Coffee Potato
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Posts posted by Coffee Potato
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1 hour ago, Solver said:
True, but that's basically a cheat button at this point as it seems to always win with no damage taken, and autoresolve isn't what normal air combat is supposed to be like.
Nope, but the air game isn't finished yet.
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11 minutes ago, Solver said:
Possible balance issue with planes - repair takes forever. As someone who isn't great at air combat, I withdrew a fighter with 10 HP from an Observer, and it seems to be taking something like 15 or more days to repair. Very slow.
Auto Resolve, they come back fine every time.
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Unable to recreate it, but this was the location and rough setup. Several reactions triggered at once, and the game just kept going into reaction mode over and over. So yeah, will report better if I can make it happen again.
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So after their iffy earlier versions, upon seeing my LMG squad taking reaction shots and suppressing a Psyon on his own turn before he could shoot, I just wanted to say:
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34 minutes ago, stewpidbear said:
Looking at the video I now feel earth needs battle suits..................;)
XD has mechs, for what it's worth. I only asked them to add Armored Cores about 800 times, hahaha
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50 minutes ago, Juan said:
I'm sure it's fantastic. Until now I tried using one of the F17 to bait the small UFO, and another one to look for UFO's back - it's a very fragile balance, any minor mistake and you lose the chance, because UFO seems to turn fast to the closest plane. Once I had some success with this tactic with the plane that was behind, but I hadn't enough firepower to make that UFO crash. I did somewhat 10-15 attempts last weekend and since I did not kill a single UFO I desisted atm while I'm doing a new run in X1CE classic. The ground combat, while tough, was more attainable.
So one thing that rarely came up in base game, but gets used all the time in XD is the speed up/slow down/dodge mechanics. If you speed up, your dodge rolls get like 8x their distance, while slowing down gives you much tighter turning. So the idea with some of those early ones is to know they'll be using the normal "leash" yours do when targeting, and so you can take a diagonal to them, exposing the side, and doing a quick dodge when just about in their firing range to get on their flank. From there, you can turn off afterburner mid-flip and use the slowdown to do a quick turn onto their side, before speeding up to keep up pace and get the kill. It's tricky, but you eventually develop this sort of circular movement map in your head.
Good luck on Your CE run!
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If there's different transition screens for vehicles, and the Valkyrie makes a comeback, I hope it looks a bit like the Armored Core 2 drop pods (that the game surprisingly never actually used).
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12 hours ago, Max_Caine said:
Half the time if there's an alien spawned close to the LZ, that alien isn't even looking at the dropship. If the alien isn't looking at the dropship, they won't turn until someone shoots and hits them, giving me plenty of time to get everyone out the bus and into cover. If I face Psyons AND they are looking at the dropship then first things first, smoke out, then advance under the cover of smoke because you can't target through it. If facing Sebillians they have terrible reflexes so I can get out before they realise their gun has a trigger. If I've got combat shields then I use that guy to draw fire if necessary. When facing a raid a good strategy for me is to get out all one side. On the docklands map I usually get everyone out the side with all the crates because there's plenty of cover. Getting everyone heading in one direction means I can maximise the odds against the aliens spawned in one side while aliens the other side have to catch up, and by the time the aliens on the other side have caught up, I've gunned down all the aliens one side.
You can't target through smoke now? Interesting, sounds like it'll be viable for Insane this time around. Yeah, since the last patch, suppression has really changed the game, it feels fantastic at the moment. Also, really appreciating that you can miss a shot and hit behind them now, and it actually lets you know. Also, grenade rushing a high TU team from the drop ship makes for A-one hell of a stylish first turn, and B-some really safe landings.
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I can try to recreate it then.
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7 minutes ago, Chris said:
Thanks for the comments, I'm glad people are enjoying the new balance more.
The LMG is in a slightly awkward place at the moment because the short bursts do allow it to fire 10 bursts before requiring a reload. The obvious solution would be to drop the damage and increase the number of shots to 10, but an LMG fires the same rounds as an AR so I imagine that change will see an endless stream of complaints from gun lovers over the remainder of development (I might do it anyway). Alternatively I could just up the number of shots in a burst to 10 but drop the accuracy a bit and increase the TU cost, but doing that gives a significant buff to the close-range effectiveness of the LMG and reduces the mobility of LMG soldiers - I deliberately switched the weapon to a LMG rather than the HMG we had in X1 to make it more mobile but less damaging.
