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

[zombieguy223]

Is there a different way you're meant to get the

Spoiler:

Syn Soldiers

these days? Because I remember getting them every odd space mission last time I played but now I've gone on about a dozen and none have shown up. Have I just been really unlucky?

To my understanding, there's 4 ways you can get one.

• 33% chance from using a Golden Apple
• 0.16% chance from extracting a junk pile
• 40% chance of one appearing on a space freighter raid (will be held by the only guild team leader)
• 100% chance of appearing in the Lost Spaceship orbital mission, which itself is one of 5 possible orbital missions that can spawn after researching !Zero-G Missions!

[quantumripple]

Yea I just got one after raiding a space freighter
I think I must've just gotten unlucky with the space mission spawns

[Amoebka]

The in-game crackdown article says base detection range is 100 miles. Most UFOs don't have sight range defined, which defaults to 268 miles. Which one is it meant to be (because currently it is 268)?

[RSSwizard]

Just defeated my first Ninja HQ, yes I cheated, I basically skipped the last two phases. Overall didn't think it was fun, just obnoxiously difficult.

I think if I fought it again id use 2 Tanks 60mm Autocannon (HVAP) because the hell grenade packs came in handy. What I used was one tank and a Bombard with Hell Shells and used it to blow away the autocannon turrets and many of the ninjas past the main defense (also weakened the tank traps so they could be blown a path through by the tank).

Overall I just felt there was a hell of alot of cheese with the medics and assassins, like come on is there yet Another one huh. Those things should've all been downstairs.

Im supremely disappointed that the barricade structure walls couldn't be blown through to make holes. That's a key feature of my tactics. I make doors.

I had 5 Gals in power armour, maybe 2 in Revenant. And 1 gal in a Grav Harness armed with a super shotgun (who scored many of the kills). Most of them had precision weapons like Precision Laser and Custom Sniping Gun. I should have brought more plasma pistols to deal with shields though and wasn't expecting that. The EMP grenades I brought didn't do anything to the mini gun turrets though, could be I didn't get them close enough or something.

[Vakrug]

Just defeated my first Ninja HQ, yes I cheated, I basically skipped the last two phases.

What does that means? Ctrl+D and Ctrl+K?

[RSSwizard]

Android version of openxcom doesn't have a keyboard to work with.
I haven't had a PC since 2019.

[termidor]

Just one random suggestion that I think makes a ton of sense, but what if glamour recruitment was path dependant? So rather than gals peasant revolution gets Grrl guides for example or male touch gets heroes (with the glamour cost adjusted for unit value).

[spazeroid]

Hi, I just recently beat my very long running x-piratez playthrough. In my humble estimation X-Piratez is the greatest game ever made. I saw X-Com when I was very young and played it basically since then. Playing X-piratez after having mastered the base game was like a revelation to me. Here's my full feedback spoilered so I don't ruin anything for anybody.

Spoiler:

So many possibilities of things you could do in the standard X-Com are so expertly realized. I never considered melee combat outside of the occasional stun prod play. The emphasis on live captures transformed the way I normally play. Once you can easily capture a group of enemies the metagame shifts to the most efficient uses for them, and how to efficiently process them and then you have to start to weigh options on what's best for your long game. The level of complexity and the need to constantly reinvent tactics is what makes the game a masterpiece to me.

I was on an older version (L 10.7) because when the sky ninjas update came out I didn't want to start over. I was in the final massive resource crunch to make the conqueror. Being able to buy Hellerium at that point was a god send, but at the same time raising that much money and making an industrial base that could make fuel pods was a worthy challenge. That had been my third playthrough, on difficulty 3. I quit the first two (difficulties 1 and 2) because they were too easy but in 3 I hit my stride. Finally beating the mars mission is probably my finest accomplishment.

Freshness and how quickly it decreases was also an interesting twist. It's nice to have OP flying armor, but man do you have to start going fast when you use it. Amusingly I didn't realize that there was a way to manage it with the cigars until I was prepping for Cydonia. I get why it exists but it made me afraid to use certain armors, and given just how useless an exhausted gal is made long missions truly daunting. Maybe a mechanic where it regens on kill, for either the squad or the gal?

I only did the green codex because honestly that was the type of gameplay that most appealed to me. Upgrading my slaves and having good tools to heal my gals with was good enough for me. I'm sure the other codex's have more openly good stuff though. I've never held with psionics or Voodoo so they didn't have as much to offer. Similarly I stuck to mostly using Gals, which I'm sure is the easier option opposed to messing with peasants/slaves.

My feedback is mostly limited, and probably quite outdated. A bit more insight into how the weirdgals and repentia worked, and what combat roles they were supposed to fill would of been helpful. I'm sure I was supposed to experiment but I didn't want to make a bunch of useless to me gals out of my elite soldiers. Also since VooDoo used freshness, it was offlimits with the hard cap going. Similarly while the Chort is a fantastic concept, they just didn't seem as good as the androids. Androids are friggin amazing though. With their crazy health Regen maybe they were supposed to be melee/tank? Finally getting to x-plasma weapons was cool, but they were in this spot that made  them difficulty to use in my gun heavy style. I didn't want to use them in ships for fear of burning up goodies, and they were slow enough and inaccurate enough they were hard to use in field fights. Honestly I got the most use out of them as bunker busters, or to kill sectopods, which while handy is situational enough that I didn't need them that often. I found myself longing for something in-between the medium and heavy plasma, which might of been covered by the UAC guns?

