[1.65/X.CE V0.35.0] X-Division 1.00 Beta (1.00.11c)

[Charon]

17 minutes ago, Sectiplave said:

@kottis - This air game tactic of baiting large UFO's gets strongly countered by Phase 3 UFO's, the larger craft (and even one of the smaller ones) have equipment that means you need to bring down the UFO ASAP or have anti-missile weapons equipped.

But yes what you describe works maybe a little too well during Phase 1 and 2.

Nice to know, thx for the additional feedback.

[sgl]

Hi. U would like to report a bug. This is the third time that I have encountered this bug so I decided to get some help here. First time, after I shoot down small scout the ufo was with no graphics at all (there were only black titles instead of actual UFO displaying). After shooting some rockets and blowing up the doors I was able to see the inside opf ther ship so it was OK. Second time was very simillar to the first one but right now I'm in dead end. I shoot down large ufo (2 floors, additional doors on both sides of the ship), After I deal with the main doors, I'm going inside the UFO but I can't see anythiing inside of that ship - only the "outer" graphics of the UFO is displaying. Could anyone help me with it please ? Game is running with the latest patch, mod order is OK too. Sorry for my grammar, hope that everything is clear.

[drages]

32 minutes ago, sgl said:

Hi. U would like to report a bug. This is the third time that I have encountered this bug so I decided to get some help here. First time, after I shoot down small scout the ufo was with no graphics at all (there were only black titles instead of actual UFO displaying). After shooting some rockets and blowing up the doors I was able to see the inside opf ther ship so it was OK. Second time was very simillar to the first one but right now I'm in dead end. I shoot down large ufo (2 floors, additional doors on both sides of the ship), After I deal with the main doors, I'm going inside the UFO but I can't see anythiing inside of that ship - only the "outer" graphics of the UFO is displaying. Could anyone help me with it please ? Game is running with the latest patch, mod order is OK too. Sorry for my grammar, hope that everything is clear.

Hey. If you can share some saves,we can look for it. It looks a bug about missing mod files to me.

[sgl]

Hey drages, thanks for your quick reply. I will send you my saves in the moment. There are couple of issues along with the bug that I have described e.g. I have captured high rank aliens but I was not able to interrogate them until Alien leader was captured (I don't know if this is a bug really) I'm in the phase 3 I belive (if the game phases equals to the researches phases on my lab screen ?) but I don't have any meele weapons to manufacture and have only two armours for my xenonauts. It is not a big problem since I can manage to play the game so far, although it's quite strange.

[drages]

56 minutes ago, sgl said:

Hey drages, thanks for your quick reply. I will send you my saves in the moment. There are couple of issues along with the bug that I have described e.g. I have captured high rank aliens but I was not able to interrogate them until Alien leader was captured (I don't know if this is a bug really) I'm in the phase 3 I belive (if the game phases equals to the researches phases on my lab screen ?) but I don't have any meele weapons to manufacture and have only two armours for my xenonauts. It is not a big problem since I can manage to play the game so far, although it's quite strange.

This mod is highly alive capture related. If you miss many of them, it would be problem. Some research chains patched with updates but if you started the game before patch, it could create problems too. So anyway the next patch will be big and will have many new things so you would need to play a new game. There is time for it still so I hope to give you much quality mod with minimum bugs and problems. 

I will check the saves soon. Thx.

Edited September 28, 2016 by drages

[kottis]

14 hours ago, Charon said:

Trolololol, you are the first one to report that the airgame is too easy. But i get your point, the damage difference between what larger UFOs represent and how much dmg torpedos and missiles do is misrepresented. Ill put it on the list to get the air game revised.

That's nice to hear.

 

14 hours ago, Charon said:

The way you describe it is exactly the way i want it to be, so thats designed. Both points are important.

1. That the GC is a fight where the aliens are going to play you after THEIR tempo, and they are designed to respond with tactical lethal force and try to overwhelm you ASAP as a good squad would always do.

2. Stunning aliens is a serious job and should be difficult. This is not pokemon where you pack your pokeballs and get your 6 pokemon ready to gang upon 1 lonely monster at a time. To stun multiple aliens during 1 intense fire fighter takes skill, patience, prudence, and risk managenment at the same time. Sometimes you just roll unlucky and have to change your plan. A good plan is always open to changes.

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.

14 hours ago, Charon said:

Theres no trial and error in this game, you go with the flow. But we will look into the command room issue.

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.

 

14 hours ago, Charon said:

I agree but Drages wants them this way.

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

 

14 hours ago, Charon said:

Thats the game. Think about with what you want to load your soldiers with. Otherwise every soldier could have an unlimited inventar with unlimited items for every situation.

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. 

 

[drages]

@kottis

About kinetic weapons,

You can be right for phase 1 which the energy weapons are already weak because it's the first time and as a tutorial phase, the aliens don't have much resistance at all. With phase 2, nearly all melee aliens got good resistance against ballistic. Tanks and discs are nearly bullet proof.

To change this, i can buff the andron kinetic resistance for phase 1.. but as i said i dont care much about phase 1 because it's a peaceful phase.

