How can I play this without feeling like I rush the game?

[Aemolia]

I love this modpack. I really do. The few months I played were my best X-Com game experience. But the game mopped the floor with me

I like playing X-Com modpacks in a laid-back way, researching and carefully reading every little piece of tech I can. So when I saw the "affects game progression" sign on something, I tried postponing it as long as I can. I collected all the dossiers from cult members, dissected all the monsters and researched every piece of equipment I could loot.

Unfortunately while I was busy researching, the cults were busy expanding. Now I keep getting cult suppression missions and I struggle a lot. I still can only take 4 agents max and need 5 vans to keep up with all the things going on around the globe. The funding nations are angry at me. When I accidentally discovered the cult bases (not the holdouts but the alien base-like bases), I couldn't figure out how to deal with them. 4 agents in suits showing up with light firearms will never do the trick..

I just want to play slow and enjoy it all.
Playing on veteran btw

[krautbernd]

No offense, but I think your playstyle is fundamentally incompatible with how the mod is structured, so the easiest solutions would be to change your playstyle to adress the issues you are facing. "Affects game progression" doesn't mean you aree being gated off from research. You will have more than enough opportunities to research items/captives/etc even if you don't research them immediately. You can postpone most non-progression related research, but you can not indefinitely postpone research that is critical for (early) progression.

If that is not an option I see multiple approaches to this, unfortunately all of them would involve editing game or save files. While playing on beginner would make battlescape missions easier I am not sure it would make tackling bases any more fun, nor would it prevent larger craft from being intercepted. Still, playing on beginner would be preferable becasue you are likely going to be outmatched anyway.

If you simply want to postpone the invasion (and cut down on cult spawns and other missions) you can reset the number of elapsed months in your savegame via "monthsPassed: " every new month and essentially stretch out the game. Note that this likely isn't going to work with your ongoing game, as it will not despawn cult bases.

If the bases are what is giving you trouble you can delete under "alienBases:" in your save game. Note that this is likely only a stopgap measure and the bases will keep spawning unless you terminate the cults. It will also not net you any positive score, it will only cut down on the points the aliens score.

If countries being unhappy is your main concern you can also modify points for xcom and alien activity in your save under "activityXcom:" and "activityAlien:" on a per-country basis.

If you are mainly missing funds you can edit them too under "funds:".

Note that for all of these the most recent value (the one for the ongoing month) is listed at the bottom.

If you simply want to reset the negative score warning set "warned:" to "false".



If research speed / Number of topics are the problem you could decrease the points required for certain topics in research_XCOMFILES.rul or you could increase the number of lab space facilites provide in facilities_XCOMFILES.rul (look for "labs:"). Overall I don't think there is a convenient or straight-forward to achieve what you are asking for, simply because the mod isn't designed for "laid back" kind of play, at least not early on when you're missing most of the transports, armors, equipment etc.

It gets better as you progress, but shutting down the cults and getting promo II/III as fast as possible is pretty much mandatory, otherwise you will get swamped in cult bases, as you experienced.

[Vakrug]

Mistakes with researching and other strategy related stuff... Don't worry, I think everyone goes through that. Do things differently, that is not hard.

I like playing X-Com modpacks in a laid-back way, researching and carefully reading every little piece of tech I can.

Not enough. You should read research tree also. Middle click on research item to access that if you were unaware.

So when I saw the "affects game progression" sign on something, I tried postponing it as long as I can.

Definitely wrong approach. And strange...

Most important early game research directions are vehicles, research facilities and armor. Good luck in another playthrough.

[psavola]

In the beginning, you'll have to prioritize and research certain things. After you have dealt with cults (after the first year or so, hopefully) the pace can be slowed down at least a bit as far as I can see. So you'll still be able to research everything, even the nonessential topics, you'll just have to know when it's the right time to do it and keep progressing the most important topics at the same time. Unfortunately, you'll mostly need trial and error to figure out what are the most crucial things to focus on. (Otherwise, you'll have to use the tech tree viewer and a lot, and maybe read a lot of messages on this board and for example int the tips&tricks thread.)

[howareyou32ny]

Play it slow brother. Good mods like this is not easy to find. Use SD to play it everywhere is another great way to play OXCE and mods.

[Enoch]

I like playing X-Com modpacks in a laid-back way, researching and carefully reading every little piece of tech I can. So when I saw the "affects game progression" sign on something, I tried postponing it as long as I can.