I picked up via the grapevine the game is playing much differently and I really want to play it. But I gotta do other things for a while. So tragically I'll have to find out later. I'm sure it's even better.

Anyway, I hope this doesn't come off as overly negative. Thank you for making a game that I sunk thousands of hours into, and is the greatest game ever made.

[Blind Cedrick]

Idea for making early game easier: arm the airbus. Opening one of the doors mid flight to point a gun outside isn't the craziest thing the gals would do.

Also, the base range of airbus is too low and the research tree buries everything. Expanded batteries are an off the shelf item. Let me buy after visit town.

Expanded idea: New research topic opened by visit town. Visit body shop. This can give first access to the batteries and give a workshop project to add a gun mount to the airbus. I would have this as an additional slot on top of opening the side door so the modded airbus would have 2x weapon slots. Give the angry bird an extra weapon slot or two while we are at it. the armored patrol should be more afraid of you than you are of it.

[Ultimoos]

Arming Airbus would make every single necroplane type interceptor completely useless. Increasing it's range makes other forms of transportation even less useful. Both ideas would be a step back. It's already very hard to use necroplanes because we already have better and more accessible options.
And we already have an armed Airbus equivalent, It's called Airvan.
Little Bird is already the best early craft. There is no need to make it even more attractive, when it is often recommended to rush from the start.

If anything I would suggest to increase Gunwagon speed to 220, or reduce number of pilots it needs, because Angry bird is superior in every way. It's much faster, needs 2 pilots, can mount dive bombs and carries 8 people.

[Blind Cedrick]

Boosting the gunwagon a bit would be useful. You can also up arm it. I disagree on the airbus making the necro fighters automatically obsolete. That depends on weapon slots. I'm thinking of the airbus having HAND only. Everything else has better. Also, you can reduce the armed airbus speed for balance.

[Splorks]

Little Bird is already the best early craft. There is no need to make it even more attractive, when it is often recommended to rush from the start.

Is it? I've never found much use for any of the helicopters. Like, what is the actual usage scenario for Little Bird? Shooting up nearby ground targets in that short time window before I can buy the Piranha?*

EDIT: To clarify, this is a genuine question, I am not trying to be sarcastic. I would legitimately like to know what I'm supposed to do with any of the "birds", because as it is, they seem very superfluous to me.

*: EDIT 2: Wait, I just remembered, I actually did use it precisely for this in my latest run. It's been several months and my memory is kinda shit these days.

[Tamren]

The early ground vehicles and research-based necroplanes are in an awkward spot.

Ground vehicles are basically useless because the little bird exists, at the same time if the little bird and angry bird didn't exists having to use ground vehicles to start from scratch would really suck. You have literally nothing to arm them with other than your starting assault cannons because it will be months before you can make more cannons or get them from fort defences, and months further still before you will even SEE a grenade launcher or RPG in enemy hands, let alone be able to buy them on the open market. So your best hope is to load up the cannons and pray that you can loot a light machinegun or gecko from hoverpods so that you can start killing bandit cars and then get better guns for war trucks and so on. Even if you ignore the little bird it's so much easier to just buy an angry bird since you can research it very early.

Necroplanes have a similar problem in that the little bird exists and is adequate for every enemy you will actually find in the early part of the game, not to mention that the tech that enables you to make necroplanes also gives you the ability to buy new little birds, and the next tier up of enemy aircraft are all aircars that require aircar speeds in order to catch. So they're basically redundant despite being research and material intensive because they jump from superfluous to obsolete. You can get to them early if you focus your research there, but new players have no idea what the prerequisites are and I only unlocked them after aircars because better interceptors than the little bird were such a low priority.

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One thing that might change that calculus would be the addition of new hangar types. IIRC there was talk of having at least two sizes of hangar, since single ground vehicles like humvees are tiny compare to aircraft that would let you deploy more of them out of the same base and keep ground vehicles into the late game for special missions. Necroplanes should be able to fit into a smaller hangar because you are only performing maintenance there (they are not VTOLs and need a runway to take off).

Another thing would be more mission types with restricted equipment that makes sense in context. Some missions require ground vehicles or undetectable vehicles like the big bird for a "stealth" approach. Ground race missions require ground vehicles and so on. There should be more of these in the early game when your air capacity is much weaker, and later on they can taper off and be replaced by new stuff (which is how most mission types already work).

[magitsu]

Yeah they are useless unless you can predict where you might use some of their big crew amount, with the unit being able to get there in time.

I tried to make Expedition and Convoy work in my current campaign but they were laughable. I even splurged on 4x geckos, but they didn't get any use.
Bus->Little->Angry->"Snake"->Jetbike (costs a lot to buy, but range + cheap to clear cannon fodder with cannon instead of missiles) makes sense

Blowfish and Necroplanes are instantly obsolete.

[Tamren]

I could see a midgame niche for necroplanes if smaller hangars were implemented. Only aircars and smaller UFOs require an aircar to intercept, there are still plenty of other targets and the higher quality aircars like the pirahna tend to be massive hangar queens if they get shot up and might need two whole days to repair, often more. Hence if I could keep a necroplane around in a 1x1 hangar I definitely would. Same with ground vehicles for the odd mission.