NuclearStudent

Hello! I used to be here a while ago. To be honest, I never played X-Division because I had an illegal copy of Xenonauts, but I was involved in X-Division a bit. What's going on?

"Madcap Mech MK1" We had certain problems in the lab when thinking of ways to reduce casualties. Armored scout cars have their applications, but are so often stuck by impassable terrain and made useless during close quarters situations. Personal body armor is limited by the weight a soldier can carry while still being able to fight. Shooting the enemy before they have a chance to shoot you is the best way, but your soldiers have already assured us that they are doing that the best they can. We believe this is an important problem-dead soldiers cannot recover artifacts for study. My team proposed and masterminded alternations and improvements to our prototypical power armored suits, hoping to create something larger, more powerful, and better protected than any infantry soldier we have to date. Without the limitations that tracked or wheeled vehicles have, an upscaled mechanical armor suit could breach with force, provide cover for other troops, and carry weaponry too large and cumbersome for any soldier. The engineers misread our designs, as usual, and decided to build the prototype twice the size we had planned for. They complained something about "problems of scale" and difficulties in miniaturization, but I suspect they are simply covering up for their egregious mistakes. Regardless, the MK1 Madcap Mech is a powerful large infantry vehicle capable of delivering mobile firepower anywhere on the field, even if it can not longer fit in any reasonably sized UFO or building.

What weapon branch lines don't have xenopedia entries? Sorry for intruding. Would rather not poke through the files myself-feeling burned out.

I have some free time, and I'm looking to practice my technical writing skills. If there are any Lore entries that need completing, I would be happy to make a couple. I'd just need to know generally how the thing behaves in game, and any specific or general tone/method you need.

At the end of the day, air combat was and is the worst part about XCOM. The air game is likely the least liked aspect of any XCOM game, Xenonauts, NUXcom, or other wise.

I'd love to see the alien strategic AI have some kind of "personality." For example, it could be an aggressive one with mission selection tendencies randomly selected, but biased towards more brazen events. In Xenonauts, there is no overarching plan to alien missions. Whatever RNG rolls is whatever RNG rolls. I've always been weirded out by how distracted and unfocussed the aliens could be. I'd like it if there were some sort of strategic AI that does internal research and resource gathering, a la XCOM: Long War. Low alien resources would weigh resource gathering missions higher than aggressive ones, or something.

That's weird. It's not a mod feature. And, your soldiers aren't overburdened either, or else you would have half of your time units on the first turn as well. The closest thing I can think of is that suppression is glitching out and is causing all of your soldiers to take the suppressed debuff for some reason. Can you check and see if your soldiers can be suppressed at all?

That is a good idea. I will write that.

That's coded into the game under "Probabilistic Search." If the aliens have a good reason to believe you are hiding somewhere, they will blindly fire into that space. If you go into the gamefiles and increase that value artificially, you get amusing results. Aliens would blindly fire at almost any empty space.

More seriously, the game is less random than you think. Aliens have surprisingly rigid patterns of behavior. Chokepoints are very linear. There are real (and annoyingly repetitive) patterns to everything in this game. It's an absolutely fact of life that your point men, who turn around corners and open doors, are going to die. So, make your worst troops point men. It's an absolute fact of life that you have to pass certain doors in certain ways and incur a similar risk every time. So, you can plan around that. There's an arbitrary forced attrition by RNG, that's true, but there's tactical planning and methods you can develop to deal with it.

That's X-Com, baby.

There are no line of sight rules. The AI will fire or use grenades on positions where it believes your troops are. If it knows it saw you peer out from behind a fence, it will bomb behind the fence.

I haven't finished a playthrough (the campaign is about as long as a Xenonaut campaign, but with far more enemies&technologies), but there's some interesting ideas to lift. 1. Fighting enemy humans. For example, gunning down hordes of squiashy human-alien hybrids. You can also run into an evil XCom that works with the aliens. It's interesting fighting human tanks, grenades, and power armor. 2. "Bases" that are actually landed UFOs. This is an abuse of the game mechanics, so alien outposts can be set inside UFO recovery maps. It's a brilliant idea that will definitely work in Xenonauts. 3. You start with a Heavy Machine Gun unlocked, that is too heavy for any soldier to possibly carry. That's an interesting way to gate weaponry-being able to use the gun depends on keeping soldiers alive long enough to become strong, and not on your tech level. 4. You can use workshops to convert corpses into interesting items. In particular, you can use the armor of elite level enemies. That could work in Xenonauts.

I understand a little now. What the Xenonauts spends most of their time fighting is the alien airforce and the escorts of scientific specialists. I'm still noodling around in my head for an explanation of the weapons and modifications the alien spec ops are supposed to have. But this makes sense to me.

Personally, I'm a bit scared of all the things and branches you plan to add. Already, it's stretching my imagination a little to think of good explanations for the things you've added. I'm not really happy with what I did do (the neutron weapon entry will eventually have to be rewritten by someone smarter than me/my future self). With your new ideas like special forces aliens? I just don't know. I don't have the imagination to conceive of why the aliens have special forces when the entire earth invasion force is arguably special forces. Special forces within special forces exist, but X-Division is larger than my skull.

