X-Com Files feedback

[Delkatar]

I would love something like that and it would certainly significantly decrease the amount of save loading when I don't pay attention and get someone killed for no good reason. In my mind, unless you're one of the best players, you should be losing people in any mission with serious opposition unless you have a significant tech advantage armour wise compared to the enemy's weapons. However, at the same time replenishing your losses should be less tedious. One of the things I like about X-Com is that you can and often do lose people. What I don't like, at least in the original and most mods for it is how tedious often is training them. That was one of the features I loved about Enemy Unknown/Within - decent ranked soldiers as mission rewards that made losses and long recovery times in the Long War case much easier to bear even when I othewise had a long and diverse roster.

Frankly now that I think about it, this is actually my biggest gripe with the mod - how many tedious missions there are and even when they're not longer vital money wise you need to do them to train rookies and I'm at the point I really want to skip a lot of them.

As far as research goes, there might be more topics for it from undercover, especially Osiron ones, however I'm not willing to get people killed without decent armour for dubious gain. As far as that particular faction goes, I'll simply wait for the freighter mission to spawn again and hope it will be enough to progress with them. Once I got a lucky spawns with Lotus/Exalt and manage to capture the officers I need to unlock their HQ and hopefully something that's not already obsolete, I would have more things to research. A part of it is luck again - there were a lot of weapons that would have been useful if I got them earlier not only as initial research but requisition to have a reliable source of ammo. In this playthrough due to being stuck unable to capture Exalt/Lotus officers I was able to catch up with research twice and now that I'm basically ignoring the alliens after the two initial landings when I got lucky to get a bunch of captures, I'm close to caught for research.

That said, last time I payed I did get a nice cyberweb mission with two live captures and hopefully some new toys. At the same time I got a mission to strike at a cyborg factory I'll be doing next time I play and there should be some nice goodies in there.

I've seen at least one more person complain about the rate at which missions spawn, however in his case I think it was Dagon or Lotus that were mostly dry. In mine it's Exalt I'm not seeing much off and until recently I had to skip a lot of their missions I actually got due to spawning in a death trap. I had similar experienced with the Lotus ones - more missions, however unless the map is quite open the risk of ninjas sneaking to my people and murdering a couple before I knew they were there was too great. Now that I have large transports and can afford to bring dogs/scout drones/tanks without compromising the firepower of my away team, I could enjoy a lot more tactical flexibility and go for officer captures without too great I risk I recon.

Another note on research - splitting my scientists so each base was working on two or three projects at the same time feels like things wen't much faster than when I concentrated everyone on a single project. If I've been doing that from the start I might have been able to handle even more relevant research with just the two bases I had operational until recently, though that is just a gut feeling and I might be mistaken.

On another note about research - now that I'm actually familiar with what does what in the early game, even more research topics won't be too big an issue because I would remember the most important items to focus on and what I could delay depending on the circumstances and available resources. If I was willing to start this mod from the start, which I'm simply not. Once again, too many missions that are not fun yet practically mandatory to actually train my people.

I hope that Solaris will be able to do something about this in later versions of the mod. Just my feelings on the matter.

[Niewiem]

The spawning of missions is random - there is really not much that can be done about that. I was the one who got dagon really late

[Barth Gimble]

Sounds like maybe you're stuck in a similar situation to my first try of the game, a playthrough which I abandoned. I likewise hadn't been making good progress on research, and when aliens showed up I saw at once I simply wasn't going to be able to deal with them. Since revising my general strategy to make research my top priority, however, I feel pretty good about how I'm doing in my current game.

On the other issue, X-Com games of any kind that I've played really are all about the grinding experience. X-Com Files is no different, and certainly no worse, in that regard. Though it was years ago, not counting X-Com Files my experience was playing the original X-Com, TFTD, and Apocalypse. Despite devoting quite a lot of time to them, I never finished any of those games, because I eventually got bored and frustrated with the perpetual repetitive grinding of which most of the gameplay consists.

