[Submod] De-Yarr Drunken Gals will find the X!

[Fampat]

Yarr, erm hello everyone!
Today i want to share a little submod of mine, but first things first!

Dear Dioxine, thank you for that really great mod. Your mod was it which re-ignited my love for the old X-Com game.
Luckily the OpenXCom-Team exist, you sirs, made a really wonderful job with creating OpenXCom, thank you for making that possible.

Because i sadly never came to finish a Piratez campaign for various reasons, i decided to give it another try with the recent version. Before i started, i made my mind what it was that was preventing me from finishing a campaign.
The only reason i came up with was that iam probably an bad player on this game, a save-scum®mer and rage-quitter.

To sum it up, its plain to difficult/depressing and unrelaxing for me. The more progress i had made in the campaign the more stressed i was. Iam aging, i remeber the good old days where this game came out and i was a young one.
I had no money and had no other choice to pirate that game! How funny, now i love to Pirate in that game

But still, like the young me, i cant stand the brutal nature of that game but want soo badly enjoy this, especially all the boobs by all the nice unlocks that require progress!
I, erm probably many of you in fact, came up with the idea of making modifications to the rules of the mod to bring the game to a level enjoyable to play on. I tested it and found it sooo much more fun and relaxing to be the James Bond, the John Wick, Mr Rambo and Terminator, THE STAR in this game.

Suddenly everything in this games feels like it turns around me now, iam no longer just a sidekick, iam the star of the show! Sure, iam still that bad that i lose my Peasants here and there on a base-defense and finally DONT save-scum!
Iam also feeling that i realy get better at this game, for some reason the save-scum is much less now, not just because the enemies miss much more, because i simply understand how many things work now. Uh, doesnt matter, i get lost on the topic...

I took some minutes to put all my debuffing of Piratez together to a submod, so that others, who are like me, can enjoy to be the Pirate King straight from the beginning!
To make up for the difficulty debuff one may turn on the Drunken-OpenGL-Shader i have put together, if you dare to use this shader you really dont need any hefty difficulty-settings to have a diffcult time controlling your gals/mouse-pointer!

Shader in action:




For guys who want the details:
- Disables Demigod-mode, which spawns always the max amount of enemies, even on the lowest difficulty
- Reduces the enemy-count on base defense missions
- All around weakens enemies by reducing their armor and aim stats
- Enemies dont react to melee-attacks from behind anymore
- Losing game conditions are much more forgiving
- Bughunting triggers a bit earlier
- Retaliation happens less often
- Living quaters now boost health recovering a bit what helps in the beginning
- OPTIONAL: All missions (422+) are at daytime, this can be enabled by editing Factions.rul, see comments in that file
- Manacles/Shackle cost much less and are way more effective (longer stun duration)
- Less Gals are now naked on Base-Defense (Hideout) Missions
- AI First Turn TUs/Stamina reduced to 25 - 50
- Earlier Contacs: Krazy Hanna (Rogue instead of Boss)
- AI Chooses weapon to use more randomly instead of optimized

Thank you for taking the time of reading. And again, thank all of you guys who made this game, the mods and this site possible!

[Dioxine]

Demigod mode doesn't do what it think it does. It just forces the game to spawn the correct (NOT MAX) number of enemies even if there is not enough spawnpoints (eg. due to map not having enough, or player not building hangars at base to lower the amount of spawning enemies)

Healing bonuses stack, so you will get compounding effect the more LQ you build.

Daytime missions are usually a bad idea, so 'always daytime' actually increases difficulty.

Manacles do not have any capacity for stun, it's not XCF.

People can't hit you back in melee if they're dead. Your change 'no reaction to backstab' just makes heavy melee weapons less useful and instead makes knives the king. Besides, meleeing bloodhounds or ninjas is a bad idea if you don't have proper armor. Most enemies are usually helpless against melee anyway.

I think most of the issues you mention come from your lack of skill and even more so lack of caution, which is in turn caused by overreliance on savescumming and the resulting bravado (you basically start seeing this yourself). Rember that the goal of a pirate is to survive, because what's good of getting rich if you're dead? Besides, the lowest difficulty exists for a reason. If you think it's still too hard, I can make it easier.
Anyway this is just an advice and explanation of some things you might have missed, don't treat this as criticism.