[EXPANSION]Hardmode Expansion -- General Feedback Thread

[hellrazor]

I am... sceptical.

Have you ever had a low-level alien survive a grenade? I don't think so.

Actually they can Sectoids are able to survive a direct Grenade to the face.
It's a rare case but possible.

[hellrazor]

UFOPaedia states otherwise.
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=ExplosionsNo, it was second base.
I have statstrings showing "class" of a soldier and I give them weapon according to their class. Suprisingly my best units are my throwers, which act both like an accurate long-range artillery and scouts.

Well i never put that much faith in throwing and used more smoke grenades and proxies, but if your tactic also works.

Nevertheless I spent 1.5 hour to clear the Floater Base and oh god, it was hard as hell. None of my battleship assault can be compared by difficulty to this one base assault. Losing 13 soldiers out of 14, blowing 28 HE packs, using _only_ explosives and shotguns and it took me 85 turns to finally end this suffer.

Spoiler:

While I was doing my job, I noticed one bug though - floaters never used the lift to XCOM green area and so I could kill them easily. I don't think it belongs to this mod though, but whatever.
And also a question: what are new spawn count values? It is abnormal for an alien base to have ~40 enemies in.

Hm.. Floaters not coming up the green entry tiles? Uhhh, i put it on my todo list for now (exams and such). The spawn values are totally fine and normal on superhuman Difficulty, even thou Alien Bases do spawn the largest contigent.

[hellrazor]

Just continued testplaying with the new economy and the Races and new Racemixes.

I got really really scared today, when i saw this in a Sectoid Elite Terrormission...

Those Armored Cyberdiscs are a nightmare without Plasma Weaponry....
Since SIMON had some bad encounters with them i called this Screenshot:

[DeltaEpsilon]

Man, something's really strange with these maps. I seem to have a lot of "bottlenecks" at certain maps like this one:

Spoiler:

There is a bottleneck at the tile where my cursor is. Enemies seem to always go there as if there is no other places to go, like literally, I've been going in and out of this UFO for 3 turns and always there was a floater at this exact tile. Also a guy won't move (or it's another bottleneck) from the tile behind PS (2 tiles from my cursor along the diagonal to PS). Just by throwing random grenade at known bottleneck I usually get 2-3 enemies killed without even seeing them at first place.

Maybe it's just because maps are poorly waypointed, but I don't think it's that bad.

[SIMON BAILIE]

Finally started the Cydonian mission and I'm just in stage one atm but something I've noticed is:

Spoiler:

the armored sectopods go down quite easily to flamethrowers. My friendly sectopods have a flamethrower in their other "hand", better IMHO than having to carry lots of flares, one armored sectopod dropped after being hit only 3 times but another survived a direct hit from a blaster bomb. Can't see anything in their armor stats as they take normal incendiary damage, is this intended or the result of funky fire damage on 2x2 units?

[hellrazor]

Man, something's really strange with these maps. I seem to have a lot of "bottlenecks" at certain maps like this one:

Spoiler:

There is a bottleneck at the tile where my cursor is. Enemies seem to always go there as if there is no other places to go, like literally, I've been going in and out of this UFO for 3 turns and always there was a floater at this exact tile. Also a guy won't move (or it's another bottleneck) from the tile behind PS (2 tiles from my cursor along the diagonal to PS). Just by throwing random grenade at known bottleneck I usually get 2-3 enemies killed without even seeing them at first place.

Maybe it's just because maps are poorly waypointed, but I don't think it's that bad.

Well those some of my first route designs, so yes the bottlenecks kinda suck. I noticed this myself in my testplay and i will change it in the future after my exams are over.

[hellrazor]

Finally started the Cydonian mission and I'm just in stage one atm but something I've noticed is:

Spoiler:

the armored sectopods go down quite easily to flamethrowers. My friendly sectopods have a flamethrower in their other "hand", better IMHO than having to carry lots of flares, one armored sectopod dropped after being hit only 3 times but another survived a direct hit from a blaster bomb. Can't see anything in their armor stats as they take normal incendiary damage, is this intended or the result of funky fire damage on 2x2 units?

Well normally my mod doesn't have flamethrowers in them. But i could add incendiary immunity if you like :>

[SIMON BAILIE]

Well I wouldn't want total immunity but say only 10-20% of normal incendiary damage would correct this "loophole".

[SIMON BAILIE]

Finished stage two earlier today and thoroughly have enjoyed this mod but can you advise me on the following:

Spoiler:

Firstly does the alien brain always have to be upstairs from the t shaped room or could it spawn somewhere else? Secondly I always thought you only had to destroy a portion of the alien brain but maybe this has changed in openxcom https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Cydonia. And finally just to be different I would have liked to finish the brain off with an alloy sword strike but I was unable(see picture).

I ended up being in late August of the second year in game time and having played it in real life from 27th of July 2015, so it did take a good while but was worth it. Wanted to clear all alien bases on earth but it was unneccessary and all six left were all Ethereal so thankfully I didn't have to.
Might start a run through through of FMP or Redux now as I want to experience the "phaser" aliens, not so subtle hint if you would like to include them in v0.94. Keep up the good work and I may come back to v0.94 at a future date.

[Arthanor]

The brain is not a unit, and unfortunately melee weapons only destroy units, they cannot target terrain. That's why the alloy sword won't work.

