Rumors about incompatibility with Brutal-OXCE

[Nalca]

If there are legitimate reasons not to pick up blue-clips, I'd rather have a generally valid algorithm that can determine whether it's worth to pick something up rather than forcing the modder to create a whitelist for every item that should be possible for the AI to pick up.

There are a lot of items that aren't weapons, but loot. Like the blue credit chip. - https://xpedia.netlify.app/##STR_CREDIT_CHIP_M
They are useless for battle, but worth a lot after. Some foes spawn with these in their inventory.

Some items are both, like the coconut - https://xpedia.netlify.app/##STR_COCONUT
A crappy weapon in the hand of a unexperimented hand, but maybe better than her fists.

[Dioxine]

Can you tell me how I can set-up a scenario where I can test my fix via the "New Battle"-functionality?

Launch Ratman Cache mission. And no, there is 0% chance of it being blind fire, unless your AI tries blind fire through 30 tiles of solid rock

My expectation as a modder would be that I can give the AI whatever kind of unit/weapon/terrain-combination I can come up with and that the AI then would be capable of grasping what it can do with that on it's own based on the properties of the units, not some arbitrary additional values that have to be set to control the AI.

The problem with your argument is, OXC had achieved this funtionality >10 years ago already. (and you haven't replicated it fully yet.)

[Juku121]

OXCE didn't have the functionality of enemies not killing Damsels until about a year ago, and it's achieved by... an "arbitrary additional values that have to be set to control the AI."

Now, I doubt this functionality is ever going to be achievable without such a value, so Xilmi's aspiration is not fully realistic, but let's not outright misrepresent what OXCE does and doesn't.

BAI might not fit a mod that's excessively customised to work with vanilla parameters, at least not without a big rework and the mod embracing Xilmi's "I want to be destroyed by AI" philosophy and both sides working together, but let's not act as if base game AI knows much anything about what it's doing. It doesn't, and it's long been a thing that's been acknowledged as a potential problem but one that is outside the scope of both OXC and OXCE.

All it does is create a passable illusion of intelligent resistance. Which is good enough in many cases. Game AI in general being relatively clueless is not an accident, an AI that can fairly kick their asses is not something most players want and thus it gets the barest attention paid to it by most developers.

If you actually pay attention, non-Brutal AI plays very inefficiently and frequently does not punish the player for obvious mistakes. And it must, or many of the maps with lots of enemies would be death traps that only the most hardcore of players could even hope to win.

[Berestow]

Well, it makes several missions unplayable or working radically different than intended (eg enemies killing Damsels), so not compatible with XPZ.

Things like it making game much simpler and one-dimensional (in my opinion it's a camp-or-die mod, at least in its current state), not even worth mentioning, to each their own.

So XPZ is not compatible with XPZ, nice.

makes several missions unplayable

Like XPZ with base defense with sewers? Or terror mission at first week that u can't win because your weapon is piece of shit and your transport is just shooting range for enemies.
 

making game much simpler

Like XPZ when once you get ACAR or tanks you can annihilate everyone without protection of power armor?

one-dimensional (in my opinion it's a camp-or-die mod)

Just like XPZ, X-Files and 40k? Right? Or there different mods with same name where are you not forced to wait 1st turn? Where are your team are not outnumbered? Where are they don't have much better equipment and stats? Where are no useless airbus?

[Juku121]

Just like ... X-Files ... Or there different mods with same name where are you not forced to wait 1st turn? Where are your team are not outnumbered? Where are they don't have much better equipment and stats?

Let's not get carried away here. I haven't played Piratez in a long while, but I do know X-Com Files. And these two mods have quite a bit in common. While these issues are present to some degree in XCF, they are not absolute:

• You are not even able to 'wait first turn' until Promo II. Since your transport has no walls until the Dragonfly. After that, it's situational, as always. A lot of aliens (and some others) also have a degree of heat vision and/or are snipers, so transports with open doors and smoke are quite a bit less effective.
  
• Your team may be outnumbered, but due to vanilla AI faffing about, unless they have heavy weapons (aliens, cultists with grenade launchers or explosives) or lots of TU (Chupacabras, Gilldogs, Chryssalids), that is not a big deal. I've watched several let's players leave 2/3 of their team idling about and still winning. This is exactly where BAI might do a lot of good.
  
• Agent stats are inflated to a quite ridiculous degree compared to most enemies, alien or not, due to a) transformations, b) commendations and c) comparatively high natural stat caps, d) armour. A generic cultist/alien mook is hilariously outstatted by X-Com.
  
• Equipment is hit-and-miss, since quite a few early and mid-game weapons are as good or better than enemy gear if played to their strengths. In fact, a plain wood axe is more terrifying than many a firearm, and can be had within the first month.
  

[Solarius Scorch]

@Berestow: your first post on this forum is an incoherent rant about a mod you don't like (or more accurately, don't know how to play), with a hint that other major mods are just as bad. And it's all quite off-topic to boot.

Honestly this post looks like a deliberate ban bait, but let's take a step back and please consider your actions here a bit more carefully in the future.

