Re: The X-Com Files - 3.5: Whispers In The Dark

[Juku121]

What do you think?

That a megamod isn't really something you play 'casually'. The time commitment alone is huge.

But I've also seen a lot of streamers absolutely faff around like headless chickens and succeed, either intentionally, because they're lazy/bored, or because they are casuals. Not to mention all the unbalanced stuff that can work for the player as easily as against them.

random events

Yeah, this mod is big on hitting you with RNG, often invisible RNG at that.

Now, I don't actually dislike this in general, and if something really gets on my nerves I can (mostly) just mod it away. But it's not an uncontroversial feature.

But there are five difficulty levels, and in my opinion they shouldn't be "Very hard", "Very very hard", "Extremely hard", "Almost impossible" and "Totally impossible".

Eh, there are people who play Superhuman Ironman and even have success. Higher difficulties have the issue of showering the player with loot and points from all the upscaled enemy numbers, so once you start snowballing, you snowball harder.

Also, most mods are something made by veteran players for veteran players, so the assumption is that you're looking for more challenge rather than less. Think TFTD instead of UFO.

...my impression instead is that it still requires a lot of skill both on the tactical and strategical layers - if you don't optimize your playing, it mercilessly makes you fall more and more behind.

How is that a bad thing?

But, unless you have no expansion strategy at all (and thus fail at the strategy part of the strategy game), I don't think it's as bad as you're picturing here.



Anyway, there are ways you can make the game easier for yourself. Bring back the 50% accuracy and armour penalty for Beginner enemies, for example. There are many other difficulty constants you could play with. If you find some happy equilibrium and share it, I'm sure Solarius will take a close look.

But making the whole game have a meaningfully 'casual' difficulty in everything (beyond just some multipliers) is such a massive undertaking I don't even want to think about it. I suspect Solarius doesn't, either.

[Mrvex]

I go for my first apprehension, and I start exploring the place with my two agents (equipped with Glock and stun baton). With playing casually I mean that I'm not employing any advanced tactics, but I'm not making my agents run around like headless chickens either. Rng has one of them sniped from halfway across the map, from the side he wasn't looking at; the other one reaches the cultist and attacks twice with the baton, hitting once - not enough, the bad guy turns around and shivs her to death.
One save-scum later, the cultist is safely arrested and I go on: I interrogate him, arrest several more, get a van, all in all I'm starting to make a little progress, until I get hit by two -300 events about the cults still being elusive. Then, between days 15 and 21 of the first month, such events fire two more times, with three additional negative score hits from different happenings (the missed crop circles, the CIA, and I can't remember which other); I haven't counted how many events I got in total, but my score is below -1500 since my missions can't even remotely compensate, and research is only slightly making up for those random losses.

The begining is extremely hard, you really need to do as many missions as possible. Make sure to research logistics with upmost priority because that gives you a van (Which can carry 4 soldiers).
It doesnt help that the Cult apprehenction, which spawns alot, has negative 200 penalty if you ignore it. And if you complete it by capping cultists, without losing people you get like 10 or 12 points.
For cult appreh. in particular, you should do this at night (van can wait if you order it to patrol on the spot, van has infinite fuel so it can wait), because humans have awful eye sight at night so its actually possible for you to get to melee/shotgun range without having to dodge bullets across the street.

Researching shotguns (Its under the non-standard weapons research topic) is also SUPER important, not only shotgun completely destroys most humans (and animals) in one or two hits and reasonable range, most importantly, they can fire stun ammo, your first medium range stun weapon, it has the benefit that enemies cant dodge it if they get hit (Also that you can simply stand outside of their melee range) melee weapons can be dodged on top of just failing to land on the enemy so in the early game, melee weapons are very unreliable (But later on, they can be really strong)

The 200 point penalty is quite ludicrous, but Solarius has already spoken about it staying that way to really hammer down that XCOM is a joke at the start of the game and the council looks at every oportunity to shut you down. So you have mission, that spawns alot, has large penalty and if you fuck up in any way in it, it will get you negative score.

Expect to have few failed campaigns, alot of this is trial and error. If you have more specific questions, we can always answer it.

[superpippo90]

@Juku121
I get your point about it being a megamod and intended for veterans, but since the difficulty levels exist, I guess one could try to offer an entry level that is more forgiving.
I actually like some of the difficulty in tactical missions, even if sometimes it's just frustrating. I mean, I remember more advanced missions that had stuff I couldn't even scratch, but it was also exciting in some way. The one things that annoys me the most is, I think, the fact that enemies have 100% TUs during the first turn, and thus full reactions (this is also a big complaint I've heard about reinforcements): in some missions there were so many enemies around that I couldn't step out without getting riddled with bullets, and to be honest having to do the smoke screen thing is pretty boring to me.
But how different from each other are the difficulty levels in the geoscape game?

