Stuff I'd love to see in XPiratez!

[Solarius Scorch]

 He won't switch over to Xenonauts, nor will any other serious modder. Xenonauts are absolutely horrible to mod for many reasons, for example every gun/armour combination requires a full separate sprite set; this is not something you can work around.
Also Xenonauts gameplay was rather disappointing, even at the time before OpenXCom... But that's not really on topic.

[Eddie]

-some way to tell if an enemy can see me. It never feels that camouflage is working
-camouflage never seems to work

"Is-seen-by-enemy" indicator would be too much, but "is-standing-in-darkness" indicator would be good.

The thing about camouflage and darkness is, it gets compleately negated by enemies with sniper/spotter behavior like spartans. If you hit a spotter enabled enemy from perfect cover, your unit is still revealed. For two to three rounds, the enemy has maphack on any spotted/revealed unit and can target them anywhere if there is LoF.
This AI behaviour is very counterintuitive. The AI is, in fact, cheating.

In this case, camouflage is only useful to avoid rection fire.

[BBHood217]

Xenonauts had some neat ideas and we do have it to thank for the Academy drone, but the lategame turned into a grind nearly on par with TFTD.

[ivansanchez]

All this and no discussion yet of Xenonauts?

Their map is a platee carrée projection*. That alone disqualifies the game for me, because I'm a map nerd and the UFO:EU geoscape was the best thing ever**.

(* And their game engine doesn't work around that... travelling 45 degrees of longitude in Siberia takes the same amount of time than 45 degrees of longitude at the equator, which is totally wrong.)

(** Except the fact that UFO:EU used compass heading and OpenXCom uses great circles, as it should be.)

[Ethereal_Medic]

Have Xenonauts on the drive as well. Gosh I can't bother myself to play this game either.
It has 2 seperate games in it. A wanna-be Xcom game and a tactical-dogfight simulator. I can't win those simulations on my own and just went with auto-resolve in case of good odds.

Base-building and management is quite meh and the crackdown missions against you are a pain to defend against with no real choice for choke-point construction.
Soldiers increase slowly in stats and every rookie with poor starting stats (TU and Firing are pretty much the only useful stats) are not worth the money or time to squeeze into your craft.

Later on you can airstrike everything to make your game free-2-win.

[ivansanchez]

"Is-seen-by-enemy" indicator would be too much, but "is-standing-in-darkness" indicator would be good.

Oh, this would be sweet. I don't know if the game engine allows for that, though.

Otherwise, it'd be nice that there is no immediate threshold between "unit in darkness" and "unit in full light". If my memory serves right, any unit on a square with illumination at level 6 or better is considered fully lit. Rather than that, I'd like visibility to increase with the light level.

Something like "at illumination level 5 or worse use night vision range; at illumination level 20 or better use day vision range; and in between those values do a linear interpolation".

[rezaf]

It all about the right tool/damage type for the situation rezaf, getting through the game with only one weapon for all situations is not the way its designed.

It's not about wanting to use "one (type of ) weapon". I have a pretty broad range of stuff, starting with Bows and some projectile smallarms (I never use them, really) to Laser Pistols, Rifles and then Assault Lasers, all sorts of grenades and explosives, Mortars and Bazookas, still some Shotguns (the Laslock Shotgun is especially versatile) and a couple of melee and stun weapons (I also hardly ever use)... I trew out most other stuff, because most of it just is pretty useless.
I just mentioned the Assault Laser because at least it CAN bring down those enemies in the end. I would expect specialized weapons to do their job - noone should survive being hit in the face by an anti-tank rifle. Sadly, X-Com has no physics, otherwise the victim should be killed by being thrown around alone, but ... yeah, this weapon is regularly shrugged off by Marsec Bodyguards.
The Heavy Slug Thrower sounds like it should have some oomph, but it reliably underperforms despite massive TU consumption.
Grenades? Mortar fire? Explosives? Specialized projectile weapons? None of that stuff works.
I CAN work my way around it 75% of the time, but it just server to drag out missions.

