Hey thanks!
Okay, next question: how do I get girls out of their cells in the X-Prison mission?
Edit: Ohhhhh. *That's* what pickaxes are for. 
Yeah and to be honest the gal in the examination room has a Whip available on the ground right next to her, IIRC, So you dont even have to bring shivs with you considering the array of other weapons that will be provided/dropped (like dart pistols).
(cue in quote from Alien 3 - its not smart to give prisoners access to weapons now is it?)Its also very useful to pick up as much of those explosives down in the pit as you can - and use them on academy girls. You have all the time you need since nobody can get into the starting wing of the compound. Blowing up academy girls and shooting them dead, is also going to have a morale effect... and in my last playthrough of this mission I managed to make the rest of them surrender.
When could an armored Cyberdisc or anything consisting solely of armored plates be taken down by a puny blowpipe
Chem == Acid damage and im guessing those darts are actually big heaping hypodermics designed to break like a beaker tube. It even sounds like a glass tube being broken because of the sound effect used for acid attacks. I forget what the damage bonus is but if its anything to do with reactions then its taking into account critical hit bonus. Just because the acid isnt Celatid level quality doesnt mean it cant make Alien Xenomorph style metal pudding out of a cyberdisc's hull, and its sensitive electronics. Heck those things pop after 15-20 seconds even when you douse them with gasoline.
(there's an idea for you Diox - when getting access to celatid acid you should be able to make high damage versions of some acid munitions, the blowpipe being a good candidate among others, at a cost of celatid acid. There should probably be some way to utilize demonic essence for the same purpose since it takes a long time to get access to any weapons that require it for manufacture, if one even gets to that point since I think those are locked behind Codex gates)
Cyberdiscs are actually very fragile critters, little more than a modern UAV with the equivalent of some kevlar slapped on it, whether its their cyberdisc or one you've retrofitted they are some of the biggest examples of glass hammers in the game (big because yknow, they are 2x2 size). It might be made out of alien alloys, but those alien alloys are like as thin as aluminum foil. At least in X-Piratez the danger of these beasts is the plasma weapon on them and the reactive power source, I can blow them away with conventional weapons no problem.
Gave the O.G.R.E. shotgun a go. Does big boom for 28x12 so I let some zombies and dark-ones ate the buckshot.
From what ive seen anything that takes 28 damage to faze can probably be fazed with 20 damage. The Heavy Shotgun and the lowly Double Barrel can make short work of most zombies and dark ones. The slug shells for the Heavy are really underpowered since all that does is give it the power to affect an armored target, while dramatically lowering its killing power. Im not sure about other players but by the time I had enough chits to acquire the Ogre through bounty hunting I already had access either to Combat Shotguns or Boom Guns, making the Ogre superfluous and nothing more than a prize token sink - the Ogre shotgun definitely needs to be put on a lower tier of the prize rank in order to be relevant (kinda like the silenced pistol, and the precision pistol, which are basically useless).
There is also the Super Shotgun to consider, even though you probably only get one of them due to the parts... damn is it effective (and I heard its been balanced to be even more powerful).
(I also want to give a shout out to the Plasma Shotgun, a very cheap weapon to get ahold of from a technology standpoint, rather cheap to maintain from a manufacturing standpoint, and powerful as hell - the only enemy ive encountered who was designed from a balance standpoint to tank it is the mercinaries)Well it is not normal RNG but PRNG
What does that mean anyway? Progressive Random Number Generator?
I remember the doom engine didnt have an RNG it just had a large table of numbers that the designers pretty much rolled dice on and determined ahead of time, and it only incremented that every time it was referenced. They did it to further reduce CPU footprint at a time where even a few cycles could mess with performance on the earliest multiplayer matches.
- I may be paranoid, but I think the game intentionally goes for the throat just before tactical autosave will be conducted. Ive had a huge number of times where my hands/soldiers will be just fine doing their thing, then on the enemy turn just before it autosaves I will get ganked, grenaded, shot to pieces, or otherwise molested and then the game will save that on me.