You can wait ufos to land, terror and assault missions got specialists too.. for short, if we give an alternative, there is no reason to have it at first place.

[Charon]

1 hour ago, kottis said:

For now getting shock weapons solve most of the problem, since its easy to stun.

Nerf, nerf, nerf .. will be incoming :D.

[drages]

2 minutes ago, Charon said:

Nerf, nerf, nerf .. will be incoming :D.

If something is easy, it should not be in X-Division.

[Subcode]

18 hours ago, Sectiplave said:

@kottis - This air game tactic of baiting large UFO's gets strongly countered by Phase 3 UFO's, the larger craft (and even one of the smaller ones) have equipment that means you need to bring down the UFO ASAP or have anti-missile weapons equipped.

But yes what you describe works maybe a little too well during Phase 1 and 2.

I agree fully agree with Sectiplave, so don't worry kottis about the easy life you will see and feel the change between phase 2 and phase 3 air combat sooner than you prefer. 

P.S. Anyone has a good strategy against the heavy fighters in phase 3? They are really like pain in the ass for me and especially in connection with a big UFO. I try to get them first down, but mostly I don't have enough time and I come in the weapon range of a big UFO and than it is only a massacre on my side. I use mostly two sonda/heavy fighters with hyper or plasma missile and plasma gun and one bomber(lancer or foxtrott) with gravity torpedo. Maybe my weapon load out is shit? Once the fighters are down the big UFO is no problem with "bait technic".

Edited September 28, 2016 by Subcode

[Charon]

1 hour ago, Subcode said:

P.S. Anyone has a good strategy against the heavy fighters in phase 3?

Interceptors actually have a fatal weakness, especially as they become faster, which can be exploited pretty easily. And especially in Phase 3 where you have marauders available. I will say no more because i dont want to take the fun away but i featured this approach in my developer diaries videos already.

Try it with close range missiles ( piranha, etc ... ) and some different cannons.

[lazylegionspark]

 

On 9/27/2016 at 1:41 PM, Charon said:

Must have missed that question, sry.

Yes thats indeed the code line for the reveal after 20 turns. Charons Changes mod only config line is:

    <RevealAllTiles afterTurns="999" /> <!--For Town, SovietTown and XenoBase tilesets -->

XD

 

Good to see YOU back.

 

Thanks a bunch Charon. I had forgotten when I posted that you had left so when I released that I decided to want a couple weeks to check back. Gonna get back to playing me some Xenonaunts now and try to get to Phase 2 once more without being utterly steamrolled once I get there now that I now about the terror site cooldown bug. What a nasty and disgusting bug. Glad you guys have quashed it for the next version. Holy moly it made everything so unimaginably hard.

I will comment after a while on how this third playthrough's progress. I will only modify the reveal tile limit so don't think that I will make the game a breeze.

 

EDIT: Curious about something. When it comes to the installation, do I have to delete the scripts every time I put something in (Base mod delete script ->Patch 3 delete script -> Charon's changes delete script) or can I only do it once if I install everything at the same time? I would assume the later since nothing has been run yet,

Edited September 29, 2016 by lazylegionspark

[drages]

8 hours ago, lazylegionspark said:

 

 

Thanks a bunch Charon. I had forgotten when I posted that you had left so when I released that I decided to want a couple weeks to check back. Gonna get back to playing me some Xenonaunts now and try to get to Phase 2 once more without being utterly steamrolled once I get there now that I now about the terror site cooldown bug. What a nasty and disgusting bug. Glad you guys have quashed it for the next version. Holy moly it made everything so unimaginably hard.

I will comment after a while on how this third playthrough's progress. I will only modify the reveal tile limit so don't think that I will make the game a breeze.

 

EDIT: Curious about something. When it comes to the installation, do I have to delete the scripts every time I put something in (Base mod delete script ->Patch 3 delete script -> Charon's changes delete script) or can I only do it once if I install everything at the same time? I would assume the later since nothing has been run yet,

Yes after everything installed, just erase it before start to game. 

[pedropars]

Hey,i´m wondering if there´s any other place where i could download this mod ? MEGA just keeps giving me a bandwidth limit once i hit 20% or so of the download and waiting for the timer to run out so i can continue is not working because for some reason the damn thing just breaks after awhile,forcing me to start over after the time limit is up.

It´s the third time i have tried and failed to download and at this point i´m almost considering paying for premium so i can download X-Division

[drages]

Mega could make so limitation for some countries. 

You can wait for our big update, we will make it much better. Then we plan to upload whole mod again to some other places.

[lazylegionspark]

5 hours ago, drages said:

Yes after everything installed, just erase it before start to game. 

Thanks drages.

[Charon]

We are really going official with this.

This pops up on startup from now. What do you guys think ?

[Charon]

Xpost

6 minutes ago, Charon said:

45 minutes ago, Solver said:

Why balance? That's a great question. I believe that game design is an iterative process. Or should be treated as such. You come up with some ideas, you implement them, and you look how they feel. Are they fun? Do they sound better on paper than in practice? You have an iteration then, and in your next iteration you work on the idea further, or not. Better yet, an iteration that you do touches all the game systems, so you get to experience the new interaction.

