Dr. Ethan

If there is enough interest I could be persuaded to update the mod.

Also, I just played a mission in X2, and I am loving the changes so far (other than the more than a few bugs XP), the player units (at least seem to) move much faster than before, the dropship having solid sides again is a nice addition, and being able to move where your command center is placed on a new base creation is a pretty interesting idea. However with that last thing, if you were to implement what I talked about in my last few posts, i think there should be a monetary or strategic incentive to place the command post more towards the center (to help with base defense balance) whether it is that when you are infiltrated the farther away your command center is from some rooms the fewer people you can have posted in that room to defend it, or the farther away a room from the command center the more the aliens damage it because they aren't caring too much about keeping intact for cover, or maybe the monetary incentive being that you have to build placeholder rooms (like tunnels or hallways) from the center to where the command center is to be able to build it there.

It would also be interesting if X2 adopted some mechanics from XCOM EW, by making some non-combatant people from your base be mixed up in the attack. For example, there could be an event where you couldn't evacuate all your scientists or engineers in time so one of the optional objectives would be for you to go and rescue said scientists or engineers or else face them being killed or captured by the aliens, this could go with wounded soldiers in the medbay as well, or maybe some of your non-combatants are being mind-controlled from a unit in the temp command base to attack or distract your units, and you could have the choice of either killing them to get them out of the way, stunning them, ignoring them, or going to kill the unit in the temp command post (which would integrate with the self destruct mechanic as talked about in the last post). It also really annoyed me that there wasn't really any dynamic content to the rooms in your base. For instance it would be cool if you were able to send some soldiers to your garage to get in one of your tanks/vehicles you have stored in there for some extra power, or maybe some of your units forgot their weapons so they have to run to the armory (aka a section in the storeroom) to pick them up, and with the static defenses it would be interesting if there could be certain rooms created for the sole purpose of housing a massive armory of them which would help with the defence of the base. Another feature that would be nice would be auxilary storage for vehicles and the dropships. This would be used for either emergency use (i.e. you troops run out of ammo and need a quick clip) or to be able to switch guns mid-fight(i.e. if you are up against an alien with good energy defense but poor ballistic defense but your guys only have laser guns). With the vehicles, this would be useful by maybe having vehicles have upgrade slots that you can fill with defense, offense, or utility upgrades (i.e. storage or reload upgrades which could allow for your soldiers to store extra ammo or weapons for the battlefield or allow them to reload the tank/vehicle when it runs out of ammo)

I have recently had this idea this I think could be cool with the return of X1 base mechanics and aliens invading your bases. What I was thinking could happen is that when aliens infiltrate your base they could set up like a temporary command post in one of your rooms from where they could stage the attack on the command center, so after you defend from the initial attack wave that the aliens send out you could have the option to send your troops through your rooms to attack the temporary command post which would end the attack early before they send the next wave. This would have some pros and cons as well. For example, the pros could be, the attack end early obviously, maybe if you don't attack the command post after a few failed wave attacks the aliens could self destruct the post causing major damage to your base's rooms which could be stopped by attacking it early, and with that you could also collect valuable tech and information from the temp command post. The cons could be, its pretty dangerous to go from your well-defended position to attack the command post, you will be staging a counteroffensive against a very well defended position with the possibility of higher-level 'officer' aliens, I was thinking there could also be a turn timer that starts after you start the attack on the temp command post in whereafter it ends the aliens self destruct the command post killing all your troops in the room and severely injuring the ones in adjacent rooms. With that being said I think it would be cool if there were a few other cool mechanics added to base defense that would increase the importance of defending your base. For instance, it would be interesting if you were able to build static defenses inside your base for when it gets attacked, it would also be cool if later techs allow you to build bigger base's (which would in turn both decrease the number of bases you need but increase the difficulty of base defense). It also always annoyed me that it never really mattered where you put your buildings in your base, this could be fixed by making the position of rooms vitaly important to base defense, for example, the aerial defense turrets could also protect certain rooms from becoming the temporary command posts, the happening because the aliens want to set up the command post as soon as they land/crash-land on your base so they wouldn't have time to move rooms from where they crashed, this would make it so you could start creating kill boxes by placing aerial defense turrets defending certain rooms to make the aliens basically only be able to crash in a certain room that could be surrounded by well-defended areas.

WOOOOOOOOOOT!!!!!

@PALU well u said that I was either wrong or I installed incorrectly and both of those were not correct so I had to show an example

...right here, alien mini-shield 102x102 pixels which gets blown up out of proportion @PALU

the handheld shield research icon should be resized, its at like a 144p resolution rn XD

the burst delay used to be .6 which is a staggering 6-10 times any other assault rifle type weapon, and it has the highest of any weapon's burst fire by atleast .3

btw anyone who is as annoyed as me with the starting aliens ballistic rifle firing burst shots being super slow, replace it with this in weapons_gc: <Weapon MODMERGEATTRIBUTE="name" MODMERGE="insert" name="weapon.AlienBallisticRifle" bulletType="normal" emptySound="Empty Click 1"> <props range="16" hands="1" recoil="0" weight="8" isHeavy="0" clipSize="6" reloadAPCost="20" reloadSound="Weapon MAG Reload" reactionModifier="1.5" isAlien="1" infiniteAlienAmmo="1" /> <SingleShot sound="Weapon Assault Rifle Single" delay="0.7" suppressionValue="6" suppressionRadius="1"> <Set1 ap="23" accuracy="50" /> <Set2 ap="45" accuracy="75" /> </SingleShot> <BurstFire ap="36" accuracy="55" sound="Weapon Assault Rifle Burst" shotCount="3" delay="0.6" burstdelay="0.1" suppressionValue="21" suppressionRadius="1.5" /> <GUIImage name="gui/weapons/Ballistic/AlienBallisticRifle.png"/> <GroundImage name="grounditemimages/mag_rifle.png"/> <Ammos> <Ammo name="ammo.Ballisticclip" type="kinetic" damage="45" stunDamage="0" mitigation="5" > <Projectile spectre="projectiles/magbullet/bullet" speed="3050" showAfterDistance="60.0"/> <Impact spectre="particles/bp_m_ballistic/bulletplume"/> </Ammo> </Ammos> </Weapon>

