Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N9.7.7 12-Sep-2024 Second Coming

[legionof1]

I just level multistory buildings in terror maps if there are to many. One or 2 is okay but a mapful i break out the mortars and level the map. Screw the penalty for civilain kills most of them are gonna die before i win anyway if i win at all.

[karadoc]

This mod is great. I've only started recently, but I've been playing a lot and enjoying it thoroughly. I like the game is rich with detailed lore which is fully consistent with the other xcom games.

I've got a minor bug report (rereport, really); and a minor question.

The question is kind of a philosophical question about the intended way to use saves and such. Essentially what I want to know is whether players are expected to play on after taking a massive loss, or should we just reload and retry.

I recently encountered a mercenaries for the first time in a landed UFO mission. It was brutal. I didn't really know what I was up against, and so I quickly lost most of my crew before realising that I wasn't well enough equipped to win the fight. Up until then, I'd basically just been playing on through whenever something bad happened, but this time I decided to reload and not take the mission. I'd kind of like to know if the game is designed in such a way that I'd recover from taking a big loss, or if a big loss would mean the start of a slippery slope towards ultimate defeat. I mean, if I lose a heap of valuable equipment and most of my best trained hands; is that something I should play on from?

Found a small bug, dont know if its relevant since you already work on the extended edition, but might be worth checking if it replicates there too:

When you try to ship slaves from one base to other (all types of slaves) and you click on the arrow the numbers change to -random number (etc -256) on both columns. If you give the order to proceed you pay the cash but no actuall transfer takes place.

Cannot fix that but it's actually good, slaves shouldn't be possible to transfer for a good number of reasons.

As a brief follow up on this: when trying to transfer slaves, the number of slaves being transferred is shown to be negative; and so the cost is also negative. This means that xcom actually gains money when attempting to transfer slaves. As pilot00 points out, the transfer doesn't actually take place, but the player can just keep trying to transfer over and over again to get infinite money. If it can't be fixed, then I guess that's just too bad. I just through I'd raise the issue again because the bug is a bit more harmful (exploitable) than originally described.

[greattuna]

The question is kind of a philosophical question about the intended way to use saves and such. Essentially what I want to know is whether players are expected to play on after taking a massive loss, or should we just reload and retry.

I recently encountered a mercenaries for the first time in a landed UFO mission. It was brutal. I didn't really know what I was up against, and so I quickly lost most of my crew before realising that I wasn't well enough equipped to win the fight. Up until then, I'd basically just been playing on through whenever something bad happened, but this time I decided to reload and not take the mission. I'd kind of like to know if the game is designed in such a way that I'd recover from taking a big loss, or if a big loss would mean the start of a slippery slope towards ultimate defeat. I mean, if I lose a heap of valuable equipment and most of my best trained hands; is that something I should play on from?

That depends on you, but usually you should be able to recover from virtually anything. You can remake\buy\loot weapons, retrain gals, remanufacture\repair armor, and replace the trusty ol' boat with a pachyderm, skyranger or manufactured ship. Though it might kill your game if you lose yer boat on first month, because you have nothing to cushion the fall, and the loss of laboratory, should it happen, is permanent.

[karadoc]

That depends on you, but usually you should be able to recover from virtually anything. You can remake\buy\loot weapons, retrain gals, remanufacture\repair armor, and replace the trusty ol' boat with a pachyderm, skyranger or manufactured ship. Though it might kill your game if you lose yer boat on first month, because you have nothing to cushion the fall, and the loss of laboratory, should it happen, is permanent.

Before xPiratez, I was playing Long War, the mod for X-Com: Enemy Within. If the player suffers a major loss in LW, you can still rebuild, rebuy, and retrain - but you still lose the game. You lose because the aliens keep getting stronger while you rebuild. In fact they get stronger even faster than they would otherwise, because you aren't raiding their bases and shooting down their ships. So although you can rebuild after loss, if the loss is big enough then it can put so far behind that you no longer have strong enough tech to shoot down UFOs... and so you lose the game.

