Suggestions on how to improve the mod

[Dioxine]

Good idea with that. Damage bonus is tied to ammo, so either it uses flintlock balls or it has custom ammo; I can't circumvent that. I'd lean towards custom ammo, so it's a single shot only but more powerful weapon. Of course an 'improved' musket isn't a bad idea either, but you have the hunting rifle for that.

[ivandogovich]

Good idea with that. Damage bonus is tied to ammo, so either it uses flintlock balls or it has custom ammo; I can't circumvent that. I'd lean towards custom ammo, so it's a single shot only but more powerful weapon. Of course an 'improved' musket isn't a bad idea either, but you have the hunting rifle for that.

Cool!  The Minie Ball is the perfect round for the "Sharpes Rifled Musket"... say, range 30,  30 damage with .1 Accuracy damage bonus.

[khade]

Cool, unfortunately I am absolute crap at coding or art stuffs, so I can't really help design the look or whatever might be useful, but I'm happy to hear it is a good idea.

Another possible idea: how hard do you think it would be to allow more than one craft to land at a location? especially for when you only have small ships and would really benefit from a lot of warm bodies in the next mission?  I assume there are multiple possible landing locations in the map, and it could be fun to have two ships in different corners or something like that.  How much would this idea change the game strategies?

[Dioxine]

Cool, unfortunately I am absolute crap at coding or art stuffs, so I can't really help design the look or whatever might be useful, but I'm happy to hear it is a good idea.

d/w I have some art already, not great but would do.

Another possible idea: how hard do you think it would be to allow more than one craft to land at a location?

Impossible in OXCom. Any ways, I'll be cutting the size of ships anyway (with the wealth of arming options, and the obvious fact that large deployments favor the player, 40 pirates in a mission is way over the top); any crafts of 15+ size will be shrunk.

[Arthanor]

Well 40 pirates is indeed a lot, but shrinking everything sounds disappointing.. I love big teams with gals that have multiple different roles.

The smaller the team, the more restricted you are in your arming options: you only pick the best all-rounder for a given role since you don't have the numbers to afford bringing the sometimes awesome bit generally not great weapons.

It also goes against my vision of the piratez: you are low tech but like most people with nothing to lose, lives are cheap. If you are outnumbered and out-teched, then you should lose.

What I could see, however, is a shift from ships that can do everything (the Bonny and thunderhorse are pretty decent interceptors and large transports) to a bigger divide between crafts. Either you have good interception (4 weapons) or good transport capacity, not both. I'd happily lose the transports' ability to intercept to make more space for interceptors, and even make larger transport slower or get worst mileage. Having to chose either blowing up with an interceptor and then landing with a transport or taking a quick smaller craft and get there in time for the landing. That would remove some of the landing farming, except for some entry level missions that could be left landing longer (and are easy enough with a small team any ways).

[ohartenstein23]

I tend to disagree on the limited number of gals forcing me to use best all-rounder weapons - I think it creates a difficult choice, yes, but meaningful in that it makes me pick the weapons I need for the specific mission.  For example, I tend to assault landed supply ships with only the eight gals I can fit on the Pachyderm, each with a well-defined niche roll.  Up to four sniper/artillery weapons to clear the field, a melee scout or two for quickly silencing the baby nukers, and some heavier armor plus SMGs + shotguns for the boarding.  I feel that rifles, one of my go-to all-rounder options for pogroms, have little place on that mission, especially when power armor may be in the mix. 

I also don't think that having expendable gals means not bringing the awesome weapons - on the contrary, they can be the perfect testing bed for that new melee weapon or gun, and if they survive, they get put on the less expendable team due to stat gains.  With a endless supply of swabbie uber-mutants, you have plenty of room for heroes toting the strangest and most effective weapons you can muster.  In my view, with a smaller team you can't afford not bringing the big guns.

[Zharkov]

Well, I think that depends on whether you are planning to reduce map size, too. A smaller force might make the battlescape more intense, but I fear that on larger maps it will become even more tedious to catch that last evasive enemy...

[Dioxine]

Reduce what map sizes? There are no maps in Piratez that cannot be completely overwhelmed with 18 gals, with the exception of Mansion, which disallows the biggest crafts anyway.
Meridian's LP shows that 18 is more than enough for almost everything, hence - there is little incentive to get bigger transport ships, unless you plan to use a lot of tanks. 40 is way over the top. My concern is that the very mechanics of XCom make such huge deployments not only very hard to manage, but also very overpowering - with each extra soldier, the player gets an extra cog to construct a war machine from; the AI always operates without any coordination. Hence, with the increase in soldiers, the player gets an exponential advantage that can be only countered with ludicrously powerful AI units.
Another factor is, that no-one will be using all the planned novelty crafts (with the soldier capacity of about 10 to 16), if they can deploy 40 troops by the means of Leviathan. I'd prefer a more gradual progression - Bonaventura gives a huge squad size increase over Pachyderm (8 to 18); it'd be very attractive even if the increase was less drastic.

[Meridian]

Meridian's LP shows that 18 is more than enough for almost everything, ...

