Hi, I am writing to say that I am having a fantastic time playing your mod! I recently finished a long running playthrough of x-piratez and like a siren song this mod called to me. It really nails the gradual build up of power and resources that makes X-Com so great. It's fun to slowly become the X-Com we all know and love. I giggled when I saw the black ops rifle, of course that's what it looks like. It's also a credit to the campaign design that when I finally got my hands on one it was a legitimate improvement. So yeah great job!
I've played a lot of X-COM starting when I was just little, and been playing it regularly since then, and this is a great addition to the cannon.
So in my current playthrough I'm in difficulty 2, may 1999. I'm a bit ahead of the difficulty curve with cyber armor and tritanium ammo. So I can do most missions without too much risk and have strong interceptor coverage. My guess is that I'm in the early middle game, and that an x-com files campaign is about as long an x-piratez campaign. No spoilers please!
So my feedback is based on a player there. I started on difficulty 1 because mods can be really uneven, and I stopped that play-through when I realized I kneecapped myself by not doing research correctly. I'm probably going to start over on a harder difficulty because a difficulty doldrum like this suggests I'll have more fun with more challenge.
Loose feedback! (lots of spoilers)
Spoiler:
Seriously a big congratulations on how the campaign ramps up. Getting the helicopter and armored vests feels like a legitimate game changer and like you can finally let loose. I love it so much. It's also very smart to start you with the glock, it's a good subtle way to say "hey you want accuracy over power for the start"
It's fun to be legitimate g-men crossing national boundaries to extradionarily rendition fools. Especially when you get sci-fi dart guns. All those conspiracy theories were right! Similarly the messages from the factions were great because they helped to drive home just what X-COM looks like from the outside. I kind of missed them for the factions after the initial four, but it makes sense they have better security or are too loosely organized to have messages.
Coming off x-piratez it's really funny how some things get recontextualized by being back in a more mundane setting. The L-85 was just good in x-piratez but I shouted for joy when I got my hands on one here. Similarly I forgot where the standard human TU cap was, and that was a surprise let me tell you. Finally I forgot just how much armor gates the amount of risk you can take.
It'd gunk up the manufacturing screen, but it'd be nice to have a way to kill captured monsters that you can use their parts for things. Bullfrogs are the biggest one of these. The dart musket rules and is borderline essential, but bullfrogs at least on the difficulty I'm playing are the biggest offenders for getting knocked unconscious for wounds.
Similarly the webwear, so useful oh my god. But it's a real RNG roulette on when you can get it. I don't know if there's a better way to do it, but maybe 3 of 4 of any combination of spider types? Not sure the research system supports that.
So on my first play through I was difficulty 1, and I really kneecapped myself because I didn't realize that some of the research is literally trivial. I was stuck in the old x-com mode of thinking where you hit every topic with all of your scientists sequentially. Maybe a comment about how you have a lot of ground to cover and most terrestrial objects are a bureaucratic formality? (That's kind of in the manual messages but might be helpful to have in the pop ups.)
If vanilla x-com had access to knockout grenades the war would be over in four months and we'd just nuke mars. Maybe we could rig up blowers and just fumigate ufos?
The only mission I had a legitimately bad time with was the Dr. Alpha mission. It was just the most tedious thing. A one hit melee could drop from the vents and just wreck someone. Since it's mostly animals you can't win on morale. And I wound up with a low TU beetle stuck in the vents so I had to sweep the whole friggin map twice. Just a bad time, not sure there's much you can do about it with how the AI and spawns work.
There was very little more satisfying than getting the ADS and introducing deep ones and aquatoids to the tempo of above water combat. They were not prepared. I'm not all the way through the plot line either, but all of the interrogations telling you about TFTD monsters really builds the paranoia. If lobstermen show up, no amount of ADS is gonna save my ass. No Spoilers!
So there's three mundane weapon platforms that statistically are just about as good as a gun can get under x-com rules and they don't seem to have exact analogues in the more advanced bullet guns. (I haven't reached laser, mass driver or plasma.) These were the SVD (three accurate, accuracy boosted, three sniper snap shots per turn my god.) the L-85 (so many accurate snap shots.) and p-90 (it's compact, it's armor piecing, it's clip is huge and it's great on TU economy.) To the point where I wasn't sure it was wise to switch until I hit higher armor enemies. It'd be probably more work than it's worth but for mundane gun platforms maybe there's a research branch about making alien fuel trace ammo? You get a small damage boost, but clip size majorly suffers and it's expensive in money and traces? (it's jury rigged technology that only works because we have thousands of cartridges to try with.) It'd honestly probably be a research trap, but my guns!
