Messages

346

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION] Final Mod Pack (FMP)

« on: November 11, 2023, 11:55:39 am »

I think (played FMP a looong time ago) that they're not bullet sponges, they just have good armour against whatever you're using. So this is what's nowadays referred to as 'skill issue'.

Does FMP have armour entries in the pedia? If so, you could try nabbing one alien through sheer persistence, look at what's it got there and see if you've got something that works against its hide. Edit: Yes, it does. /edit



Edit2: But, yes, FMP does away with the "Heavy Plasma in month 3" progression of the original, and you've actually got to fight the super-advanced aliens with your crappy Earth tech for a while. You've got to do some alien-napping and other research before plasma (or even lasers) open up. On the flipside, the human arsenal is a lot bigger and more varied.

347

OXCE Support / Re: Sell All Buttons Are Dangerous

« on: November 10, 2023, 09:54:43 pm »

I know "auto-sell" feature exists, but I simply cannot use that... it's so wonky, I simply cannot trust it and/or use it effectively... I've burned myself too many times overselling or underselling (when the game thought it knows better than I)

A bit offtopic, and I don't disbelieve you, but can you give a simple example? Maybe I've been sabotaging myself without knowing it, too...

348

The X-Com Files / Re: Promotion II

« on: November 10, 2023, 11:20:40 am »

It lists Plasma Blade as "technically leading to" the CAG. TTV is not a player-facing interface, it's a way to peek under the hood of the game. So the point is that it literally cannot deceive you when used for its intended purpose.

If you use it as an in-game tech tree then, yes, it lies to you. It's not really meant to be used for that, even if that's probably the biggest use case right now.

[Spoiler]

349

The X-Com Files / Re: Weak UFOs

« on: November 10, 2023, 12:26:09 am »

This just begs the question why X-Com can blow up a whole convoy with a single missile, but not eliminate safe-houses, bases or manors the same way.

Please keep the airgame where it belongs - in the air.

Or bring the air game to the ground and allow aerial bombardment of bases. It's not as if 'bomb UFO and get cash' wasn't one of the more popular features of Xenonauts 1, or anything...

Spoiler" Nits are back!":

Disagree. The "more involved air game" also gave me 6-8 hover cars spawning from hybrid bases which fruitlessly try to attack interceptors, waste my time and have given me an ingrained hatred for the interception music.

That's mostly the aircars being too spammy and overstaying their proper time in the limelight, i.e. a balancing issue.

I'd welcome a "less involved air game" with focus on more (and more coherent) lore to be honest.

You want a narrative, I want an emergent strategy game. Can't please everyone, I guess. I'd say Piratez has shown that you can have an at least somewhat interesting air game even with the limitations of OXCE. Granted, all the big mods tend to overstay their welcome, but that's not really limited to any one aspect of the game. Any significant part of the mod has its problems.


I don't really believe the air game is going to get a razor-sharp makeover, since Solarius hasn't really shown too much interest in that. So I guess your stance is pretty reasonable, all things considered.

The former only further illustrates why law enforcement agencies are the guys to handle this, given that they have the expertise with exactely this kind of situation, and the latter is not all reflected in-game where you can intercept and break-off from UFOs with basically no consequence. You can literally spook the hybrids to your hearts content.

Well, the cases the FBI handles for us are the ones that come in the mail. The hybrids actively running around are ours to deal with. Or not. Whacking moles on a global scale is exactly our business. Investigating mole holes, not so much.

As to the spooking, as long as you keep spooking them, they can't go to ground, on account of there being helicopter gunships chasing them, or similar. Although this does break down when you can just go away and chill for an hour and then resume the routine.

Edit: My original headcanon was more like "FBI is looking at us, better do this another day" vs "the guys in the black helicopters are chasing us, run!". X-Com spooks them so hard subtlety is no longer an option. Hybrids might deceive the FBI, they are not going to fool an X-Com squad out for blood. /edit

I'll admit that hybrid convoys with no target aren't contributing much besides lighting up the globe with colourful markers. Convoys with a target, like those of the cultists, now that's another matter. 

No need to drop them from a moving vehicle, just set them up a sufficient distance ahead. Whether you are using caltrops or spike strips, you really don't want to "stop them right then and there", i.e. crash - you want them to run out. And sure, the hybrids could have run-flat tires, use tanks or anti-grav tech to enable any scenario of your chosing tbh. But that is quite beside the point. We have a clandestine convoy with normal vans, not some supered up vehicles that X-Com needs minguns or missiles to stop. A simple police roadblock should be sufficient for what is portrayed in-game, period.

