[SOURCEMOD] Brutal-OXCE 7.12.1

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Tanks stop after opening doors, soldiers do not. Is it a feature?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Playing average difficulty. February. My only base is assaulted by Tasoths with Reapers and PWT launchers. Is it expected or I just unlucky?

[Abyss]

Playing average difficulty. February. My only base is assaulted by Tasoths with Reapers and PWT launchers. Is it expected or I just unlucky?

If you play your own mods then probably some experienced modmakers can help you with insight for mission rulestes. E.g. mission spawn timers and probabilities.

[Xilmi]

Tanks stop after opening doors, soldiers do not. Is it a feature?

No it's not intentional. I compared with OXCE (7.8.5) and there they don't stop.

...

Okay, I think I found the issue. It's caused by the recently included "Brutal Brutes"-option. I implemented this incorrectly. Will be fixed in the next version. But I don't feel it's important enough to push a version just for that.

[Xilmi]

Playing average difficulty. February. My only base is assaulted by Tasoths with Reapers and PWT launchers. Is it expected or I just unlucky?

The earliest base-assault I've gotten was January 6th.
But Tasoths and Reapers shouldn't be possible that early with vanilla TFTD. So there's likely some sort of mod at play.

Note that with "Aggressive Retaliation" enabled in Brutal-OXCE successfull missions on landed UFOs also have a chance to trigger retaliation, not just shooting them down.

[0xEBJC]

Xilmi,

This is really great work, thank you!  I am enjoying all the additional features and using them to work on new mods.

I am working on a new hangar mod, and saw that your repo supports not only multiple hangars but configurations for placement and craft specific hangars, i.e. garage for XCF automobiles. .... I didn't realize you already had an example mod for this until after I had already made a garage basebits sprite, it's got a car lift., attaching here and you are welcome to add it to your repo if you want.


I have two suggestions that I hope you'd consider.

Would you be open to changing the restrictions of the hangarType slightly?  The problem I'm hoping to solve is I want to put the XCF cars with hangarType: 0 into the garage as well as the vanilla hangar that doesn't have the hangarType defined or -1. So if the craft has a hangarType: x then it can go in any hangar with hangarType: x or -1 but if a craft doesn't have a hangarType defined it can only go into hangars without the hangarType defined or -1, thus all hangars with a hangarType defined can only accept that type of craft but hangarType: -1 (not defined) would accept all craft types.

The second thing I'd suggest a slight change in the wording for clarification in the advanced configuration menu for the following:
"Realistic accuracy shot dispersion"
"0 Realistic"
"1 Normal"

My understanding is that "realistic" is when this feature is enabled and it's confusing as 0 usually denotes off and 1 denotes on... or am I mixed up with what it's saying.  I think "normal" is a little confusing also as opposed to "vanilla" to indicate original game calculations.  Sorry if this was already discuss or if I'm not understanding this setting options.

[0xEBJC]

here's part of the hangar mod I'm working on.

I don't have any experience building battlespace maps, so just starting to read the tutorials on that in the forms. was thinking of making the hangars look similar to the duratread facilities with the walls and then add the landing pads.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

The earliest base-assault I've gotten was January 6th.
But Tasoths and Reapers shouldn't be possible that early with vanilla TFTD. So there's likely some sort of mod at play.

Note that with "Aggressive Retaliation" enabled in Brutal-OXCE successfull missions on landed UFOs also have a chance to trigger retaliation, not just shooting them down.

That is probably it. Any description on mechanics?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Try #2

Again medium difficulty.
Shot one small SUB then landed and raided another small SUB.
Jan 7: my base is attacked!

Isn't it an overdo of aggressive retaliation?

[Xilmi]

I am working on a new hangar mod, and saw that your repo supports not only multiple hangars but configurations for placement and craft specific hangars, i.e. garage for XCF automobiles. .... I didn't realize you already had an example mod for this until after I had already made a garage basebits sprite, it's got a car lift., attaching here and you are welcome to add it to your repo if you want.


