Messages

541

XPiratez / Mod: Improved Stun Baton

« on: February 24, 2016, 10:33:53 pm »

I was a bit disappointed with the performance of the stun baton so I made this small mod which makes it competitive. It changes the damage of the stun baton from "30" to "20 + MELEE*0.2 + BRAVERY*0.4". Think of it as an improved handle or a knuckleduster for weak but brave melee skilled gals.

The files go in the mods folder of pirates which is OpenXcom_XPiratez\users\mods


Crunching the numbers:
For low skilled gals, the new stun baton behaves pretty much like the old one. Ok vs non-armoured targets but useless vs armoured.
For medium skilled gals, the new stun baton is on par or better than the cattle prod. Weak target armour favors the stun baton, stronger armour favors the cattle prod.
For elite gals, the stun baton is as good as a knuckleduster and may slightly surpass it in average damage (with high bravery, which is hard to get). But the stun baton has a 50-150% damage range, which makes it less useful vs really heavy armour.

Edit: toned damage down to 20 + MELEE*0.15 + BRAVERY*0.2

542

XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: Extended Piratez general FAQ/Strategy Guide

« on: February 24, 2016, 01:24:51 pm »

To use the flag, you need 20 energy and 65 moral.

543

XPiratez / Re: Melee weapon math

« on: February 21, 2016, 11:02:15 pm »

Ok, lets see if I read the code correctly...

Example 1: Ball Bat
Lets say it does 40 damage on a hit, type is stun. I hit a target with armour 20, so 20 actual stun damage is dealt. Now the Ball Bat has "ToHealth=0.75", so in addition to the 20 stun damage the bat does 20*0.75=15 damage to health.

Example 2: Plastersteel Pipe
Lets say it does 30 damage on a hit, type is concussion (type 3, HE in vanilla). I hit a target with armour 20, so 10 damage to health is dealt. Now the pipe has "ToStun=1.5", so in addition to the 10 damage to health the pipe should do 10*1.5=15 stun damage. But since "ToStun" is rolled, it does 0-15 stun damage, so an average of 7.5.

Edit: If I read the code correctly, "ToStun" ignores any stun resistances the target might have if it's not totally immune to stun damage. Also, no resistances in the "ToHealth" damage, and no bleeding.

544

XPiratez / Melee weapon math

« on: February 21, 2016, 03:23:59 pm »

Edit: I made a spreadsheet that you can use to calculate melee damage for your gals. Type in your gals stats and see what is the best weapon for her. If you think my formulas are not correct, please discuss here.


Melee weapon damage is complicated enough that you need a spreadsheet to do it quickly. But I got a bit confused what the actual damage formulas are. What gives me trouble is the "ToStun" and "ToHealth" modifiers. Is that damage added or is the existing damage split?

Example Handle:
It has a "ToHealth: 0.15" modifier and does stun damage. Is the damage
StunDamage + (HealthDamage=Stundamage*0.15)
or
StunDamage*(1-0.15) + (HealthDamage=Stundamage*0.15)?

In the second case, what happens when the ToHealth modifier is >1?

And what about resistances and armour in all this? Are resistances applied to damage types seperately? Is armour applied to each damage type or the total?
Bottom line, can someone give me the correct formula please?

545

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: February 21, 2016, 02:54:31 pm »

Found some buggy tiles in a terror mission. They cost no Tu to move across.

546

Released Mods / Re: [FULL MOD] Illamasqua's UFO & TFTD Rework (last upd. Feb 16)

« on: February 17, 2016, 01:18:30 am »

Just read the changelog and the to do. I agree that getting alien UFO/USO don't get researched enough, because there is no benefit. So maybe make them a prerequisite to research new xcom craft. There might be a problem in doing this though, as autopsies you get from a medic don't unlock research. The same mechanic might applie for alien UFO/USO.

547

Work In Progress / Re: Vanilla Sprite "Extraction" Question

« on: February 16, 2016, 06:15:02 pm »

Well, i used the method described in this post here:
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,2980.0.html

And you can easily turn the silacoid green by inverting the color. I did that using Paint.NET, but as stated also in the tools section, paint is not good because it screws up the palette. So the attached picture is just proof of concept and should not be used. Just need to get around installing some other grafic program to do the inversion with and then it should work fine.

548

Open Feedback / Re: New Nightlies: openxcom or opentftd

« on: February 12, 2016, 01:21:34 am »

My impression is, the project is pretty much "done" in the sense that everything from the original games is implemented. Now they just do sugarcoating by implementing new features.

549

Work In Progress / Re: New features for missions - variable timers

« on: February 08, 2016, 12:15:35 am »

The available chronoTrigger options are not a good fit for an Ufo taking off. They are more fit for the activation of a self destruct device that kills everything in the area. But then again, why would the aliens destroy an undamaged Ufo instead of just taking off.

