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Author Topic: Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N9.7.7 12-Sep-2024 Second Coming  (Read 4273997 times)

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9090 on: June 18, 2024, 09:53:55 pm »
I guess that game cannot show more that one mission notification at the same hour, even one-after-another.

Yeah, this part is true.

Offline cheeen

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9091 on: June 19, 2024, 06:44:59 am »
How are piratez balanced, in general? What's the idea around difficulty?

On one hand, if you savescum, you can get insanely op units that capture everyone - veteran catgirls(should've been called catgals really) in grav boots have 200 tu and insane reactions, i give each a stun baton and they stun entire map on second turn. If you encounter armour you just use medical slicer or a wand of pain. You just have to be careful to not go below 40 tu when someone not in melee range can see you, to not eat reaction shots. But you still have to savescum, it's pretty much mandatory, since there's no way in ufo interface to know whether you missed an enemy. A room might appear revealed, but there was actually a guy with a shotgun hiding in there. This isn't even a tu/skill issue, but a fundamental issue with the engine itself. And it takes A LOT of time to get your recruits to the point where they can do this, you could feasibly put new recruits through the art of trouncing/mma+gladiatorial training, but that's like a month of downtime. And recruits themselves are capped(except peasants). In the original ufo we all just bought a shitton of rookies, and had a gunline with good stat laser guys sitting inside smoke, while rookies walk around the map and scan everything with motion detectors, but you had easy access to lasguns, rookies, and you could bring a lot of bodies to a mission. I would lose 2-4 soldiers with bad stats per typical mission.

You could say "well just shoot everything like this is ufo", but the game seems to heavily incentivise live capture of pretty much everyone. Your infamy bonus is barely enough to pay for brainers, council payments are a joke, and then every new facility costs upwards of a mil, and stuff is just expensive or takes a long time to manufacture in general. AND you need a metric shitton of live captures for your research. AND you have random uninterceptable assaults against your bases, so you need at least 30 peasants at each base. AND the game advances at a rather rapid pace, you need larger transports on day 1, you need better armours or guns, you need motion scanners, smoke grenades, etc. Also the guns are pretty crappy, while one catgal can stun 4-5 bandits per turn and jump into cover, a good shooter with a good gun will still take an entire turn to kill one bandit. A bad shooter will just die to reaction fire. Maybe i could give everyone metal armours or heavy suits, but by the time i get this stuff enemies will be packing lasers and plasmas. And there's stuff like turrets, which can only be feasibly destroyed via pre-primed explosives, a lot of setup with an rpg, or a smartly moving top-tier gal with a hammer. Or mercenaries who are only vulnerable to poison damage. Or enemies like mongorns - a fucking APE, first time i saw them i just stunned a few and stood in the open, well they threw rocks over half a map and killed half my team. I mean what are their stats, when even my veterans can't pull off shit like that?! Also each mission is absolutely swarming with enemies(i'm on the middle difficulty). And just now in my savescum campaign i had a raider invasion into my main base, and the raiders had 6 blaster launchers. If it wasn't my main base, this would've been a base gone. Or, another example, i had an etherial ufo with sectopod in it. 3 Cagals with sabers and medical slicers made short work of the thing, but how the hell would i deal with it if i had just a bunch of noobs with default guns? This is in august or so mind you, but i was getting a rank up every month, maybe etherials and blaster raiders are tied to your captain's rank.

I wanted to play ironman like a normal xcom, started a few games and i'm either outmatched on tactical level, where i don't have enough soldiers and or tus to stun the enemies carefully and not lose gals, or i'm going bankrupt on geoscape. Are you just meant to sit around with your 3 brainers for months or what?

Offline Vakrug

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9092 on: June 19, 2024, 10:43:31 am »
There is no shame to savescum during your first walkthrough. (It is your first walkthrough, right?) Pretty much every mod out there is balanced around players that already knows most of ins and outs (up to the point of not providing crucial info in ufopeadia), and XPiratez is no exception, despite stated otherwise.

It is hard to tell why are you so much struggling. I am also playing on medium difficulty, but think that XPiratez is mostly easy. There are few difficulties during first month, secondary bases have to be decently protected, but apart from that your main enemy is your own greed. Most problems arises when you take mission you are not prepared for. (And for new players it is unavoidable.)

