Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N10 24-Nov-2024 Aurora's Dawn

[Ethereal_Medic]

Rodger that, will try next time!

[clownagent]

Some missions like "scientific experiments", "warehouse wars" or "church" use sometimes the village or city terrain, which is in principle very nice for variety.

However, then the few defenders are distributed over the whole map and not in the building they ar supposed to be, which is a bit annoying.
If this happens you have some relatively weak enemies thinly distributed over a large map, forcing the player to comb the whole area. Such missions are very tedious, take a lot of turns, where not much is happening, and are not very rewarding (from a fun-perspective).

I suggest that for these missions most of the defenders should be located near or in the building they are supposed to protect.

[Solarius Scorch]

I suggest that for these missions most of the defenders should be located near or in the building they are supposed to protect.

Easy to say, but practically impossible to achieve, since these missions use the same maps as other missions (only with added "UFO" which is the special building). Meaning that if they have higher spawn nodes than the "UFO", these nodes are populated first.

There are three possible solutions:
1. Modify all maps to decrease their spawn values. It would affect all missions though.
2. Remove all terrains with high spawn values from these missions. Evidently not good option.
3. Add new code to better control what spawns where. Probably the only valid idea, but obviously the hardest.

But in my opinion it's not really that much of a problem. A crew stuck in the woods will stay in their compound most of the time, but a crew stationed in a city would probably have better things to do in their free time than rot in the barracks. At least some of them would rather rent a room nearby or simply bum around the mall, etc.

[Ragshak]

I would be nice to see some voodoo powers early in the game. Maybe some rescue misson that gives fixed in stats unit with in-build magic stuff. Before I dig into Voodoo School Dioxine is realising new version and try to start from the beginning.

As for the mod. There are no words to describe how awesome it is.
Wonder if there is a way to implement classes and class related skills.
For example, one-mont of training at Matrial Arts facillity /new option that doesn't give stat increase/ would transform Gal into "Ninja"class.
Skill would be accessed via items and would be restricted to class-oriented Gals. Quick example of skills(Items) for Ninja: 2 slot item that gives +1 Camuflage and -5 HP; special weapons like returning ninja star.
Training at Workshop would give "Engineer" class; at Medby "Medic" class etc.

With bounty hunt system, codexes and current variety of mission it gives endless possibilities how to unlock classes and their skills.

[ohartenstein23]

Why would you need classes when you can just do that with your own sets of weapons and armors?  Ninja you just give camo armor, melee weapons, and throwing knives.  Medic just gets nurse armor or biggest medkit item you have.  Why do you need to be constrained by what Dioxine decides your classes are?

[khade]

Besides, you can't have a pirate ninja.  It could destroy the universe!!!!

[Ragshak]

Because there is no much difference, besides names, between Gals.

[Ethereal_Medic]

This new feature of "-50% aim for no LoS" makes fights in smoke clouds alot more tricky.
Only the %-hit-indicator isn't playing along right now. Gals with 121% chance to hit something outside of LoS make bad shoots like rookies.
Only a small thing that seems 'incorrect' to read.

[ohartenstein23]

This new feature of "-50% aim for no LoS" makes fights in smoke clouds alot more tricky.
Only the %-hit-indicator isn't playing along right now. Gals with 121% chance to hit something outside of LoS make bad shoots like rookies.
Only a small thing that seems 'incorrect' to read.

The main OXCE+ release doesn't have code to include this penalty on the cursor, but some code is in testing that does show it. That 121% is probably 60%.

[Ethereal_Medic]

I'll keep that in mind and aim for 200%+ now for noLoS-shots in the dark. :3

[ohartenstein23]

I'll keep that in mind and aim for 200%+ now for noLoS-shots in the dark. :3

At least there's a reason to use the sniper rifles now.

[RSSwizard]

You're not bringing melee weapons into space? Also the life pods LN2 gun prevents the boom on death...

I had the unfortunate chance to run into a zombies space mission and the way I handled this was:

I had a Syn go after the Strix with a Shiv, don't think any of the Strix exploded, but they still died. However even if the strix exploded I don't think the Syn is vulnerable to the damage type.

I really don't give a rats' behind about using melee in space, now that there's a laser shotgun which is more accessible I might like to use that. But the inability to actually run up on guys in space makes melee difficult. Ill have someone with a force blade just in case there's zombies.

So I decided to take the 5 Shivs that ive got stowed away from the Dr. X mission and kept those just in case (because its so quick and in space there's alot of close quarters with guild spacemen).

Code: [Select]

Speaking of which, is the Dr. X campaign completed now?
The Challenge of Dr. X
Why again do enemies not reaction fire to you conducting melee on them?
Also ive had enemies reaction-fire With melee on me (particularly reapers), but its really rare and I wonder what the rules are for that?

