Topics

1

XPiratez / New sub forum.

« on: January 08, 2023, 10:24:18 pm »

Hey all in effort to neaten up the forum we have split off threads dealing with the nitty gritty strats and tactics to it's own sub board. It has become a very significant portion of the topics and we felt it needed it's own space with how much volume it took up.

We will keep up redirect topics for the moved threads for a few weeks. let us know if we miss anything you think should be over on the new spot, or moved something we shouldn't have.

2

XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Welcome to the Strategy sub board.

« on: January 08, 2023, 09:32:17 pm »

This sub-board exists to collect all the gritty detailed discussion about the many nuances of the mod. Beware of spoilers.   

3

XPiratez / Matrix Space. Offcial chat for mod.

« on: February 17, 2022, 02:56:08 pm »

Alright folks as i have been promising for awhile now, XPZ chat has moved over to the matrix platform. And we are finally ready for putting the public link out in the wild.

But first RULES. and terms. Note that room=channel, and server=space, more or less.

1) Public rooms are on mostly on topic places, failure to keep to the channel purposes(within reason) will result in warnings, followed by expulsion, and then bans. This a new cleaner space. Respect it.

2) There are some private rooms within the space, they are invite only and cover a wider range of topics. These are a Privilege to be earned.
 
3) Please report offensive behavior to either a room or space moderator. We are taking this much more seriously in the new space. (Examples of such behavior include personal attacks on other users, excessive swearing, ect.) Don't feed into such arguments and incidents, report and leave it alone.

4) If you are having trouble accessing the space or a room you believe you should be able to please contact a space mod or admin. This is a new platform for most of us and we are all learning.

5) If you have a request for a new room in the space please contact me directly for help in getting it built.

6) Please be patient and keep in mind setup is ongoing. Mistakes will happen. If you find something you think is broken or mislabeled or whatever please let us know.

And now the part everyone is waiting for. THE LINK.

4

XPiratez / New Mangment

« on: February 07, 2022, 04:57:32 pm »

Okay so just a short statement here for the time being, cause i have to work for a living. As the more eagle eyed of you may have noticed Dioxine is no longer the sub forum moderator. After the recent mess it was decided to remove him from board management and stick me in the seat. If you absolutely must know further details of the whole extended debacle, DMs only.

Further extended statement sometime while im not at my desk.   

5

XPiratez / Bounty Challenges

« on: March 22, 2019, 02:02:42 am »

So i feel its been a sufficiently long time that bounty challenges are no longer super spoilery. To that end which one do you do? do ignore them? share your stories and thoughts.

My 2 dolloros, initial impression first then details per encounter.

The challenges so far do not seem anywhere near equal in difficulty or rewards, though i've only played 2 in a live campaign, so i could be missing something. The token rewards are wildly different. Namely the gnome encounter for the bank only yields tokens if you manage to take the gnome alive, which is really difficult. On the other end, the slitzkrieg encounter is 1800 tokens for winning period. The rectculan vats is imo the hardest of the 3 to get total victory on, and comes somewhere in the middle for tokens. so 0 tokens to 1800, depending on choice and ability to succeed.

The slitzkreig is by far the easiest encounter, so long as you can kill the tank turret, everything else is standard humanist fare. Map is pretty open so you can have some bad luck with the map RNG and spawn with the turret having a clear line of fire to your craft exits. Also don't expect to come out of the battle with much score, open terrain, terror mission environment, means most of the civvies are gonna die pretty quick. Also not much in the way of special/additional loot, just whatever the humanist troops are carting around. This is a maybe, if jack bounties aren't popping up. 1800 tokens goes along way, but its still only a fraction of the total of good prizes for jack, let alone everything.

Gnome hideout is pretty easy but for the gnome herself, that's the real problem. Techno sewers tile-set is pretty squarely in the players favor between hatches and limited pathways. The gnome however needs to be taken alive which is quite a difficult task with early to mid game gear. She is armored along the lines of a guild master, no shield, but the resistances are quite high, particularly against almost all non lethal types, and most anti armor types. However it gets worse, underneath the shell she's very frail at a mere 40 hp. Anything that can overcome her shell in a single hit risks outright killing her. Immune or dead, with very little middle ground. The best option I've found is to hose her down with repeated chem or minigun fire, then follow up with stun rods, and hope she doesn't bleed out on you. That said, it takes alot of hits to strip down her armor, and she is pretty deadly in return. Her gun appears to be akin to a mammoth chain shotgun, and she has a nasty melee hit. Due to the risk inherent to the attempt and the terrible rewards if the gnome doesn't make it, this is a solid pass for me.