Few ideas about secondary base defense strategy.
  • Rookies are pretty much useless. You should train their TU and energy before assigning them to guard bases.
  • Dogs are cheap and potent even being rookies. They can't eat Academia Drones and Highwayman Scout Quads, but can eat pretty much everyone else during early stages of the game.
  • Bees are also useful. And almost indestructible. And they eat enemies on autopilot.
  • Yes, sooner or later heavy hitters will arrive at your bases. By that time you should have few heavy lasers to penetrate their armor. EMI grenades stolen from ninjas are great. Slaves helps hugely. They take blasts for your soldiers and reveal enemies.

Offline Psyentific

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9093 on: June 19, 2024, 06:54:55 pm »
Ironman is very much not the intended gameplay experience for the entire xcom genre. You will want multiple saves for when you realize you fucked up 2 turns ago or 2 months ago. You will want multiple saves for when Random Bullshit gibs one of your best dudes. You will want multiple saves for when you're on Turn 2 and realize the mission is a deathtrap with your current units and loadout. Ironman is just as much a meme difficulty as Jack Sparrow. Just, try not to F5/F9 too much.

Regarding the earlygame difficulty, there's a number of things going on. Your baseline Uber Gal is fast and tough and strong, but your starting equipment is junk and the airbus can be replaced by almost anything else. You need money, lots and lots of money, in order to fill your brainer slots and build all the facilitys you need and recruit more Gals. The research is a matter of opportunity cost more than anything else; you want all the everythings but need to prioritize what you immediately need the most.

Do all the missions you can, limited by roster depth and transport capacity. Capture enemies alive when practical, but don't go out of your way to do so unless you need a specific captive. You do need the money but it's more important to not spend 20 days in Medbay than to capture a G.O. alive instead of dead. Conserve TUs for reaction fire once you've started the mop-up phase; relying on reactions beforehand can expose the shooter to enemy fire. Missions get you cash which lets you scale up faster, and they give you stat points and commendations. Be aware that doing Literally Every Mission Ever can throw some nasty surprises at you before you're ready (ex early pogrom with armored car), so exercise caution when entering the unknown.

Regarding enemy types, you usually want to have a diverse mix of both damage types and shooting profiles throughout your squad. Try to get away from that "xcom standard issue" mindset with your loadouts in favor of bringing a lot of cool and unique guns. Having a diverse spread of damage types allows you to be effective against whatever you might find, and having a diverse spread of weapon types (ex SMGs and Autoguns and Rifles and Shotguns) allows you to have a weapon ready for most engagement patterns.  Use grenades and other throwables (molotovs <3) to get more damage type coverage, which often helps with wildlife-type enemies. Use the QD inventory slot to pick sidearms which cover niches the main gun doesn't; for example pair a sniper rifle with a super sawed-off, and a heavy melee with small SMG or handgun.
« Last Edit: June 19, 2024, 07:16:21 pm by Psyentific »

Offline Mathel

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9094 on: June 21, 2024, 04:18:29 pm »
So, are the reinforcements in BlackSun headquarters infinite, or is it possible to eventually slaugher everybody?

Edit: The last reinforcements announcement was around turn 30.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2024, 01:18:12 am by Mathel »

Offline Dioxine

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9095 on: June 23, 2024, 02:17:54 pm »
They are not infinite, I don't do that kind of thing :)

Also, as i understand it, the game generates a finite amount of missions, so every new crap mission type you research detracts from the amount of actually good missions you'll get. So not only did you waste research to unlock a crap mission, you'll also detract from good ones.

Not true. You've either been taken for a ride by someone or you're trolling. Your whole post is full of red flags.

Also I'm not adding missions I don't enjoy playing. You can call them trash or not, I don't care.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2024, 02:26:14 pm by Dioxine »

Offline cheeen

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9096 on: June 24, 2024, 07:45:56 am »

Nah, i just got bamboozled by eyeballing how many missions i get.

Hey, would you humour me with the grand plan on pirates? I've heard some time ago that you'll add 6 or 8 endings, there's also stuff like hellerians, white dragon, ranks that imply we'll be fighting shadowmasters...
Is that the plan? You have those ideas planned out and you'll eventually implement them?

Offline ontherun

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9097 on: June 26, 2024, 01:13:30 pm »
From the openxcom xpiratez io mod page, in the install insctructions tell us to have also the tftd files to play, see screenshot:

So if we don't have these, might missing some game content?

