A thread for little questions

[Greep]

Yeah they're pretty stupid.  Built the oc radars in the main base, and immediately before I start building them in the second base:

10th of june and there's 6 million gone in missile defenses and rebuilding XD


(and there should be one more coming.. oh joy)

[RSSwizard]

Lasguns are actually weaker damagewise compared to bullet-shooting guns. Their main advantage is their arpen, but you probably don't have any armor anyway, so that advantage is mooted.

Yeahhh, not really.
Entry level laser has infinite ammo. Regular pistol does 30 and the military version does 36. Rifle does 48 compared to an assault rifle doing 30.
Cuts 1/3 armor (if you split the difference between armor and damage thats effectively +15% damage right there, so add another +5 to +8 damage).
Also it can SET YOU ON FIRE.

Since you have 20 armor and probably actually 30 armor if you're wearing Warrior or any of the specialty suits you need to consider ARpen as some form if damage. Splitting the difference to +16.6% might be a good rule of thumb. In that case in your mind you need to consider LASERS as doing damage like:

Holdout Laser - 19
Self Charging - 26 (better than an assault pistol)
Nerf Laser - 35 (like a commando pistol but way lighter)
Laspistol and Assault Laser - 42 (remember it does lots of bursts too)
Lasgun - 56 (pretty much og, accurate aimed shots too)
Autolaser - 58 (and bursts)
Heavy Laser - 75 (crazy) and can threaten you even in power armor

And as for Your Usage they are great against anyone who isnt bare flesh. Also fairly much a kill shot on Academy Drones. Pretty much just get semi-close and unload a couple Bursts with a Laspistol or Lasgun and you should get some good damage rolls. You dont know how many times ive made power armor dudes flash red by unloading laser on them, be it Firebats or Bodyguards.



@Missile Shinnannigans
Haven't had these yet, is it possible to intercept missiles?
Anyway stop playing Ironman unless you're on the next-to-lowest difficulty setting.
If you have lower than 100 hit ratio just savescum it and move on.

Missiles sound like a BS mechanic for what they do, it should be a Hideout Defense that causes an Explosion which may kill people and destroy equip and (possibly) destroy a facility if it can nuke the critical tiles for it. Turn 0 trigger invisible Baby Nuke sorta thing.

As a special game mechanic it could have been designed to pull up a Base Defense without letting you equip soldiers, without turns, and just blow up the bomb on a random spawn spot and give you the report card.

If I find any missiles im cutting them out of my savegame because its a POS mechanic. If you really get down to it the thing should also potentially kill Runts, Brainers, destroy Craft depending where it hits and what was going on in that facility at the time. Not much thought was given to this at all, the biggest danger is FATALITY not having a building destroyed (the rubble can be cleared).

(its because you could lose Fruity Taco or Amy Jellyfish or Indian Scorcher and 4 brainers and a PILE of equipment at the same time)

[Greep]

Yup, you can intercept missiles, although usually by the time you have a craft capable of interception you'll already have SAMs or cannons which are cheap enough to spam.

Honestly I'd rather just play davy jones with some silly playstyle than savescum, xcom just doesn't feel the same rerolling stuff.  Mostly missiles I find just annoying because if you completely ignore them 90% of the time all they do is blow up one base in september, you get flak cannons and not really even notice.  But sometimes they're just unstoppable hails of armageddon every month    They're even bugged to throw double the missiles currently for some reason, there's no way one missile is blowing up 8 buildings even with disconnects.

I think you can disable them by going the factions ruleset and just setting executionodds for technocracyFirstStrike and technocracyStrikes to 0 which will get rid of the later set on normal difficulties I believe.

[Nilex]

Last few lingering questions from me:

1) "Not your business" research topic - unobtainable as of L6? Can't unlock White Dragon "Experimental weapons" without it. It unlocks some very cool items for purchase as well as very mysterious Eye of Horus facility. In the rules it's discouragingly called STR_UNOBTAINABLE.

2) Is EMP Minibomb really the best way to capture a live Technomancer? Followed by using Manacless on the body, and even Rod of Bliss for good measure. Last time I had to kill him because he just kept waking up every turn (restores 33 stun points) and knocking him out with Shock'a'Fist kept reduced his HP pool too much so he died. They are super rare (sole encounter came from zombified space freighter) so I wanna be prepared.