By the way, I restarted and my second mission had the dimension X stuff. I got charged by the bees, two taser gun charges didn't bring them down, and I had to flee. On the brighter side, during the whole first month I only got three negative score events this time, for a total of -198 compared to the about -2000 of my other try. That's frankly too much difference, and I'd rather have the rng be toned down a bit in that regard.

@Mrvex
Thank you for all the advice. As I wrote in my other comment, I have already played an older version of this mod for a while, so I know how to get through. I was just reporting that playing on "Beginner" can feel too punishing for a more casual player.

[Juku121]

I get your point about it being a megamod and intended for veterans, but since the difficulty levels exist, I guess one could try to offer an entry level that is more forgiving.

That's entirely valid, but the mod is still heavily WIP and Solarius has other priorities. I think he's said several times that he isn't taking any responsibility if you're not playing on Veteran.

My advice about tweaking the constants is that the easiest way to get a modder to include something is to do the legwork yourself. Barring a clash of vision - which does tend to happen with XCF more often than one would like - there's little reason not to accept. That's how zee_ra got Zrbite munitions disassembly into 2.6: he made me interested enough to make a mini-mod, and Solarius was happy enough to take it mostly as it was.

The one things that annoys me the most is, I think, the fact that enemies have 100% TUs during the first turn...

As they say, there's a (sub)mod for that.

...and to be honest having to do the smoke screen thing is pretty boring to me.

The smoke screen is actually considerably nerfed from what it used to be, due to proliferation of heat-vision, psi-vision and especialy sniper-spotters.

But how different from each other are the difficulty levels in the geoscape game?

Never played on non-Veteran, so I don't really know. I imagine not vastly different, since the big thing constraining you is money and while higher difficulties make missions harder, they also give out more loot and score.

By the way, I restarted and my second mission had the dimension X stuff. I got charged by the bees, two taser gun charges didn't bring them down, and I had to flee.

Swarmids are supposed to be hard to take down with conventional weapons. Fire is their big weakness, but you don't really have any at the start of the game.

That's frankly too much difference, and I'd rather have the rng be toned down a bit in that regard.

That's nothing. Wait until you hit the random game-progression blocks because a man with a specific funny hat didn't get a mission to spawn, or didn't take his special gadget with him.

[superpippo90]

I didn't know that other difficulties weren't 100% supported, I guess that changes things a bit. Still, I'd suggest Solarius to take my critic into account if he ever thinks about rebalancing them.

Thanks a lot for the mod link, I'll try it.

[Akamashi]

I'm not sure if I have the right to write something like this, but I will. I had the mission of vampire castle. In my humble opinion, this mission should not be in xcomfiles in the form in which it is. I assure you, I tried to consider this "fortress" in every way, I always saw only a gray dump. There is no way at all to determine where the wall is and where the floor is. Where is the staircase, and where is the decoration. The quality of implementation is very disgusting. I would really like to have good content in this mod, and not see upsetting. My advice is that the vampire castle in the current implementation should be removed so as not to spoil the overall quality of the content.

I'm sorry that I allow myself such a review without doing anything to create good content.

[Juku121]

I assure you, I tried to consider this "fortress" in every way, I always saw only a gray dump. There is no way at all to determine where the wall is and where the floor is.
...
My advice is that the vampire castle in the current implementation should be removed so as not to spoil the overall quality of the content.

No need to take such drastic measures. Either Ctrl+End or something like

Code: [Select]

  - type: STR_VAMPIRE_CASTLE
    width: 60
    length: 60
    height: 10
    shade: 2                                                   # <- 9
    alert: STR_ALERT_VAMPIRE_CASTLE


[Mrvex]

Can someone tell me how high reaction values numbers fly on with rare npcs like Gertrud or Master Wo ?

This is third turn of doing this and not even one agent is capable of landing even a single hit, i had to send someone to get the knockout grenades.
I tried bashing her with fists in case of Gertrude being somehow invincible towards electric damage but alas i had to resort to gas.

[Juku121]

If I'm reading it right, Gertrude should have 72*1.2 ~= 86 dodge and Lo Wo 95 dodge on Veteran. Worse, they have eyes in the backs of their heads and can't be backstabbed. So your puny 82% chance to hit will never work.

I tend to carry either taser or a dart pistols on most everyone for such cases of ninjas popping up, or someone blocking a lift, or just needing to be stunned ASAP and without worries about missing.

[AmanitaVerna]

The online reference site at xcf.trigramreactor.net says that all the handheld plasma weapons have these properties, but what do they mean exactly?

Code: [Select]

Armor Degradation (Raw Damage) 0.05
Stun Damage 75%
FATAL WOUNDS Damage 12%
Random FATAL WOUNDS? FALSE
The one I'm wondering about the most is the armor degradation figure. Is that multiplied by the weapon power, or by the random damage roll prior to subtracting armor from it, or something else? Does it decrease armor before or after calculating how much damage it does to the target? Either way it doesn't seem like it would have a huge impact from a single shot, but with aliens firing six shots at the same agent in a turn at close range, I'm wondering if armor degradation becomes significant then. If a plasma rifle removes 4 armor per hit, that would be a not insignificant increase in damage for each successive hit.