[hellrazor]

Well I wouldn't want total immunity but say only 10-20% of normal incendiary damage would correct this "loophole".

Well depends, they are also very suspectible to Melee damage, so yes they do have their weaknesses.
But this nothing which can not be adjusted

Finished stage two earlier today and thoroughly have enjoyed this mod but can you advise me on the following:

Spoiler:

Firstly does the alien brain always have to be upstairs from the t shaped room or could it spawn somewhere else? Secondly I always thought you only had to destroy a portion of the alien brain but maybe this has changed in openxcom

Putting the Brain not in the T-shaped Room as you mentioned, would require desgining a new 20x20 Maptile, the T-shaped Room is the vanilla Brain Map. But that is nothing which can not be done in the future, i do have in mind to make few more base modules for the Alien Base, showing of "landed" and "docked" Medium Scouts, Large Scouts, Fighters and Sentries. I know it doable and i they only would have the default interior design (everything would end up in a maze of doing maps).
I also saw that in FMP there do exist some other Alien Base Modules, probably self designed ones from Solarius or from Civilians Base Add On Mod, i wanted to take a look at those for a long time, so probably those will also find its in (kinda depends on how they are made).

Well we did get some additional ruleset variables, from Warboy so you can set the objectiveType and amount of the objects (and other stuff) for custom mission design, i always found it unlogical, that i only had to destroy only 1 portion of the Brain to end the game, so i changed this and you actuall have to destroy the Brain completly, but thi i do not think this really matters and shouldn't be a big problem.

Spoiler:

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Cydonia. And finally just to be different I would have liked to finish the brain off with an alloy sword strike but I was unable(see picture).

Unfortunatly Melee Type weapons cannot attack objects directly, it would actually make sense to have this kind of option ingame, but i guess it is rather hard to implement or simply something which has never considered to by neccesary.
Why not create a official Feature request to the developer Team? So this can actually find its way into upcoming 2.0 release (maybe)?

On the other hand, did you enjoy fighting the Muton Brain Guard? I designed them to be pretty much resilient against a lot of stuff. I may need to optimize the Mapscript and overwork the Maps a little bit to control the flow of aliens more towards the players starting point, so you will face them in their full force. Actually i think Psi Panic might be something which could be quite usefull against them, if you have a very potent Psi (95+/100). In version 0.94, those Muton Brain Guard, are renamed to Muton Elite Guards and can also be encountered on Earth and oh boy, i tested Terrormissions against them in New Battle, no joy there (got a few times Squadwiped , because of their ability to sneak up on me and Melee my Walkertank ).

I ended up being in late August of the second year in game time and having played it in real life from 27th of July 2015, so it did take a good while but was worth it. Wanted to clear all alien bases on earth but it was unneccessary and all six left were all Ethereal so thankfully I didn't have to.

Well i will change the Missionscript regarding the generation of Ethereal Bases, so they stop the extra mission once you have interrogated the Ethereal Commander. Instead i could then set in Motion a mass infiltration Mission which technically already is in, but only occurs after you researched Cydonia or Bust and the Ultimate Craft. (Missions only get triggered in the following Month).

Might start a run through through of FMP or Redux now as I want to experience the "phaser" aliens, not so subtle hint if you would like to include them in v0.94. Keep up the good work and I may come back to v0.94 at a future date.

I am not sure if i should add any more alien Races, it is kinda problematic to show them all ingame, but maybe the "Phaser" aliens could be shown in a special Mission (maybe the one which would give you the Psi Amp Item).
I am currently in the process of rewriting the Race mixes for 0.94 Version and i also need to rework the structure of the additional Missions, i probably also will put in some Patches for the Terrain Pack (for MCD files and such).
My progress at the moment is really slow due to my upcoming exams so i will not have much time until middle of December this year, to actually Mod further. On the other hand it gives me the possibility to test out the new Economy settings and so far i actually like what i experienced, no clue how this will change when i start to produce Lasercanons, but probably i could adjust their productiontime to make them less profitable, but still profitable enough that it makes sense to produce them for money.

Anyway as always thanks for the feedback. I hope you enjoyed the Mod

[SIMON BAILIE]

I was just thinking the same that both yourself and Arthanor stated and I suppose I could have used the powerglove which I tweaked so that it can destroy terrain at range 1, however the trade off is that you can't attack on diagonals as they are considered to be >1. Will keep an eye out for v0.94.

[Solarius Scorch]

The alien base blocks in FMP are taken from a variety of sources, mostly Civilian and Luke83. I wasn't too discriminating in what goes in, since they're all good and the alien base has no specific mapscript.

[hellrazor]

The alien base blocks in FMP are taken from a variety of sources, mostly Civilian and Luke83. I wasn't too discriminating in what goes in, since they're all good and the alien base has no specific mapscript.

I have planned to make some more Mapblocks, containing landed/docker Medium Scouts, Fighters, Large Scouts and Sentry Ships.
Since those could be represented in a alien base 20x20x2 Map module. Will leave them in the FMP thread for your usage if you like, but do not expect anything before middle of december (my exams!)

[Solarius Scorch]

I have planned to make some more Mapblocks, containing landed/docker Medium Scouts, Fighters, Large Scouts and Sentry Ships.
Since those could be represented in a alien base 20x20x2 Map module. Will leave them in the FMP thread for your usage if you like, but do not expect anything before middle of december (my exams!)

Hell yes. This is something I've wanted for a long time, just never got to actually do it.