Reticulan vats, this one is pretty hard even if you planned for it, 12 peasants without gear in bondage outfits, vs a bunch of mixed reticulans with stun weapons and some hostile smooth captives, and a single elder. Hard limit of 64 turns, but you can cut and run early with whatever/whomever you can carry assuming you can find the exit in the maze. You will know generally where to search but the pathing can be pretty hard to discern. You are morale stable with decent bravery, but that about the only advantage you start with. You need really good voodoo stats on your peasants or you risk the single elder seriously messing with your ability to win. Your outfits are net -10 defense, but at least your morale stabilizes reasonably high. That said, no ranking unit to buffer the psi panic hits. If you can manage to near max out a batch of psi strong peasants in time, its defiantly worth the effort. 1200ish token(conversion of smooth captives), an elder, and a ton of medical related loot. Mixed feelings here, the loot for total victory is great, but having the quality of peasants to pull it off, that's a whole different problem. Bulking up melee stats for peasants early on is quite hard, and there's the bravery/voodoo defense issue as well.

Final option take your 500 score and leave it alone. This is probably the choice 8 times out of 10, there's always gonna be more tokens if you patient, and the token yield, when you can get it done, isn't more then one middle/high tier prize in most cases, which is hardly gonna catapult you over some great hurdle, or dramatically alter you play by itself, by time you can reasonably expect to win them.

Looking forward to seeing other peoples opinions.

6

XPiratez / The muscle power challenge.

« on: August 02, 2018, 10:34:23 pm »

Welp after the fail of the last campaign we are gonna try a a slightly less restrictive challenge. Melee, bows, thrown, and voodoo. The brain is a muscle, shutup, my challenge my rules. Stay tuned for reports in the usual 6 months of game time per report format.

7

XPiratez / A new experaince(Campaign reports and museings)

« on: July 22, 2018, 08:22:37 pm »

Okay so started the first new campaign in several months, and i thought since the overall game had changed quite abit in that time, i decided i would share the experience and my thoughts as it is played. I also set myself a bit of an extra challenge.

Started on 0.99J4

The challenge: No firearms of any kind including lasers, guass, and plasma; only melee, bows, thrown weapons(including nades) and voodoo permitted. Red codex as we are trying to push the melee focus. If i find i cant make it any farther i will relax the restriction and allow the slaves/loknarrs some stuff.

I will post a summary of events and my thoughts every six months of in game time. Here we go.

Status report 1: Stumbles, bumbles, and handles to the rescue

Had quite a few false starts due to the new gal types. Getting more then one specter in the initial pool is...problematic. 3rd times the charm thou only had one, 3 repentias and 2 gals. Loaded up with handles as our initial weapon, and the usual assortment of bandages, canteens and whatnot. First mission is a landing of Dr. Xs fugitive hunters.

First battle goes pretty well no injuries and all foes captured, Specter, ironically named Armored Lana, proves less then useful in any capacity. We shall see if this ever changes.

But thankfully we get some crackhouses and distress calls so we can bolster our ranks with more of the living. Distress calls arn't so bad for the most part, but the crackhouses involve alot of tense camping and working LOS hard. Specter comes out to the field a few more times to sub for for the injured, but again is very lackluster.

A bit of a captive overload occurs since brainers to keep up with the influx are far to expensive to hire, oh well there will be more. We do eek out a few more Brainers and recruit the saved castaways when Rare earths allow.

In the base we put up a pair of plantation and a mess hall fairly quickly to combat costs, and ease the wounded timers.

Few months pass with a combination of Ratmen rodeos, loknarr villages, and saving more castaways from various perils. We add javelins to our arsenal for some punch and just in time too cause shortly after they are built we need to handle werewolves at blood rituals and distress calls, and a shambler hunt. Not testing our luck with pogroms just yet and also passing on watch towers cause i forgot the tech path to make more bombs for awhile.