Regarding suppression, the Mantids and the Wraiths look like they're suppressible and both have the default 50 Bravery. I just tested it out and a single LMG burst is indeed capable of suppressing them. It's probably worth noting though that suppression is now applied by each bullet as it travels down its flight path. In X1 it didn't actually matter where the bullets went, suppression was just applied in a radius around the intended target. What that means is that suppression is less effective at long range because if a bullet doesn't pass close to the intended target then it will not apply suppression to them.
To answer specific questions:
- I'm still not 100% sure about the Strength training effect. I might just set it to grant +1 strength on a mission if you spend at least 200TU carrying more than 70% of your max carry load, and +2 strength if your soldiers spends at least 200TU carrying more than their max carry load. But to make that more interesting we might have to provide set TU bonuses / penalties at certain weights - e.g. a soldier gets +10TU if they are carrying less than 70% of their max carry capacity, and gets -10TU as soon as they get overloaded (and then a scaling penalty if they go above 130% carry capacity maybe).
- Yes, we are planning to have different weapon tiers have different properties, although I've only done a basic pass on this so far (e.g. laser weapons can't be reloaded but regenerate ammo, plasma weapons drain ammo each turn, etc).
OH hell yes to all the above! Also, could always try the XDiv thing and just give LMGs 1 extra shot. While using different calculations, it made them just reliable enough to suppress in two directions. Sounds like it might work for X2.
Our of curiosity, how does Suppression actually calculate now? Is it when bullets apply, they do Bravery damage, and suppress if bypassed, or...?
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1 hour ago, Juan said:
I tried X-Division one time and only several hours, and my heart still beats hard when I remember the scene where I was approaching an UFO and few spider-ish unknow melee aliens opened the door and came to eat my soldiers. They were ambushing me. I decided played X-Division later anyway because the early air combat was too tough for me, and I didn't see a single video about how someone can win it.
I still enjoy X1CE with only few mods already named here, like 120 degree view angle, blood, other with real faces, and other which isn't named here (and I dont remember it's name now) about ambience sounds. I also used lots of new music.
XDiv's airgame takes little practice, but ultimately becomes as strategic as the ground game. They do have an Easy Air Game mode in the mod settings, though.
In general, like the ground game, it revolves around assuming for what you'll run into, and using the types that work for you. While some are very effective counters (like Heavy Fighters w/AntiMissiles vs Battleships), and can get away with barely a scratch, in many cases you can even plan around stuff that shouldn't work, like my preferred method of dealing with most medium UFOs: just send fighters with longevity loadouts to plink it in the butt forever till it dies. Optimal? No. Convenient? Yes.
But yeah, XDiv has so many different approaches to everything that you generally want to be thinking more about what can be abused in what situation, rather than what is directly "supposed" to counter anything.
More examples:
Smoke is for safety, but might as well be an off switch for Androns, since they will almost always move to get away from it for better shots.
Using identical weapons on fighters is recommended, but I like using a sonar/laser combo sometimes, because it gives them options for dealing with faster planes by firing in all directions after the initial attack.
Axes are a desperation weapon, but I've been loving their command room clearing utility.
Missile planes are supposed to actually make it back, but I usually just leave them to dump their 4-20 missiles and hope they consider coming back.
Anti missiles aren't supposed to be a weapon, but work just fine for auto resolve calculations if you retreat your expended planes from a damaged UFO.
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Another thing from XDiv, as well as something I've seen in other places, would more interesting progression in weapon types as the game goes on.
Using XDiv as an example, the Division Cannon starts off as a clunky rifle with an AoE hit. Then it evolves to do more damage, but also has more power and armor mitigation. Then, it starts evolving into a rapid-fire variant, firing times per round. Ammo counts go up and down as the scientists figure out how to make the thing either stronger, lighter, more accurate, or easier to use over time. It feels a lot more organic than just a flat damage increase, and ammo decrease.
