endersblade

All I'm getting out of this thread as that a lot of people really don't understand how real lasers work. Considering this thread is titled with 'realism' in it, I find that extremely baffling. Correct, we do not currently have legitimate weaponized lasers (though some people have made some really powerful ones on Youtube) and so there is a certain amount of suspension of disbelief required to use them in a game. But the technology is real and theoretically possible to make real weapons with them based on that tech. Did you know that a common laser pointer has an effective blinding range of almost 50 feet, and can be SEEN up to 2.2 miles? That's just a rinky-dink little keychain laser pointer. A 500mw (half a watt) laser can do serious damage at over 500 feet, and can be seen up to 22 miles away. That's HALF a watt. Imagine one powerful enough to be used as a weapon. Something say around 5 watts. That would probably be strong enough at 50 feet to punch a hole in solid steel with little effort. Games seriously downplay the power of a laser weapon, mostly for balance purposes, but sometimes because they didn't bother doing any research on the subject. My point is, a laser weapon strong enough to deal actual damage to something just be being hit with it is not going to lose any effectiveness on a map the size of the ones ingame. If you want something that loses effective damage over range, look no further than plasma weapons. Deadly up close, useless at range.

Agreed. Again, I think Terror missions should not be tied to UFOs. They should just spawn on a map. Since this game seems to be going for a sort of infiltration thing, we could consider that the city in question is be raided by aliens already on the ground. That way you have no chance to shoot down the UFO before it starts the mission, the mission just pops up when the aliens start opening fire on the civvies. And/Or, if we shoot down a ship of a specific size or higher, but we leave it there for a while, the surviving aliens venture away from the ship and start a terror mission in a nearby city/town. As far as missions go, I had a thought. What about 'baiting' missions? They send a high value UFO out for you to attack, but once you get in range, more UFOs spawn to intercept your interceptors. So you can take out the flying loot crate and risk losing your planes, or attack the interceptors and risk losing the high profile ship. Or if you're good enough, do both :-P This high profile ship can be anything, not something specific. That way we never know when we'll get ambushed. It could just have a chance of happening every time a UFO is spawned.

This was the biggest drawback of XCOM 2. Most of the enemies are just basically humans in armor. I mean, I totally get WHY as far as the story goes, but it feels less like an XCOM game and more like Jagged Alliance or something. Even the original XCOM had predominantly alien looking aliens.

Here's an idea as far as looting vs selling goes: Either in the research tree, or maybe in the stores, have a check mark set so that if it's checked it gets sold, if it's unchecked it gets stored (or vise versa, that works too). That way we have control over what gets kept and what just gets vendored at the end of the mission. The first round of the objects that come in get saved for research, after they populate in your stores you get the option to keep or sell.

Dat clone army with the one token black guy lol

I'd be all for that idea. It might be less risk, fewer rewards if you skip out, but if you don't, you get the added bonus of assaulting a landed ship. I just wish terror missions weren't tied to actual ships you can shoot down...once you gain air superiority, terror missions basically stop :-(

They need to be LOS. And by that, I mean the alien using the psi ability needs to actually SEE the target, not the current setup where it sees it by proxy because someone else saw it. Having one psi alien sitting at the top of a large ship, hitting your guys on the opposite side of the map with psi abilities is just garbage. I was never a fan of Psi or MC in the original two X-COM games. I usually either modded them out completely, or turned on the built-in mod of OPENXCOM to make them LOS. A million times easier to deal with, but still possible to lose a squad to a V. Large full of psi-capable units. In X1, we have the problem that psi is basically one-sided. To my knowledge, we never get the ability to use it. However, building up resistance to it is also fairly easy, it's just based on bravery. Once you get bravery rolled over to 99+/99+, your soldier is basically psi proof.

No. You're trying to make this MMO-like - Hey, you can reach the cap, but can you REALLY? Come, sink thousands of hours into this game to try! Just no. One of the best things ABOUT the older X-COM and its clones is that you CAN cap out your stats. If you play the game long enough to have a bunch of super soldiers, you deserve it. Because the game becomes beatable LONG before that usually happens. It's the reward of having soldiers survive so long - the payoff for being a good strategist.

I figured it all out. I started by copying the original files from XCE that I needed into my mod folder, deleted all the info in each file that I didn't want to change, and then just need to put the relevant modmerge lines/combinations in where they were needed. Mod works fine now.