Injuries are common but nobody is dead yet. Whats this about a tavern celler? oh fuck that's alot of rats. Everybody lives, barely, ran out of medical items, but the repentias held the passages. Looks like we are taking May off ladies, cause our shortest recovery is 23 days longest is 45. Down to the specter and 2 others.

mmm landed ufo, should i? yah lest go look at least, oh larger sectoid ship, cant crack the mechtoid with current gear, so lets nab a few captives and get out. Had to leave the weapons behind 

Oh birthday cake time already? Lets see what we have managed. We have javelins, an assortment of lower tier nades, the repentias have barbarian(S) armor, gals are in rouge. We have eeked out 10 brainers and somehow afforded/researched our way to a blowfish and the gals to fill it with some spares. Still need a wrench and durathread to get the workshop so codex is still waiting. Probably time to start doing the tech for additional missions.

Seeya in the next report.

8

The X-Com Files / First Camapign: A post op

« on: June 22, 2018, 08:00:40 am »

So rather then wall o text the discord more on my thoughts on my first run, and to preserve those thoughts for future reflection, i commit them here. 

First the good points.

Atmosphere: Excellent, it really does feel mystery and X-files like. Plenty of fluffy touches, that make for an atmospheric experience. Well done.

Content: Seems varied and good, from what i can tell. The first run ended almost 6 months before the invasion, and i never got much cult progress. Final judgment withheld, as i dont feel i saw a sufficient amount to render a full opinion. But what i did see was good.

The Bad:

Pacing: Holy Balls, there so much going on at any given time that is easy to feel overwhelmed. There are just sufficient signposts of progress that an Xcom vet can muddle along alright, but i felt almost lost, and had to spoil the tech tree to actually make sense of what the signposts told me to do. Later runs likely will feel better cause i know more about what to do. On too the next set of pitfalls.

A second element in pacing worthy of note, is that there are imo to many content Arcs operating at once to get a good feel for any of them. It's all just one huge mashup. Zombies, Creatures, 4 cults, undercover and the occasional ship. 7 sometimes 8 types of things competing for your limited ability to respond. And if the RNG is not in your favor the cults just dont work out. I was only able to progress Black Lotus to the operations stage during my 18 months and when i did they vanished for the next 4 months and the run was over.

The Ugly:

Balance: This is totally impossible to even give a fair assessment. This stems from the above pacing problem, since all but the barest tools must be scavenged from the fallen and defeated. Scavenging by itself is in keeping with the mod style, but the variety or not of drops is on a exceptionally wide spread of RNG. I ended up skipping almost directly to promo 2 and invalidated most drops without ever noticing(skipped nitro express utterly, didn't even know it existed). On the other hand there are some quality drops that i nearly missed out on due too mission crowding(M60 and other military carried things, only 3 military v monster spawned in total. I only reached 1.)

Final assessment:
Gona take more swings, if only to give the mod the opportunity to show all it has to offer. Good and bad aspects but quite the perceived potential. 

Specific suggestions/gripes:
More map clear space around cars vans and humvee. Very often i found i was so crowded in by trees, bushes, rocks, and other map features that i could not make the first turn flee/engage judgment as anything but a blind coin flip. Humvee in particular thought it belonged in a hedge maze during this campaign.

Tack on another year before the invasion or otherwise adjust mission spawning to reduce overcrowding. Intentionally concealing what exactly is going on with cults and creatures in the briefing is okay, but what i observed was such a large variance in allowed progress, particularly between Promo II and containing the first cult. Between getting early promo II and the start of 1998 i saw almost exclusively the lesser cult activity and not the outposts with the officers needed to progress the cults aside from lotus. And once the witch was integrated and lotus operations researched, the lotus stopped clean for 4 months by which point game over. Granted i could not attend all missions that popped in that time frame so there very well could have been what i needed and i was simply overloaded for the agents i had and the blind picks i made.


 

9

XPiratez / heyyy Freak Out!: PSA about freak gal type.

« on: July 06, 2017, 04:28:23 am »

Okay so went digging for the new freak solider's stat block and the results are....interesting.

Minimums stats are about 5 points less then standard hands across the board

Stat caps(from training and combat gains) are 5-20 points worse then other types of gals with exception of Psi strength at 66(best possible) and psi skill at the normal 40.

The interesting feature is max stats(max possible stat value on hire). These range from -10(fireing) to +35(stamina) over other types of gals stat caps.

This means a well rolled freak is better then anything else available in what it rolled well in and only marginally worse elsewhere. Notable stats include 120 reactions(vs 100), 110 hp(vs 90), and 100 strength(vs 80).

