Messages

31

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

« on: May 21, 2020, 12:14:31 am »

Please may someone provedo a video/some GIFs/screenshots with explication on how update buildings work? Also on how to harvest the weed and boom plantation

Here you go, niculinux xcomfan.  I found this on the bootypedia page for weed plantation.  You should use the bootypedia more as it tends to be very quick and useful for providing needed information.

"Automation of lighting and watering allowed (alloweed?) us to master the growing of a notoriously difficult, yet very useful plant - the Sectoweed. Farming ain't for dumbheads and needs following certain steps:

1) Construct Sectoweed Plantation, this needs 12 Sectoweed. It can be either constructed anew, or on top of an existing Plantation, the latter saves us $80k.

2) When ready, 'Dismantle' it to change water and light regimen, fostering second phase of growth. This will cost $40k.

3) When fully grown, 'Dismantle' again to harvest (costs $5k). This will net us 240 Sectoweed and leave behind a standard Plantation."

I recommend planting on the first of the month for best results.  Apologies if this is out of date; it's not from the latest version.

32

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L1A1 - 9 Apr - Aurora Nights 2

« on: May 20, 2020, 11:51:14 pm »

Wish don't cost a thing

It may seem like it, but over the years I've found this not to be true. 

33

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 20, 2020, 11:45:04 pm »

Let me just say that I 100% love the manually switchable Z layers. They are both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Terrain features getting transparent look meh and are not very comfortable to understand where things are, especially in a terrain heavy game like X-Com.

Well, in my case, there are like 64 layers (XCOM has just 4, and 9 in Apocalypse), and typical human unit is 2 layers tall. It would be incredible confusing to expose the layer system.

I agree with Solarius.  In original Diablo it was a pain to see objects through terrain transparency.  And sometimes the terrain didn't go transparent when I wanted it to.  As the player, I had no recourse if the game chose not to make occluding terrain transparent.  The layer view in Openxcom is really just a cross section view shown at an isometric view angle.  Using the mouse wheel in Openxcom to quickly scroll through the layers when needed is very convenient and not too taxing on the player.  Multi-level view (Openxcom's name for the view, it's really just a 3D isometric view) could be the default mode to show all the scenery.  Actually clicking the mouse wheel button could toggle between multi-level and cross section views.  In a fixed view angle game like Openxcom, giving the player the ability to control cross section views is both important and sufficient.  Otherwise, there will times when the player will want to see an occluded yet visible area of the map (such as the ship's deck occluded by the sails) even if nothing important is there but the game prevents it.  I have yet to see a program that tries to guess what I want to do and tries to do it for me that I don't end up fighting with when I don't like its choices.

Some games avoided occlusion problems by preventing anything from being in or traversing the occluded area.   I generally dislike this approach as it ruins immersion for me.  Diablo 2 does this quite a bit but not everywhere.  It also uses transparency and fixed cross sections.

If you have ever done drafting or fabricated parts from detail drawings or blueprints, you'll likely understand my point of view even if you disagree with it.

34

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: May 19, 2020, 10:01:21 pm »

Just let the ship retreat for a few seconds then engage it again, that will make it stop fighting to the death.

I didn't realize they retreated.  Or do you mean the player, using a faster ship, has to disengage after damaging the seeker, and then reintercept and finish it off if it isn't in hunter killer mode?

35

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: May 17, 2020, 01:18:47 am »

what's the recommended strat for taking down the ninja seeker ship?
four gauss cannons on a barracuda seem too much....

I think that should work.  IIRC, I used a barracuda with 4 lascannons.  But sometimes the ninja seeker fights to the death instead of crash landing at greater than 50% damage.  In general so long as you aren't blowing a ship up on the first couple of hits, your weapons aren't too OP for that ship.  Also, I don't think save scumming works to try to crash it instead of blowing it up just in case you might have tried that.


Now for my question:
 Can the spector do any mission that the starting airbus could do?  I still have the airbus gathering dust in a spare hanger but can build the spector.  I'm assuming I can sell the airbus and replace it with the spector without having future mission problems.

36

Open Feedback / Re: daytime x-files

« on: May 14, 2020, 08:14:42 pm »

You can also press Ctrl+End twice to turn on full brightness.

This will only change the visual side, all the game mechanics will still work the same way as during the night.

Is there a secret key sequence that changes visuals back to normal after ctrl+end twice is used?

37

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L1A1 - 9 Apr - Aurora Nights 2

« on: May 14, 2020, 06:11:29 pm »

wtf is rpgramming?

"Captain, damage control reports main weapon batteries are too damaged to repair!  What should we do?"

"Set course to intercept, engines at redline, and rig for collision!"