45 minutes ago, Solver said:

So then I believe that after an iteration that's heavier in terms of design/new features, you should do a balance iteration. Not because your beta should be perfectly balanced but because balancing gives you a much better idea of whether your new systems are fun. Maybe a system that seemed unfun in the last iteration is actually quite fun after a balance pass. Maybe you find that it's actually a useless system after balancing - it's something that ends up either being unbalanced or very boring. That in particular is something that happens very often in design.

45 minutes ago, Solver said:

It just ends up giving you a better game with less work. I believe that approach to game design works far better than first trying to get your systems in place and then balancing them in another phase of development.

 

Thats exactly what is happening right now.

You might not know that, but we regularly bring out patches to the community which follow exactly the pattern you describe. To even begin to give you a detailed list would be exhausting, so lets go with 1 example.

 

Weapons/Shotgun

At the start of the thread I suspected that the shotguns were completely useless because of their high TU cost, and the feedback the people gave us were telling the same story. So in Patch 1, or Patch DAY 7 as we call it, we totally revised the shotgun/carbine system and put it in the patch. The feedback we got was overwhelming positive, so say that we didnt have a single person bitching about shotguns/carbines again and we also had quite a number of people telling us the shotgun now has a place in their game, not OP, not too weak - exactly as it should be.

After that was fixed, and tested enough, with enough feedback from the community, i revamped the stun damage for shotguns/carbines to its appropriate level for Patch 2.

Next iteration, next test run and the system for shotguns/carbines has stayed the same ever since Patch 2.

 

This is the way we work. We bring out a Patch. The community tests it throughly and gives their feedback and we implement it. Its not over the top to say that 80% of good feedback gets implemented into the game straight away, or better, gets put on the list, since we need a lot of time to code the stuff as well. So far we had 3 Patches and 4 feedback iterations.

The only reason we havent already put out Patch 4 is because you, Solver, give us so much to work and implement with. Patch 4 will change the game entirely but before proper feedback can get back, the game has to be properly coded. Furthermore it doesnt make sense to let people test things we are going to change anyway - like the Country retaken base mission, where it is still not clear how it will play out finally. At this point I want to stress that increasing the number of base sizes in the way i described would enrich the game the most at this point. Special missions hurray, but to increase the base limits is slightly more important.

What you also dont see is that we regularly get in touch with the people who play X-Division via Steam. People have a problem - we talk to them. People want to give us feedback - we talk with them. From special developer invitations with Drages and me to single chat feedback session - we do them regularly and consistently.

This all happens silently and fluently behind the scene. Brandon, our steam tester, gave us feedback about the vehicle problem that it would not "really" be worth it to take a vehicle on a GC. I had similar thoughts and this feedback pushed this point over the edge and into the system we have right now - vehicles dont take up space in the chopper anymore and unconditionnaly are an integrated part of the GC without any drawback for the player, except if they dont want to use vehicles which is fine as well. I believe this is one of the best decisions ever, which not a lot of people will notice because it integrates so fluently into their experience that they wont even believe it had ever been differently.

We also have a steam group and reddit feed.

 

Like i said you would know that if you would actually look. We work exactly the way you describe it and i would say our work epic is beyond the words you used to describe the process.

At least thats my oppinion.

How do you like the new picture i posted in the X-Division Beta thread ?

 

 

Edited September 29, 2016 by Charon

[pedropars]

12 hours ago, drages said:

Mega could make so limitation for some countries. 

You can wait for our big update, we will make it much better. Then we plan to upload whole mod again to some other places.

I see,i tried downloading through MEGA one more time but got hit by the limitation again so i think i´ll just follow your advice and wait for the next update

[Charon]

Just now, pedropars said:

I see,i tried downloading through MEGA one more time but got hit by the limitation again so i think i´ll just follow your advice and wait for the next update

Where could we conviniently upload it beside nexus ?

[pedropars]

Just now, Charon said:

Where could we conviniently upload it beside nexus ?

ModDB i guess ? Or if possible split the download into parts and upload to Mediafire or MEGA ... I´m guessing the limit won´t be a problem as long as the file size is around 1GB or so,but then again i´m not so sure about how the MEGA bandwidth limit works since it appears to be different on each region.

[Sectiplave]

1 hour ago, Charon said:

We are really going official with this.

This pops up on startup from now. What do you guys think ?

Yes, yes and yes! This is a great idea

[btbrown0786]

I am trying to get this mod to work. I downloaded the mod and installed patch 3 but my game crashes during tactial combat. Also I have noticed early aliens have no weapons.thoughts as to why my game crashes?????

Edited September 30, 2016 by btbrown0786

[sfarrelly]

4 hours ago, btbrown0786 said:

I am trying to get this mod to work. I downloaded the mod and installed patch 3 but my game crashes during tactial combat. Also I have noticed early aliens have no weapons.thoughts as to why my game crashes?????

It sounds like you haven't installed X:CE. Refer to the first post in this thread for all requirements and mod loader order.

[Nekonomimi]

Mothership dont want to load...