Messages

271

XPiratez / Re: Succesion-Style Collaborative X-Piratez Let's play!

« on: June 10, 2019, 06:21:18 am »

I'm actually partial to 2 months myself. The only thing that is holding me back is how many signups we get. If we get like 20+, is possible not everyone will get a turn with 2 months. But in principle I'd mark it for 2 months.

One week per player sounds good. Even then, it'll be a long 4-5 months if everyone plays the maximum time allotted so I'll kindly ask the peeps to not dilly-dally.


Also, should we take signups after the game starts? I can add them at the bottom of the queue, before the rotation.

272

XPiratez / Succesion-Style Collaborative X-Piratez Let's play!

« on: June 09, 2019, 10:58:25 pm »

Hey guys, MagicSkeleton here.

I am trying to gauge interest for a collaborative-style X-Piratez playthrough. For those who don't know what that is, you can look up probably the most famous of them all, Boatmurdered from Dwarf Fortress.

https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/Introduction/

Essentially, I am looking for a list of players to take turns playing one single save file from start of the piratical enterprise to (hopefully) happy end. We each play one or two months (depending on the interest and how many signups we get), then pass on the savegame to the next person. The person who is done with the turn should write an after-action-report (AAR) here and provide us with exciting screenshots from his gameplay. (If you love this mod as much as I, then you know we need more exposure, so a good chain of AARs can be shared and might get us new fellow players.)

If you have any suggestions or opinion, post it here, or find me on Discord.


AARs go here: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,7193.0.html

DA RULZ:

*Difficulty 4 - We don't want Jack Sparrow.
*Supermutant - No Save Scumming! (Well, not unless you're into savefile backups -- We can't check that so we'll take your word as pirate's honor)
*Codex pick - The guy whose turn it is picks the codex.
*After you're done with your game, pass the savefile to me AND to the next guy. If, for some reason, someone drops off the face of the planet, we can resume from my copy.
*New signups go at the tail of the queue, if we run out of people, the queue starts over with the first person and cycles again.
*Each different player gets to name ONE of one's soldiers after onerself. Losing any named soldiers as such is going to be met with severe glares of disapproval and eternal shaming.
*One week per player. If one is done faster, pass the savefile, then writeup the AAR. I am afraid that the longer we go, interest will wane so no sense in prolonging the game more than necessary.
*We will upgrade the game in the middle if needed.
*First 6 will play 2 months each, everyone else will play 1 month each. (Due to the inflation of things to do late-game.)
*Will shuffle the order in which everyone plays.


Things to decide:

-How much real life time allowed between turns.
-How many months each gets to play.
-Do we update the game mid-game or not?
-Do we take signups after the game starts? I am thinking of adding new signups/interested guys at the bottom of the list, before the rotation starts if anyone late wants to join. Again, depending on the number  of signups.

Members:

Magic Skeleton
Great Tuna
Thinky
Solarius Scorch
Legion of One
Dioxine
Gothmos
Grub Leafeater
Tiff Aching
Nep Nep
Marza


Order of action:

Magic Skeleton
Legion of One
Thinky
Marza
Dioxine
Nep Nep
Great Tuna
Grub Leafeater (MIA)
Solarius Scorch (partial turn, 13 days)
Tiff Aching (Withdrawn)
Gothmos (Passed turn)
Magic Skeleton (partial turn, 26 days)
Legion of One  (partial turn, 10 days)
Thinky <----
Marza
Dioxine
Nep Nep
Great Tuna
(Grub Leafeater?)
Solarius Scorch
Gothmos
Magic Skeleton
Legion of One

273

XPiratez / Re: Any way to make your gals emit light on night missions?

« on: October 01, 2018, 06:31:26 pm »

I think that is a very bad idea. Everyone will shoot at you.

274

XPiratez / Re: Is there a mandatory difficult base defense at around 18 months of gameplay?

« on: June 14, 2018, 06:44:59 am »

To be just a bit clearer on what is going on here let me talk about the four basic types of crackdowns in the game.

As legion mentioned, in the early game Dr. X's teams of Academy Nurses and friends scour the region of your base looking for an opportunity to assault it.  If they find it (due to patrolling nearby) they will often send an assault.  These teams are lightly armed and pretty easy to deal with overall.

Similar to this are the Rat Patrols.  These opportunist foes spawn swarms of slow moving contacts looking for bases they can take over.  If they spot your base, they may go after it (and attack your base themselves), or they may "sell" the location to other interested parties.  You can often shoot most of these down and protect your hidden status.