The problem with roadblocks is that you need time and continuous intel to set these up. And resources X-Com is probably not carrying around with them on global manhybridhunts. Machine gunning the convoy is at least as effective and much simpler, unless you want it more or less intact.

I don't disagree that helicopter gunships and air strikes on road vans are overkill. But just essentially doing an air assault on a bunch of cars and basically beginning the tactical mission straight away seems much easier and less risky (in the sense of not setting up in the wrong place and losing the convoy) than the elaborate police procedure you're proposing. Sure, if you're the cops you might want it that way. But we're not the cops.

But is this really needed, given that we are talking about an ordinary ground-bound convoy moving at most at highway speeds?

No, not for these convoys, you've convinced me. It might be handy for stopping cultist infiltration or assassination cars, though. Or a enable a variety of similar missions that don't exist yet. Whether that's desirable, well, I guess we differ there.

[Spoiler]

350

The X-Com Files / Re: Weak UFOs

« on: November 09, 2023, 07:23:32 pm »

I generally agree that rolling back to 'immobile' convoys seems the most reasonable solution right now.

Spoiler" Nits being picked":

However...

...further complicates something that does not need or benefit from additional complexity.

Disagree. A more involved air game with mission-spawning convoys is both more 'realistic' and more interesting.

And I'm not the minority in this. When nuCom went with the "choose on of three" terror site strategy, everyone was pissed about not getting to intercept the terror UFOs. Same concept here.

There have been (kinda rare) manor-spawned cultist convoys that do exactly this for quite a while now, which suffer from the same problem of X-Com blowing up a bunch of punk cars with long-range air-to-air missiles. A solution for both would be preferable to rolling back the convoys and either leaving the rest inconsistent, or moving to invisible convoys for everyone.

Why do they need to have helicopters on stand-by just for stopping and inspecting suspect van convoys when that task is perfectly suited for police/FBI/other national law enforcement agencies?

My headcanon is that all reports that reach the Commander's Chief Agent's desk have already been confirmed. Either the FBI already inspected the convoy, and they are now making a run for it, leaving two dead feds behind. Or it's a limited-time opportunity, and the hybrids will disperse if someone spooks them too soon. You need to hit them hard and fast, which is the entire MO of X-Com. YMMV.

And again, why can't X-Com just drop tire spikes in front of the convoy?

Hard to do with a moving convoy and not guaranteed to stop it in its tracks right then and there. Spikes are small and difficult to target from a moving vehicle with enough accuracy, and cars can go some distance even with broken tires. Never mind that they might have some sort of run-flat tires for the more important vehicles.

Just shoot (at) them, like all guerillas/army patrols do IRL.

It does seem to me that the simplest solution from the modder side would be to ask OXCE devs for an 'always lands when intercepted, even by faster unarmed transports' UFO flag. Maybe also a "give a 'destroy/force landing' prompt if the interceptor is armed and faster" flag. Don't know if there are technical/design problems with that.

351

Released Mods / Re: xcom1 and xcom2 mod?

« on: November 08, 2023, 10:30:47 pm »

Yeah.


Dynamically generated underwater maps, especially UFO/USO crash sites, are the hardest part.

You can look into 'fake underwater' textures, but this is nowhere near the simplicity of a 'simple list'.

352

Released Mods / Re: xcom1 and xcom2 mod?

« on: November 08, 2023, 10:43:03 am »

Depends on what you mean by "water missions". The path of least resistance is to spawn 'terror' sites with special environmental effects and craft/armour/equipment restrictions. The harder bit is to get USOs flying around and generating underwater missions and/or randomly spawned underwater terrain for regular RNG missions.

You also need to get some underwater maps into the game, and the original TFTD maps are known to have some junky features.


Also, note that files in OXC(E) mods are purely organisational. You could have the whole mod in one giant file if you so desired (fun fact: Piratez, the largest mod in existence, isn't far off from that ).

353

The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste

« on: November 02, 2023, 08:10:49 pm »

That's kind of a silly argument. Sorry, but falling to your own assumptions is your own fault, when these assumptions were made too hastily.