I have two suggestions that I hope you'd consider.

Would you be open to changing the restrictions of the hangarType slightly?  The problem I'm hoping to solve is I want to put the XCF cars with hangarType: 0 into the garage as well as the vanilla hangar that doesn't have the hangarType defined or -1. So if the craft has a hangarType: x then it can go in any hangar with hangarType: x or -1 but if a craft doesn't have a hangarType defined it can only go into hangars without the hangarType defined or -1, thus all hangars with a hangarType defined can only accept that type of craft but hangarType: -1 (not defined) would accept all craft types.

The second thing I'd suggest a slight change in the wording for clarification in the advanced configuration menu for the following:
"Realistic accuracy shot dispersion"
"0 Realistic"
"1 Normal"

My understanding is that "realistic" is when this feature is enabled and it's confusing as 0 usually denotes off and 1 denotes on... or am I mixed up with what it's saying.  I think "normal" is a little confusing also as opposed to "vanilla" to indicate original game calculations.  Sorry if this was already discuss or if I'm not understanding this setting options.

These are both things provided by other contributors. Changing the shot-disperstion-option logic would be easy but I'd rather ask jnarical if he has an opinion about that.
When it comes to the Hanger-stuff, I don't really know too much about that code and whether a change like that can easily be done. I'll try to get hold of the guy who coded it first before I'd consider looking at it myself. I mean I did look at it before because I wanted to automatically compute defaults for the positions of several crafts, so it does work without defining them manually. I think I ended up just using the center for all of them as it was too difficult to come up with an algorithm that could just take any number.

Edit: He did reply and said this:

"It can be done, but allocation would be slightly more difficult, as you should consider how many hangars of your type are free, and how many "joker" hangars are free. I suppose it could be done adding a "second allocation trial" when all typed hangars are allocated."

So maybe not so easy for someone who isn't deep into the topic.

[Xilmi]

That is probably it. Any description on mechanics?

You mean the retaliation-mechanic?

Normally there is a percentage-based chance of triggering a retaliation-mission for every UFO you shoot down. I think it is 4% on Beginner and 20% on Superhuman with 4% increments between difficulty-levels.
The change with Aggressive Retaliation in BOXCE is that this also can trigger off of successfull landed missions, as otherwise the player could just avoid it by never shooting down any UFO.

In vanilla the mission consists out of several small craft who try to find your base and at the end 2 very larges who try the same. Whenever one of the UFOs finds the base it will no longer search for it and instead a very large will go right for the base at max-speed.
Now with aggressive retaliation other UFOs could also randomly find your base, not just the ones that are part of the mission. This had very little impact in practice. But I also normalized the search-pattern. In vanilla the search-pattern heavily depends on the mission-zones. Which makes it make a massive difference to the chance of finding your base based on where it is located. Like for example switzerland had a very high chance but crete had an almost 0 chance. The search-pattern was normalized in BOXCE if the aggressive-retaliation-option is enabled and instead of searching on the region, the UFOs will always search in a sqare centered around the actual base. The square is roughly as big as europe. So it means the chance of your base being found is always as good as when it is in switzerland.

[Xilmi]

Try #2

Again medium difficulty.
Shot one small SUB then landed and raided another small SUB.
Jan 7: my base is attacked!

Isn't it an overdo of aggressive retaliation?

Medium-difficulty should be 12% chance for retalition. So if the Mods you are using don't mess with retaliation-chances your chance of getting a retaliation were roughly 22%.
Would have been 12% with without Aggressive-retaliation, since the landed sub wouldn't have counted towards the chance.

You can always just disable "Aggressive Retaliation". But I'd also recommend to check your mods. They might have increased the retaliation-chance. There's also away to simply trigger a retaliation based on events. Like researching a certain tech, for example.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

You mean the retaliation-mechanic?

