Messages

391

The X-Com Files / Re: Ok so ... How is superhuman to be played?

« on: December 06, 2023, 06:36:24 am »

A nice tip from SL on the stream: avoid researching 'abducted farmer' for as long as you can. They give good score (28 base value = 56 when captured non-researched) and give about 170 points per mission (with SH) if you haven't researched them. If you have, you get only roughly 60 points per mission.

That made me wonder if there are any other such things to look for. Many other human enemies must be researched to progress the game, so I'm not sure if there are other important ones to look for. I suppose you don't get extra points for killing unresearched enemy units.

As far as I know, you don't get mission points for recovering human items on the battlefield, so it makes no impact on mission score whether you have researched those or not. In vanilla games, all the alien artifacts (including weapons) have the same property, giving double(?) points if you haven't researched them yet, so some people intentionally avoid researching those that they don't need or need yet. In XCF I think this applies to alien components, but I was unable find scores for alien weapons.

Speaking of farmers, in stream part 6 (at 45 mins) I noticed for the first time equipping the squad with only killing weapons and pre-primed grenades when going for a crop circles mission, I suppose in anticipation of MIBs. MIBs start appearing in crop circles in month 6, although it's still much more likely not to encounter them. I hadn't paid much attention to this before, but it seems cattle mutilation missions never have nasty surprires, while crop circles may also have zombies and mibs, so I guess your preparation tactic might be different.

392

OpenXcom Extended (OXCE) / Re: OXCE (OpenXcom Extended) main thread

« on: December 06, 2023, 05:28:54 am »

Does it make it easier detectable at night?

At least the original personal light did. I noticed this in XCF with tanks for example. They have a bright personal light, making it impossible to use them in night-time missions when the enemies have weapons that could hurt them (would attract all the enemy fire) unless you disable it at the start of every mission. I dread those who don't know of this feature and the special hotkey to disable it (no way to know it otherwise).

393

Open Feedback / Re: Sectopods - Can't be Psionicly captured?

« on: December 05, 2023, 11:37:46 am »

Is there a perceived problem with the fact that an alien was under a psi control, and then it is sent on trial, torture, and execution for the sake of information extraction.  That is: Is prior instance of a psi control considered to be an obstacle to subsequent interrogation / research?  Why or why not?

This is going way off-topic, but if you wanted "realism", interrogation should be somewhat easier (research cost-wise) when you have obtained psionics and sufficient skill to overcome the aliens. Regardless of whether you captured them psionically or not. Wth psionics you could just make the alien tell all its dirty secrets immediately. No need to torture it or otherwise make it spill the beans. Much faster, I'd imagine. But I don't think the OXCE engine doesn't support this and I doubt this would be a very interesting feature in any case.

394

Open Feedback / Re: Sectopods - Can't be Psionicly captured?

« on: December 05, 2023, 07:17:46 am »

I mean specifically the original TFTD.  I recall having a trouble with capturing a Lobsterman Navigator, who was hidden in the center colony struct, very hard to access without destroying Zrbite planted nearby.  I was accomplishing those colony missions by MC-capturing most aliens, including the Lobsterman Navigator.  It turned out that I was unable to research that specific alien after finishing the missions, until I stopped to MC-capture it.  Clearly, this implies that an explicit mechanic in the game against researching those aliens which were MC-controlled at least once during the tactical mission.

I wonder, if that specific mechanic was a deliberate decision.  If so, how does it correspond to the corresponding design decision in XCF?

There is an OXC/OXCE option "allowPsionicCapture". I do not recall how that was in OG XCOM2, that is, does the mission end to an MC capture and if so, do uou get a) nothing, b) corpse, c) live alien. If you disable allowPrionicCapture (I have never played so myself), AFAIK based on the source code it seems the mission just continues even though you captured the last alien (until you no longer capture it and deal with the last one with some other manner). With default OXC(E) TFTD settings you can certainly do MC live captures.

395

The X-Com Files / Re: Ok so ... How is superhuman to be played?

« on: December 04, 2023, 07:51:11 pm »

I'm a bit bored with veteran, so there's proper IM/SH run in the workings now.

Thanks, I'll be interested in checking it out.

The chances of one-shotting a shotgun mook turn 1 with your small shotty - are meh, pump shotty - mid (lower dmg, but better accuracy),  shotty shotty - fairly decent. I really like researching non-std & shotty first. Single kevlar can be got from researching or processing captured madman (granted RNG blesses you and you get the mission).