I can relate to your playstyle, and it's definitely possible to play X-Com Files that way, except for that last part.
The good news is that's a pretty easy adjustment to make. When the mod displays this warning it's easy to assume that by completing that kind of research, you'll either lose opportunities or get thrown into a difficulty curve you can't anticipate.
That's actually not true: in the vast majority of cases, researching a tech with that warning actually gives you more opportunities (more missions, tech, etc), not fewer. The mod is very explicit about which and when missions will stop spawning, and some mission types will never stop spawning. And as for new mission types appearing, you don't have to do them all, or at all, at least for a time. This mod is a lot more forgiving about skipping missions than X-Piratez, for example.
I think it's definitely possible for you to enjoy your pace, especially on veteran difficulty, but you should look at research with the "affects game progression" warning as something to look out for if you're starting to get behind the curve, as opposed to something you should avoid until there's nothing left. I know my enjoyment of the mod vastly improved when I did.

[Empiro]

In this game, it's actually very important to do what you can to keep pace. Part of that includes getting more scientists as quickly as you can. Stuff happens at fixed times, and you have to stay on top of it. In a way it's similar to the original UFO or TFTD -- the game gets harder as time goes on. Except here, the game gets _much_ harder.

Most things with with "affects game progression" are good. They open up new missions and new technologies. Some will cause some types of missions to disappear. Again, it's a good thing, because those missions aren't going to give you anything new. Plus, there's just so much content in this game that you've got tons more to uncover.

Don't worry too much about missing out on stuff -- the missions lead one to the next in a logical manner, so if you've unlocked a tech that says that, then you've already done the lead-up stuff.

[jnarical]

No offense, but I think your playstyle is fundamentally incompatible with how the mod is structured
…..
If you simply want to postpone the invasion (and cut down on cult spawns and other missions) you can reset the number of elapsed months in your savegame via "monthsPassed: "
……
 Overall I don't think there is a convenient or straight-forward to achieve what you are asking for, simply because the mod isn't designed for "laid back" kind of play, at least not early on when you're missing most of the transports, armors, equipment etc.

To me, it seems obvious that some scaling for elapsed time to slow down game progress could be added in options, like x1/1.5/2/2.5/3 variants. And increasing the duration of all the game processing would be as simple as adding one line in some function which returns time elapsed.

If there are plenty of fixed dates things become more complicated but it still can be solved

[Juku121]

I don't think there are any fixed dates besides the start date.

Scaling everything is probably not a good idea, because now your scientists do their work every other midnight, all items take twice as long to produce, soldiers are in hospital for twice as long, crafts fly across the globe half as fast, etc. I don't think that's what people who desire a slowed down pace actually want.

But most if not even all the actual important stuff is in the month-based entries of the rule files, so putting a little tweak into the getter function(s) for those seems fine. Whether the dev team actually likes the idea, that's a different question.

[psavola]

Essentially everything in X-COM mission/arc scripts is based on defining missions that happen on a monthly basis. This naturally leads to a ramp-up that's defined in the number of months since the start. While it would be technically possible to design a system where for example game difficulty or similar factors would affect the ramp-up speed, this would lead to a lot of duplicated rulesets which would be a maintenance nightmare.

I also doubt there is much demand for a general "scaling factor" as a new OXCE feature for many reasons; for mod authors it would be very difficult to test the balance of the mod with all the different combinations.

What would be technically feasible is making more missions dependent on the research and other progress (such as the existence of a particular base facility, as a measurement stick of your progress) instead of the progress of time. This would be exploitable by the users. And also appears to be the opposite what SS as the mod author wants. So I wouldn't hold your breath.

[Empiro]

So one thing Meridian suggested is editing the saved game and changing the following variable:

monthsPassed: X

This variable gets changed and checked at the start of the month, I believe (when all missions and events get generated). So if you decrease this at the start of some months, you can slow down the escalation by as much or as little as you like.

[Juku121]

There's also a mod that does something largely equivalent to month-changing. Probably needs updating and tweaking to work 100%, so likely no better than manual save editing.

[Empiro]

Yes, I saw that mod, but it looks like it hasn't been updated in quite a while. From the comments, if you try to use it now, it leads to very uneven escalation (where some of the events gets slowed, but not others). The save game editing is pretty straightforward, not too onerous (since you only need to do it for some months), and is much less likely to break things.