Possible Mods

First, let me say i do not own Xenonauts yet, but i have been reading a lot of what is in the forums and i own everything x-com related released except xenonauts.

I will eventually buy Xenonauts, my doubt is if i do it now or when it reaches a "bargain price" later as i normally do (i bought the new X-com only when it reached a bargain price, and will only buy the enemy within when it does soo too) - i consider a bargain price anything below U$ 9.99.

To answer my question i need to know if i will be able to mod some game mechanics that i see are going to be part of the "vanilla" game - as i rarely play any game unmodded, but mod it to my own tastes, so, can anyone tell me if the following mods are possible on Xenonauts:

- Make aircafts destroyable, reduce earthtech aircrafts to only a symbolic value (the pilot/mechanics salaries only) without reducing the price of the alientech fighters.

- Make earthtech aircraft as glass cannons so a scout alien can down a earth aircarft with a single, or at most 2 shots

- Change earthtech aircarft weapons as to be extremely weak needing at least a half dozen shoots to down even a alien scoutship.

- Increase the number of armed civilians on all mission types, specially adding police forces (pistols) to urban areas and conventional soldiers (rifles/AK47) to other areas - at least a couple dozen "local forces" added to de battles.

- Increase the number and types of aliens on all mission types - mostly to compensate for the added number of local forces.

- Reduce research speed to at least a fifth of vanilla speed, with a corresponding reduction on alien escalation levels.

If all these modding wishes of mine can be done on the current state of Xenonauts i will definitely buy it at the current price - otherwise i will wait for it to reach bargain price levels.

Thanks

The answer to all those is "yes". #1 is alterable from... from.. damn I'm blanking here. But there's a toggle in the .xmls you can set. Everything else you mention can be set, as most of the variables are easily accessable to even the most novice modder (Xenonauts is VERY friendly to modding). The only thing that's a bit awkward to set would be the number of armed AI, as you would have to set that individually in the maps, and there are 80-odd maps.

Thanks for the answer - since it is possible to mod the game to the way i like to play (even if somewhat work intensive on the case of the "local forces" mod) i will buy it now instead of waiting for a bargain price.... when i mod my modifications to the game will put them here for any others interested...

- Increase the number of armed civilians on all mission types, specially adding police forces (pistols) to urban areas and conventional soldiers (rifles/AK47) to other areas - at least a couple dozen "local forces" added to de battles.

You can change how many local forces appear easily enough, as it's a map setting. You'd need to distinguish your maps from the official ones for obvious reasons, but the process is as easy as copy and pasting .xml files and then changing the number of friendlies. Although frankly, with higher numbers of units running around, it sounds as though you'd be better off making mod-specific maps - which you can do with the map maker that comes with the game.

The only problem you might run into is editing the local forces' loadout. Right now they spawn with different loadouts depending on the map's tileset. Industrial UFO recoveries will have cops with pistols and shotguns, while Middle Eastern maps will have soldiers with AKs, and farm maps will have Farmer Jim and his trusty shotgun. If you don't like the sound of those loadouts, I think you might be out of luck, at least right now: if there's a way to replace Farmer Jim with a soldier, I don't know it.

Easiest way would be to replace the sprites and change the stats on the farmers shotgun weapon.

As long as you keep the current names it should work.

But if you wanted to modifiy what the cops from indus or the soldiers from desert use, you're out of luck. Right?

The answer to all those is "yes". #1 is alterable from... from.. damn I'm blanking here. But there's a toggle in the .xmls you can set.

Ooo, really? I thought that'd been locked away somewhere. If you happen to remember where it is, could you pass it on?

(Don't have a problem with aircraft recovery per se, but I'd be interested in experimenting without it since the game economy has changed drastically since the change was introduced. Early aircraft, at least, are fairly cheap now compared with budget size and fully replacing losses doesn't seem beyond possibility).

You know, I can't find it! I swear to god it was there, but I can't find it!

While i obviously would like o change the unit types i can get on the local forces on each map, i see no problems in having only a predefined type... I mostly want to increase the number of "local forces" on urban areas, where ina real alien invasion the local police/army would be called in big numbers to try to contain the aliens - rural and isolated areas would not have a major presence of local forces...

What about alien escalation? can i mod it easily - so with the reduced research the alien numbers/tech/species show up more slowly too?

I decided to buy the game at the current price range, but will wait until the weekend, when i will have time for modding it before starting play...

Woah woah, don't buy it yet. I'm still looking for that #1 that you asked about, and I can't seem to find it.

No hurry - i will wait until friday at least...

I can't find a setting to prevent interceptors returning to base after destruction.

I would assume it was in gameconfig.xml if anywhere but can't see anything that would do that.

I think i will wait for the game to reach bargain bin levels before buying for now... back to openxcom for my modded xcom fix... (xcom 2012 is really hard to mod)

I'd love to see the earth aircraft to have realistic weapon pylons with the options of fuel tanks to expand their range or you can take its default performance and arm it to the teeth and have close range fighter. You should have an option of the advanced fighters(4th/5th generation/alien) which are quite an investment but you pay for what you get and cheaper 3/4th gen fighters which can be your workhorses.

You'd have to make the 3rd gen fighters their 3+ variants so they all have radars but they would basically be weapon platforms with a few being dog fighters. The 3+ gen fighters(mig23/F4/mirage/mig21's) would be basically equal of the scouts while 4th/5th would be better then scouts/fighters. You would basically overwhelm single UFO's with swarms of 3rd gen fighters with 4th/5th being the rare fall backs.