@Chris Ah! There we go (sorry for being kinda annoying about it XD)! So far it looks pretty good! I definitely love the ability to freely rotate the camera from the get-go *cough xcom 1 and 2 cough* and the 3d graphics and animations are feeling pretty smooth (if a bit slow). I have come across what looks like a soft lock tho, I was just playing through the first alien ground mission and it just stayed on alien turn, hidden movement output_log.txt until i force quit the game, it wasn't frozen it just wouldn't let me do anything other than move the camera with the curser. A couple of things I would suggest would be. 1: make the movement faster but have the camera zip over to the enemy when they shoot, I was having trouble seeing who the enemy was shooting when they had surrounded me. 2: I really liked the troop carrier in the first game actually having to travel across the world, it gave it realism and made me paranoid if ever there was a fighter that appeared on my sensors. 3: It would be very nice if the roles that you assign a soldier would appear on the soldier list so that i can easily see what training i should give them (be it accuracy for the sniper or TUs for a medic).

@Max_Caine just want to point out this is fairly obviously a dig at me XD

i would be able to rate if the promised keys came out

@Mr. Mister technically decreasing because the lower the number the more they prioritize to get to it, and the only way i can think of for making them only do it in terror missions would be to make terror mission specific civilians and then you could change how they act in that file. I dont know for sure but you can find that by digging through the xml files XD.

yeah, here it is. it was added in 0.99.10 apparently.

@Charon wasn't that image already in the files?

@Mr. Mister this seems to be actually fairly simple, just in aiprops.xml make the change (change the internal values how you will) <Civilian MODMERGE="update"> <Pathing Environment = "-20" Sight="0.5" Sound="-0.3" Cover="-5" ShotPotential="-10" EnemyInfluence="-2" AlliedInfluence="-1" Ambush="-20" Trepidation="20" EnemyLOS="1.3" AlliedLOS="0.5" ProbabilisticSearch="-0.8" NearestEnemy="-0.5" Goal="-5" /> </Civilian> with this kept in mind Explanation of the pathing weights: Environment: Environment defines hazardous locations on the map; Dangerous objects {Fire, Smoke} get a negative values. A negative weight will make a unit avoid dangerous objects. If you want Buddhist Civilians, you can give this a positive weight. Sight: Sight defines a raytracing of each location on the map; i.e. a general visibility of each location. The higher, the more visible. A negative weight will ensure that units stray to the open, positive they will seek hidey-holes. Sound: Each action will cause a rippling, decaying function originating from the source. Negative attracts unit to the source Cover: Cover defines the general cover value of each location, given the spotted enemies of a Faction. (uses AttackVector) Ambush: To be balanced, leave at 0.0 for now. (Gives a value to locations which are near to a location with a very high sight value, but themselves have a low sight value; aka good pop-and-shoot locations) Trepidation: Gives tiles on which units have died (and surrounding) a value. A more positive value will detract the AI from these locations. Also gives a higher value to tiles surrounding enemies (range 3). A more positive value will detract the AI from hugging the enemy. ShotPotential: For all known targets, precalculates the value of a shot on it for a tile, for all surrounding tiles (to some range). A lower negative value attracts to potential good shots. Intent: Keep below 0.0 Skipped by Civilians and Xenonauts (unnecessary calculations) EnemyInfluence: Decaying function from all known enemy units. Uses floodfill, so takes into account obstacles as opposed to NearestEnemyFunction. A lower negative value attracts to nearest known enemy. AlliedInfluence: Decaying function from all known allied units. With a small (range 3) negative circle around allied units. This value should be negative; the higher, the more allies stay together (but never not too close, negative circle) EnemyLOS: Gives a positive value to all tiles which have enemy LOS. Positive will make the unit avoid the locations. AlliedLOS: Same, but for Enemies ProbabilisticSearch: Gives a value to a location which determines the chance a unit might be located there. NearestEnemy: (Don't give high values, less than 0.2 preferably; use Enemy Influence as it takes obstacles into account) Gives distance to nearest known enemy. Closer is higher (Negative attracts to nearest known enemy) Goal: Rippling, decaying function from goal tiles. The goal is dependant on the mission and script type: - UFO Mission: = DEFENSIVE Script: UFO. Higher value makes the unit stick more inside the UFO. (Balance this with ShotPotential to make them pop out) = Allied attack requests. (Whenever a unit attacks a unit, it will make a request for others to help) = Civilians / Allied: Do not move onto UFO; Try to move to Xenonaut Spawn area - Xenonauts Base Defend Mission: - KeyProps, Command Room (both once detected at least once)

is this how the scouts are supposed to look @Charon @PALU @Svinedrengen ?

@Svinedrengen @Charon Other than some slight discolorations i see almost no difference, what assets are you talking about?

The best way to discuss would be on discord tbh https://discord.gg/Y9evkJQ

Here is where all of the FitH port discussions will now take place

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1674213871 here is the steam link for anyone who wants to try it

Discussion on my port Discord would be easiest https://discord.gg/Y9evkJQ

@Max_Caine sounds A ok to me

@Changeling_wil I mostly do that English stuff to blow off steam, secondly there are 4, lastly I am pretty sure it replaces the lasers.