Another interesting thing in your game was your use of small shotties. I suppose they are useful in really close quarters, can fit on the belt and are not too weighty. I have used mostly regular or especially double-barrel shotguns myself (especially as an equip-weapon which can be dropped if there are no close quarters enemies in turn 1). Especially double-barrel has ridiculously good accuracy with aimed shot (best of all the weapons?) and can kill easily from over 10 squares and hit a target from a ridiculous 20+ squares (and if you want a really deadly close-quarters shotty, sawed-off is the best in early game). But I guess this could also depend a lot on your style. You're rotating even really weak rookies in many missions, and then you maybe need to use other tactics compared that can work with lower accuracy and strength compared to when you use more experienced troops.

396

The X-Com Files / Re: Ok so ... How is superhuman to be played?

« on: December 04, 2023, 03:19:27 pm »

If you want to learn you may want to take a look at this VET/IM youtube series (which was mentioned elsewhere):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE9um8-d4SFK0E1qzEpMhu2GwfAucJGKP

I've certainly learned dozens of new nuggets of tips, shortcuts etc. For example, a starting location somewhere around India is interesting, as it allows Helicopter access essentially everywhere except the Americas (and maybe NZ), and you get Americas covered by placing a second base in middle americas (to where you can fly-transfer, hopefully this also works with osprey).

However, to me, the playstyle is in many cases very courageous and/or risky and I'd advise more caution. Such as dancing around zombies requires very precise knowledge of how much TUs they have and need to attack. But I suppose this can work with very intimate knowledge of the game. I would definitely have aborted many the missions earlier just to be on the safe side. Based on my experiences - and I just restarted another SH/IM game, here are a few key things I'd suggest doing in a little bit different manner:
 - don't let any events despawn (this requires some knowledge of the range of durations for each spawn). Despawning always causes penalties, and at least in one month a major negative score. OTOH, many environmental events have no abort penalty, and abort penalty is always less than the despawn penalty. So I'd strongly suggest having one car, later private car, which can be used to get to all those far-away missions you can't get to in time otherwise. You can even deal with some missions with a team of two agents.
 - go into cult missions during the dark, and find a spot nearby that's in the dark or has cover, and throw out flares as needed. Going by daytime risks reaction shots, which causes wounding and casualties. (With this tactic, it is also more viable to delay researching kevlar vests a bit.) Using smoke is less effective early-game strategy because it also impairs your own visibility a lot (and you get mechanisms to work around these such as scout drones and indirect weapons like grenades only a little bit later). This is all the more important the more challenging the missions get. To minimize risks, also apply this tactic to the very first cult apprehension events, especially if you play SH and thus there are 4 enemies rather than 2 as in VET. You can also manage missions with minimal crew if you go in the dark and get a decent spawn (for example, you could be able deal with Safe Houses with just two agents if you get decent luck).
 - ramp up the research capacity faster (for example, so that you can get all the fancy new stuff earlier - and so making the rest of the game easier).

397

OXCE Support / Re: I recall that interceptor attack mode also meant how soon it disengages

« on: November 29, 2023, 06:42:42 am »

I have never seen interceptors disengage automatically at some point after they get hit (OG, OCX, OXCE). You have to disengage manually.

The main thing the attack mode affects is whether the interceptor tries to keep within the range of its longest distance weapon, shortest distance weapon or try to close up right down their throats. The mode also affects several other things under the hood, such as the firing rate, but in essence the most important thing is the distance it tries to keep.

398

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

« on: November 28, 2023, 08:59:15 pm »

Possible bug:

Has happened to me a couple times now in 2 different playthroughs. Toward the end of the game (close to reaching Cydonia),
- Osiron missions do not return Osiron boxes to base.
Example, I did 2 Osiron warehouse missions, collected 15 boxes each mission (Per the inventory screen). I get back to base, nothing to unpack.

Not that I really need anything in those boxes at this point. But just something to take note of. If I remember correctly, something similar happened with MIB boxes as well. Almost like I reached my max.

It seems very difficult for this kind of bug to actually occur, and it is more likely that you're missing something (pun intended). If you suspect this in a certain mission, you will really need to make a save from which it could be reproduced.

399

Brutal AI / Re: [WIP][SOURCEMOD][OXCE] Brutal-AI

« on: November 28, 2023, 01:53:36 pm »

To make the BAI more accessible and easily usable in various environments without a need to compile it yourself, I wonder if it would be possible to build the binaries on a regular basis on some build farm (Like Win32, Win64, and Bionic like with OXCE at https://lxnt.wtf/oxem/#/Extended - initially there were, but they have since then been abandoned at https://lxnt.wtf/oxem/#/ExtendedTests). Or have I missed anything and is it already available somewhere (I'm interested in binaries usable in Linux in particular.)