Anyway, as for new sounds/replacement for the rcf weapons based ammo, how about to use the fal at 10:47 in the unexcom mod?

Offline Dioxine

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9098 on: June 26, 2024, 01:59:20 pm »
Wrong place to ask, the guy who posts the mod on io has nothing to do with me and I have no idea what he did.

Offline Dioxine

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9099 on: June 27, 2024, 06:10:22 pm »
AFAIK, it mostly can. With one exception: if you use multiple triggers for the same deployment with 'objective: 3', you can only have one such mission per month per region specified (or the default list of eligible regions, if nothing is specified). And most missions nowadays seem to be the 'fake' terror missions with 'objective: 3'.

Not too bad if you have plenty of regions in the list. Kinda bad if the list has two regions and there are 8+ triggers. Means pure script-and-probability-based mission counting will be off, too.


Also, base defences called from scripts with 'targetBaseOdds' can also only target a base no more than once per month.

As it's often the case, you're full of c**p. None of these statements is actually true.

Offline Juku121

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9100 on: June 27, 2024, 06:50:58 pm »
I can back up my statement, both in code (for bases) and experimentally.

Can you?
« Last Edit: June 27, 2024, 07:24:43 pm by Juku121 »

Offline Dioxine

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9101 on: June 27, 2024, 07:45:14 pm »
I just asked the game to launch 6 different missions on the same region, all using the new (spawnzone 3) method. All spawned. Stop digging a deeper hole for yourself.

Offline Juku121

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9102 on: June 27, 2024, 07:51:10 pm »
All you say are words, while I have shown evidence, both in the codebase and in mission scripts. Edit: Never mind that this is not something I came up with, read the linked thread. /edit

Post your code mission script. Edit: Preferably for base X-Com or TFTD, so there are no misunderstandings about underlying assumptions. /edit.

Edit2: I reread and corrected my original post a bit. What I meant was a mission with 'objective: 3', not deployment - as deployments don't have the 'objective' attribute. This should have been clear from the linked thread, though.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2024, 11:26:16 am by Juku121 »

Offline Mathel

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9103 on: June 29, 2024, 11:34:00 pm »
And so it is, that I have finished the game, getting the Space Pirate ending.

I smelled another ending, one that depended on one Knight of Cydonia, but the Conquerer was completed first.

SpoilerAbout final mission, Conquerer Cydonia:
The Freshness Recovery was nice. It allowed most of my people to stay at full Freshness in the first 4 layers. It was not enough to keep Bugeyes from losing Freshness unless they were low on Morale.

The surface was easy. The mercs stood no chance against my superior weapons and Bugeyes.

The main hangar was very difficult. Having your main force pincered between turrets and continuous Merc reinforcements that appear and act immediately is a recipe for disaster. It was also pretty difficult to find the exit elevator, and I could not find the last enemy, so I could not bring my stash with me.

Residential level was reasonably dfficult, but doable. Plenty of Mutons to mind control against the Star Gods and Reticulans. Again, I could not find the last enemy, though I was already missing my stash. It just meant I could did not take all the dropped medikits.

Dark Ones Dungeon was difficult, but mostly because of the Fallen One, who kept shooting fire through walls and spawning Hell Barons and Spider Demons.

Lastly, the Cavern of the Governor. It was difficult, but thanks to the small opening between the subway and the cavern itself, I could drop a Chort with a Giant Öx into the cavern and have her make her way to the structure. Everybody else guarded the entry.
Thanks to ridiculous amount of health, no fatal wounds and 40HP/turn regeneration, the Chort was pretty much impossible to kill. Sure, they dropped her unconscious plenty of times, but they could not kill her. And the Giant Öx could be used to cut through those unopenable doors and eventually the brain.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2024, 11:36:12 pm by Mathel »

Offline Dioxine

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Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N8 28-Apr-2024 Labyrinthus Noctis
« Reply #9104 on: June 30, 2024, 01:46:57 pm »
All you say are words, while I have shown evidence

You misunderstand. I don't care about winning a debate with you. I checked if the problem you mentioned is real in practice (with a kind of script that reuses the same regions the most) - turns out it isn't, at least as far as XPZ is concerned - end of story for me.
« Last Edit: June 30, 2024, 01:50:38 pm by Dioxine »