The Drone Strike Package (for everything drone! Version 0.2)

Kiel, I love the images. However! Canonically, the ultimate drone in Xenonauts is the Fury, so anything I do has to tie into that. The second generation of drone fightercraft I made different by boostin its stat but mostly giving it a very different weapon (I stil have to do the writeup for the Privateer). How would you imagine a third, non-Fury generaton of fdrone ightercraft?

Close protection drone

Having checked my finances, while I can prototype and then execute Gauddlike's idea, I won't be able to afford assets for it until midway next month.

Max, who told you Fury is the ultimate drone? have you seen Yukikaze? http://www.gearsonline.net/series/yukikaze/mave/

Max, who told you Fury is the ultimate drone? have you seen Yukikaze? http://www.gearsonline.net/series/yukikaze/mave/

The in-game text says that the Fury is controlled by an AI.

That and the Fury is armed with an "I win" weapon. Can't do any fancy manouevres verses a singularity torpedeo! Anyway, I have this mod and others to do, as well as request to fullfil. Excuse me!

Is this possible to make a floating base (aka Avenger's helicarrier) ? It would be so delightful.

Okay, went over the files in my supposed X:CE-compatible version, and turns out I never actually added the changed files. To fix this, here is the updated download link:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82304502/Xenonauts/Attack%20of%20the%20Drones.zip

I'm having trouble with this version, whenever I try to manufacture a Lamplighter, the game CTD's when the manufacturing is done. I assume this happens to the rest of the drones. Can anyone who's familiar with the modular modding system look over this and figure out what's wrong?

Great mod once again, Max!

If you or skaianDestiny could fix ufo content files to work with the new X:CE format introduced in 0.26, it would be great. Thanks!

Ok I'm on it. I have a question though for Max: Aside from adding drones are the ufocontents files any different from the vanilla ones?

I don't quite get what a drone assisted rifle is like. Seems like just a OP regular rifle or something. I'd like to suggest that maybe we could get droppable auto-turrets, a la Aliens. You could leave them at certain key points in the map to keep from getting flanked while you concentrate force elsewhere. This would be especially useful in terror missions.

Hi all, I've been out of the modding loop thanks to work, but I've had three hours today spare to mod. so rather than scratch my head over why it's isn't working with CE, I've spent my time doing some playtesting and asset addition. The link in the OP will link you to the latest edition.

• The drone aircraft now have construction images, but the aircraft are a little too big - the image itself is the right size (so it will work!), but the aircraft inside it are too big for their supposed size, so I'm going to shrink the aircraft down a bit.
  
• I've changed the xenopedia entries for Drone Analysis and Lamplighter as reading it through I didn't like the original text. I still don't like the amount of text in the Lamplighter, but I can't yet find a way to shrink it down
  
• I've altered AM_Researches so you get Scouts earlier. I noticed in my speedy playthorughs that the earliest you could get a Lamplighter was midway through October, which kind of defeats the purpose, so I've introduced Scouts earlier so you get the bits needed to build long-range aircraft sooner
  
• I haven't yet added skaianDestinies' revised AC aircraft, mostly because I spent too long tonight trying to improve the existing ones. I'll add sD's new aircraft probably after I wake up tomorrow and before I go to work

Tomorrow I'm not going to have any time to do any modding other than just before I go to work, but Monday skaianDestiny I'd like to work with you on getting this to work with CE, so I'll put on hold any further asset changes or additions until it's working with 0.26HF.

Xitax, I can't mod that in. There's no modding trick I can run to do that. It would take Community Coder support to do that.

skaianDestiny. no, there are no other changes to ufocontents. However, and quite importantly, the files were edited using notepad++, not Excel. So the Excel header which counts the number of lines in each Excel file is incorrect. I suspect this may cause a problem with llunaks module mod system, but I can't prove it.

Okay, I've figured out the problem with manufacturing (it was the new "storage space" column for X:CE that was causing the problem).

I've incorporated all the new stuff you've added on as well. I changed the scout spawning on ticker mark 60 to this:

UFO				Ticker	Chancem:airplane.alien.lightscout	0	100m:airplane.alien.lightscout	60	60m:airplane.alien.scout		60	40m:airplane.alien.scout		100	100

So at ticker mark 60 the light scout and scout would have a ratio of 60:40. This way hopefully the beginning is not immediately overwhelming. I can change it to whatever value you think is best however.

Here's the link:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82304502/Xenonauts/Attack%20of%20the%20Drones.zip

EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot to change the ufocontents. Please stand by while I take care of that.

EDIT2: Link has been updated. Max, I noticed that the cruiser, carrier, and dreadnought crew loadouts have not been changed from the vanilla version. I assume this is intentional?

Yep, it's intentional because I haven't yet got to the point where I can playtest the mid-to-late game. I personally don't feel there's any point introducing anything without at least *some* playtesting first, and I don't have a savegame in either vanilla or CE which would let me try things out. I will just have to plough through the game (which isn't that hard, tbh.)

We'll have to see regarding Scouts. I had originally thought of introducing drones at the light scout stage, but while testing showed that the blaster on a light scout won't kill a trooper straight away, they are way more likely to cause morale events due to being hit several times and that can be frustrating for a starting team.

EDIT: Thanks for all your help, sD!

they are way more likely to cause morale events due to being hit several times and that can be frustrating for a starting team.

Counter-argument: it makes bravery more important early on in the game and provides additional opportunities for leveling bravery without soldiers having to die.

(Looks really good what you've done, by the way.)