Normally there is a percentage-based chance of triggering a retaliation-mission for every UFO you shoot down. I think it is 4% on Beginner and 20% on Superhuman with 4% increments between difficulty-levels.
The change with Aggressive Retaliation in BOXCE is that this also can trigger off of successfull landed missions, as otherwise the player could just avoid it by never shooting down any UFO.

In vanilla the mission consists out of several small craft who try to find your base and at the end 2 very larges who try the same. Whenever one of the UFOs finds the base it will no longer search for it and instead a very large will go right for the base at max-speed.
Now with aggressive retaliation other UFOs could also randomly find your base, not just the ones that are part of the mission. This had very little impact in practice. But I also normalized the search-pattern. In vanilla the search-pattern heavily depends on the mission-zones. Which makes it make a massive difference to the chance of finding your base based on where it is located. Like for example switzerland had a very high chance but crete had an almost 0 chance. The search-pattern was normalized in BOXCE if the aggressive-retaliation-option is enabled and instead of searching on the region, the UFOs will always search in a sqare centered around the actual base. The square is roughly as big as europe. So it means the chance of your base being found is always as good as when it is in switzerland.

Very good explanation, thank you. Few questions.

Every USO altercation (shooting or raiding) CAN trigger search mission.
Is it a single time bounded mission? Meaning they search for some period of time and if they don't find it - no more attempts are made (for this search mission).
Then next search mission can get triggered, and so on.

I understand this is probably difficult to calculate but what is the estimate probability for the search mission to discover X-Com base?
What is the probability for the any USO to discover X-Com base? Is it same as in vanilla or different?

Essentially, I am trying to understand with what probability I receive base attack after shooting down or raiding USO? Thank you.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Medium-difficulty should be 12% chance for retalition. So if the Mods you are using don't mess with retaliation-chances your chance of getting a retaliation were roughly 22%.
Would have been 12% with without Aggressive-retaliation, since the landed sub wouldn't have counted towards the chance.

You can always just disable "Aggressive Retaliation". But I'd also recommend to check your mods. They might have increased the retaliation-chance. There's also away to simply trigger a retaliation based on events. Like researching a certain tech, for example.

Got it.
I am not using any fancy mods on top of BAI but will check anyway. What should I look for? The "retaliation" word in rules?

[Xilmi]

Very good explanation, thank you. Few questions.

Every USO altercation (shooting or raiding) CAN trigger search mission.
Is it a single time bounded mission? Meaning they search for some period of time and if they don't find it - no more attempts are made (for this search mission).
Then next search mission can get triggered, and so on.

I understand this is probably difficult to calculate but what is the estimate probability for the search mission to discover X-Com base?
What is the probability for the any USO to discover X-Com base? Is it same as in vanilla or different?

Essentially, I am trying to understand with what probability I receive base attack after shooting down or raiding USO? Thank you.

The search-mission performed by each of the UFOs that are part of it has a finite amount of way-points it flies between. I think like 5 or 6. Basically every time they change direction they reached a way-point.

Every 5 minutes or so it rolls whether it detects your base. The chance of success for that is based the distance to your base and how big your base is (how many slots are filled). There's also a building that reduces this chance. The chance for each individual roll is not very high. But smaller UFOs fly slower and thus have a lot more rolls in total than the bigger ones. Basically you should shoot down every UFO that flies close to your base, as they are likely searching your base. The big ones you can't usually shoot down but those also have the lowest chance to find you, so it's fine.
Problem is: Especially in the beginning with the crappy small radar, chances are you only discover the UFO when it's already too late, as the radar only refreshes every 30 minutes of whether there is something. (once it was found you won't lose it while still in radar range, except if it leaves orbit of course)

Also: If the UFO is not part of a search-mission and you shoot it down thinking it is, you can of course trigger the search-mission in the first place.

With aggressive retaliation enabled the chance of discovery, when you do nothing against it, is pretty high I'd say. More than 50% from experience that they find your main-base that way.
Without aggressive retaliation, as I said the chance can be way lower depending on the location of your base. Threre are some "dead-zones" with abysmally small chance. If you are close to or between several bigger cities the chance is a lot higher.