AndreiN

Take your time, I can just do some internal tweakings to the mod myself, no need to waste time doing hasty incomplete updates since there doesn't seem to be much demand for it at the moment.

Hey kabill, no final version/updates on this? I was planning on starting a new run with a fresh install, this mod on top.

In my opinion lasers, at least the middle-tier and higher ones, still retain their usefulness because of their superior long-range power. The improved sight range and short range bonuses in this mod really encourage keeping the distance if you want to minimize the risk of losses, and I ended up using more lasers than MAG's even in the mid-game. Then again, maybe I didn't explore the potential of the MAG weapons fully, at least I didn't realize that they had no long range damage scaling. Yeah, the fact that it encourages more specialization with base building and using your resources is a good thing. In my game I ended up in a situation where I was lacking 2 alenium to build alenium missiles and had enough resources to get the ground combat explosives which could have really helped against the emerging andron horde. Choices, choices... I had couple of soldiers with 80 at couple of stats in my latest game. Getting up to 100 before that was really rare though, but it gave those rare soldiers even more value for me to try to keep them alive at all costs. I fear that with 80 caps, late-game soldiers might just become boring jack-of-all-trades. I don't think slowing the progression would really make it grindy, it'd just make the starting stats matter more. I'd really like to explore the idea with medals I mentioned, to make soldier progression more connected to unique feats instead of just dragging them along in every mission to get that +1 to all stats after it. Maybe a +5 to a random stat for every medal aquired, or +2 to all stats respectively. Completing a mission would only give a boost to the most used stat, perhaps. Not sure if that's possible to do with the moddable game resources though.

I really enjoyed this mod at the beginning, but I must sadly concur with this. When you've learned the ropes, the same close circuit tailing maneuver can be pulled out pretty constantly and doing it over and over again becomes a bit tedious. It can still be pretty punishing even for small timing mistakes, but generally it's not that much of an interesting challenge in the end. The underlying idea of the mod is great, though, with the narrow targeting area and trading evasive rolls for maintaining weapon lock. I had an idea of maybe giving the initial facing of the aircraft more tactical meaning, so that approaching the UFO already on the geoscape from the right angle would be an extra factor. In connection to this, at least the missile weapons and most UFO weapons would be in range already at the very start of the combat, but target lock would require more time. UFO turning speeds and weapon projectile speeds should go up, so that you couldn't so easily avoid fire without using the evasive roll. This way it might become more of a long range shooting/damage trading minigame akin to the original UFO games. I've not the slightest idea how this would work in practice, though.

I went and corrupted my savegames because of some tweaking and juggling mods around. Got a pretty good picture of the mod though, here's some more summarizing impressions: I think the early laser and MAG technology should be researchable at the same time (presumably after power cell+alien alloys) like it was in Extended Armouries, to give the the soldier weapon tech tree a bit more branching structure and a more immediate choice crudely between long-range and short range specialization. Getting MAGs earlier would hardly be overpowering, since you won't be facing any armoured opponents in the early game anyway, apart from light drones and an occasional Harridan with the Dynamic UFOs installed. The advanced laser/MAG tiers becoming available could depend on researched alien weapons with similar functions, e.g. alien autocannon + carbine could unlock the rapid-fire lasers research, and so on. Generally though, the tech-tree feels fine and the different new weapon categories all feel useful (played until late MAG's). Sadly didn't get to play around with the nifty new Predator-class weapons. As a small nitpick, I think the ballistic HK precision rifle should get it's NoDamageScaling flag back, otherwise it feels a bit underpowered. New aircraft and infantry explosives requiring the "manufacture packet" works really well and makes these mandatory upgrades much less of a no-brainer to aquire, but without going as far as making it tedious. Really great idea. I also like the subtle variation between frag and alenium explosives, for example, frags still staying useful because of the larger blast radius. Oh, and the new C4 is a lot of fun! I'm not sure I'm a fan of capping soldier attributes to 80. If I understand correctly the rationale behind this was to avoid soldiers becoming overpowered? I think a better way to achieve this would be just to slow the stat-gaining progress instead of introducing an artificial cap. I wonder if the level up process could be made less "gradually linear" by, for example, making the normal stat gain really rare but giving each gained medal a +2 or +3 to all stats, or something like that. By the way, not immediatly connected to this, but do the stat boosts from your Cybernetic Armor mod's armors go over the basic stat cap? So could I still achieve 100 stat points using this mod and CA, when using an accuracy+reflex boosting armor? Didn't do much combat with the latter aliens, so can't comment on their exact stat changes. I've had my own mod which does pretty much the same, though - removes the HP bloat and adds some armour and stat boosts to compensate. I'll definitely start a new game in future with your version, since it generally seems better thought out. Edit: forgot to say that I really didn't mind the new damage randomness in the end. I think my initial impression was mostly caused by just seeing the numbers and having some kind of a mathematical discrepancy of not understanding exactly how much damage my weapons were supposed to cause - 50%-150% just feels much more intuitive, I guess. Actually I wouldn't mind even a 0%-200% flunctuation like in the original UFO, if I remember correctly. Hitting the higher end spectrum can really cause one of those enjoyable "CRITICAL HIT!!!" moments in an occasional tight spot Oh, and thank you once more for your hard work with these great mods!