There are three possible solutions:
1. Modify all maps to decrease their spawn values. It would affect all missions though.
2. Remove all terrains with high spawn values from these missions. Evidently not good option.
3. Add new code to better control what spawns where. Probably the only valid idea, but obviously the hardest.

Change all Spawn Points for the UFOs to be priority 10 or something high like 7-10. Im assuming that the generic map spawn points are generally 1-3 priority. So if you want to make sure most of them are in the UFO/Building then set them really high. This wouldn't actually be a hard task since the UFO/Buildings are much more limited in number I think than the generic maps.

There will still be spawns outside the UFO but it'll be like 1-2 per map, and this is what you use the Aye-Phone for (trust me I put off the Organ Grinder missions for this purpose alone, not just until I have protective gear, but also because I need to make sure everyone has Aye Phones).

For example the escape tower, I don't know the weights, but most of the missions I end up with 1 enemy outside the ship (usually the Mage or Noblewoman) which is acceptable. One mission I had like 3 of them outside the ship, most of the lowlifes were in it while the Mage/Noblewoman and Commandos were outside.

Then again ive had an Escape Tower mission that didn't even have the Escape Tower map block spawn in it (this is okay I suppose, it could be explained that the escape tower is actually down the street and you managed to catch them all outside).

Another explanation for enemies being outside the main building is maybe they were doing an hourly scout patrol, or maybe they were actually returning from running an errand (particularly that odd Savvy girl who always seems to be outside holding the mission open). For the Watchtower and Warehouse missions this makes the most sense.

[Solarius Scorch]

Why again do enemies not reaction fire to you conducting melee on them?
Also ive had enemies reaction-fire With melee on me (particularly reapers), but its really rare and I wonder what the rules are for that?

As far as I know, melee reaction can only happen if the target is directly to the front. The reacting unit does not turn sideways to attack.

Change all Spawn Points for the UFOs to be priority 10 or something high like 7-10. Im assuming that the generic map spawn points are generally 1-3 priority.

I'm afraid this assumption has zero relation to reality. Why did you even assume this just like that? 10s are very common on vanilla maps, for example inside the barns.
Hmmm, maybe decreasing priority for them would make sense...

[RSSwizard]

I'm afraid this assumption has zero relation to reality. Why did you even assume this just like that? 10s are very common on vanilla maps, for example inside the barns.
Hmmm, maybe decreasing priority for them would make sense...

Didn't know that. I was working off of assumptions from TFTD maps and from what I remember seeing of their .rmps they only rarely had spawnpoint weights above 1 for the generic terrain maps, and even the spawnpoints in the ufos were usually only weighted like 2-6.

I did not work much with anything having to do with UFO/xc1 so I didn't know about the heightened values. However since we're talking about editing the vanilla maps in this regard all you'd have to do is provide modified .rmp to go in the ROUTES directory in the mod and these would override the vanilla ones (since the .rmp is only a suppliment to the vanilla maps, not the meat and bones of them, and they are modified versions, I don't think this would be an issue).

Going through all those vanilla map chunks and cycling the existing rmp spawn points to a much lower weight would be easy-peasy. I think that would probably only take a few hours since you're not actually modifying the structure (adding, switching paths) for any of the nodes.

Even Dioxine wouldn't have to do this work, someone else could do it since all it takes is opening up the vanilla maps in the map editor and making those alterations and zipping up the RMPs, you dont need a full blooded map editor setup to do this.

(they dont all have to be set to 1, some more tactically advantageous spots could get 3's or even 5's for that one ideal defensible position)

[Solarius Scorch]

Didn't know that. I was working off of assumptions from TFTD maps and from what I remember seeing of their .rmps they only rarely had spawnpoint weights above 1 for the generic terrain maps, and even the spawnpoints in the ufos were usually only weighted like 2-6.

Yes, TFTD is very different in this regard. In fact, spawns are way too sparse, meaning that the problem rarely exists.

I did not work much with anything having to do with UFO/xc1 so I didn't know about the heightened values. However since we're talking about editing the vanilla maps in this regard all you'd have to do is provide modified .rmp to go in the ROUTES directory in the mod and these would override the vanilla ones (since the .rmp is only a suppliment to the vanilla maps, not the meat and bones of them, and they are modified versions, I don't think this would be an issue).

Going through all those vanilla map chunks and cycling the existing rmp spawn points to a much lower weight would be easy-peasy. I think that would probably only take a few hours since you're not actually modifying the structure (adding, switching paths) for any of the nodes.

Yes, .rmp modification is easy. I would be more worried how it impacts the whole gameplay in non-obvious ways.