What happens when the alien is given a reaction skill of 1 and the lowest possible health? Would it be almost guaranteed that reaction fire would proc?

This is OpenXcom. http://openxcom.org/ OpenXcom is almost an exact clone of the original Xcom. The main difference is that the old bugs are gone and many quality-of-life features are in. It's incredibly easy to install. You download the installer and click "yes" when it asks you to. You need to own a copy of the original Xcom to play Openxcom, but I'm sure many of you happen to have it in your steam libraries. Now, pound for pound, Xenonauts is more fun than vanilla OpenXcom. However, with this mod pack (http://www.openxcom.com/mod/final-mod-pack), I would reconsider playing ordinary Xenonauts. This adds all that crap anybody could possibly want in an Xcom like game. Installation is incredibly easy-download and drag the latest openxcom version onto the openxcom files, and download and drag the Final Mod Pack onto the openxcom files. I've made a lot of talk about this game and this mod. So, what is it? You start out with choice and chance. Unlike Xenonauts, both you, the aliens, and the other enemies you are up against start with an incredible number of possibilities of action. There's a ridiculous number of weapons on each side. Your troops can get murdered by Will Smith with a submachine gun. You can fire back with a LMG, or a HMG, or a 40MM grenade launcher, or any practical weapon you could realistically fit on a helicopter. I never realized how awesome it would be to unload a minigun into a Reaper until I did. The progress of gameplay is a lot more varied than in Xenonauts. I can count with my hands the number of truly game changing advancements in Xenonauts, and they are all spaced apart by weeks or months of in game time. If Xenonauts had a tech progression like modded Openxcom did, we'd be unlocking something as game-changing as electro-grenades every week. Xenonauts is not going to be this awesome until X-Division is done being balanced. Give OpenXcom and the Final Mod Pack a try, and spray a space marine with buckshot today. (Yes, you can do that.)

Was that your first mission? BTW, revived soldiers always count as casualties. They are the injury kind of casualty, not the dead kind of casualty. Specifically, which research topics are ###? I'll fix them if I can.

I always bring a guy with a rocket launcher. You can open up the roof with a rocket and then snipe the alien out.

Sorry. I keep thinking I'll go write, but then I keep doing other things.

Ticker modding is a simple change of the game config giles.

Drages, if you don't mind, I have a suggestion for a support weapon. It would be nice to have a ranged smoke cannon so it is safer and faster to advance. I've made an example of what I'm talking about. <Weapon name="weapon.hologun" bulletType="normal" emptySound="Empty Click 1" disableReactionFire="1"> <props range="25" hands="1" recoil="0" weight="3" isHeavy="0" clipSize="12" reloadAPCost="25" reloadSound="Weapon Laser Rifle Reload" reactionModifier="0.5" /> <BurstFire ap="20"" accuracy="100" sound="Weapon Laser Rifle Single" shotCount="3" delay="0.6" burstdelay="0.1" suppressionValue="0" suppressionRadius="1.5" /> <GUIImage name="gui/weapons/Lasercarbine.png"/> <GroundImage name="grounditemimages/laser_carbine.png"/> <Ammos> <Ammo name="ammo.laser.lasercell" type="energy" damage="0" mitigation="0" pelletCount="3"> <Projectile spectre="projectiles/laser/laser" speed="1500" showAfterDistance="60.0"/> <Impact spectre="particles/explosion/explosion" radius="2" sound="Weapon Stun Baton Reload" fireChance="0" smokeChance="100" gasType="SmokeGrenadeGas" /> </Ammo> </Ammos> </Weapon> Major Adrianova has been bothering us. She saw a conflict between her squad tactics and my own design doctrine, claiming that aiding squad manoveure was more importantly than focusing on delivering high kinetic energy. While I resent the insult to my team's technical planning, I was willing to take advice from the troopers waiting for our advancements. A major source of distress for our troopers was taking reaction fire while leap-frogging toward objectives. The good Major requested a tool to seal off enemy sight-lines from range . The hologun was originally made by our American sponsors. It "blacks out" areas it is pointed at. Free electrons are suspended by the Goldstein process midair. Nothing heavier than light is blocked. Of course, there are certain technical problems that caused the original developers to abandon it. For one, the massive consumption of power. For two, there were difficulties in sustaining the shadows under combat conditions. The use of alenium power batteries and adaptive alloy dispersers has solved this. A quick squeeze of the trigger automatically fires a three shot burst of darkness. It is moderately accurate, covers a respectable area, and is power-efficient. Our soldiers are already enjoying this device on the firing ranges.

What I'm trying to say is that I've never seen the Scientist as anything but a scientist and the type of human being that is driven to STEM. I've seen him as a decent worker, with an obvious skill at design. Xenonauts never mentioned what he specialized in, but I'd wager he has a doctorate of chemistry or physics.

Caine, that doesn't sound like the chief scientist I remember. I remember the chief scientist being fairly free with his grant money. During the base upgrade he spends money experimenting with alien gel sacs and he spends money upgrading equipment without so much as a by your leave. I could imagine him being perturbed at the consequences of reduced future funding on his research, angry about the breach in privacr angry that his equipment and data is being tampered with, but not angry at a spy because the spy profits.