It's a good counter argument - something that a level-headed person could take into account and (ab)use. However evidence from this forum suggests the emotional impact morale events have tends to drown out their value. I think by staging things so the player gets armour before light drones, the personal impact of morale events is somewhat mitigated.

sD, Ufo contents are still in old format and won't merge correctly.

It's a good counter argument - something that a level-headed person could take into account and (ab)use. However evidence from this forum suggests the emotional impact morale events have tends to drown out their value. I think by staging things so the player gets armour before light drones, the personal impact of morale events is somewhat mitigated.

Ok, that's fair enough.

I thought I'd take a moment to chat about Gauddlike's suggestion - a close-support drone that specifically accompanies the dropship. I've prototyped various ideas, and the one that's standing out at the moment is a ship which has a large, long-range missile pack similar to the AIM-7 Sparrow, but more of it. I've even come up with some descriptive text and the like. It's distinctive but there's a problem with space. The inital dropship and the starting team begin in semi-developed base, which only becomes more crowded as time progresses, limiting hangar space. Considering that the "Shepard" as I'm now calling it would take up a hangar slot, is it worth going ahead with it? Cost of assets comes to $400-$500 with the artist (and that's cheap!) so even with the rising pound verses the dollar that's not something I'm keen on doing unless I know it's going to at least have a reasonable chance of being used.

I don't quite see the point of a specialized dropship escort in the stock game, given that it's rather rare to get a dropship shot down unless one plays poorly or is not aware of the possibility. Most people seem to do only one ground missions per wave and only after they've dealt with all the (dangerous) UFOs around.

That said, one item in my (long) todo list is making aliens go more after dropships on higher difficulties (and some related things). I haven't thought about balance implications of that much yet, but my gut feeling is that even with that I still don't see much need for a specialized escort (and if there was one, it might have a huge impact on the feature). But then this is your mod, so it's your call, this was FYI.

I think I'd agree. I literally can't remember the last time I had my drop-ship attacked. There's times when I've had to keep it grounded due to an air superiority flight that I've not been able to deal with, but that was only because my other planes were busy or out of action.

Thinking about it, the only time you really need a long-range drop-ship escort is when you're flying to a mission outside of your radar/interception range. However, with the exception of terror missions and alien base attacks, the only missions you ever fight are in radar range by necessity. And since you can do base attacks in between alien waves (therefore with no risk of the dropship being attacked) it only actually matters with terror missions (and then mostly only until you have three bases' worth of coverage up, at which point most terror missions will be in detection range).

As such, I'd argue that there'd seldom be much use for a transport-escort.

sD, Ufo contents are still in old format and won't merge correctly.

Argh I copied from the wrong source. I've gotta be more organized with this shit.

NOW it should be fine. Download from the same link.

Also, as much as I like new stuff, a dedicated dropship escort doesn't really have a place.

Dropship escorts find a place when going after landed UFO's. They're a good idea, but not much use with vanilla landing/bounty settings, as it's easy to get all the materials needed from just crashed UFO's.

I think the biggest problem with a dropship escort is that the stock game is designed such that you either don't need it or can't afford it.

Strategy on the Geoscape largely centers around establishing and expanding air-superiority - and if you have air-superiority, then sending an undefended transport out isn't really a problem. On the other hand, any time the aliens are winning the air war you probably A) can't afford to divert resources from other more critical tasks and/or B) don't have many ground missions to send the dropship to anyway.

I could potentially see a drone escort being useful in a mod which heavily rebalanced the air war so that there would always be more UFOs roaming around than you can possibly shoot down, and the player needs to focus on surgical strikes against carefully chosen targets. (Although in that scenario, you'd probably want to significantly redesign the dropships anyway. The stock ones don't make much sense for a surgical strike through hostile airspace.)

I agree that they are more likely to be useful in a game rebalanced for their existence.

I rarely play without some kind of modification or balance tweak so I am probably not remembering how vanilla plays properly.

My suggestion was based on situations where I have found myself wishing I had some way to properly escort the dropship.

Another source was forum posts I have read asking about things like splitting squadrons so escorts can return home when they are out of fuel, ways to make interceptor squadrons automatically follow the dropship rather than manually doing it, and annoyance over landed ships killing the dropship if they take off as you arrive.

I think there is a role for them but whether that role is important enough to slot them in without other balance changes to make them a valid choice is debatable.

Few things I picked out in the Lamplighter text if you haven't already seen them:

Hey all.

I've been wearing my moderator hat for quite a long while now as modding needs concentration and time that I haven't otherwise had. I'm currently working on and off on a few things, and one of them is the equipment and arms for drone strike. I'd like to ask people's opinion. I'm doing a smart grenade - a hand-thrown fragmentation grenade which can alter itself in flight and calculate the best possible moment to explode. The artist working on it has come up with two sketches, and I'm not sure which one to go for:

The aim of the smart grenade is to produce a manufacturable weapon which has a longer range, better accuracy and more bang than the freebie equivalent. The smart grenade required a hand-assisted launch, but after that it stabilises itself in flight and directs itself towards the assigned target. I'm thinking of increasing the weight and the AP cost to show this (the operator has to spend time programming the grenade). So, which one better emphasises "smart grenade" to you?

wow max i dont even know how do you have enough time for so much mods you are working right now, (also memory to remember to work in all of them, i cant ever remember what was my breakfast ). about the inteligent grenade i like more the left one, i always liked the idea of a grenade that open itself before exploding, a beautifull flower that blooms before sending you to hell ;D!

if i could just made one change would be to rearrange the grenade to be more "open" (you know..the example i said above about the flower) but in general i really like the idea and the skecth you get until now .