Anyone else really enjoying the Assault Bike Armour?
What the hell is that anyway?
I haven't invested in it yet but it sounds like its actually going to transform your gal into a gal-on-a-motorcycle. Is it a 2x2 armor or still a 1x1 critter?
The tech tree is intentionally overwhelming, I'm afraid. : )
I know what dioxine was trying to do when the tech tree was adapted, but at that early stage of development its pretty hard to estimate with something so complex just how it would turn out.
In my opinion it has
too much filler in it, but its acceptable (and unchangeable at this point) considering that difficulty of estimating the outcome. At least you cant deny that it makes the Science game really interesting and compelling.
The decision to cut the number of Researchers down to like 1/5 as many as usual compared to vanilla is perfect. Because if you consider sci-fi shows the crack team of researchers in them is usually just a handful of very smart people just like you see in piratez (ie, take Stargate for example, colonel carter and mckay plus a handful of other researchers are responsible for backwards engineering most of the tech, most of the other researchers pretty much count as the equivalent of Technicians working on the fiddly bits but not lending any real insight to their progress). You pay more for them, you cant house as many of them, but it still produces the same outcome.
And really putting the chokehold on the amount of research you can do is a much needed game balance because in vanilla there was nothing but money stopping you from making a base with like 200 scientists and 4 labs. And in reality research takes time and you cant rush it by throwing more people at it.
(and it also makes that 1st base critical, as if your first base in any xcom game wasnt already a very important investment, in piratez if you lose it its like losing your queen and a knight at the same time in chess. I guess if you had a boatload of money you could build a research base and not be so harpooned if it was like year 3, but it would definitely sink a VIP's ransom to do it. But even in supermutant mode it would be worth reloading a save and eating 10 days of progress to try to avoid losing that base)If someone were ever to re-make Piratez or take any examples from it I would suggest that the number of research topics should probably be about 2/3rds as much as it currently has.
Especially cutting down on the low end techs while increasing the amount of time necessary for the other low end techs. There are alot of starter techs that can be consolidated and are a little bit more straightforward than they seem, but in exchange could cost 2 or 3 times as much research time to compensate. That way it takes alot longer to get into the Science game - and you're forced to deal with what you have and focus on the starting missions more rather than be constantly updating your arsenal during that period of time.
But based on what ive seen from playing piratez... I wouldnt reduce the tech tree any more than this.
In each of the mods ive done for xcom I have thrown in roadblocks to getting access to the Laser and Gauss weapons by either making the initial tech take longer, or in some cases giving you the Heavy weapon first (making the player work their way through miniaturization to get the more practical weapons). If I could expand that in the vanilla game the player would have to probably investigate manufacturing methods to be able to fabricate carbon nanotube superconductors to be able to produce the lasers (since even in 2018 now we dont have a way to mass produce carbon nanotubes for some reason, despite them having been discovered in the 90s).
I always felt that the Initial Techs in the vanilla game were abit premature and a pretty powerful drop, which was compensated by the need for fast response to the alien threat (you really gotta be on top of your game by March or April). I mean if some scientists could convene to develop high powered laser weapons within a couple months, then there wouldnt have been anything stopping military defense contractors from deploying them 5 years before that. The "Laser Weapons" topic certainly could cover all of the obstacles between making the weapons feasible, but with only 50 short research hours required that is quite a pitiful step and some kind of Prototype weapon should be forced before you can make any of the canonnical weapons.
(id also say that its more likely the Tank/Laser would be engineered first before any of the hand weapons, or the aircraft weapon, just because it would practically have the largest number of tolerances to expand and refine off of. And also because in gameplay terms the Laser Tank doesn't give the player any real added advantage compared to a Rocket Tank, and Tanks dont gain experience. For the player that big red 110 damage looks really awesome to get your hands on. Plus 1200 man hours to build it would give a real good reason to beef up manufacturing)mite be a wall of text but I had to consolidate replies, and its been awhile for me