X-Com Files has the consolations of very good, intriuging, and multifaceted plots and themes which continue to fascinate me and make me want to continue playing-- so I can find out what will happen next in the story, rather than because I'm particularly interested in constantly exploring slightly different ways to kill the ten-thousandth enemy. This in my mind is the great achievement of the mod. It wouldn't be an X-Com game without the general style of gameplay, but the mod offers so much more as well to prevent degeneration into a mindless pixel-pushing experience.

[Delkatar]

That's just the thing - without getting luckier with certain missions or knowing that I had to repeatedly interrogate the same type of enemy, I'm almost caught up on available research minus certain older weapons that I've been using as padding when there was nothing useful for my labs to work on and that state of affairs happened already two times just before promotions II and III. Perhaps feedback in a report/dossier that interrogating the same type of captives again and again gives new research topics to work on? The few times I tried all I got was amusing comments from the staff - something to consider going for once everything else is researched for the time being and only if said captives won't serve better sold?

My two primary issues at this time is lack of better armour - aliens tend to one-shot people with the alloy vests/shield combo and I would need to spend a lot of time rebuilding my roster with psionically powerful people. The only silver lining is that once I have Exalt/Lotus missions next I can actually afford to throw my veterans into the fray and spend them to get the captives I need without caring even if most people that go on those missions come back in bodybags. Then the lucky survivors could be relegated as snipers, which should mitigate the effects of enemy psionics by keeping them as far away from the aliens as possible.

Any idea what exactly unlocks the personal armour so I can finally get few cybersuits? Is it something I get through the alloy research or do I need to capture and interrogate someone in the cults? I do have the implants not only researched but a few built, duarhreed manufacturing, the alloy vest and have either already researched or currently researching everything made available by studying the allien alloys - said vest, the shrapnel bomb, blades, etc.

[Barth Gimble]

The cyber armor seems pretty good to me, not something I've really seen my people get one-shotted much while wearing while fighting sectoids and snakemen (which means it's also great against human enemies). The personal armor isn't bad either, for this stage of the game. I think your trouble is likely that you're far off from personal armor, since once you get that cyber armor should follow quickly.

To get personal armor, you need:

Spoiler:

Precise Alloy shaping, Jumpsuit, Bio-Exo Suit, and Alien Power Systems.

From what you've described, you could have a problem because Precise Alloy shaping requires an alien alloy welder to unlock, and this is exactly the sort of item randomly found in many of the Osiron missions you said you passed on. The other two prerequisites are alien power systems and alien alloys engineering. Have you already gotten alien engineering? It's a prerequisite of alien alloys engineering, and it mostly comes from capturing Exalt and Black Lotus bosses-- exactly the two cults you haven't tackled yet.

While in general player dependence on knowledge gained during previous plays is a pretty bad thing, in a game as profoundly complex as this, there's really no way around it. I certainly empathize with the trouble of not knowing what needs to be done in order to progress with research-- as I said, I abandoned my first playthrough, in which I had quite a few hours invested, for exactly the same reason.

Really, with what you've got in your game, I would recommend the same advice as I gave for that lost base situation. The next few times an Osiron mission or a Black Lotus mission comes up, instead of thinking what a hassle it may be to play them out, just go there and use debug mode to capture everyone on the first turn so you can be done with it. You need the tech to salvage your game at this point, if you haven't the leisure of restarting as I did. Playing the game should be fun, not a chore, so if you need a few freebies here and there to stay motivated-- it's your game, make the most of it. 

[Delkatar]

Well, the next time Exalt/Lotus spawns I'm dropping a Skymarshall chock-full with veterans on their vests, with a few dogs and tanks. I'll probably sell one interceptor for the five man covert vehicle for when Osiorn covert mission spawns too. Meanwhile I'll hopefully have something worthwhile to research from the Cyberweb mission I just finished during my last game session and I do have a cyborg factory ready for assault next game.

As far as alien engineering goes, the only thing in that vein I had was a sectoid engineer that I got alive during my first successful landed mission - that one in fact lulled me in a false sense of security because I got out of there with five alive captives and only two dead rookies I used as scouts. On the alien missions that followed, things went downhill in a major way.

We'll see what it will take to unlock the precise alloy research.

[Solarius Scorch]

Oops, I never said thank you for your feedback, Delkatar. Sorry about that, feedback is crucial.

