Author Topic: Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N7 16-Dec-2023 Flying Tiger, Hidden Tentacle  (Read 3611529 times)

Offline superschokokeks

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2220 on: April 13, 2016, 02:39:07 pm »
Thx for advices. It seems I have to risk more. like never attack crackdowns.

I raided a military supply ship and found Defender Armor and I can't research it :/
Well I have no research option anymore.. I really should attack bigger crafts for moar loot(and I should watch more path of ufos and raid them when they land)

(Base Defending against Mercenaries isn't fun..)

At least the game make more fun again.

Edit: How to capture star gods or at least mercs. Stun grenades and cattleprods don't work well on them and mercs are tough isn't fun to kill them.. and then.. capture them x_X?

edit: Do I need pillow book-item for diplomacy? I start to think I'm missing research, that I could research. Well I already researched pillow book and any prerequisite for diplomacy. It seems I can't research it. I loaded up my savegame if anyone want to look at it
« Last Edit: April 13, 2016, 09:40:49 pm by superschokokeks »

Offline Cristao

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2221 on: April 13, 2016, 10:24:35 pm »
^I think you should reduce the difficulty level that you are playing at...

Offline superschokokeks

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2222 on: April 13, 2016, 10:31:18 pm »
Don't take my "complaining" too serious. I'm having fun. And having fun too find weaknesses of the enemy.

I look up the tech tree and saw that more stun stuff is coming and reveal maybe a bug at my savegame..

I guess I'll stop asking things..

Offline legionof1

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2223 on: April 13, 2016, 11:34:43 pm »
Okay dug around in your save and yeah you are hung up on the tech bottle necks. Specifically Diplomacy and the subsequent broken prisoners. You are also missing a few country knowledge which are bottlenecks. Eurasian autonomy, pirate straits are the big ones that are missing. Capture guild hostesses to solve that bottleneck. I can't get the tech tree viewer to work right now so I am unsure whats the issue with diplomacy is.

Also your base design is weaker to ground attacks although it does maximize space. Foes spawn in hangers and the lift and having more connections gives you more places to defend. The ideal defensive setup looks something like this:

HHHHHH
HHHHHH
L
BB00000   H=hanger tiles L=lift B=barracks 0=other

This setup forces all attackers to come through the lift to attack you. in addition the majority of your units will spawn in barracks so having them close to the lift choke point cuts down on turns spent moving to defend.

Offline ivandogovich

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2224 on: April 13, 2016, 11:59:01 pm »
Also your base design is weaker to ground attacks although it does maximize space. Foes spawn in hangers and the lift and having more connections gives you more places to defend. The ideal defensive setup looks something like this:
<snip>

And yeah, there is a feature to re-arrange your base if you would like to. ;)
Spoiler:
Ctrl-click on a facility and it puts it into "move" mode.  Left-Click to place it. :)

Offline Arthanor

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2225 on: April 14, 2016, 12:07:06 am »
Although this is the generally accepted design, I personally don't like it for Piratez. Many Piratez factions present odd challenges that are more easily overcome by playing differently for me, especially in base defences.

Especially early in the game, many factions (academy, spartans, regular guild) will attack your base with lots of weak units (almost all spartans, academicians, GOs, guild reps and Hostesses) that sport strong (plasma + blaster) weapons and, for the academy, some psi. It is much easier to have quick access to them and take the offensive. You can slaughter a whole bunch with a few rockets T1 in the hangars, crippling their morale and, with some fire, effectively paralysing them in there to be picked on. This significantly reduces the risk of something going wrong by reducing the number of enemy units.

Other factions (or even the guild if you get a guildmaster + several power armors) can present you with tough enough units that they can push through the bottleneck without you being able to shoot them effectively or approach them for melee since they are all together coming out of your one entry point.

A lift also provides the enemy with nice cover from the doors. Breaching the lift is always the worst part of my base defences. As such, I make sure that the enemy walk through something clear without doors to protect them.

My usual setup is something like:

55L555
HHHHHH
HHHHHH
142434
OOOOOO
OOOOOO


Where numbers represent the priority of building either vaults or barracks at that location, L is the lift, and O are other valuable facilities. The 5s on the top row are the last buildings I build, usually all at once (to prevent a few gals from being isolated and overpowered there, although hiding upstairs and ambushing there can work). This uses the whole space, which is good.

Early on, it makes the lift totally irrelevant since the enemies will walk into the open in hangars where they are much easier to pick off. Later on, once you build up the top row, you can tackle the lift from two sides, while your gals on the other side hit the hangars so the lift doesn't get reinforced. On the bottom, you have plenty of little rooms to hide in and direct, open lines of fire into the hangar from the corridors. Snipers, HMG and rocket gals can hide in the back behind smoke.