And this is just one area of the mod. I really love that there's so much stuff in XPiratez (even though not all of it suits my taste), but there should be much more "gating". I should not have the Stone Axe, Javelins, some Musket variant, a Laser Rifle and a Plasma Pistol all available as research projects at the same time. $0.02 and all, sure.

Btw., NuXCom is great for one playthrough and then forgettable. (Xenonauts is just X-Com but not quite as good, and who needs that?)

[niculinux]

Some thoughts:

1) may be the x-grog barrels taken on a missio be refillable like the the canteens? since these are i don't see why not, plus once gals learn to make it, the tradeoff is that is veery unwieldy to handle in battle. I found rather sttange that bandages and medkits cannot be used on the user itself, but whatever☺

2) modify "duplicate" weapons? for instance the six shooter and ol revolver are similar, i'd keep the ol revolver (with sprite of six shooter, i like it) and  reokace the shooter with a xbow pistol, a short version of crossbow that is the opposite (no penslty with close combat). same the snubby and magnum; hiw about to use the sprite in ooenxcom files and replace one of these (snubby) with something original es: with a derringer .22 featured in the game as "lil pistol"? (bit poweeful thatn the hooldout pistol but with more reduced range and only 2 tshots of course)☺

3) some less advanced firearms like the messer may be buyable as soon as researched in the early game? since seems to be commond and not powerful?

4) how about ancient firearms, like a , a possible "early" version of the mortar? may be unlocked with the blaxk market, and supposed to be oitdated when gals learn to manufacture assault cannon? or even a gatling machinegun, an early black market machinegun?

[LouisdeFuines]

I`d like to see an option to view pedia entries out of the production screen, when clicking with a mouse button.

[legionof1]

It's not about wanting to use "one (type of ) weapon". I have a pretty broad range of stuff, starting with Bows and some projectile smallarms (I never use them, really) to Laser Pistols, Rifles and then Assault Lasers, all sorts of grenades and explosives, Mortars and Bazookas, still some Shotguns (the Laslock Shotgun is especially versatile) and a couple of melee and stun weapons (I also hardly ever use)... I threw out most other stuff, because most of it just is pretty useless.
I just mentioned the Assault Laser because at least it CAN bring down those enemies in the end. I would expect specialized weapons to do their job - noone should survive being hit in the face by an anti-tank rifle. Sadly, X-Com has no physics, otherwise the victim should be killed by being thrown around alone, but ... yeah, this weapon is regularly shrugged off by Marsec Bodyguards.
The Heavy Slug Thrower sounds like it should have some oomph, but it reliably under performs despite massive TU consumption.
Grenades? Mortar fire? Explosives? Specialized projectile weapons? None of that stuff works.
I CAN work my way around it 75% of the time, but it just server to drag out missions.

And this is just one area of the mod. I really love that there's so much stuff in XPiratez (even though not all of it suits my taste), but there should be much more "gating". I should not have the Stone Axe, Javelins, some Musket variant, a Laser Rifle and a Plasma Pistol all available as research projects at the same time. $0.02 and all, sure.
snip

At least in your example you sound like your expecting to rapidly kill one of the top 15 sturdiest enemy units types with weapons that barely exceed there armor in avg damage. Alot of the more difficult foes take several gals at once or multiple turns to kill. Once everything starts getting armored and shielded your rarely gona one shot anything even with the strongest late game tools. This is by design, if you want one shots and quick tactical battles this is the wrong game for em.

[rezaf]

hE

At least in your example you sound like your expecting to rapidly kill one of the top 15 sturdiest enemy units types with weapons that barely exceed there armor in avg damage. Alot of the more difficult foes take several gals at once or multiple turns to kill. Once everything starts getting armored and shielded your rarely gona one shot anything even with the strongest late game tools. This is by design, if you want one shots and quick tactical battles this is the wrong game for em.

