A thread for little questions

[Solarius Scorch]

Bravery training?
did you mean:
Nude hallucinating?


(Never tried it myself, but many people practice it.)

[Dogbarian]

If someone would please do me a solid and do a quick test for +5/+6 VSK rolls with attached save on pre-L8 version (mine is gone). Just Seduce the final pig with special icon in top-right. Best of the notables I got in over 100 tries is a single +4 and few +3s. I'd be happy to hear if you can do better off in, say... 10 tries? (ignore missing mods message)

Apparently, I was still running L6 (thought I had moved to L7 when it came out some weeks back, but I guess not?).  Anyway, I did 10 tries, and never did better than a single +4 with a single +3 (and I think a few +1s).  Most of the attempts were a single +3 along with +1s. 

[Nilex]

Yeah I got the same results with L8. Means more attacks were indeed necessary for higher rolls, as unbelievable as it feels to me. I know got showered in +6s before in same type of short Pig missions. Oh well at least I'm nearing the end of my VSK grinding so it won't bother me as much. Appreciate your time and trouble, thank you again. Get yourself L8 it has some nice mid-game goodies which start paying off the sooner you get em.

[Dogbarian]

Yeah, going to grab it shortly and move my save over.     Should be able to wrap up work for the day soon.

[Dogbarian]

My poor second base got jumped again, this time with no warning at all.  Dark Ones this time.  Two things really sucked about this - I had just moved 5 "veteran" peasant militia (very loosely defined as trained + surviving 3 or 4 missions and getting some stat increases) out of here to send to my new third base to start staffing defense there, and, since I had just run a training mission out of this base about a week before, a number of decent gals had little to no armor equipped.   You can't change armor in the equipping screen (which makes sense, since the alert just went off and your troops are scrambling to grab weapons).  I guess I need to keep people armored up when not on missions, which probably actually means I need more armor or outfits.

Luckily didn't lose anyone, although the worst injured gal is down for 40 days, even with a sickbay.  Ouch!

So, the little questions for this - is it worth building defensive buildings, or are those just a waste of space?  Never really built them in vanilla, because I relied on either my aircraft to shoot down the attackers, or my ground troops (but I had tanks and such reserved for base defense).  My overcharged radar did get in a hit, I have no idea what benefit that actually provided.
 Second, is my backup gear scattered around in the vaults, or is there a big pile of most of it in one place?  And third, with the devaluing of peasants and slave soldiers compared to what it sounded like existed a few versions ago, is it worth buying some of those to staff for defense, or just buying a few hands (more expensive, but more capable/flexible as well)?

Oh, and a semi-related question - since it looks like all of the lottery armor winnings are slave SS suits, are there plans to change those rewards into gal armor? It doesn't like I can scrap those either, but maybe I need to research them first (gotten multiple suits of SS Defender & Kevlar, even though I haven't actually unlocked Slave Soldiers yet).

[legionof1]

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3x3 and 4x4 size HWPs. And also x2 height critters.
Because you forego using the 2x2 setup and have null tile graphics for them.
Instead you Overlay a graphic of the appropriate size centered where the object should be. So that's pretty much a "If its this type, drawa graphic here" equation. I don't even see a problem with visibility/layering of other tiles because you just check those (blank) tiles it belongs to for the layering.

In fact that would have been Exceedingly Preferable and worthwhile to implement for regular 2x2 HWPs (like, waay back in 2016 kinda thing). Yeahhh if you only see part of the HWP itd show you the whole thing, but the Map shows you the big dot anyway so you know its there.

But seriously I haven't played the Jack's mission with the Tiger Tank yet... is it just a turret that shoots at you and Looks like a tank that wont move?

Problem here is 2 fold, firstly compatibility with vanilla, openxcom is an extension to an updated engine to run vanilla, and as such must be capable of doing vanilla. So while the concept is functional it would need to be a parallel and separate render method. 2nd is how something like that would interact with the world, current 2x2 are assembled in the way they are so that they properly interact with the terrain for climbing, pathing and line of effect(most important on the Z axis). what you describe would have much more limited contact with the world surfaces and so you would have very frequent clipping and instances of being unseen or untaregtable due to not registering to the proper tile occupancy.

And yes the bounty tank is just an immobile 2x2 stuck on a box.

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Today's little question - I recently noticed a post about hunter-killer UFOs making Spy Zeppelins worth less (intentional space there).   Since I just got access to Pigeon, kind of made me wonder the same thing, is there a way to add stealth (either in-game or via mod) so that the HKs ignore them? 
snip

No way to do stealth in a reasonable way, nilex did mention the 2 plausible ones, both of which stink. It does leave certain craft like the zepplin as a relic of older iterations.

snip
Today's questions - getting back to whether stuff in old posts is still relevant, or whether things have been fixed by now.
- do I still need full radar coverage of the planet by end of the first year?  if so, I need to get cracking on bases.
snip

My 2 cents on radar, i would agree with getting up 5 bases worth as the minimum target for year 1. Less then that sacrifices alot of targets of opportunity even from just following to see if they land.