So probably because I was on an easy difficulty but I took the message about when the war was going to start to mean that I needed radar and interceptor coverage by then. I managed it, but I felt super overprepared. Not sure that's worth doing anything on your part, but I thought it was worth mentioning. I sort of assumed the aliens were going to try and knock me out by launching a terror mission or two. In a way like the syndicate would eventually try.
It got introduced in the version I started on, but I really enjoy the council giving you advanced agents. It's nice to not have to train up mouth breathers and they almost always have commendations my strategy wouldn't get them. It also lets losses feel less like I need to load, an x-com agent is valuable but I can deal with losing someone good. At the same time though, something which reduces tension needs to be managed carefully in an x-com game. I like it, and it's making things easier for me but it's my choice to use it.
I'm mostly done fighting ghosts but it's fun and a great way to push the engine to do interesting things. Having to check for enemies as light sources is a really neat touch.
Similarly I very much enjoyed the arctic base mission. Would have gone a lot different if Macready brought an m-60.
Oh the company HQ mission was a test in patience because, that's a lot of stairs. like ten minutes of clicking lots of stairs, like final fantasy 7 lots of stairs. Please a hidden elevator every three floors or something. You can't get the CEO with morale so it was just annoying by the end.
I never played apocalypse, so the dimension x stuff took me much by surprise. It's really fun to run into something completely novel like that. Being limited to certain armors also really reinforces how vulnerable you are. Friggin spitters man.
I'm a completionist, at the same time X-COM files is pushing me to go as fast as I can. This is good, that's the tension of X-COM, you can play quite well but take too long and the aliens will win. The downside is that researching prisoners/aliens/corpses/animals almost always feels like there's not much reward. The x-dimension is the worst for this. Maybe a couple of Technomad files in the dimension X base so if you want to research the dimension x creatures you don't have to fish for all of them? Similarly you could get the files or corpse/captives from the expeditions. It'd be a crappy reward for the cost, but my completionism! (I just saw in a post above this one that land surveys might do the same thing?)
I'm sort of surprised you can't get gas masks, as that was how I got around Choking in X-piratez but at the same time I don't want em if it means the enemy gets em. Knockout grenades my beloved.
I managed to get a Base Invasion before 1999, which I thought was a great way to say "Oh you want to do interceptions? Why don't you say that to my face."
I never really bothered with Psionics in base x-com or VooDoo in x-piratez and I was pleasantly surprised by it's implementation here. The ghosts are great for going "Okay, guns aren't always going to be the solution." Also it was neat that things like the plasma glove have the stats to have utility outside of combat. Being able to melt doors etc, is legitimately useful. Similarly they are good for getting damage types you might need but not have access to otherwise.
Oh relatedly a message in the Osiris casenda mission about how to expect a fortified locked position would be good. I don't normally use explosives and you gotta breach. Flame glove will get you inside though.
My favorite faction to fight was the red dawn, yes I'd like free reasonably good guns and durathread. My most annoying was black lotus. Friggin ninjas man. On the flip side the red dawn HQ mission was a real wall in terms of difficulty, which I enjoyed. It was nice to see someone smart enough to bring armor to the fight and having to scrounge up anti-armor before I could buy it.
After my first run I found the best strategy for the initial factions was to move up in mission difficulty for all factions at once. On my first run through I put myself in a cult-de-sac by leveling up the black lotus chain too high before I had access to anything bigger than a helicopter. The avatar mission is not kind if you don't have good guns and a good number of guys.
It’s a very minor note, but because I was sure the aliens were going to come out swinging I wrapped up the enemy factions as fast as I could and then missed being able to do safehouses for free briefcases of money. Not sure that’s worth addressing.