[Torchwood]

Having test played Brutal-AI with Piratez myself, I can tell you about my firsthand experiences. Long story short, while running it is possible, there's some complications that make this inadvisable to outright.
First, it will radically change the way AI behaves - by default, Brutal AI shares information between enemies as well as the player going on better. This means there are few to no campers, every single enemy will start rushing towards your position. So most fights boil down to can you hold your position or be overrun, with very little maneuver on your part. Giving how assault-focused Piratez can, and arguably should, be, it's not an improvement for the better in terms of gameplay experience.
And yes, whatever code used for enemies to ignore neutral units in certain missions, i.e. damsels, doesn't work in the BrutalAI version.

Regarding X-Com Files, I enjoyed playing it because is yes, you will at one point be expected to fight scores of humanoid enemies with just a handful of agents. However, with good tactics and superior training and equipment, it is possible for a small elite force to prevail even when greatly outnumbered. High quality weapons to make sure your volleys are deadly, grenades for crowd control, body armor to increase agent survivability, and a few others tricks. Enjoy it while it lasts and the tables turn when you need to deal with alien expeditions using a mass army ill-equipped for their weapons.

[Berestow]

@Berestow: your first post on this forum is an incoherent rant about a mod you don't like (or more accurately, don't know how to play), with a hint that other major mods are just as bad. And it's all quite off-topic to boot.

Honestly this post looks like a deliberate ban bait, but let's take a step back and please consider your actions here a bit more carefully in the future.

Your first answer to me on this forum is ban threat about theme you don't like.

If you don't understand why i can't agreed with complaining about Brutal AI incompatibility with arguments like "oh no you forcing people to camp-or-die" when it's come from XPZ author.
Yet you dare assume that i don't know how to play? Or you just don't like that not everyone will play rush and die?
Let's see how people play mods? How often they rush and don't die? How often there were complaints about ninja bases where u start without any cover with bunch of turrets and ninjas with mass destruction weapons? How many complaints about ninja belts?
Or maybe there different opinions about things?

Yet, you don't like mine and can't argue so your only way to ban me? Nice.

[Solarius Scorch]

Your first answer to me on this forum is ban threat about theme you don't like.

That's because I'm a moderator here and this is my job. Not because "I don't like you".

Take a deep breathe and rethink what and how you communicate here.

[JustTheDude/CABSHEP]

Like XPZ with base defense with sewers? Or terror mission at first week that u can't win because your weapon is piece of shit and your transport is just shooting range for enemies.

Man, please stop. I'm going offtopic here just to act as a thrid party unaffiliated with anyone else.
By this quote alone basically everyone who played XPZ will see the rest of the post as either mad ramblings about mod a mod someone didn't like for some reason, or as a troll.

You are not supposed to even fight those terror missions at first week. If not engaged they only hit you -100 infamy points, laughable.

How base defence with sewers is unplayable? You can get dogs in first month and first real base defence mission (ones that aren't just academy nurses and researchers with harpoon guns) happens around few months in. And dogs have inbuilt motion detector (eye-phone).

And how transport that is a piece of shit that is just a shooting range for the enemies can be both that and also promoting camp-or-die gameplay? If your transport is shitty, you have to rush. If your transport is good, you camp inside. And there is a balance, with airbus being the fastest option you have available from the start, but with low capacity and not providing much cover vs trucks for example, that are slow, but provide decent cover, come with a turret that both shoots and act as a good decoy to soak up damage and reaction fire on the first turn.

I could go on and on, but in both cases, you are either mad, or trolling, just stop. All the problems you have with mods existed in Vanilla and TFTD. You either camp in skyranger turn one, or send something to get annihilated, you are always outnumbered also. In there instead of useless airbus you get useless skyranger (if it is so perfect, you can get it in piratez too!) with exactly one one exit, with no doors.



And to not be too offtopic. When it comes to the term of a mod (or something else) being incompatible I personally think of stuff outright not working where incompatible mods simply crash the game.
The term I would use for mod/something that breaks the other mod in some way (and Brutal-OXCE does as proven with certain missions mentioned here) it is "not supported". The game works, you can still play it, but it changes behaviour to what is completly unintended by the creator/s of one, or two mods.

So here is that. Call it "not supported" and end hostility. Say it is "unadvised" to use with XPZ and some other mods and we should be allright. From what I saw and played over the years in X-Com modding forum and mods themselfs, I don't think Dioxine, Solarious, or any other big mod creators wants to strike any change to their mod out of spite.
Maybe the whole drama is just about using the word "incompatible", where both mods don't crash the game, but make it run differently, in a way both modders do not intend.

[Nerro]

As a complete outsider that did not play Brutal-OXCE (yet?) nor XPiratez (yet?) and has no authority to give any advice on this subject, I would like to second the advice of using the "unsuppported" term in this case.
When I see "Brutal-OXCE and XPiratez are incompatible", I expect that they would not run toghether. If I try and it works, I would probably start thinking that the "incompatible" information is outdated and that it is now working. There is nothing stopping me from going to XPiratez people if I encounter small issues between the two.
When I see "XPiratez do not support Brutal-OXCE", I understand that if I try to use those toghether, the XPiratez people do not want to know about it and I should not aks them for help in making the two work toghether correctly.

