kottis

Hello, after half year break, I played a little bit with the actual version of x-division again and found something strange. In "Charons changes psi sounds" mod there is a gameconfig.xml which changes the attribute gain in each ground combat quit a lot - you get now more or less infinite amounts of attribute points. Is this intended?.

That's nice to hear. I am aware that it should be more difficult than pokemon. The problem results in the general need, to stun every alien to progress in research. With so many different alien typs present, whereby most of the specialist already dead in the beginning, its very hard. Maybe a solution would be to give access to missed research topics by an alternate way. This could be something like doing 10 corvette crash sites. This would serious delay your research if you have no luck with specialist, but in the end you can be sure to at least get the research topic. But that's only a suggestion. For now getting shock weapons solve most of the problem, since its easy to stun. The command room should be hard but not 10 crowded aliens. Unfortunately I don't have a save anymore, but it was a cruiser or bomber. Regarding kinetic weapons: Its only a balance issue due to the powerful drones present from the very beginning. However a rocket launcher solves most of this problem Regarding carry capacity: Yeah, I am aware of that but I dont have the self discipline to do this. With the current weight limited system there will be no solution, the system should be slot limited. So I will just just tweak the base carry capacity a bit.

Hello, I’m currently at the end of phase two and want to give my impressions so far (veteran difficult, v. 99.3). - Airfight: I have 5 bases and each has only 3 Aerius/Corsairs with the upgraded spear cannons (great vs 3 heavy alien fighter). There is simply no need for torpedo bombers or missiles. I can easily bring down every UFO so far, mostly using one aerius as a bait and the other two going behind the ufo, same or better with Corsairs. This feels a little bit to easy for me, maybe increase the HP of all larger UFO by 50% and the damage. of the torpedoes too. - Stunning aliens: This is really complicated, it’s a save & load to get the desired ones. Especially because they are so aggressive in the beginning of the mission. It would be nice if the alien specialist can stay defensive in the ufo. But not the command room! - Ufo command room: 8 Androns and 2 small drones and a medium one require too much try and error. You should limit the number of aliens staying there to max 4. - Alien storming out of the ufo after breaching the door: Its to easy, you have just to set up a trap to kill them all. I have never seen the inside of a corvette!  Some alien should stay inside, distributed in the ship. But only a few! - Xenomorph predators/warriors needs more HP or needs to be faster. - My general feeling is that kinetic weapons are much better, mostly because of drones, which are my main fear enemy. Additionally they have a good mitigation, so are useful vs. Androns as well. - The base carry capacity is to low. I normally total overload my soldiers, and start to remove stuff at the begin of each mission. If I then need something I simply ran back. This is tedious, especially with new recruits. Due to the many different enemies you have to prepare for everything! - There should be a slightly increase in the general stats of new recruits during the game (+1 per month maybe). To train new soldiers in simple missions is boring. So far really a great mod, but needs some polishing.

Hello, I am looking to modify the general health recovery time of injured soldiers after ground missions. The medical center provides a boost here, but I dont know if there are any numbers in the files which can be adapted. So is it possible at all? Thanks.

Thanks, when do you plan to release version 0.99 of x-division?

Hi, I am having some questions about installing the mod. So far I installed the standard version of xenonauts with steam and manually installed the mod + patches and it worked correctly (besides the invisible xenomorph?!). However, in the install guide its mentioned that the mod is for 1.09 & X:CE 31. So did I have to manually install X:CE 31 (steam is at X:CE 33 currently) and than the x-division mod? If yes, what's about the additional mods in the X:CE, did I have to deactivate them in the mod manager? Thanks.

One of my mods requires ufo datacores for advances weapon production. For example you need 2 light scout cores for a laser pistol, 2 corvette cores for plasma pistol and 2 cruiser cores for MAG pistol. Similar with the other weapons, up to a Battleship core for MAGStorm. So if you want the top tier weapons you have to do the ground missions. I have just started to play with these changes, so I cant say anything for balancing yet. But I think this is one way to go to make mid / late game ground missions more mandatory.