If you face enemies that need to be taken out in melee, they will be spread out coming out of the hangars in the #1-4 facilities, which reduces the likelihood that they can cover each others with reaction fire, instead of making one unapproachable clump in the one bottleneck.

Once you have strong and plentiful enough ranged weapons that you don't have to fear the clump, and psi-strong enough gals that you don't have to fear psi so you can take your time, a bottleneck might be great, but by then, you don't really have much to fear and might as well use all the tiles in your base.

Offline legionof1

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2226 on: April 14, 2016, 02:18:55 am »
okay i can see that being effective. I personally don't have an issue with lift breaching stage since by that point it usually an empty cube from explosives use. I also tend to come from above and below first rather then up the hallway at ground level.  different styles.

Offline Arthanor

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2227 on: April 14, 2016, 05:41:15 am »
I've got to admit I haven't been playing much recently, and have not experienced the new base defences with sewers, corridors and stuff. That might well change my game plan since it already dilutes the attackers/gives more ways to attack. I'll have to see!

Offline legionof1

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2228 on: April 14, 2016, 06:37:10 am »
The upper level "ductwork" is pretty favorable to the player because its mostly one tile wide hallways with 2 hatches between tiles. So few foes at a time and little opportunity for return fire because of the LOS nature of autoclose hatches. However limited options to flank within the ducts themselves. Heavy armor foes can a big problem since multiple attackers are hard to pull off, and few rear shots. Under armor is also hard to get because no overhead space for arcing weapons. arcing weapons effective range is about 6-7 tiles while crouched.

The cavern level is an interesting "huge problem to no problem situation". The terrain down there has a very high TU cost so even the fastest things move quite slowly. Parrots with 120 TU go about 6-8 tiles a turn. Many, many short multi branch 1 tile wide paths exist with real short LOS. I think about 6 tiles is the longest straight line outside of under the hangers which are giant empty caves. So nothing is going to go real fast down there and come up behind a defense line in time to matter. However finding anything that wanders off down there can take a very long time. power armor and one tile terror units are even worse then in ducts because you spread out a ton to find things in the sewer so massing sufficient firepower while keeping track of the target without losing gals or lots of parrots because the almost melee LOS is a challenge.

However few foes actually go down into the caverns because the pathing tu cost is so high. Anything actively trying to go some where distant will not path though sewer. Its the random wandering guys that go down there and dink around getting lost.

Offline Arthanor

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2229 on: April 14, 2016, 07:01:10 am »
Good to know! Will have to be careful with these new additions.. It does sound like the ducts will be cool and I'm curious about the sewers. I'm surprised flying units don't get a bonus for movement down there, but I guess it's not high enough to fly above the gunk..

Offline legionof1

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2230 on: April 14, 2016, 08:41:18 am »
its how all the terrain works, since hover capable units use the TU of the ground in the tile they are in. Empty/flat tiles are cheapest. For example its faster for a hover tank to float up and over a hill then up the side despite the up and over being more total tiles.

Offline superschokokeks

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2231 on: April 14, 2016, 09:07:47 am »
First of all: Thx for being so helpful :)

I read how to change ruleset and I changed Maxdistancething to 20 and fixt that hellerium destillthing.

Now I can't see crackdown ships anymore..

Offline legionof1

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2232 on: April 14, 2016, 09:22:35 am »
Are we talking not seeing any on the Geoscape? It's possible to not have any crackdown ships spawn since crackdowns are dynamically generated based on player activity. Or are we talking something missing in intercepts or the battlescape?

Offline superschokokeks

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2233 on: April 14, 2016, 09:30:38 am »
Sorry for being not clear.

Geoscape. Before fixing they were a lot crackdowns ship and got every few hours a new one.
Now: Nothing. Only normal Ufos. I got a base attack out of nowhere. No, sightings. Don't know if this normal but I think I could see every attackship before

Edit: Ok I saw a smuggler crackdown, which attacked my base, but I recently attack them.
So all of the old ones are gone?

Offline legionof1

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.98B - 31 Mar - I Can See My House From Here!
« Reply #2234 on: April 14, 2016, 09:49:07 am »
After an an attack on your base the crackdown ships for that mission stop appearing. Now multiple factions can have multiple crackdown mission running at one time. But it sounds like to me that the base attack hit and concluded the mission. The actual ships that do the base attack are very fast(6000) so depending on base position relative to the spawns it possible for one to hit in between detection sweeps which are every 30 mins of in game time i think.

Crackdown missions come in 2 stages:
Stage 1 lots of normal ships trying to find a base by searching the region where there factions ship was shot down.
Stage 2 a single attack ship goes for the base. If it is shot down by base defenses after awhile another may try. Sometimes it bugs and you get a never ending series of ships getting shot down by base defenses.