550

Open Feedback / Re: Alien's dual weapon wielding? (AI question)

« on: February 08, 2016, 12:05:32 am »

Blaster Launcher / DPL is a tricky weapon indeed. From what I remember of the vanilla game, when Aliens used Blaster/DPL a lot of the times they blew themselves up with it. I don't remember Blaster/DPL beeing a particularly fearful weapon in alien hands. But that could also be because by the time Blaster/DPL was a widespread weapon I was using MC on anything anyway.

Lets face it, the way Blaster/DPL is right now is not easy to use for the AI and heavily favors the player. To remedy this, it would be easier to change the Blaster/DPL before trying to teach the AI how to effectively use it. Maybe change the firing type from the waypoint thingy to an arcing projectile. I imagine this would not favor the player so heavily, but I need to playtest this to see if it actually helps the aliens.

551

Suggestions / Re: Random component to Ufo selection and trajectories

« on: February 04, 2016, 08:58:10 pm »

If you have an excellent memory or a list of all the UFOs and trajectories then yeah. Then again if you're not interested in being able to predict UFO behavior, then you shouldn't look into the technical details of the game

Well, I wanted to incease the likelyhood of medium sized Ufos and you can't do that without looking at the game files. And what has been seen, cannot be unseen.

I don't know how the code works exactly, but I was hoping that adding some +-10% random speed to Ufos is just one added variable in a line of code.

552

Work In Progress / Re: Question: Gun that ignores armour?

« on: February 04, 2016, 08:49:51 pm »

Thanks a lot, I will take a look at Extended then.

553

Work In Progress / Question: Gun that ignores armour?

« on: February 04, 2016, 08:38:34 pm »

I want to mod in a new gun, and I was thinking about properties that would make it interesting gameplay wise. What I came up with was a gun that ignores armour, but does low damage. On top of that, I want it to reduce time units of the target on hit, to sort of disable the target. This is for preventing reaction fire. If the TUs go to a negative value, I would like this value to be subtracted from the TUs of the next round, so the target is possibly disabled on his turn, too. And I want to make the shot arcing, but that is easy.

Gameplay wise, I imagine this weapon to be used by xcom as a special case for tough, dangerous targets. By ignoring armor, I can make it deal constant low damage to every enemy (say 10-20), especially heavy armored ones. Each hit would burn about 20 TUs on the target. By disabling the target with concentrated fire, the low damage doesn't make it impractical to use, because you are not dead the next round. The amount of damage to different targets can be controlled by adjusting the damage resistance variable of the armour. This way, I can introduce a weapon in the early game that can damage tough stuff without one-hit-killing everything else. Also, higher tech weapons won't be obsolete, because they deal more damage. In alien hands, it can be a weapon that does not one-hit-kill in the early game without beeing harmless to tanks and power armour.

The story of the weapon is that I saw this picture in the TFTD gamefiles:

I realized it is the gun of the Deep One, which they probably didn't implement because terror units can't have items.


The ufopaedia says Deep Ones use an electric discharge as weapon. So I will call the gun Electroblaster, and it shoots blobs of electrocuting gel. The electric dischage ignores armour and disables the target. It is especially dangerous to mechanical things like tanks, so be careful with them.


Sooo.... how do I get the properties of this gun into the game? Can someone help me with this? I did not play Piratez yet, so I don't know if extended has the functionality I am looking for.

Edit: Next problem - if I manage to mod this weapon into the game, I would like to give it to the Deep One of course. Any ideas how I can give one terror unit a weapon, without breaking the other terror units?

554

Suggestions / Random component to Ufo selection and trajectories

« on: February 04, 2016, 07:46:23 pm »

I recently had my first look at the way Ufos are generated and how trajectories work. I didn't realize it up to that point, but from the speed and type of the Ufo, you can more or less know exactly if it will land or not, even without a hyperwave decoder. For example, P8 is the only trajectory with 56% max velocity, so if I see a Ufo with that speed I know I need to shoot it down now because it's not going to land and soon will get away. You also know exactly what the next Ufo is gonna be.

For me, it's not much fun playing a game where I know what will happen next. So I would like to add some randomness to Ufo type selection, trajectories and speed.

- I would like to add a random component to the speed, so I cannot tell what the trajectory is by just looking at the speed.
- I would like to add a randomness to the selection of waypoints or trajectories, so that it's not 100% guaranteed that an Ufo on abduction mission will land.
- And most of all, I would like to have some tech level or causality dependent selection of Ufo size and number, with a random factor. By causality dependent I mean that if an Ufo fails to accomplish it's mission, the next Ufo is going to be a bigger one than if the mission had not failed. Or they send two instead of one.

555

OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: [SUGGESTION-CUT][#007] But where are they? (Aliens location)

« on: February 01, 2016, 11:41:42 pm »

I like the idea of hellrazor for the line of fire indicator. It would be nice to know if you have a line of fire other than the error message when you try to shoot something.
The situation where this is important is when you want to kneel before shooting but don't know if you actually have a line of fire.