Of course there is a fine border, but most of the players achieve air superiority within month 3 or 4 which results in always repeating crash sites. The trick is to give players, who are to successful, new challenges and one could be an increased alien progress. If you just in increase the starting difficult level and so the alien progress too, most players will more struggling in the early month but gain air superiority later too. Of course this mechanism is nothing for the normal or easy difficult.

I just played a little with the vehicle parameters to improve there usability, as done in kabills mod. One interesting point is required space of vehicles at each drop ship. Default it's 2 but some testing has shown that it can be set to 0 or 1 without CTD. For my next play through I will use kabill mod and additional set the boarding space variable to 0, so you can have a vehicle in each mission without loosing soldier space (its get a little bit cramped in the chinock, but it's worked). To balance this I will half the vehicle accuracy in general. So vehicles are more of scouting / protection / suppression and you need still your team for kills. The reason behind this, is that actually no one uses vehicles especially in the early stage of the game. That#'s a pity since they offer an increased tactical possibilities and variety.

That's a pity, it would be nice to have an element to punish players who are to sucessful for the choosen difficult.

Hey, I am wondering if its possible to increse the global ticker value if certain events occur. The reason behind is the ability to punish the player, if he is to succesful by shooting down UFOs), by in increasing the alien progress. On the other hand you could slow the ticker a little if the players fails to much or has a bad RNG. In the gamesconfig.xml you have the possibility to increase the ticker if certain UFO are present, for example <researchTicksPerMinute value="0" comment="An alien research mission generates this many alien ticker points per minute of the UFO being on the map." />, however its set to 0 since it punish bad players even more. Is there any varialbe which is connected to shoot down UFOs or something else what could be used to identify succesful players?

Maybe the first question should be what is the current escort system lacking off? For me that's 1) all mission /ufo types should be escort available 2) setting the escort chance for each mission / ufo type from the very beginning 3) if escalation is available - setting the escalation value for each mission / ufo type For 1) that<#s already implemented by adding e:alien... to the AM xmls (scout and research missions escorts however has to be added in code) For 2) and 3) it gets a little bit tricky; with the current system you have 3) with the lack of setting the limit values exactly (lowerbound and upperbound), so just adding variables here in each AM file would be fine. For 2) you need an additional minimum and maximum change for escorts, which only comes to play if the chance of escort from the vanilla calculation is smaller or bigger than the minimum and maximum. So just to summarize, if you want complete freedom you need 4 additional variables in the AM files and some coding (lowerbound, upperbound, minimum, maximum).

So if I do the math correct there is a average chance of 50% for each ship type that escorts are generated. And with the available parameters there is no way to change this.

Hm, but what happens after battleships? There is no further ship. In my test escorts for battleships appeared around June/July. As for the dynamic ufos mod, after disabling all missions except research (high ticker value), no escorts were generated even after 12 months. Maybe there is a simple boolean in the code which disables escorts. I will play with the suggestions above maybe there is walk around to have always escorts.

That's exactly what I have seen in my tests. After a certain time after each UFO type escorts are appearing. There is still the point that some missions have no escorts at all, like research and scouting. For ground attack you can enable escorts by adding the e:alien... rows in the xml.

If you mean the ticker for the first escort (i.e. e:alien.fighter) its always set to 0. Heavy fighter and interceptor were default. Or is there an other parameter?