However the intial range on stats is huge and 100k a pop to hire.

10

XPiratez / Big Black empty sky.

« on: November 22, 2016, 03:09:23 pm »

Okay so my first dozen or so space missions finished and i have some thoughts.

1: can we get some background or more terrain or something so we have a functional reference frame. I've had to flip on debug mode about half the time just to find the dang station. The worst example so far was a prison sat that was near upper z limit in the opposite corner from my ship. I spent about 10 mins with debug mode on before i found it.

2: Content feels kinda weak at least at middle difficulty. I have yet to encounter anything that threatened more then some downtime. Given that the default pod weapon is an aoe with really bad aim just about every pod that fires takes some minor damage so more downtime when the whole crew will have some anyway feels pretty meh.

3: I get that the pods are supposed to be the bad last resort but they have so many charges on the medkits that i feel like im directing a bunch of cyclopes. I will win by attrition if nothing else.  The gun is appropriately bad however.

4: Also minor bug, standard musket balls are valid items. 

11

XPiratez / A brand new year: The year of the handle

« on: November 21, 2016, 09:42:45 am »

So, it having been a very long time since i took a crack at the early game, i started up a new play-through. I presently stand at January the first and wish to share some thoughts.

First thing up on the block, handles are spectacularly effective for early missions. Very little in early game opponents can remain awake after a few blows from decent gals. Even Guild security can be clubbed unconscious from the front in fairly short order. Every single gal has 2-3 master of handle commendations

Next up the new organ grinder mission. I really like this mission conceptually but it is a tremendous pain in the ass to complete when you get access to it. Even at 1 year mark i dont have the gear to make it cost effective. Also after a few turns it becomes a severe strain on the eyes to pick out anything in a grey map full of smoke with grey foes. Thank fuck for orange night vision filter. The foes presented remind me in a bad way of cyclopes. Massive hp pool regen and not particularly effective offense. 

A close runner up to the handle is the hammer/pickaxe to cut your way around. The very small village map closes of foes with annoying frequency. All the gals are packing something to break walls just ease my own frustration. On the other side I've discovered that you can crack open the sides of watchtowers, research bases, and warehouses which makes those missions much simpler. Even saved my hide when i opened up a tower full of zombies.

Air game has yet to get off the ground for lack of resources, the runts that i can afford simply can't keep up with production needs. Didn't help that they had to go full for cash production until October to keep fiscally afloat.

Research feels soo much better then last time through i have yet to bottle neck on a crucial topic though i can see the first one approaching if i cant get of the ground soonish.

12

XPiratez / What counts as a space suit.

« on: May 01, 2016, 12:27:02 pm »

For the edification of others here is a list of what is a "space suit" for the newly revamped cydonia landing.

Spacesuit(default)
Loader
Annihilator
Ghost
Bio Suit
Ragnarok
Superhero

 

13

XPiratez / Dojo mechanic question

« on: April 28, 2016, 02:41:11 am »

Anyone know what the rate of stat gain is? I'm trying to  work out a comparison with my average combat gains.

14

XPiratez / Small adjustment request

« on: April 14, 2016, 10:29:48 am »

Could base walls be reinforced by a smidgen feels a little flimsy when iffy quality(below 35 dmg)gunpowder weapons blows through several walls in a row on auto fire. For something that looks like metal 2 floors below ground I've met sturdier wood shacks. The shacks in question seem to be about 50/50 to mid 40s dmg guns.

The corner wedges in the lift on other hand feel remarkably sturdy generally withstanding lots of pretty high dmg explosives.

 

15

XPiratez / Usefulness of Factory

« on: April 12, 2016, 04:34:25 am »

Okay is there a good use for this building considering it requires a further 4 large barracks and a power plant(a total of 17 tiles) to build and fully utilize? such a setup precludes very much else(26 of 35 tiles used). Given the build time and the massive 15 mil build cost it needs to do something worth the investment. 

Vessel production potentially comprises good base defense principles since you cant isolate the necessary hanger.

Production of pure cash items(grog or forgery) requires an additional building and additional barracks space to reach full utilization if you want a garrison. Given the limited space ground defenses are of limited value at low tech. A garrison seem the best option for defense.  While such a setup would make a lot of money very quickly the investment and setup time makes me question the effort when much smaller setups can produce significant positive cash flow.

I have a base with a only 70 runts on grog making a half mil in profit per month.