Regarding vehicles and manufacturable weapons, I think at least the Hunter is grossly overpriced at 75,000 - actually I often felt that the original 60,000 was also a bit too steep. With Armoured Assault the vehicles are really useful, but when comparing the investment as a replacement to 2 xenonauts in your dropship it very often comes down to making a decision based on economy. 75k equals to 15 expendable xenonauts (with the xce 0.32 changes, which I think is pretty fair)!!! I think the weapon manufacture prices are fine (what I've gathered from the mod files, in-game I'm just at the laser stage), but maybe the manufacture costs of the vehicles should be lowered by 30%-40% considering the extra expenses from fitting them with advanced weapons, which are not even linear improvements over the free ones. This by itself is of course a good thing, but adding a laser cannon priced at 60,000 (+rare materials) to an already pricey 75,000 chassis, which still is pretty easy to blow up even with early alien weapons is a bit too risky investment.

Alright, I was somehow under the impression that sebs had reduced sight range in original/xce but I checked the aiprops.xml and this is not the case. The thing is they're definitely much less aggressive when compared to basic xce 0.33 AI. As additional arguments apart from the tedium issue I mentioned, their current AI doesn't: - make sebillian encounters offer enough tactical diversity from the other alien foot soldiers, caesans and androns. Now they're just a kind of mix of both aforementioned. - correspond to their xenopaedia entry of them being physically intimidating, but dumb and short-sighted. Them utilizing their physique to the fullest when it comes to tactics is not very plausible. I think it'd be actually fine to give them 20 or so extra resilence, if they'd in return behave more like berserk warriors going on frequent mad rampage charges towards your troops. I've zero experience tweaking the AI files though, so can't really come up with any constructive ideas how to achieve this. Btw, I can verify mosshadow's observations of caesans being sneaky bastards. I've also been shot in the back from buildings I've considered a non-threat while advancing towards the alien UFO. Also the new AI works really well with the Hold the Line! mod, because I usually have more xenonauts engaged at the same time in firefights and getting 1-2 xenonauts suddenly paralyzed can drastically change the set-piece. Generally, they're really fun and challenging to fight against. Actually, your mod should make sebillians more suspectible to suppression, since you've raised the suppressionMultiplier to 0.6 from 0.5 and the percentual armor decrease shouldn't indeed be the case here since I was talking about sebillian guards, which don't have any armor. Need to test that flashbang issue a bit more. I'm pretty they were landing right next to the sebs.

Definitely, the improved sight range and longer short range hit range make things much more tricky. Especially I'm having problems with assaulting sebillian ufos, since you have to get close to deal significant damage, in order to overwhelm their regeneration. I'm getting hit all the time even behind cover and I can't cover my advance with smoke. Also, they seem to be harder to suppress now, at least with flashbangs. Usually you need at least two to get one to hunker down. Speaking of sebillian AI, btw, I don't really like how they are at the moment. They seem to have the exact same sight range as everybody else and usually prefer to stand passively at a long range and play the sniping game. Their high resilence + regeneration, and the fact that because of the more random damage flunctuation you shots are more unreliable, fighting them is a bit tedious unless you really invest in long range specialized arms, which is counterproductive in the end because you really need decent assault troops to effectively assault a crowded sebbie ufo afterwards (I'm playing with the Dynamic UFOs, of course). Also rushing towards your troops just fits their mad rampage lizards from space nature better, so I think at least their sight range should be dropped to a range of 18 or below . Still just fighting against the initial scouts, no feedback on the GC changes yet. Sadly not much time to play lately.

Here's the set, edited from riflesingle.ogg from the original files: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b6jxofxbfbqp0q5/weapon_carbine1.7z?dl=0 Considering the damage flunctuation, I pretty much agree with your rationale and like the randomness. What I was implying was that the original +/- 50% range was a decent enough variation. Though the fact that you've made the exact damage points dealt visible on Insane might have also had an effect to my impression, so a knee-jerk reaction is a possibility I'll try to come up with more feedback when I've had time to play a bit farther.