Ok after some testing and playing with the parameters in the missions xml I am a little confused. Here the results: During testing all other missions start ticker were set to 1000 (worked fine), veteran difficult choosen, radar range set to 5000, funding damage set to 0.1, single base Lets start with air superiority: ES (escort chance) = 0 ; TK (Ticker, when mission type starts in game time) = 0 Result: starts appearing end of Okt. (only a sinlge mission of each wave was possible, “once per wave” parameter has no influence) ES = 500; TK = 0;  escorts starts appearing end of Okt. ES = 1000; TK = 0;  escort starts appearing end of Okt. Terror mission: ES = 0; TK = 0;  escorts starts appearing end of Okt. . (only a sinlge mission of each wave was possible, “once per wave” parameter has no influence) ES = 500; TK = 0;  escorts starts appearing end of Okt. ES = 1000; TK = 0;  escorts starts appearing end of Okt. Constructions mission: same like terror Ground attack: (default no escorts at all, if fighter are added escorts will be created) ES = 0; TK = 0;  escorts starts appearing end of Okt. ES = 500; TK = 0;  escorts starts appearing end of Okt. ES = 1000; TK = 0;  escorts starts appearing end of Okt. Research: no escort was created regardless of parameters Further points: After the appearing of a new UFO types no more escorts are created, only after 1 ingame month new escorts started again. This was the same for all UFO types. Escort chance seems to have no influence, maybe its an artifact from previous versions and is overwritten by same global command.

The high number for “escort chance” in AM_airsuperiority.xml was 1000, but if its linked to the ticker, I would expect to seen no escort at all in the beginning. And with set to 0 there would be escorts from the start, if the general mission ticker is zero too. I will play a little with these values maybe there a other way.

Currently, I try to add always escorts to air superiority ufos to test some aircraft properties. This should possible by setting the “escort chance” in AM_airsuperiority.xml to high number. However this seems to have no influence at all. I use a fresh installed version and tried to chance the escort change in different missions types too, but with no result. Has anyone an idea where to change the escort change? Or is there a global variable which overrides everything?

Thanks, I will look at that.

Actually the only real resource to produce high tier weapons, armors and aircrafts are alloys and alenium which can easily be collected with low risk missions (there are a few exceptions). So in mid and late game its not worth to do the high level alien ships missions more than once, since most of the required alloys and alenium are already present. A simple way to change this are specific requirements for each produced item additional to alloys and alenium. My first idea are datacorese form different alien ships. So for example you need a scout datacore for a laser pistol and a corvette datacore for scatter laser. I know the items.xml the manufractum.xml and the required properties to change. However where can I change the number of items in each ufo type? And is it possible to add more than one datacore to each ship?

That’s right, auto closing doors which can’t be closed manually would be nice. However you have to close them automatically after the soldiers and the alien turn, otherwise it would be to asymmetric. But if you do this you would get the exploit problem again (in a reduced way)

I am looking for a solution for the door open/close exploit, to make UFO assaults a little more challenging. Since I am very lazy sometimes, it’s hard for me to not use the exploit, especially if it’s late and will finish the mission. There are rumors that some guys here have the disciple to not using the exploit. (I am not one of them.) So, some thoughts about solving the exploit: 1)Set the TU for opening doors to 95%. So a guy who opened the door can’t move anymore and would be open to get killed in the next alien turn. However I assume that no alien will open any door anymore and you can still exploit it with 2 guy for open and closing doors only. 2)Doors opened only one time can’t be closed anymore. This would be a nice solution, however I don’t have a clue how to implement this, even if it’s possible at all. 3)Currently all ufo doors are closing at the end of the ET turn / beginning of soldier turn. Maybe, if this could be changed in doors open at the begin of soldier and ET turn together with high TU cost for doors closing, the exploit will be minimized. However it would be a little odd if you close a door and a magic hand opened it at the end of your turn. Additional, I think this is beyond the standard modding and requires some changes in the source code. So if you have any useful thought about that or even a solution, please post it here.

Ok, thats a pity, than setting the LOSNightMultiplier to 0.9 is the way to go.

Actually my night missions are a big fat chemlights throwing party, to overcome the LOS penalty. As a result my night missions are daylight missions with a much slower pace. This is quite boring, so avoiding night missions is the thing to do, if possible. One idea to make night missions more playable, is the overall reducing of the sighting distace for ET and soldiers. So you get something like a close combat fight without the sighting bonus for ET. The problem is I dont kow where to adjust the sighting distance for night missions in generall. So far, I can only find the LOSNightMultiplier and the DefaultViewRange, which is not sufficient. (Ok u could change the DefaultViewRange everytime u do a night mission, but thats not practical. Has anyone an idea how this can be turned out? And is there an individual sighting range for each alien?