3) Where to get "Cyberzombie Database" and "Necronomicon" items, required for Red Mage finally to move in?
UPDATE on 3: nevermind found it myself by digging through rules. Both are found in Crypt of the Technomancer mission (Black Mask's Origins research related I presume). Funnily enough the mission is set to spawn 15 game days after my latest save, but many months and several hundred Megapol cars after I researched the damned topic. Guess I'll find out if my EMP theory holds true sooner than I thought.

4) This one is tricky...
Is there an easy way to determine if a soldier has reached peak capacity in any given skill using normal methods (via just plain battle XP)? Will explain using Bravery as an example. Normal peak is 100 but can go over the limit with Commendations (COM) and suit buffs. But let's focus solely on COM and ignore suits. The problem is when a soldier reaches let's say 80 Bravery but together with COM it gets pushed to 110 and you have no way of knowing if you should stop leveling it or is there room for 20 more that's hidden by COM.
I could probably read it from save or carefully subtracting every earned COM award to get normal unbuffed value but that's way too labor intensive. Hoping there's an easier way... maybe from reading unit stats graph better? Pretty much all skills are affected by this situation, some more than others. Ideally there would exist a button that, when pressed in stats menu (or anywhere stats are shown, such as hands ordering), would show unbuffed skill values (maybe even allowed peak next to it in brackets).

[legionof1]

2) You pretty much have it, thou the rod of bliss is pointless, since the techno has no regen contributions from freshness. Unless i am mistaken they can surrender, so it might be viable to nock em down once and then clear everything else.

4) Not from within the game, but a breif ruleset dive for "maxstatcaps" will show you the limits. Each soldier has fixed limits but there largely identical for the same species.

[Greep]

-Not your business is just deliberately a tech so you can't use/buy/w/e anything assigned it unless you're hacking your game or testing or something.

-Hard to say, but I do know manacles will probably be just broken out of.  At 40 strength on the enemy they start rapidly losing effectiveness, technomancer has 65 strength.

-There should be a tally of all the earned stats on condemnations in the "+" tab for the soldier I believe, so you wouldn't need to go through every condeomnation. Edit: yeah click "summary" on that tab

[Nilex]

@legionof1
Only relevant stat I could find in analysis is "Immune to morale loss/fearImmunity: false" so I guess too he can surrender with low morale. I'll also bring TU & Morale damaging weapon and see how that goes. Thank you for all your diligent help in last 4 months!
(exactly tomorrow will be 4 whole months for this playthrough of mine, Jesus Christ)

@Greep
After my post and digging in discord I got the same idea, you just confirmed it. Although just the presence of such building shows Dio is apt at understanding when to give player what in order to lessen the burden. Hopefully Horus facility makes it into the the final cut at some point. Consequently it also means it's not possible to achieve 100% research even with all Codex unlocked. And looks like I'll have to rebuild the Casino again (replaced with Printer, sill under construction lol) to get enough Mystery Boxes for those Shadow Orbs. FML
Big thanks for the "Summary" tip. Is better than expected so it'll have to do. I hardly pay any attention to commendation mechanic so I'd never find that little screen.

[Ragshak]

After some time I\ve decided to go onece again with XPiratez ... and just WOW. So much improvement after all those months!

Quick question:
1) How to evade enemies evade? I run to enemy with melee weapon and they kill me before I can even attack / THey act once my char steps near them
2) Any early manfufacture projects to earn some cash? I remember from old versions that I could rush brainers quite fast but now I dont see a way.

[Alex the KatanaCutlass]

Yeah, I also like ninja-ing around, but you see, if they have better reac and/or melee, then YOU're gonna become THEIR sushi, maybe even yummy:)
So train them also in using some BLAMMA-BLAMMO stuff. My Destructor gal has some 3-4 melee weaps plus an 'ole plasma gun. And grenades.

A ninja can use any damn thing as a weapon, or tool. So let's do so. It's fun, btw.

[Greep]

If you wanna kill stuff in melee, these days spears (and bamboo vs unarmored) are your friend early game: reaction disrupt means they won't fight back and being able to fight from a distance also means less TUs to get there.  It won't train reactions, though, sadly.