Did a couple of early scout missions against caesans, and liking it so far. The extra sight range seems to have positive effect of drawing more foes, including the passive AI ones into firefights giving the the impression that you're fighting against a team, not zeroing on individual aliens. Kicks up the difficulty too in a positive way. One thing I noticed was really weird damage flunctuation. For example I was getting precision rifle hits with measly 10 or so dmg, and a caesan guard was one-shotting my high resilence xenonaut with almost 100 dmg. I'm also pretty sure one of my shielders got one shotted from his protected side, though I can't remember if his shield was already damaged. I checked the mod files afterwards and noticed you've changed the DamageRandomChange from config.xml to 67. Not completely sure how this work, does it mean that the random flunctuation is now 33%-167% instead of 50%-150%? If so and it's not an oversight, I'm not sure that's really necessary. Especially in Insane difficulty usually every shot counts and if you're lucky enough to get enough hits in but they end up doing pea-shooter damage, that might end up being really frustrating especially when fighting the more difficult aliens. Btw, one more thing about about making the carbine a bit more distinct: I edited an unique sound set for the carbine from the unused game sound files when using your Extended Armories mod. I could upload it, and if you find it fitting you could add it to this mod.

This looks really promising! I ran into wall with the earlier Extended Armories update, stuck between releasing just a version of your mod with all the bugfixes or a more modified one with my own weapon stat tweaks I was never completely happy with in the end. I might as well abandon that one and put all that time into more productive use playtesting this mod. Some very quick early nitpicks: - the rifleman loadout at the moment comes with a ballistic carbine (weapon.rifle in your mod) + 2 x ballistic rifle clips (ammo.ballistic.rifle) when using the vanilla loadouts.xml. - maybe it was just a temporary solution, but since I noticed you also updated the xenopedia image: I think using the different m16 sprites for both the carbine and the rifle is not the best idea, since it's hard to visually tell them apart. Khall's solution to use the AK47 for the ballistic rifle is much better, and puts all those AK wielding unit sprites already in the vanilla game (and your Armour assets, too) into actual use.

Right, thanks! I'll let you know when I have the mod packed in a state suitable for a release. I actually found your mod just randomly browsing the download section. Liked the initial description, downloaded and dug around the mod files and really liked what I saw, afterwards started adding some small tweaks here and there. It actually took me quite a while to find this very thread where the mod took shape Intrigued about your extensive GC overhaul mod, I hope to see it materialize some day! I'm using Dynamic UFO's, You Can't Take the Sky From Me (another great mod I've been tweaking around a lot lately), Hold the Line! and this (also Fire in the Hole & Cybernetic armor, but they don't really ramp-up the challenge), and I'm really finding the difficulty spot-on (Ironman/Insane), without the game never really degrading into a mop-up phase. Thank you for all the hard work you've put to these great mods!

Here's my lua file (sequipview): https://www.dropbox.com/s/p5ncj11qj3lkhl8/sequipview.lua?dl=0 I just compared the old one to the new xce file and updated any conflicting lines, never went into specifics about what exactly changes what so I can't really pinpoint the exact cause of the problem. The problem I got after switching to 0.33 was that the soldier equip screen went completely blank, not displaying anything apart from the PNG background. Updating the script file fixed it, though I think one could fix the problem also by just deleting the script file in the Resource Pack directory, so that the game would use the xce one by default. Can't comment on whether the new script works with vanilla 1.59, since I'm using the community branch with heavily modded game. In theory it should, especially if you also throw in the new styles.lua (which the sequipview.lua refers to) from xce 0.33 to the Resource Pack.

Hey kabill, sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but I wanted to know if you're still planning to support/expand this mod? I think it's still the best weapon "rebalance" mod around and has been a part of my xenonauts install for a long time (as have almost every other of your great mods). If you're done with this, I've an internal version with some bugfixes and minor improvements (mainly unique sounds for the new weapons). I'd be willing to upload my version at some point and keep this mod alive (it still requires the trudging data entry work to strings.xml before one could consider it a "completed" mod, I think). With your permission, of course.

Hey, just wanted to bring to your attention that this (an consequentially Cybernetic Armours) is not compatible with the latest community edition (0.33). The soldier equip screen LUA script has to be updated to the new xce parameters. I've this fixed internally, so if someone is interested in a temporary fix, let me know.