400

Brutal AI / Re: [SOURCEMOD] Brutal-OXCE 7.10.1

« on: November 28, 2023, 10:12:16 am »

I'd really like to see QoL improvements make it into mainstream OXCE, to benefit also non-BAI users. But I suspect some of these might be contentious and non-trivial *), so I understand that this might not be a priority for Xilmi.

*) As examples:
 - Pre-prime right-clicking skipping the number of turns dialogue. I suspect 99,9 % of players would prefer this. But already someone has suggested something else. But I'd still wager this could be implementable in OXCE.
 - TU-efficient equipment placement. The right placement of items is affected by the order by which you add the items. Intelligent placement will only work to some degree if you assume the biggest and most relevant items are added first. Adding 1x1 sized objects to optimal places afterwards is a trivial (but very nice) improvement, and the big challenges arise when you place larger objects, the usefulness of which also depends on its purpose. So I could see that at least some improvements might be resisted in OXCE with an argument that doing so would create an endless need to finetune the placement algorithm.

401

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD][OXCE][Major] TFTD: Vanilla Plus

« on: November 27, 2023, 06:31:26 pm »

Based on the original post and being based on or inspired by "Easier TFTD" mod, I thought the intent was to make the mod easier than vanilla TFTD. (Which I'm not personally that interested in.)

But it appears that is not the purpose, but rather make the game somewhat longer, balance it differently and make it more sensible. Whether it becomes somewhat easier or harder is immaterial. (As a TFTD veteran I'd say the vanilla game is not all that difficult, if you know how to play it, but rather some missions are just so tedious and dangerous that you want to avoid them, because you don't need to complete them.) I definitely think the idea of different (and easier) Alien Base missions sounds promising. The same applies to 2-stage terror ship missions.

Significant increase in variety is also something I'm looking forward to. Wrt. TFTD I have liked TWoTS a lot but its one drawback is that the progress might end up being very slow and sluggish repeat of hundreds of essentially identical and easy-ish USO missions (unless you just shoot down and ignore). If there would be more variety (compare, for example, to X-Com Files), I suppose that could avoid getting bored by the game too quickly.

When looking out for balancing and making various things more relevant, you may also want to check out, compare and contrast to how this was accomplished in TFTD Evolution by Alpha Centauri Bear. The purpose of that mod was also to make the game more difficult (even excessively so, I think): https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8661.0.html

402

Released Mods / Re: [TFTD] [Expansion] TWoTS+ Release (v.2.58)

« on: November 27, 2023, 07:39:56 am »

There appears to be a hole, probably a missing floor/ceiling tile, in this variant of battleship. In the screenshot, a shrimp drone in the ground floor below the red marker can see the gillman inside. Not sure whether this is a map bug in the original TFTD or TWoTS.

403

OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: QOL: escorts redirected to the base after the escorted craft's mission is over?

« on: November 26, 2023, 05:26:30 pm »

Wow, thanks a lot Meridian!

404

OXCE Suggestions DONE / [DONE] QOL: escorts redirected to the base after the escorted craft's mission is over?

« on: November 26, 2023, 03:41:17 pm »

When a craft is returning from a ground mission, it cannot be attacked by the alien craft. Thus there is never any need for escorts (but the escorts themselves may be in danger of hunter-killers and at any rate, it would make sense to get them back for refueling etc,). Because the escorts are usually much faster than the transports, they should always return home immediately after the craft which had a mission is on the return journey (unless the player wants to give them some other target).

Would it be feasible to make a small QOL improvement: the escorts would automatically be redirected to the base after the craft they're escorting is on its return journey (obviously, the player could redirect the escorts to do something else if needed). This would avoid all the clicking after each mission.

I'm assuring the game is aware that an escort is escorting a craft that is returning from a mission (_craft->getMissionComplete(), I suppose) and actually requires no escort.

405

OXCE Bugs FIXED / Re: Game Allows To Launch Craft Without Pilots

« on: November 26, 2023, 11:39:24 am »

Were you able to replicate teleporting soldiers? I still can't replicate that.

I only tried the flying empty craft. I now tried, but could not get a pilot to appear on the craft after changing it to patrol (but there weren't all that many details in the post as to how to do it anyway). Maybe Dioxine will provide more information. And/or the issue becomes moot if the craft pilots > 0 is checked before fly-transfer.