 

38

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 07, 2020, 05:31:19 am »

I guess it depends on how complex a combat system you wish to make.  I was assuming hits that did 0 damage were still considered hits instead of misses.  OpenXcom seems to have a good combat system but perhaps there are some things you would like to do differently.  Maybe a hard hitting blow should always do some damage even against strong armor.  Or maybe a percentage of the damage blocked by armor gets converted to stun.  Maybe weapons should be a combination of damage types.  For example a grenade would do both blast damage and the shrapnel would do piercing damage.  Or a rifle bullet would be 80% pierce and 20% concussive while an arrow would be 50% pierce and 50% cutting.  This system could handle sandbags that can stop bullets but allow arrows to penetrate them and grenades that demolish them.  IIRC, the bullet arrow sandbag thing has to do with arrows having more momentum even though bullets have more kinetic energy.

39

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 06, 2020, 05:05:27 am »

Additional question: should armor reduce damage or just difficulty to hit?

Generally, many games treat armor as primarily reducing damage.  Better armor usually doesn't make opponents miss more but instead lessens the effects of the blows received.  Although, bulky or heavy armor may make it easier to be hit.  Special armor with magical attributes such as invisibility or displacement can make it harder to be hit.

40

XPiratez / Re: [Mod] Alternate Graphics for XPiratez - 099J14A Now Avaliable

« on: April 20, 2020, 06:20:36 pm »

Roxis231, we're sorry this happened to you and we hope you get well soon.

41

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: April 19, 2020, 10:34:25 pm »

Just curious, how do you guys play the game?

First off, I think this question really deserves its own topic thread.  To do every battlescape mission possible really takes a huge amount of free time that most people don't have.  I've tried this approach and it has taken me over a year to do around 800 missions in 3 game years.  And the first game year was mostly pink mission sites as I didn't have interceptors that year.  I'm guessing it would take another 300 missions or so and another game year to complete my game with this approach.  I'm around 85% research completed and currently bottlenecked on a couple of missing vip interrogations.  However, real life has intervened and I haven't played much at all in the last month.  I think a better approach would be to focus on the higher scoring missions and the missions that can advance your progress in the game.  Instead of trying to maximize the booty collected in the game, try to maximize your progress through the game per player hour spent.  That way you will have more time to play through multiple times trying different codex's for example.  Or trying other mods.  Hopefully those who have finished this mod multiple times will take the time to answer your question.

42

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: April 17, 2020, 07:51:44 pm »

I can live with them being somewhat of a pain to find.  But as they stand right now they are mostly a player exploit that the AI can't do much about.  As for the player not being able to see much in certain areas of the map, I guess I got used to that in the original Diablo game.  It is symptomatic in many fixed isometric view games.

43

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: April 17, 2020, 01:45:37 am »

Widening out the diagonals would probably help with the bug but also annoying line of sight issues where you can't see somebody standing a tile diagonally over. Your only ways to deal with that are waiting for them to move or using like a pickaxe or something, which could possibly take a number of turns to make any real progress anyways.

This is why in my previous post I was wondering if shaving off the occluding corners of the adjacent solid rock tiles would be sufficient while keeping the diagonal passage 1 tile wide.  Or if the diagonal passage would have to be widened by replacing some of the adjacent solid rock tiles with open tiles which would effectively widen the diagonal passage.

44

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: April 16, 2020, 11:43:57 pm »

Same goes for disabling missions - they may still show up until the end of the month.

Just a minor nitpick for clarity: Since some missions especially multiwave ones can take more than a month to complete, disabled missions may still show up past the end of the month.

45

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: April 16, 2020, 08:12:36 am »

The picture in your previous post from about 4 days ago reminds me of the Civilization games.  Typically, cities would automatically spot non stealth units in the surrounding tiles which were free from the fog of war mechanic used in those games.  The Call to Power version also allowed the player to build remote detection structures outside the cities such as watch towers which removed the fog of war from a large area or radar dishes which showed enemy units on the minimap over a much larger area.  There were also sonor buoys which detected ships and non stealth subs iirc in the nearby water tiles.

In your game it might make sense for cities, towns, and castles/fortified structures to autodetect large raiding or siege forces in adjacent tiles.  A halfling thief would be a stealth unit that would have a reasonably high chance of infiltrating a city or village without being detected.  He could be used to steal a key artifact or other high value prize from a castle or slowly bleed off gold from a city over time.  A raiding party if successful could plunder a city viking style.  A large siege force would be capable of capturing a city and then defending it instead of just raiding it.

Another game series I'm reminded of is the Magic Candle series.  In those games, the various cities, towns, castles, and other structures weren't capturable as the player only had a small party of up to 6 adventurers.  Enemy towns could only be entered if someone in the party could cast a disguise spell.   Defenses for towns consisted of roving patrols outside the village that could be evaded if the party could cast a detection spell that would allow the party to see them in nearby tiles on the map or alternatively they could be defeated in combat and thus eliminated.  In the magic candle series for travel over water, ships could be rented by the player's squad or party similar to how taxi service works in real life.  Typically, major coastal towns would have a ship nearby available for rent by the day to allow the party to travel to various islands or to avoid travelling by land around a large bay or inlet.  The player could pay to have the ship wait a few days for the party to return to it, otherwise the ship would return to its origin when the party disembarked.

These are just thoughts of mine that came to mind while reading your posts, Nikita.  They may or may not be useful to you.