The argument is fine, since it's conditional on non-'realism' and 'fake difficulty' being non-desirable. The conclusion may not hold, if either of the two is fine, at least some of the time  - which, from previous discussions and general design patterns in the mod, seems to be the case.


*shrug* I mean, it's no skin off my nose. If the bots start to annoy me personally, I can just replace the chainsaws for myself. It's the newcomers who will have to live with "what you see is not what you get", and will come back with this or a similar report next year, and the next, and the next...

Edit: In any case, if the chainsawbots remain as they are, at least a little explanation in the pedia wouldn't go amiss. Right now, I think they don't actually have a proper entry? The armour paperdoll has a, well, chainsaw that's pretty attached to the body. The chainsaw entry looks all in the world like a regular chainsaw, and you have to go to the nerdpedia to see that it's actually a retractable ninja chainsaw.
/edit

Or I could make consistent rules about how standard tiles (like walls) work...

From what Yankes said in the relevant OXCE thread, this likely is not enough. Asymmetric vision can also be caused by unit shapes, both player and enemy. It's like a lot of other weird bits in OXCE, it's close enough and you just learn to live with it (or make your own fork). Myself, I've never relied on getting to spot enemies just around a corner without someone in some manner actually not turning that corner.

354

Released Mods / Re: xcom1 and xcom2 mod?

« on: November 01, 2023, 11:25:36 am »

Generally, yes. If it was easy, there'd be many more 'hybrid' mods out there.

How hard depends on what exactly you mean by 'alter a mod for water misions'. The three biggest problems to tackle are a hybrid geoscape, underwater maps, and underwater restrictions on missions/equipment. All of these require nontrivial amounts of gruntwork even if you can reuse someone else's base work (which includes TFTD itself).

355

Released Mods / Re: xcom1 and xcom2 mod?

« on: October 31, 2023, 09:53:12 am »

Many a mod has both underwater and land missions.

I haven't played it, but Ethereal's X-Com: Terror From the Unknown is supposed to be a combination of UFO and TFTD.

There's another that's quite 'hybrid', but that one's a bit of persona non grata around here, and it's just so much more (and a mess) than merely UFO+TFTD that it's no more a 'combination' of them than anything else.

Otherwise, depends on how much value you place on the underwater aspect, the 'X-Com vibe', etc. Underwater, TWoTS. X-Com, X-Com Files is popular and probably the most expansive of the variations on the original. I think there have been various smaller attempts at a hybrid mod, but don't recall offhand if any of them reached a passably playable state.

356

The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste

« on: October 31, 2023, 09:36:44 am »

Two possibilities: the messages are coming up at most twice per month per cult, which means everything is working as intended, you're taking your sweet time researching your way up the cultist tech tree (whether deliberately or due to bad RNG), and the Council is giving you a kick in the rear to make you shape up. So take the hint.

The alternative is that you're getting spammed with events, cult and otherwise, because you're using an ancient or forked version of OXCE (last time this happened, someone was somehow playing with FtA ). In that case, get yourself a modern mainline version.

357

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N6 03-Oct-2023 Zany Cats

« on: October 31, 2023, 01:00:41 am »

Never played Metal Gear, but wasn't Naked Snake already Bigger than the Boss from the beginning? So he just got his rightful rank.

358

The X-Com Files / Re: How can I play this without feeling like I rush the game?

« on: October 27, 2023, 10:45:16 pm »

There's also a mod that does something largely equivalent to month-changing. Probably needs updating and tweaking to work 100%, so likely no better than manual save editing.

359

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky

« on: October 27, 2023, 10:40:17 pm »

One thing I would definitely like to see fixed though, is the implementation of the scout-sniper.
...
To compensate, it would be nice if enemies were a bit smarter...

Given how many times this issue has been raised with no change (never mind the one guy who made and shared a fork resolving this exact problem; outdated now, I believe), and the general idea of OXCE not messing with AI (to any significant degree, at least), the first is rather unlikely and the second is almost certainly not going to happen.

On the other hand, there's Brutal AI now.

Although using BAI to make scout-sniper less of a pain is sort of like 'fixing' a broken toe by chopping off the entire leg and installing a bionic one.

360

OXCE Support / Re: Corner visibility

« on: October 27, 2023, 08:03:20 pm »

Is the asymmetry a matter of soldier POV being asymmetric even if their location on the battlefield isn't, enemy voxel makeup or the wall MCDs? All three?