I thought that might have been the case

When we consider beginners vs. veterans, I think veterans can handle anything with 18 soldiers and beginners would only have more losses (grenade magnets, etc.) with more soldiers anyway.

As for different playing styles... hard to say... maybe somebody really needs more soldiers.
Speaking for myself, I'm good even with 14-16.

As for the game progression, I really have no reason to switch from Bonaventura to anything else... yet. It may happen that I skip everything and jump straight to Avenger and go to Mars.
So, I do support the decision to start with small crews and make player work hard and invest time, research, money etc. to get to better crafts. Otherwise the motivation to upgrade (other than curiosity) is very small.

As for interceptors, I also have some ideas, but I will share them later, so that you don't implement them too quickly

[DracoGriffin]

My random two cents since I have not read anything:

I got my ass kicked by the Ratmen Rodeo; first mission out of the base.

I didn't take it too seriously (I'm hyper aggressive) but wow, gals felt really delicate and only six, ouch. Oh well, more meat for the meatgrinder!

edit: Just did another quick start... wow, what changed? Early game is significantly nerfed... barely made it through the first month (couldn't catch ANYTHING - all civvie vehicles - all the spawned missions were way outside the range of the Airbus - and then a mutant pogrom with six gals? Yikes...). Second month I catch up to a landed Raider ship... didn't even kill one and then promptly got exploded. I'm actually pretty turned off from this... basically watched the sun rise/set the first month (huge negative score and lost protection money) and then TPK on first mission.

Wow.

[legionof1]

Im for smaller craft capacity in most cases. Something large(25-28) still needs to be around to face battleship and other very large craft because of the sheer volume of foes. Having some extra bodies eally helps if there are more then say 40 foes on landing/crash maps which tend to be quite small. If the enemy craft occupies more then say a third of the map you tend have to clear the LZ and setup covering the craft at the same time on the first few turns because of the the high possibility of foes merely walking out a craft hatch and unloading a hvy weapon into open door of your ship

Around 16-20 seems to be ideal size depending on squad composition. The more gals you bring with inbuilt roles the more gals you tend to use. Very few of the "specialty" armors are suited to anything beyond there specific job because of the armor stats or lack of inventory/hand space. These specialty units are great to have but are not directly able to handle threats like a normal gal.

[Gunner-chan]

I only recently started playing again with version 99, and I don't know why but I really like how one of the portraits (The white haired one with red eyes, one of the newer designed ones) appears to have an arm tattoo that's preserved in all armors. And looking at a few more, some have necklaces that are preserved across all armors.

Given the "Default" armor now appears to be tribal, it feels kinda fitting and flavorful. But it makes me wonder, is there any intention to further diversify some of the portraits like this? Maybe inking up a few others or other little traits that can be different per portrait? It's a small thing in this case but it does add a lot more individuality.

[Bloax]

If you give me stuff to rip off (or, indeed, just simple edits and descriptions of what you want, because I've more or less hit a creative wall at this point o_O) then I can add it to the inevitable hit list of Things To Do.

I've been more or less in a productivity coma this past month, but it should clear out soon now that I barely have any exams left now.

[Dioxine]

I only recently started playing again with version 99, and I don't know why but I really like how one of the portraits (The white haired one with red eyes, one of the newer designed ones) appears to have an arm tattoo that's preserved in all armors. And looking at a few more, some have necklaces that are preserved across all armors.

Given the "Default" armor now appears to be tribal, it feels kinda fitting and flavorful. But it makes me wonder, is there any intention to further diversify some of the portraits like this? Maybe inking up a few others or other little traits that can be different per portrait? It's a small thing in this case but it does add a lot more individuality.

Thanks for that! The main problem with such upgrades/making new portraits is that it takes many, many hours of gruelling work to introduce changes all across the whole armor spectrum, which is somewhere around 70-ish atm (including six armors from supported mods - alt tac, alt smokey, naughty).
Sure some of the older ones beg for a facelift and adding some decorations, although I want to keep the latter to the minimum (there will be a special outfit with extra jewelry for everyone, might also be used as base for Seductress upgrade).
Also the white haired/red eyes model is actually a character I've once rendered in Poser and 2 years ago used as base for all pirate dolls

[Gunner-chan]

Well I understand it's a lot of work, it's just a general suggestion! Like something to maybe be done alongside an art cleanup or something. Nothing super mega turbo important or anything. Just seems adding some jewelry or tattoos or scars or something to some of the portraits may help add a little flavor to them. At the moment touching up some of the older heads is definitely more of a priory I think, though still minor. They do have a sort of charm to them anyway after all.

And yeah, there's just something nice about that portrait, somehow she seems to be one of my better pirates this run. Stunned a church priest with ol revolver bullets on one job, killed 3 dudes with a cutlass in one turn in another.

Another minor art based question I have is the UAC carbine, it seems a bit... Off compared to the other doom weapons? Not exactly as close a representation... If I could recommend a replacement, can I offer this?



This is the representation the rifle has in several mods, such as brutal doom and Doom Rougelike arsenal. I feel it's a lot closer in style.