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So, the little questions for this - is it worth building defensive buildings, or are those just a waste of space?  Never really built them in vanilla, because I relied on either my aircraft to shoot down the attackers, or my ground troops (but I had tanks and such reserved for base defense).  My overcharged radar did get in a hit, I have no idea what benefit that actually provided.
 Second, is my backup gear scattered around in the vaults, or is there a big pile of most of it in one place?  And third, with the devaluing of peasants and slave soldiers compared to what it sounded like existed a few versions ago, is it worth buying some of those to staff for defense, or just buying a few hands (more expensive, but more capable/flexible as well)?

Oh, and a semi-related question - since it looks like all of the lottery armor winnings are slave SS suits, are there plans to change those rewards into gal armor? It doesn't like I can scrap those either, but maybe I need to research them first (gotten multiple suits of SS Defender & Kevlar, even though I haven't actually unlocked Slave Soldiers yet).

Very worth it in this mod, there alot of extra features to base defense AA buildings, most prominently mmost of them spawn a defense turret in the battlescape of the base.
 
The vault contents are scattered between all the tile nodes that are coded for gear. These are present in vaults, burrows, and several other building types that provides stores spaces.

Not sure what devaluement you are refering too. But it a matter of initial cost and preference mostly since rank salary is mostly uniform. That said gals garrisions are a strain on the budget that isn't really needed given the strength of early invasions.

Lottery spins and cupon output are very random most tiers have upwards of 50 outcomes. There are more non gal outfits, but then as far as the world is concerned gals are outliers in both physique and expected wealth. Nobody really makes standard issue uber armor so it not resonable by lore for jack to have much lying around.   
 

[RSSwizard]

My poor second base got jumped again, this time with no warning at all.  Dark Ones this time.

Save often. Save & Load are part of the game.
Ironman/Supermutant is for masochists who dont mind grinding up bases and gals and losing games after dozens or hundreds of hours of play.

I have two manual saves one for geo and one for tactical which I (usually) plant on turn 2 after I get everyone out of the transport (since the autosave overwrites on turn 5 and the game has a freakish tendency to injure the hell out of someone on the enemy's turn just before it saves - thats when a wild ratman mob lieutenant appears and lights up 2 gals with a skorpion - thats when the marsec goon appears and launches the baby nuke)

Ive had it happen before alot like that, what I do is reload the geo save and redo events probably for the day before - I know where the base is that'll be hit so ill change gals' armor and ill even ship top notch gals and equipment to that base to fortify it.

@re: Defense and Equipment
Yes its very much worth planting defensive buildings. Im not so sure about the Flak Tower Kit but most of them not only lock off the sewer they put an immobile 2x2 HWP in the hallway which is badass. We're talking like 250 laser damage from the laser defenses one. Even Security Corridors are great for the same reasons to sprinkle in new aux bases because enemies will shoot at the cameras as decoy units.

Equipment is strewn all over the base when combat starts. In vanilla it would do that but the spawn points were only in General Stores facilities (much like your units).


@Human & Lokknar units -
They play a bigger role in current versions and many missions require them exclusively. It was obviously designed to leave you exposed and increase difficulty. Thats why equivalent armor for them sucks compared to when a Gal wears a tac vest or defender armor. In fact they tend to suck worse than vanilla X-com soldiers too (while marsec goons, bodyguards, and the undercover cop guy maintain vanilla-esque stats).

This is designed specifically to hurt you. But consider cheesy 90s sci-fi shows like Andromeda or Firefly or Farscape how you have auxiliary characters who dont normally do the fighting - and the results that happen when they actually do have to fight.

Way I heard it is the Chryssalid mentality - if you have 20 soldiers with premium stats and Flying Armor armed with Heavy Plasmas its boring unless you have something that can still threaten you (which is why you put 4x Hovertank Plasmas on the avenger)

[MemoryTAS]

Save often. Save & Load are part of the game.
Ironman/Supermutant is for masochists who dont mind grinding up bases and gals and losing games after dozens or hundreds of hours of play.

I personally play exclusively on Supermutant because I find having absolutely 0 consequences for screwing up to be extremely boring. Yes I might lose games but I don't mind. Only time I wish I kept it off is if it's a mission I'm not at all familiar with yet and end up with a lot of dead gals, otherwise yeah. I also always keep EMERGENCY IN CASE OF ZOMBIES gear on hand for every mission.

If you don't play with tons and tons of saves it's best to keep your troops armored appropriately even when off duty. Also peasants and Slave Soldiers are far from devalued in recent versions, no idea what you're talking about there.

