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[Vanilla 1.5x + Community Edition 0.31] The Lore+ Project


Max_Caine

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Well, I've had a chance at work to think about how I would re-write Discovered! If anyone wants to take a look below and tell me what you think, I'd appreciate it.

A spy.

In MY labs.

No... no.. far worse. You know what to expect from a spy – there’s something charmingly honest in their duplicity. What you don’t expect is a man you hand-picked and raised to greatness to stab you in back and steal work you sweated blood and tears over for misguided ideals of a fatherland that won’t exist if we don’t beat the greatest threat to this planet’s biosphere since the K-T extinction!

Don’t misunderstand me. I support collaboration in the scientific community, so long as the appropriate credit is given. But I’ll be seen naked and dancing on the rim of Mount St. Helens before I hand my work over to fools in charge of nuclear weapons who are right now blaming everyone for the invasion and have those nukes pointed at each other “in case of the worst happening”.

No wonder the articles I published haven’t been getting more attention! If even one country has our data then it won’t be too long before the researchers of every government and major corporation on the planet will be scratching their simian skulls over our advanced technologies. Well, let them try! We caught the little rat trying to sneak out one of our prototypes, so they must be having trouble grasping the nuances of alien technology, even with my notes. I can't say what the consequences of this traitor will be, other than don't expect to ever sell our alien-derived equipment at a profit.

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Max_Caine, three things:

First, I like this last "draft", I think it's the best and it fits well this time, IMO. The guy is so egocentric that the entire theft incident is described as if he was the main victim, even if he does indeed "mention" some consequences for the organization.

Second, for your future work on the "We Will Be watching" Guy, I'd love to see you taking into the consideration a massive nuclear counter-attack aiming at the fleet in orbit. As you mentioned in this latest draft, everyone has the nukes pointed at each other. It would be very shortsighted then to presume that none of them has ever considered to point a good portion of their nuclear arsenals towards the skies. USSR and USA had already tens of thousands of ICBMs in the late '70. It could be a good opportunity to show how such an attack could fail spectacularly, thus enhancing the atmosphere of desperation and underlining the importance of the Xenonauts as the only tactically viable way of fighting the aliens. Thousands of nukes launch as the last line of defence, once the world governments realize theyd are unable to control the skies, and are obliterated in the upper atmoshphere far below the oribiting fleets. I've always thought that it was very silly for the governments to rely on a small group of people to stop an alien invasion right off the bat, without exploring other solutions first . But after such a failure, this concept could be strenghtened by the mere fact that it's just an act of desperation, just because everything else failed.

And third: if you have to rename a special version for the CE, please give it a less confusing name :) Lore++ is also Lore+ spelled incorrectly ;)

Edited by Koranis
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Ah, meant to comment on this when it was first posted but forgot.

I'm going to write something decidedly unhelpful: I prefer the original version. I like how it is raw and emotional. For me, it communicates the utter fury of a man so supremely confident that he can barely fathom the idea that someone would betray him. And perhaps this is just me, but there is a subtext that he is furious with himself, too, for hiring the traitor and not detecting him sooner.

In contrast, in the rewrite he seems more reasonable. The new middle paragraph articulates a concern for the wider geopolitical situation that, in my mind anyway, doesn't fit with the character that I read as arrogant and self-interested. And it takes the edge off of the other two paragraphs which, although they articulate the same things as the previous draft, for me don't have as much impact because of that middle section.

This said, I have a particular fondness for terrible, unpleasant, self-interested, myopic characters in fiction and there's no reason to change/emphasise anything for my sake. Character-design-by-committee can, I think, only lead to bad places. But you also asked for opinions; this is one.

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  • 2 weeks later...

So....

How would anyone feel about an Andron Analysis? I mean, I can see the reasons why there was never an Andron Analysis, but doing one in the same style as the others would be doable. I mean, the analysis could be done off an Andron Officer corpse and I could have the Chief Scientist congratulate the Commander on his men being just incompetent enough to scramble the logic and command circuits of the officer instead of killing it but....

And this is a BIG but....

It means two things. Firstly, this would be a bit of research that would have to be researched, something that would take up time and resources. Secondly, it would have to offer the same 10% bonus to damage, same as the other Analysis and these two things together would catapult Lore+ out of the pure flavour text zone. What do you guys think? Let sleeping dogs lie?

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Um you could check XNT xenopedia.I believe that TD merged Lore+ with XNT when Xenonauts was v18-19 and we kept it up to date (until departure of team ) but I am not entirely sure.Theon or anyone of us haven't changed anything regarding lore,however Theon did some re-formatting of text to make it more readable.

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Double post because I'm special like that. Henry's finished the art for the final part of this set of work. The next one will be an Andron Analysis. Don't have a timeline on when it will be ready, as for the past few weeks staff have been going sick/ill at work and I've been working lots of extra hours to fill the gap.

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hi max,outstanding work as always, and nice illustration, it totally looks like finish tropps in the winter war,real fit the era :)!.

Btw i had to ask this..i noticed that in all your text you spell "soliders" instead of SOLDIERS, and im curious about this, is some kind of error or there is some kind of rule for that (sorry english is not my first language so im not sure if is correct to use it xD), is nothing killing but im just curious about it :).

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  • 2 months later...

Hi folks. Just a quick update. Hnery's sent me back sketches for the Andron update. I'd love to show you them, but I'm keeping it all under wraps for the moment. Once we decide on a final image, I may show what didn't make the cut. No promises!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi folks, the update for the Andron Analysis has been ready for a while now. Henry's done some great artwork for it but I haven't been able to get in front of my home computer for over a week now. Travel time + work time + sleep and other necessary maintenance = no time for computer. I honestly don't know when I will have the time to push out the update. Perhaps next week?

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

SO!

Getting time off has been, and still is very difficult for me. My job since April involves an INSANE amount of travel which adds a lot of time to an already long day so every time I think I'm going to have time off, I end up spending that time off travelling between work sites. "But what about your days off?" you ask. I have been working 6-day weeks since January. My day off is spent catching up on everything that I should have done during the week. I noticed that my travelling is a lot of dead time, so I've bought a very cheap laptop and have been able to do some work on mods while travelling on the train. The first fruit of this is now here: Lore+ has been updated to include a new Andron Analysis - simply kill an Andron Officer to trigger the research!

Currently there's a problem with the research - it's supposed to be a normal research topic, but for whatever reason it treats the research like a 0-day piece of research, and I can't work out why, so until I do I'm not updating the mini version or exporting it to steam or anything. However it is available to try out from the normal OP. For those people who don't want to get the research "normally", here's the cheat sheet:

Andronpeek_zpsegndg50i.png

I honestly don't know why it isn't working as a normal piece of research, so it may be a while until I work out why it's not working properly.

Edited by Max_Caine
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Hi,

I can't work out why the Andron Analysis is turning up as a 0-day research project, even when it shouldn't be. If anyone could take a look at the researches.xml entry (it's at the bottom) and see if it's correct I would be really grateful.

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