play on Superhuman, I don't think it's too fun):
1) Never use any item that wasn't researched (no bootypedia entry). What if you turn a gun wrong way and end up shooting yourself?!
2) Never try to fight a one-sided battle. This is about not cheesing it out with grav harness vs melee enemies. As long as enemies don't even have an option to retaliate, it's boring and not pirate-worthy.
3) Never "power-level" with any kind of tricks. Such as repeatedly stunning and un-stunning enemies to train weapon skills. Well, unless that particular enemy pissed you off BIG F*CKING TIME, but then it's about having your rightful vengeance, not about power-leveling.
4) Never kill a civilian, unless you can't help it (someone went berserk or whacked a bit too hard with that bat). They're wimpy and not dangerous anyway, killing them is just admitting your weakness. Yes, this includes situations when a civvie tries to burn your gal with an iGun.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99E.2 - 18 Nov - Dead in Space 2

« on: December 20, 2016, 01:30:51 pm »

And just to clarify, am I right in assume that there is no max-stats advance of Warriors over Hands?

Yes. Warriors can have better initial stats, but stat caps are the same as Hands.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99E.2 - 18 Nov - Dead in Space 2

« on: December 20, 2016, 02:22:58 am »

I personally found the Airballs worthless when I tried them in my last run.  Out of 5 engagements with Civ ships, I had 3 complete misses expending all ammo, and 2 complete destructions of the target craft.

That's about the same as my experience with them - too strong for civilians, and way too risky to use against anything stronger. Thought it's theoretically possible to wreck a Runabout with them. Theoretically.

29

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99E.2 - 18 Nov - Dead in Space 2

« on: December 20, 2016, 12:40:40 am »

So, to answer my own question about early aerial combat.

There are three ways of getting early craft weapons (getting Aircar is quite trivial):
1) Loot. Shadow a (faction) craft, wait for it to land, loot 25mm cannon and some ammo from it. Straightforward but highly random. Also you can't replenish ammo, but it will last for a few interceptions, especially with a good pilot. I could never get a govt. craft with guns early game, so I'm pretty sure that only global faction crafts qualify.
2) Buy. 25mm cannons and ammo become available at "Contacts: Krazy Hanna". However, I'm not quite sure about prerequisites for that tech, and I never could reach it especially early (3rd month at best).
3) Make. Better weapons (namely, 30mm cannon which you can often loot from early crafts) can be researched & built, but for most things above 25mm cannon you'll need Workshop. Which is locked behind Runt Outfit, which is in turn locked behind Durathread research (obtainable from traders and kind of impossible to miss unless you kill everyone and never capture enemies) and "Contacts: Builders' Hall".

Getting to Workshop is extremely important, as most of craft-related production requires one.

30

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99E.2 - 18 Nov - Dead in Space 2

« on: December 18, 2016, 02:18:04 pm »

And, honestly, night maps are too night. Why aren't there at least some light sources here and there in inhabited places?

Yup, I always considered it pretty strange when you fight on a suburbs map and the only reasonably lit area is the road. Almost all buildings could use a lot more external lighting sources.

There's one very "natural" solution to NV being overpowered - is to apply temporary 1-turn visibility debuffs (camo, light level, anything) on firing most weapons - basically, to simulate muzzle flashes. Which will allow enemies to see you after you fire a gun, thus negating your ability to shoot things with impunity with no risk of reaction fire (which is the most OP part of night vision). But I'm not sure if it's at all possible with current OpenXcomEx.