[Greep]

So, the little questions for this - is it worth building defensive buildings, or are those just a waste of space?  Never really built them in vanilla, because I relied on either my aircraft to shoot down the attackers, or my ground troops (but I had tanks and such reserved for base defense).  My overcharged radar did get in a hit, I have no idea what benefit that actually provided.

If you're curious about exact details, here's everything you want to know about base defense facilities:

https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8460.0.html

The short answer is 4 OC radars in a base means never seeing those pesky demons again if you decide it's worth the expense   You can get by with as little as 2 if you want to reload (a lot).  Flak cannons are much more cost effective but needs "cannon defenses" which needs a lot of random techs to get like humanist soldier, lacc/spitfire and light cannon.  Flak towers are pretty much trash, just use the radars if you want defense and don't have cannons.

I don't think hitting the ufo but not shooting it down does anything to deployments, but I'm just going off experience there.

Regarding spy zepellins being useless:  I made that comment back when all of the military ships were HKs, now the skies are (slightly) less dangerous.  Still probably not worth it, but it's not quite as a bad anymore.  The zeppelin is a nice way to shove more gals into a mansion mission if you want to squad wipe even more gals more looters.

Also:  Expeditions are pretty cheap if they get shot down, so you can use those if you want. When I was trying a convoy/expedition game I actually sold my radar and just used an expedition that never returned to base and just delayed mission expirations and acted as radar xD

@Dogbarian
Someone said UFO/TFTD engine is actually 3D despite looking archaic. If you select a soldier and hit first-person screenshot (F10 default) and then open in it some picture viewer you will get some idea how game interprets stuff. If your solder is looking at small/medium/large units when you screen it you should be able to understand what relative unit sizes pertain to. Personally I never gave enough of a damn to investigate myself as it never played a noticeable role in actual gameplay. But if anyone can be bothered to display hitbox diagrams for comparison in the future I'd be interested to see that. Anyway I don't remember sizes being explicitly explained anywhere in-game besides for immersion sake in occasional armor description. If it were really that important I wager it would be a proper stat, like resistances.

I was curious about this a while ago as well and delved into some older forum posts.  Turns out there actually is some significant unexpected gameplay effects of the 3d system: the "front/side/back" armor values are actually not quite as reliable as you would expect.  If someone is shooting right at your face straight at you there's a small chance of your side armor being hit, same with someone shooting your side having a slight chance of hitting front/back.  There's also no averaging, so a 40/20/20/20 armor hit on a diagonal is going to either hit the 40 or 20 randomly.

Generally doesn't make much difference except for tactical vests/armor which are much riskier than expected.  I've no idea how this affects melee, but at least in my experience melee hits exactly where you'd expect, with diagonals being 50/50

As for relative unit sizes playing a role:  Basically just pretend you're going to be hit like 3-5% more often in very large units lol.  The actual shooting mechanics in vanilla were just straight up weird, like I think shooting accuracy just narrows the potential firing cone with ~120% actually being an always perfect shot, but 100% generally hitting you anyways due to being a "very close non-perfect shot".  A large hitbox would mean more of those near misses being actual hits.  How much of this made it to openxcom I don't know, but I assume all of it from their development philosophy.  I'm just going off what I read online, so just take this with a grain of salt.

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Accuracy_formula has some useful stuff at the bottom
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Firing_Accuracy_Testing for extreme nerdery

[legionof1]

I can safely say it was all of it in this case. Not that it really matters much, the "big" armors tend to hard stop most things at there tech level, so taking more hits then a smaller unit is kinda irreverent. Taking 6 extra pistol hits does not matter if the pistol has zero ability to penetrate.

[Dogbarian]

If you're curious about exact details, here's everything you want to know about base defense facilities:

https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8460.0.html

The short answer is 4 OC radars in a base means never seeing those pesky demons again if you decide it's worth the expense   You can get by with as little as 2 if you want to reload (a lot).  Flak cannons are much more cost effective but needs "cannon defenses" which needs a lot of random techs to get like humanist soldier, lacc/spitfire and light cannon.  Flak towers are pretty much trash, just use the radars if you want defense and don't have cannons.

<snip>
Yeah, I read that post and I think my main takeaway then was "I'm not giving up that much space to building defenses!".      If they only raid me every once in a while, I'm good with them bringing me loot via delivery instead of takeout.  It does mean I need to keep a few troopers on hand in each base, but since I'm (happily) mistaken about the usefulness of peasants and slave soldiers in the current version, I'm good using them for that too.   A dog for sensing, a few decent guns, an LMG maybe, some demo & some anti-tank, and call it done.  And I think I'm actually pretty close to Cannon Defenses, just need one more thing to unlock Krazy Hanna and the path is basically there.