Now, maybe my IT background is changing the way I see thing and someone without it would not understand the "unsupported" term correctly. But I don't think this is a good reason to not use it correctly.

[Xilmi]

There are a lot of items that aren't weapons, but loot. Like the blue credit chip. - https://xpedia.netlify.app/##STR_CREDIT_CHIP_M
They are useless for battle, but worth a lot after. Some foes spawn with these in their inventory.

Some items are both, like the coconut - https://xpedia.netlify.app/##STR_COCONUT
A crappy weapon in the hand of a unexperimented hand, but maybe better than her fists.

The base-pickup logic of Brutal-AI is to pick up weapons that are usable or ammunition for the weapon it already has. It doesn't just pick up all sorts of random stuff that's lying around. It would still do so additionally if the stuff was specifically marked to be picked up in the mod.

[Xilmi]

This means there are few to no campers, every single enemy will start rushing towards your position. So most fights boil down to can you hold your position or be overrun, with very little maneuver on your part. Giving how assault-focused Piratez can, and arguably should, be, it's not an improvement for the better in terms of gameplay experience.

Yeah, I've been going away from that kind of play-style for the AI and it worked well in the base-game. However, I had previously integrated a special treatment of the condition of seeing the enemy but having less effective range than the enemy is away. This enforced a unit to go into "Sweep-Mode" and thus made them all move forward. And since everyone tried to get a line of fire, basically everyone except snipers were affected.
Yesterday, as of BAI-version 4.0.1 this was removed. And together with the improved peak&hide-logic this should vastly change how such enemies play. I haven't excessively tested that but in a few WH40k-missions I had saves of, it made a big difference.

I haven't looked at the damsel-issue yet. But now that I was told how to reproduce it, so it should be easy to debug into what the issue is.

[Xilmi]

As a complete outsider that did not play Brutal-OXCE (yet?) nor XPiratez (yet?) and has no authority to give any advice on this subject, I would like to second the advice of using the "unsuppported" term in this case.
When I see "Brutal-OXCE and XPiratez are incompatible", I expect that they would not run toghether. If I try and it works, I would probably start thinking that the "incompatible" information is outdated and that it is now working. There is nothing stopping me from going to XPiratez people if I encounter small issues between the two.
When I see "XPiratez do not support Brutal-OXCE", I understand that if I try to use those toghether, the XPiratez people do not want to know about it and I should not aks them for help in making the two work toghether correctly.

Now, maybe my IT background is changing the way I see thing and someone without it would not understand the "unsupported" term correctly. But I don't think this is a good reason to not use it correctly.

In general I'd also say it's not the Mod's job to support the client. It's the other way around.

And personally I'd like to be able to say that my modified alternative client supports all sorts of mods, including this one. Of course not just by disabling the client's core-feature but also when it is enabled.

And while it would have been nicer for me if I was met from a more cooperative mindset, as long as I can obtain the information I'm after, I'm fine.

I should probably also make it more clear how to tell apart intentional differences in my AIs behavior from unintentional ones.
But on the flip-side, to support mods better, I sometimes need to understand the reasoning behind specific things done in mods. An example for that would be enemies with several weapons of which the base-AI would only ever consider using one of them anyways. In the WH40k-Mod, for example some enemies that weren't that big of a threat suddenly became much more and some others less deadly because BAI recognized and started using their secondary weapon, that previously was just ignored by the base-AI. It's stuff like that, that I also like to be told about. So I can write better algorithms for weapon-effect-comparison.

[JustTheDude/CABSHEP]

And personally I'd like to be able to say that my modified alternative client supports all sorts of mods, including this one.

Nobody is stoping you. You can say that your mod/client(for the sake of simplicty lets call Brutal-OXCE a mod) is compatible and is supported with X-Piratez. That doesn't mean it is the other way around.
This means nobody is stoping any other mod creator for saying that your mod is not supported with their mod.

Vanilla AI and its logic existed since the beginning and many mods have their core balance depending on it. The whole melee-centric gameplay (in XPZ and XCF) hangs on the fact that if your soldier runs up to a enemy, then that enemy will try to shoot its gun at that soldier and thanks to the evasion mechanic will miss. Optimised AI could simply do what us players do, which is moving one tile back and then shoot.

Entire X-COM series, each and every game basically boils down to your forces being outnumbered and outgunned, but with your clever tactics you have to prevail over their only weakness - AI is dumb.
Every X-COM mod I have ever played, or seen works that way. Even Imperial Guard playtrough in WH40k you are still almost always (with exception of assaulting small crashed ships) outnumbered anyway by chaos marines and deamons.

I really do think that such a big change to a core mechanic is almost impossible to implement functionally into existing big mods. Only something made with Brutal-OXCE in mind in the first place could really shine as something cool and fresh.

The biggest difference between intentional and unintentional AI behaviour is not their actuall behaviour, but balance. And your mod/client can't do it for mod creator. Those armor values, those TU's, that Stamina/Reactions/Strenght has to be tweaked, just as they are tweaked when choosing different difficulty settings.