[Delkatar]

You're welcome! Those are just my impressions. Some of the root issues probably are due to luck and engine limitations. I could have gone for more bases earlier however considering that I was caught up on the vital research which I had available I didn't see the point. Later, when I had the spare money the alien invasion was a few months out and I concentrated on scrapping everything but two Dragonflies and getting the best interceptors and weapons for them that money could buy only to get unpleasantly surprised by the weapon restriction. Still, those early planes, the MiG-31 and the first Interceptor were perfectly able to kill everything I sent them after, which as it turned out later was counter-productive when those Sectoids came to visit one of my bases and managed to tear apart, largely through mind control and insane reaction shots basically all non-wounded soldiers I had.

Keep the great work!

By the way, will you put a prompt in one of the next versions that interrogating the same types of enemies multiple times could net something more important than amusing stories from the base personnel? If I was aware of that, it might have changed the playghtrough dynamic more than a year back and led me to some different conclusions of what was a good idea to do/build, including a secondary base or two to house captives awaiting interrogation. There were a few months I got a lot of cult missions back to back with a significant number of captured Dagon and Red Dawn personnel, including all kinds of officers that I ended up selling because I saw no other use of them once their type was interrogated once.

Don't get me wrong - there was a period that I was interrogating low level captives while everything I had available for research was weapons and weapon requisition of stuff that I deemed obsolete, that was shortly before Promotion III while I was building up my forces for the Alien invasion and I did it solely for the amusing blurbs which by itself were worth it at that point compared to what I could get by selling those captives.

[Solarius Scorch]

Nah, I'm not going to ad this much handholding. It's a mystery mod after all. And interrogating people should be within the player's interest anyway.

[Delkatar]

Yeah, interrogating them once. After that it's entirely possible for a player not to think of interrogating the same type of captive again. The first time I did it was actually by accident and after all I got was an amusing blurb from the staff I discarded doing so again unless I had captives available and nothing else useful to research. I'm I the only one who did the same before?

[Solarius Scorch]

To be absolutely honest, yes: I have no idea why one would arrive at such a conclusion. Even in vanilla it was not like this, as you could interrogate most alien ranks repeatedly.
Oh well, everyone is different.

[Delkatar]

I played very little vanila before finding openxcom and mods. Most of my X-Com experience has been with Enemy Within with the Long War mod. Needing to interrogate the same type of captive multiple times is a new for me and compared to every other type of research is counter-intuitive. If I got a new type of research unlocked the few times I did it I might have thought of doing it repeatedly. As I didn't I believed that it was just a nice flavour feature of X-Com Files. To add to that, the other mods I've tried - FMP which I played for some time a few years ago and more recently the WH40K one, in neither of them it occurred to me to interrogate the same time of captives multiple times.

[tkzv]

I played very little vanila before finding openxcom and mods. Most of my X-Com experience has been with Enemy Within with the Long War mod. Needing to interrogate the same type of captive multiple times is a new for me and compared to every other type of research is counter-intuitive. If I got a new type of research unlocked the few times I did it I might have thought of doing it repeatedly. As I didn't I believed that it was just a nice flavour feature of X-Com Files. To add to that, the other mods I've tried - FMP which I played for some time a few years ago and more recently the WH40K one, in neither of them it occurred to me to interrogate the same time of captives multiple times.

Vanilla allows to study each species-rank combination at least once. (Makes perfect sense to me.) If there's more to learn from a particular combination, they remain available, the biggest example being medics. As far as I know, megamods behave this way too.

[Delkatar]

Yeah - each type of alien, cultist, etc, once. Like sectoid soldier, engineer, navigator, the various types of cultist. After that, if you're unfamiliar with the potential to unlock new research topics and get just flavour text in interrogating some type of captive again it's natural to conclude that what you'll continue to receive by repeating it until you've ran out of it or it begins to repeat itself me thinks. I've done five or six repeated interrogations of various captured cult members both officers and lower ranked ones and all I got was very amusing but ultimately useless feedback that led me to conclude that I shouldn't be doing that until I didn't have anything better to research at the time.

[Solarius Scorch]

Well, now everything is clear
Have fun!