Regarding spy zepellins being useless:  I made that comment back when all of the military ships were HKs, now the skies are (slightly) less dangerous.  Still probably not worth it, but it's not quite as a bad anymore.  The zeppelin is a nice way to shove more gals into a mansion mission if you want to squad wipe even more gals more looters.

Also:  Expeditions are pretty cheap if they get shot down, so you can use those if you want. When I was trying a convoy/expedition game I actually sold my radar and just used an expedition that never returned to base and just delayed mission expirations and acted as radar xD

Yeah, I think your post was one of the major contributors to me thinking about that.  Probably won't bother with Pigeon now, and I've started 2 more bases since then (so up to 4), but if I get zeppelins soon, I may use one or two to cover holes.  I'll have to look to see where I'm at with research, compared to say, hyperwave decoders (which I'm pretty sure are not close yet).

I can safely say it was all of it in this case. Not that it really matters much, the "big" armors tend to hard stop most things at there tech level, so taking more hits then a smaller unit is kinda irreverent. Taking 6 extra pistol hits does not matter if the pistol has zero ability to penetrate.

Yeah, exactly, taking a few extra hits for zero damage is pretty irrelevant! 

In fact, if the "bigger" armor can better block a buddy standing behind it, that's actually a good thing.



As far as the debate on save usage, where I am on that is that my free time is valuable, and limited, so with what I do have, I want to enjoy playing, particularly this and other mods as a new experience.  But I don't want to redo a whole bunch of stuff, because that means some of my time got "wasted".  I don't mind losing troopers, or having a lot of them spend a long time injured, but I don't particularly want to lose a lot of game progress either.  So a base wipe, yeah, I might have to think about reloading, but at the same time, as I said above, I don't mind over-preparing for something that might never happen.  I do take a lot of extra gear with me on missions to be prepared for unforeseen circumstances (like the first time I ran into Zombie Troopers). But at the same time, I do save during combats, more to guard against a crash (and that's more my computer than the mod, by the way).  I'm not going to reload because I got ambushed, or did something stupid.  I have also saved as a "test" before trying new things from time to time, but, as it happens, for nearly all of those, I've accepted the outcome of the test and moved on.  But I don't care about e-penis size, so I'm not going to play super hard core challenge mode or anything similar.  I play for my own entertainment.  Sometimes that does mean reloading and replaying something, because it is fun to solve the tactical puzzle. 

Thanks for everyone's input!

[thevideogameraptorboggle]

Coming back to this after a while, (my last save says it was in August of 2019), two questions I have.

1. What are the biggest changes that have been made to the game since then?

2. What are the best strategies to deal with the Shadow Realm? I use Slave Soldiers, and without fail, three-quarters of my men get stuck in cages as the rest get slaughtered. Failing that, how would editing my save file to reduce the difficulty work? I am stuck with nothing to research, and the Shadow Realm is an insurmountable challenge. I wish to lower the difficulty just to clear the first Shadow Realm mission, as I think the rest will be easier once I can start with actual weapons.

[Nilex]

1) Been around for 6 months playing a single playthrough so I'm not the best to give an answer but you can skim through the changelog. Not that much to read and largest changes are at the top of every new patch section anyway. To me the biggest "feel good" change, from looking at older YT videos, is new UI coloring scheme.

2) Updating during active battle, especially from such an old version, is bound to cause problems. It is better to finish the battle in old version (J16 by the looks of it) then perform update on geoscape. Alternative is to reload a save before Shadow Realm after update, if you have it.
Difficulty can be lowered by simply editing "difficulty: X" line near the top of file. Lower X value. In theory it should work. I recommend "1" because "0" may impose research locks.
Shadow Realm hasn't changed it seems. Same deal with the cages even today, but there are two Hammers on map which can be used to destroy cage walls (maybe newer patch addition, idk). Later on you can bring an ultra-rare Saint suit to punch your way out and wreak fiery havoc on helpless demons from afar.
As for how to unstuck your research - use the Tech-Tree Viewer accessed by "Q" on geoscape. Or by middle-clicking an item in sell screen, to start you off somewhere familiar. You'll get the hang of it soon enough. Assuming the TTV is new to you, lol.

[thevideogameraptorboggle]

Difficulty can be lowered by simply editing "difficulty: X" line near the top of file. Lower X value. In theory it should work. I recommend "1" because "0" may impose research locks.
Shadow Realm hasn't changed it seems. Same deal with the cages even today, but there are two Hammers on map which can be used to destroy cage walls (maybe newer patch addition, idk). Later on you can bring an ultra-rare Saint suit to punch your way out and wreak fiery havoc on helpless demons from afar.

Thank you!

[thevideogameraptorboggle]

Can I get a reminder of what files I need to copy over to update to a new version?

I tried copying over the UFO and USER folders and it's not working.

Running it through wine, but all the previous versions worked fine.