Also, fight naked if you wanna melee early game weather permitting of course. +20 reactions and infinite energy is super nice.

Capturing is just harder, but if you have barbarian (S) armor with high melee you will pretty much evade every counterattack.

The manufacturing money train is:

hellerium (inspect machinery)
x-grog (cunning)
chateau (needs apples, from missions/recon expeditions/gambling)
gambling (needs blue chips from robbing/purses/bagsocash)
plantations
weed plantations (need 12 sectoweed from crackhouses and gambling, leave as plantation for the maintenance end of month)
cigars (need weed)
canteen o wisdom (need still)
medical supplies (need library)
mint->gambling (need scanners from cutters/x-prison, savvy girl/G.O./neophyte mass interrogation for activities:enterprise, useful always for the stuff, though)
plastasteel?
battletanks?

I just always mint endgame since it gives you infinite zaxx/wizbix tokens and a decent amount of glamour though.

[BlorkTheOrk]

How do I get the Conqueror (the 36 men transport for the last mission to Mars)? I got the codes and Zubrin. But no further research appeared.

[Nilex]

Gotta be one of these from the picture.
More info HERE. Note that you need Computer Core service to research Higher Studies, which ZUBRIN does not need.

[BlorkTheOrk]

Thank you for the answering.

By the way Google search for some reason doesn't return bootypedia even if asked "xpiratez bootypedia". Does anyone knows why?

[R1dO]

Personal search bubble i assume.

When i enter your search query it is 3rd in the list (assuming you are trying to find "xpiratez.wtf") just below some forum topics and an article on ufopaedia.org.

[Gals]

Hi, I had been hoping to finish X-Pirates on my own, but I am stuck!

Brief history: I tried the mod a few times in the past, and loved it but never got far. Then I started a new game at the end of 2019 (freshly downloaded files) and was impressed at all the changes. I was much more careful and managed to actually survive! I never reload if things go wrong or it is game over, and came close a few times (e.g. when I spent a ridiculous amount of money on a "The World Is Mine" item, only to find that it wasn't the end of the game, just some points, and I was immediately hacked by someone and my account then dropped to -$250 million and I only just broke even and avoided a game over at the end of the second month ...)

Anyway, I have been playing the same campaign for around fifteen months, the longest I've ever played a single game. I thought I had reached the end of the game earlier. I have all four Cydonia codes, and have made 250 Hellerium Fuel Capsules. Nothing happened. So I looked at all the craft I have unlocked and realised I must need a longer range one. I had yet to build an Obliterator (the bomber one) so built that, because it has the greatest range out of all my possible ships. I finished it earlier today, loaded it with 250 Fuel Capsules and a crew, and launched, but there was only the option to go somewhere on Earth, not to go to Mars. So obviously it's not enough to have the codes, a spaceship, and enough fuel. There must be something I'm missing, but I have no idea what. I've reached that point where months and months go by with nothing new to research. Every time I do find anything (such as a Star God rebel on a smuggler ship, or some high rankers on the huge spaceship assault missions that have around 20 levels) I think ti will unlock a new bit of the tree, but it just leads to a description (e.g. golden chaingun, light gen) but nothing new unlocks. I have no idea what I am missing.

My game is stable: I have a fleet of Sabres (with Tesla and Laser) to take out smaller ships, and Dragons (with plasma) for the bigger ones. I make enough money just from my score (via shooting ships down) to add about 50 million to my account every month. My soldiers and Syn units are super tough (the gals wear Harbinger armour and have unlocked all the laser, gauss and plasma weapons). I have a tank that comes on some missions, and Blaster Launchers for Sitzkrieg. However, now that I built the Hellerium Fuel Capsules and ship, and got the codes, I just don't know what else to do. The only type of ship I have never shot down is the Silver Towers, is that what I need to do? It outruns my Dragons, and the Sabres just aren't tough enough to take it down (I lost all my craft trying to do that in an awful month, and spent about three weeks of real world time just to get back to that point where I had a fleet again!)

If I have missed something obvious I'd be grateful if someone could help. I don't want to just keep repeating the same missions for months and months more (real world time) and still not get anywhere if I have missed something, or I'll start getting frustrated, especially when I thought I'd reached the final stages! Many thanks.