That's the kind of thing I was worried about happening when I was defeated by the merc ufo in xpiratez. My thinking was roughly this: if missions like this are going to become the new normal, then I can't afford to lose this - otherwise I'll have to restart the game.

Maybe I'll try to play without using saves from now on, and just see how it goes. If I have to restart, then it won't be so bad anyway - because it's an excellent game! I kind of look forward to trying a different early-game tech path.

[Solarius Scorch]

No, Piratez will never screw you over like that, it just wouldn't fly in the X-Com community. Although losing the lab would be a major pain, since you'd have to build whole new bases only for research and paying dearly for this not very efficient solution. Plus the lab allows you to hack data, which is very useful.

[Dioxine]

Nah you can always rebuild, unless you're hit twice or thrice in a short time, which has a very low chance of happening. The easy enemies are never going away for good. And you can get hit by full-force Mercs in the first month anyway, if you're both over-aggressive AND very unlucky.

[superschokokeks]

Over-aggressive and very unlucky : |

I raided a church small or medium (don't know) ship. Didn't know it was one.
After that my base got attacked by the church...

with plasma weapon and a lot of more high tech shit. At least no power armor.
Half or more of my gals got killed, but I won.

I'll never attack the church again until I eat their units at breakfast.

Ok. It wasn't the first month. I think it was the sixths or so.
It never happend before.
So I think the church attack your base more likely than other factions? Or Did I have bad luck?

p.s Yay I have plasma weapons. It will take month until I can use them but hey.. I have plasma weapons!

p.p.s Nobody likes my parrots. They get killed very often. Even my own gals shoot them. They "miss" the enemy and hit my parrot,which was about 60° angle away from LoS to the enemy..

[Foxhound634]

A while back i think i remembered Dioxine talking about the chance of a retaliation mission when shooting down ships. I know that they will search the region where the ship was shot down, but i think you said that there is always a small chance of them finding it regardless of location. Is this true, because that would mean that they could still find me, even though i shot down their ship on the other side of the globe...and that just seems like cheating :/

[legionof1]

Yeah game is slightly cheaty when comes to detection of bases. Each crackdown mission has chance to find a base if it survived disregarding regions. At least it worked that way in original xcom and I don't think it was altered in open.

[Boltgun]

Location does matter however, my base in China was attacked a few times already while 3-4 North American crackdown failed to find my Caribbean base. Maybe the Caribbean count as South America for the game despite it's proximity and is causing these missions to fail.

Other isles in Oceania might have similar results. Perhaps Sardinia too.

[legionof1]

Had not thought of island behavior given that most island are pretty meh for coverage. 

[Arthanor]

I always have a base in Crete now. The search patterns for UFOs on retaliation missions are predetermined and they are designed to look at the mainland of the regions, nut can miss edges and islands. Crete gives you great coverage of Europe, north Africa and some of Asia, while being tough to spot. Makes it a great starting spot!

[greattuna]

And here am I, who tried to build production base in the Pacific, because who would've search there. First thing I've encountered was mercenary hideout, second - two successful retaliations. There was also a base in eastern Asia (found and destroyed, lack funds to rebuild), and in centre of southern America (found and destroyed twice, rebuilt and ready now). Main base in Crimea _{(don't look at me like that, please)} wasn't found yet despite 2-3 retaliation attempts.

[legionof1]

Yeah the game has some odd corner cases when it comes to pathing. They at least minimize the flyover detection chance but do diddly about the crackdown end of mission roll.

[Dioxine]

There are only 2 possibilities of a Crackdown (retal) mission ending:
1. All ships make their flyovers
2. Attack ship is launched and defeated (with the next ver. it will immediately end the retaliation if you shoot that ship down, not only if you fight the hideout def.).
Also shooting Crackdown ships down will not generate extra retals; and any automatic retals will not always appear.

Some stuff from the next ver. - if you're into infiltration but not into dress-up games (Gfx mostly by Bloax):