The third is the classic retaliation.  A faction that loses a ship shot down by you has a chance (adjusted higher for higher difficulties) of initiating a retaliation mission.  This usually spawns a series of ufos that hunt for your base and if located, a final craft will send in an assault team.  Shooting down the assault team will usually end these missions.  Shooting down any craft on this mission will not generate another crackdown (but may delay the current wave a bit).                These factions can insta-locate your base in the retaliation mission if it was previously spotted (like by rat patrols).

The fourth type of crackdown is the unexpected one that you describe in the OP.   The PirateZ campaign has a trigger  adjusted by difficulty to start spawning random crackdowns every month.   These are random factions in a random region.  It may coincide with any or none of your base locations.  Again, if your base was previously spotted, they can get the insta-locate and assault immediately.

The good news is that the "spotted" flag is cleared from any base that repulses an assault.  With a good enough air game its often possible to greatly minimize further base defenses.

Hey, thanks!

It looks like the raider crackdown was the third type, and the humanist assault was the fourth type. This is why I was suspicious. The crackdown came on the 1st, with no humanist shipping preceding it (do humanists even have shipping?), on a base that did no interceptions. So now I understand! It was a combination of the two.

275

XPiratez / Re: Is there a mandatory difficult base defense at around 18 months of gameplay?

« on: June 14, 2018, 12:03:45 am »

Sorry, it was a bit of a joke, though, think of the poor doggies!

276

XPiratez / Re: Is there a mandatory difficult base defense at around 18 months of gameplay?

« on: June 13, 2018, 09:51:35 pm »

I already knew about the chokepoint strategy. Only that I put may gals so that they would be ready to take reaction shots...and the raiders threw explosives at me. So there's that. And they had really powerful explosives, that exploded for...20 tiles diameter maybe? I had nothing like that.

It was a mix of being surprised to see really powerful guns, and a bunch of launched grenades that wiped all my veterans.

So, there's that.

It's not a scripted encounter.

277

XPiratez / Re: Is there a mandatory difficult base defense at around 18 months of gameplay?

« on: June 13, 2018, 08:52:38 pm »

You just want me to load up 40 attack dogs and load them up with pre-primed explosives, yes? 20 to draw reaction fire, 20 to kamikaze them.

The raiders did not seem to have very good armor, except one firebat(nothing that a spiked mace -or 4 swings- to the skull from a 81 str gal won't fix), except their weapons were not what they usually carried, and I bonked a LOT of raiders.

The former base assaults were only academy ones, lot less dangerous and they carried their usual weapons, so this is why this was surprising.

278

XPiratez / Is there a mandatory difficult base defense at around 18 months of gameplay?

« on: June 13, 2018, 06:50:40 pm »

I am new to the mod though I am used to play Xcom on the highest difficulties.

Thus, this was  Jack Sparrow Ironman so this might be something. Also this was my first game that lasted this long, I restarted all other before the third or so month.

At around 18 months I got hit by a raider invasion sporting some serious plasma guns (I assume). Thing is, I have never even seen a plasma gun before, not on any of the raider craft downed, so their invasion was absolutely uncharacteristically brutaly difficult.

Thei also had reapers, and my only previous encounter with those I stood on the roof of my shadowbat throwing potshots at them with boarding guns. For obvious reasons, that was not an option now.

After the reapers poured an army of humongous raiders with plasma weaponry and I assume alien grenade launchers. 2 of those grenades reduced my metal armored boarding-gun toting gals to ash.

Is this normal? I've never even seen weapons like that and I have barely unlocked Eurosyndicate laser rifles.

What's more I had a backwater base that had not done anything of note with. Was still building, did not shoot down any shipping from it, hell, all I had in the stores was 1 tamed reaper.

Not 5 days after my primary base got wrecked (unfortunate, but I assumed that it was not unrecoverable), my backwater base was hit by humanists. (Or maybe government? They had Military police and tanks) While I understood the raider punitive assault (I did really shoot down A LOT of them), I did not understand this second base assault since I kept away from government suff, and basically stopped only 1 humanist pogrom.

Poor reaper got destroyed on turn 2 and I lost the game.

So, apparently, I read on the forums that it's not ususual for out of depth difficult assaults to appear at 18ish months. Is that sort of an 'exam'? What should I do to prepare better? Since january the second year I have been progressing very slowly with no major weapons breakthrough(unupgraded boarding guns still the best).

There was an faction facility raid I ignored because the rookie that went down fist got plasmaed by a cyberdisk and I noped out of there. Should I have done that?