I was sort of surprised you couldn't cut a very expensive deal with the Black Lotuses patron. You want to defend humanity, she kind of wants to defend humanity, friendship! It definitely wouldn't be the most morally ambiguous thing you do in this game. Friggin Neoderm. Similarly given how plot lines and monthly events work, it'd work well if in exchange for access to avatar forms you pay in monthly score events. (I wouldn't take the deal and I'm not sure it could be mechanically balanced but it occurred to me.) Things could resolve in the middle/late game when you double cross her. (But then people might feel like they have to for completionist reasons? I really hate being locked out of content myself.)
The kitsune is a really big gift to the player. Which I don't mind, I love that thing. But before that I had been building bases entirely to get within osprey range of HQs. A big, fast "go anywhere" troop transport for free is hella useful. I’d be surprised if it’s given in higher difficulties.
I'm gonna wait until I beat the game to ask how it works, but I am so curious how events and missions spawn within the x-com geoscape framework. It's fun system, I love that there are events happening that you can't know about, really ties into the feeling that you are trying to manage slowly spiraling chaos. Similarly it's fun when you get a good event, I'm hoping it's tied somehow to your level of intelligence capability so that investing there has subtle effects.
I liked the syndicate is angry plot line. It really felt like they were a rival actor who knew exactly the levers to push to make me lose in a smart way. They don't need to kill me, just my support.
Oh I thought making alien alloys a rate limiting material was inspired. Coming off x-piratez where it was per faction enemy drops, it seemed like a nice way to simplify the system while still making you have to carefully conserve resources. Do I want better ammo for the guns more than I want better armor or stuff for labs? I'm guessing tritanium ammo will get superceded by laser, but getting to lasers takes knowing the tech tree pretty well.
Making progress gated behind high research projects is an interesting touch. For me it seems to incentivize knowing the research tree and figuring out how to get the most labs in a single base, and then building smaller research bases for things like interrogations and autopsies. I think this is the desired behavior?
Similarly it's interesting how certain high research things are effectively traps for a new player. "Surely researching an MIB agent won't take that long?" (<someone about to have a bad time.)
The final note I have is just as someone new to the mod, it's interesting how much of the management comes from trying to manage storage. Partially this is bad habits I picked up from x-piratez where taking captives could manage your storage problems by generating negative size items. I might need ancient guns eventually! I like to run teams from a central base, so keeping all the kinds of armors, and various guns is running up pretty hard against storage limits and items I need to research. I feel like this is working as intended to make you commit to moving up the tech tree and sell things you legitimately don't need anymore, but it's annoying at times.
So I've got a few questions that I don't really want spoilers for, but I could use the advice of someone who is familiar with how the mod progresses.
1. Transformations seem to be a big part of the intended design. Coming off x-piratez it's been humbling to have to deal with puny purebloods again, so I'd love to upgrade. At the same time in the version of x-piratez I was playing (an old one about 2 years out of date.) Freshness, the sanity analogue; was the stat I was working around in the end game. The high level armors sucked it out of Gals, and late game missions were all freshness draining. So basically any transformations which limited freshness made that character useless in the endgame. A veteran Gal, in high level armor became basically useless after 20 turns, and that was without freshness reductions from stat boosts. (There was an item to get around it at an HP drain but I didn't realize that it existed until I was trying to get onto mars.)
Is that true here? Can I use transformations without making soldiers so sanity limited they are basically useless after 20 turns in the end game? It's a real bother to have to play the whole game to realize you crippled your best soldiers a hundred hours ago.
2. So I'm probably going to start over my campaign on a higher difficulty. I beat x-piratez on 3 and I thought that was a fair challenge. X-piratez is much more of a power fantasy though. At the same time this is hopefully the last massive X-COM mod I'm going to beat like a drum. I need to play other games, to touch grass. So I might go up to 4.
Is difficulty 4 manageable if you are good at X-COM but don't know X-COM files like the back of your hand? The nature of long campaign mods like this means that you can screw yourself over and not realize for dozens of hours. X-piratez got around this by making the game basically unlosable past a certain point, I’m doubting x-files is as nice. I'm not touching 5 or 6, I'm neurotic enough about losses, higher difficulty is going to make that worse.
3. Is sneaky Ai recommended? Given the way TU economy works, enemies taking cover around corners does actually make things a lot harder. At the same time it might mess up animals/zombies?
Again thanks for making a really great mod! It's so fun to see how people are pushing the engine in ways I never thought possible.