(I've seen high-level agents get hit several times by a plasma rifle before dying or falling unconscious, and I've seen rookies in power armor take a single shot from a plasma rifle and die instantly, which... I'm not actually sure how much HP my agents have, come to think of it.).

Also what does it mean when a character flashes white? Does that mean the shot hit but the armor blocked the damage? I know red is for receiving one or more fatal wounds but I don't remember flashing white from the original xcom (I don't know if I've forgotten or if it's an OXCE innovation).

P.S. By January 2000, the best armor I've researched besides M.A.G.M.A.'s power armor, is cyber armor.

[Juku121]

...what do they mean exactly?

Code: [Select]

Armor Degradation (Raw Damage) 0.05
Stun Damage 75%
FATAL WOUNDS Damage 12%
Random FATAL WOUNDS? FALSE

• How much of your random damage roll eats away at armour before armor can even dream of doing something. Part of why both plasma weapons and miniguns are so good against heavy armour.
  
• Normally, you do 100% of your nominal damage (after random rolls and armour reductions) to health and another 25% as stun damage (that's why enemies pass out from being shot). Plasma weapons do 75% instead, so they basically get a +50% to damage that doesn't kill.
  
• This is the converse of the previous. Normally, 100% of your final damage is taken into account in calculating whether do deal fatal wounds (10 damage threshold). For plasmas, it's that 12%. Except...
  
• RandomWound: False tells the game to ignore what I just wrote and just do [final damage * toWound]. So you get 12% of your final damage as fatal wounds, rounded down. Thus you'll be on par with the normal formula from ~16 damage, worse from 10-16, and (much) better at higher damage numbers (of course your agents might well be dead at said higher numbers). Oh, and you get 1 wound at 9 damage as a bonus.
  

So, yes, armour gets damaged before it enters damage calculations. And a big bad (or just lucky) plasma weapon can strip quite a bit of armour away since AFAIK resistances do not affect that armour-stripping damage.

And getting hit multiple times by plasma weapons is bad. Maybe not as bad as miniguns, but they do have significantly higher raw damage.

I've seen high-level agents get hit several times by a plasma rifle before dying or falling unconscious, and I've seen rookies in power armor take a single shot from a plasma rifle and die instantly, which...

If you mean MAGMA Power Armor, Plasma is a weakness of it, doing 120% damage. Though a Plasma Rifle still needs to get lucky: on average, it does 80*0.05 = 4 damage to armour first, then 80*1.2 = 96 damage vs 76-96 armour depending on facing. And it's damage distribution is triangular, not uniform, so it's much more likely to be closer to average. Of course, you can still get (un)lucky and do up to 160*1.2 = 192 vs 71-91, which will one-shot even a pretty hardcore veteran.

I'm not actually sure how much HP my agents have, come to think of it.

I'm pretty sure I've seen health bars in the game (yes, the decline was in full swing already back then! ).

Also what does it mean when a character flashes white? Does that mean the shot hit but the armor blocked the damage?

Pretty much.

I know red is for receiving one or more fatal wounds but I don't remember flashing white from the original xcom (I don't know if I've forgotten or if it's an OXCE innovation).

Technically, it's neither. It's a custom script that's enabled by OXCE. And it doesn't count fatal wounds, it counts 'same-damage hits to kill this enemy' (HTK). 3 or less HTK - bright red, 6 or less - darker red, 7 or more - no red.

[Vakrug]

Also what does it mean when a character flashes white? Does that mean the shot hit but the armor blocked the damage?

If armor just blocked damage, then there is no special effects. White means damage is blocked, yes, but armor still got damaged (degradation).

Normally, you do 100% of your nominal damage (after random rolls and armour reductions) to health and another 25% as stun damage (that's why enemies pass out from being shot). Plasma weapons do 75% instead, so they basically get a +50% to damage that doesn't kill.

No, 25% means random between 0% and 25%. Same with plasma (from 0% to 75%). Otherwise it would be much easier to capture live aliens and staying alive as well.

[Yankes]

So, yes, armour gets damaged before it enters damage calculations. And a big bad (or just lucky) plasma weapon can strip quite a bit of armour away since AFAIK resistances do not affect that armour-stripping damage.

This is false, basic resistances is first thing that affect damage, before any calculation of any thing else.
If XCF do not use scripts to override this behavior then there is no way to " armour-stripping" bypass resistances.

[Juku121]

Yeah, my bad, forgot about RandomStun. So more like 12.5% and 37.5% extra stun damage.


As to resistances affecting toArmorPre, I was wrong, again. Shows me how not to comment without testing/code diving. What misled me was the nightly reference ("primary damage (Power x RandomType)" and the example using pure rolled damage) and that really should be rewritten to add resistances and possibly whatever else might be lurking in regular, non-scripted damage code. Perhaps work these into the example as well.

[AmanitaVerna]

Wouldn't that make it even more effective against power armor, with the weakness to plasma it has?