Heh, see, this is why I wrote initially I realize it's a pipe dream. There's always people wearing the "deal with it" glasses and no matter how crazy something is, they'll defend it with "go join the other toddlers if it's too much for you".
Do I expect to be able to kill an enemy the game literally throws at me by the dozen in one shot? I certainly do not.
Do I expect him to fall if I use the best tools available to me with a dozen gals, all concentrating fire on that one enemy? I certainly do.

[Ethereal_Medic]

Pretty much everything should die in 1-2 shots if you hit it with a plasma-destroyer.
Slugthrower rolls 50-150% so it's alot more reliable against soft targets.

[legionof1]

hE
Heh, see, this is why I wrote initially I realize it's a pipe dream. There's always people wearing the "deal with it" glasses and no matter how crazy something is, they'll defend it with "go join the other toddlers if it's too much for you".
Do I expect to be able to kill an enemy the game literally throws at me by the dozen in one shot? I certainly do not.
Do I expect him to fall if I use the best tools available to me with a dozen gals, all concentrating fire on that one enemy? I certainly do.

Not trying to play the "git gud scrub" card Rezaf but needing multiple turns to down difficult foes, before you get to the end game, is one of the balance targets. Your expected to need alot of time/work/risk to beat these foes. I would say your having the expected experience and not to be discouraged or angry. This is a very hard mod compared to vanilla xcom, and i wouldn't call that easy.

Going  back to the Marsec bodyguard example. He is balanced to shrug off basically everything non melee, before lasers, the exceptions are chem because it chews up his armor very quickly, even it does little damage, allowing other weapons to be effective and bio, because nearly all bio weapons ignore 50% or more armor. However the early delivery tools for those damage types are pretty short range so risk is involved. Even more risky but more effective take a hammer or pickax to his backside and he will be dead in a few swings. Melee can kill anything in the game with hardly more then starting tech, but getting into position for it is risky and takes no small amount of practice to make work.

Bodyguard armor analysis bootypedia page screenshots included, in case you dont know what your up against yet.
 

[rezaf]

It'd be a-ok if we only saw one of 'em guys once in a new moon, but even medium sized vessels sport half a dozen or more of them.
Conveniently parked in a corner of the map with a cannon that shoots nuclear warheads when turn 1 ends.
Sorry, you just cannot sell this to me as good game design.

I did try this same mod a year and a half ago, but since then difficulty has been dialed up to a point where I have a hard time enjoying the experience. Have the design fundamentals changed since then?

This is not the first and definately not the last mod to go this course. You have a hardcore audience that sticks with the mod all the time, and not just ties it once every two years like I do. For those players, the utter chaos that is research in XPiratez is not an issue, because they have hindsight and know which things are important when. And ridiculous enemies are not that much of an issue either, because chances are there ARE weapons somewhere in the research tree which at lease increase survivability of your own gals, but that does not help at all the new player that is clueless about those things.

That's why the notion of the mod at least telling you what you should be researching or should have researched at certain intervals.
Another option would be to have more gating, i.e. you transition between enemy types only at a time when you are reasonably prepared. The earlier version of XPiratez had a huge issue in that Mutant Progroms would far too often spawn with Star God Guardians, against which you had no chance early on. This time around, I only faced those guys in a single progrom (of about 20 now), and I just legged it. Their psi is also way overpowered, but since these are probably end game enemies, that might be ok. I'm still struggling to get a voodoo infrastructure going and thus cannot say anything about that.

[Dioxine]

Dioxine ever decides to transfer over to Xenonauts I'll follow for sure.

Never. Xenonauts are hostile to moding, and pretty much inane code-wise. I modded Xenonauts before moving here. Loss of time and effort.

It'd be a-ok if we only saw one of 'em guys once in a new moon, but even medium sized vessels sport half a dozen or more of them.

That is complete bullshit my friend and you know it. Farming Supply Ships does not count as normal experience.