Figured I'd make a new topic since the discussion is long past the point it has anything to do with contries signing pacts. Maybe a mod can move some of that discussion over here?
Thanks for bothing with responding Juku, I do realize I have probably already crossed the threshold into rant territory.
Eh, I'm a mad wall-of-spaghetti person myself.
Thing is, aliens (especially Mutons) are EXTREMELY good shooters. I have folks with accuracy of 120% or something, and yet they often struggle hitting the broad side of a barn with a sniper rifle. Mutons will often one-shot me from across the map with a Plasma Pistol.
Well, some of it is confirmation bias, some is the weirdness of the game's accuracy and line of fire system. Some might be the fact that sniper rifles suck up close, and only start giving good returns when you hit 100%+ accuracy rating.
That having been said, you are not the first to complain about accuracy. If you come upon a battle like that again, could you make a save and upload it here and Solarius/myself and/or some others might look into it? And also state your issues with the accuracy as precisely as possible (e.g. the Muton in the upper right corner of the map is making impossible shots through three windows and a field of corn at agent Rookie McRookiengton Jr.; him being the corpse ten tiles above the Skywarden). It's not impossible that something
is wrong with the aliens' accuracy.
You misunderstood me, probably because I didn't spell it out right. What I meant was, while such a solution (editing the savegame) might bring me recourse for now, a mod (in development, as you say) should eventually aim to make such workaround unneccessary.
Well, the mod is somewhat idiosyncratic and has some peculiarities that are unlikely to go away. For instance, the cultist/cryptid tedium and the RNG in which of them actually show up in a particular game have been complained about from the start, and show no sign of disappearing. So, while some things will definitely see improvement, some others might remain core parts of Solarius' vision no matter what 'should' happen from a more mainstream game design POV. Mods tend to be strange like that.
It's just the lack of variety that gets me. After the Waspoids, the next two UFOs were Mutons again. Since my main squads now have at least Laser Rifles, dealing with them is no longer so nightmareish.
Well, it's part of the original game's 'alien mission' system. UFOs fly specific missions by race, and most have several 'waves' that can take a while, sometimes more than a month to show up. Especially if you keep shooting them down. The upshot is that there's a certain amount of logic to what kind of UFOs you see. The downside, of course, is that you tend to be stuck with the race flying the mission for a while.
There are some TFTD-esque mixed race missions to spice things up, but they're not common.
What really should happen is that you ought to be given longer ranged and more reliable capturing methods. I've had Small Launchers for ages, but you cannot research and thus not use them.
Why is there no stun grenade ammo for the Grenade Launcher, Rocket Launcher, Milkor etc.?
There
is stun ammo for grenade launchers: blunt rounds. It's actually pretty good unless you're facing fragile enemies. But stun gas rockets and similar would be very welcome, indeed.
Taser cannons are an early mid-game stun weapon with some range and armour penetration. Not very convenient to use, but if you're out to capture someone at all costs...
You also get beanbag rounds for some shotguns. KS-23M is considerably better since it also does health damage
in addition to stun. A high-accuracy soldier can shoot a shotgun pretty far.
All I have is Knockout Grenades, which do jack shit far too often and are very TU intensive to boot, and Dart Pistols / Rifles, which suck against Mutons (but they might suck against Sectoids, too, due to the energy shields).
Don't you have stun mines?
Sectoids indeed have shields that are pretty much tailored to stop dart weapons. You can always use a shotgun or similar to remove the shield and then dart the little grey bastards.
Do note that dart weapons suffer from an invisible feature that halves their damage. See
here for some details. Solarius says it's intended, but the end result is that dart guns are essentially 12/18 damage weapons. I've given them better armour penetration and disabled the damage halving, and they're pretty okay now. I used to have an entire family of dart weapons, but that was part of an overhaul mod-mod I never had the time to get back to.
Thus the strategy I've been employing to get captures at all is to use maximum firepower, and if, as it happens occasionally, even that leaves the opponent injured instead of killed, I try to rush a soldier over and heal him up. Then I leave a guard with a dart pistol in case he wakes up again.
Don't you have tritanium handcuffs? I
think those work on Mutons. Edit: Actually, regular handcuffs should work, too. Kinda strange, but it is what it is. /edit
Dropping a smoke on one might work, too.
Otherwise, yeah, that's what people do, but as you can see this method of taking captives takes a long while and is very unreliable.
I might have criticized that myself at some point, and I do enjoy the idea of tanks gaining XP, but I don't really see why nobody just made a code change to allow tanks to gain XP. It's not like we're stuck with XCOM's codebase now with OpenXcom, right?
We're 'stuck' with OXCE, which has a whole bunch of built-in limits on the project level. For good reason, I might add. And I think making tanks into soldiers would run against some of them, especially since this feature is already available with the little caveat that you either have to change tank 'armours' or be stuck with a single-purpose tank.
It's entirely possible to have several kinds of AI, some of which are HWPs from the beginning. It's just a
massive amount of work, work that Solarius might not even find attractive from his perspective.
I think reimplementing some basic, non-developing, non-soldier, old-style HWPs that come online before alien AI is available would be a neat feature. Not sure Solarius wants to do all the duplicating, though.
Besides, the purpose of HWPs in the original game was to have a frontine unit which wasn't so painful if you lost it, and now those alien crystals are FAR MORE RARE than good soldiers, so you can only have an extremely limited number of tanks, and ... what happens if one is destroyed, if the AI lost for good?
If it's not vaporized ('overkilled'), there's a manufacturing project that revives the AI pretty fast and cheap. So AIs
are kind of disposable.
OTOH, they're incredibly rare, so if a big bad plasma weapon happens to melt down your little brave drone soldier, that's a major loss. And fielding them in any numbers is very close to impossible before you start destroying alien bases on a regular basis. I made decrypted alien data slates give out shards as well, and I'm still not drowning in AIs.