I finally got around to playing the latest demo, and figured I'd drop in my 2c: Please, for the love of god, tell me those map textures are placeholders. I'm holding out hope that since this game is still in Alpha/Beta, that that's the case. I LOVE the new Sebellians! They have a mini-godzilla feel to them :-) I also like the new Ceasans, or whatever you're calling them now, those were the same types of Sectoids in XCOM EU/EW that I liked. The ones in XCOM 2 are garbage to me. I like the creepy-crawlies, not the upright humanoid types! I loved the soldier sprites, or models, or what-have-you. The move fairly fluid, and are very nicely detailed. The weapon swap idea - absolutely genius! Way to go on that one! I can't shoot around corners, but they can? I had several situations where I was standing on a corner and trying to shoot at something, but the wall directly in front of me would block the shot. However if the roles were switched, aliens had no problems shooting me through walls. Some of them could even shoot through the whole corner! I love the new ship design! I absolutely loved the ships in X1, but being static objects like that really took away from what you could do to them, like in the originals. Pretty to look at, but not very functional. Being tile-based now, or however you want to put it, modular? Sure. Means people can mod them, or create their own, and allows us with the proper tools to breach them. Not a fan of grenades in this. The throw animations feel rigid, there doesn't appear to be any grenade flying animation, and the explosion was...odd. I can't really explain it better. It just didn't feel like I threw an explosive, more like a party favor. Final thing: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me this game is going to be moddable like X1?!?! Having virtually everything in a text/xml/yml file makes modding a breeze. Please don't take away that ease of modding! Overall, looks like the game is starting out nicely. It obviously has a ways to go, but this is definitely a great start. Keep up the good work!

24 views and not a single comment? Edit: Never Mind. Figuring it out slowly by myself, I found the log file to help.

I'm trying to build a custom starting base, but anything beyond 0-9 doesn't seem to work. Are we capped at 10 buildings in the starting layout? I've tried putting building10 and buildingA (in case for some reason it was numbered in Hex), but that last building just never shows up. This is what I have so far:

So I created my own mod, and am going one file at a time changing things. Gameconfig.xml, I changed the starting money, base layout, and soldier stats. Money and base layout changes took place just fine, however the soldier stats are still pulling from XCE. Do I need to put a modmerge line in here? Why is it just this one section that isn't overwriting XCE? All previous files edited so far (buildings, aircrafts, aircraftweapons, etc) have shown up just fine. But for some reason that one section in Gameconfig.xml isn't. Edit: Hmm, weapons_gc isn't either. Or, most of it isn't...I changed the ammo values of all the weapons, including weapons.xml to match. The basic pistol's ammo has updated, but none of the others did. The show correctly at the Geoscape, but not in Battle. I've used Modmergeattribute "name" and modmerge "update" on the weapons and ammos in weapons_gc.xml. If I copy/paste it to the XCE folder, it shows up ingame, but not in my mod. Why does the game seem to pick and choose which part of each file to load? Why does XCE override only PARTS of the .xml files rather than all of it? What am I doing wrong?

Taking away the stats from the first one and they way they leveled is going to be a serious downfall to this game. That was the best part of your soldiers. Leaving parts of it static (like from armor as you mentioned) is too much like the new XCOM. You're taking away customizability, and that's never a good thing. Stats progress naturally as your guys see combat. Some get better at shooting, some get better at throwing, some scouting, etc. Sure, given enough time they all basically become super soldiers, but that's the thing, it's a CHOICE. And having all the stats we had in X1 gave us the opportunity to chose what we leveled and by how much. You are trying to homogenize things, I don't think that's going to end well. Making it so all the original combat stats get rolled int one 'military' stat or whatever, where's the fun in that? What does that actually denote? And then making, from your previous post, more skills for each weapon type...that's pigeonholing people into playing each character a certain way. While some may be good at science and some at engineering, the combat stats need to be separate so we can still tweak them the way WE want to play them, rather than being forced to play a certain way by the game. FREEDOM is the key here. I get where you're going with the skills. Rifle, Grenade, RPG, Medicine, etc, I think Jagged Alliance did that? Been too many decades lol. IF you want to go down that route, how about giving us the choice? As in, whenever a 'staff member' levels (or however you denote experience), let us pick which skills they learn, instead of them being set in stone. You could do it like this: Each person has three core stats: Military/soldier, Science/Scientist, Engineering/Engineer. These get leveled as they get used. Once one of them hits a level, you get to pick a sub skill for that particular branch, which requires a specific core stat level (or combination of core stats) to pick. For example, you hit Soldier rank 4. Maybe you can now pick Pistol, Rifle, Shotgun, but Sniper Rifle requires Rank 5. Or Grenade/Grenade Launcher, but that requires Soldier 4 and Engineer 5. Then each perk can be leveled as it is used, giving you a bonus to whatever it is. Shoot more accurately, increased damage, crit chance, etc, each perk will tell you what each level in it does. This would also give YOU the freedom of virtually unlimited skills to make. Science could have ones that maybe increase their ability to research specific things, or help in combat (I have no idea along that line, I'm sure you could think of something). Same with Engineering - "Ship building" and the person builds ships faster. "Mechanic" and they repair things faster. And so on. And once Alien tech gets involved, you can start cross referencing skills: Say, everyone can USE an Alien-based rifle, but if you actually have the skill for it, Xeno Rifles, you do more damage, are more accurate, etc. But now that training requires higher Soldier/Scientist/Engineer skills to use. That way end-game isn't everyone running around in Power Armor and Mag Cannons just obliterating everything in sight. The point being, you can keep your skill tree and not do the X1 stats, but it still gives us the ability to build our soldiers the way WE want. Edit: Sorry I just sort of breezed through your previous post, it looks like you already commented about doing this lol.

On point with the pregenerated characters: Will they still grow in stats like X1? Do they still have the same stats they did in X1? Or is it just "soldier" "scientist" and "engineer" that get raised in points?