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3 hours ago, Emily_F said:
I'm really liking most of the current balance. The only thing I've found is that I can have the gunner lay down two bursts and no suppression (on psions and lizards it seems 50/50 but wraiths and spiders appear immune like the androns and drones)
Even bullets are scared of spiders.
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I left 3 units watching a corner when a Psyon walker walked around the corner, one fired, but it seemed like it couldn't decide what to do, as it kept flashing Enemy Activity and Hidden activity over and over. Logs and Save attached. Issue happened when hiding behind the southern trough. 3 were behind it, 1 was behind the hedge. The two that seemed to be, and should have been reacting were behind the hedge, and middle of the trough.
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Definitely true. XDiv has that rule where Terror Missions have all aliens start outside of the immediate houses, which tends to lead to this interesting "oh crap, where are they, hide, hide!" situation, that, in reality, just makes that first less likely to ruin the player so hard they quit the game. I kinda feel like we needed to either be able to send more people to take those hits (See XCOM Rookie Cloud Cover), or improved armor that can take a couple hits, even if the enemy count goes way up as a result.
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Should be this one.
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2 minutes ago, Keflin said:
Good topic Chris,
All reasonably good comments above. X-Division sucked in a good way in that it was extremely hard to beat. It was rich with additional content in all of the right places. I especially liked the feature where the economy (if that is even the right word) was built around capturing alien stuff, disassembling it into its basic components that were needed to build new equipment. My base engineers were never not busy, ever. It served as a great technology throttle as well. You appear to have some what adopted this in principle when we can "convert" alien weapons for human use.
I will not get long winded on everyone. One way or another X-Division II will get built by the community somehow on top of your new engines which will breathe new live into X2 once the original content gets repetitive. X1 X-Division only major short coming for me was not being able to rotate the view. Of all of the features in X2, that is the #1 improvement for me. Everything else is mostly icing on the cake.
Great Work so far...
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1 hour ago, Chris said:
There's no plans for unique maps per city, no - it'd require far too much extra art to be worth the time and money we'd have to spend on it.
Any odds of more indoor areas, though? Malls and such?
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All of the CE mods make for a fantastic experience, however..
X-Division has been hands down the best experience I've had with the genre in general. Reasons:
Armor-
Armor feels like it does what it says it does. When early armors can only resist ballistic, and successfully negates a couple shots from a Sebillian ballistic pistol, it feels fantastic. When the Wolf description says it can survive a 50 cal, and successfully does so when you test it on accident, it feels fantastic. When you get a suit of Predator, and they can survive 3 rounds of fire from all over the map, it feels FANTASTIC (incidentally, those two predator units still died on stream yesterday, but dang it, they did great until I tried to capture a Xeno Queen in the middle of a Terror Mission). Point being, you knew roughly how much of what kind of punishment your armor loadouts could take, and it allowed for more offensive defense, if that makes sense.
Weapons-
Everything fires more, at worse accuracy, but for more damage. There are more considerations for damage types, and each weapon has a role it fits very well. HMGs can fire two Suppression bursts, Miniguns dedicate a whole turn to firing 40-120 times, shotguns shred armor and can hit TUs, SMGs can shoot into TUs as well, but can use a shield, pistols are super cheap and portable, rifles can handle sniping or suppression, while snipers mostly just miss and get insulted, but do a ton if they ever do hit. Fights feel very active and alive, plus bypassing armor is a major part of gameplay, resulting in more varied loadouts. This leads to random experimentation, and the likely effectiveness of some fantastically weird builds.
Research-
The slight randomization of the tech tree unlocks every round is used to great effect here. Every different class, weapon, ufo type, component, etc has different pieces of different puzzles, and it creates a constant reward loop of capture and discovery. Random missions don't feel like you're there for another corvette and 65k, you're there because they might have some new tech, or some components for a new jet, or you want more fibres to upgrade your vehicles. It's a fantastic feeling loop, and probably my favorite part of the mod after armor doing it's job.
AI and Randos-
The AI is improved in some fun ways, and tends to be, while still predictable, more surprising in it's approaches. They tend to find more reasonable hiding spots, and almost feel coordinated at times. On top of this, there's up to 4x and many civilians and other locals running around, which leads to some amazing moments where you get to see the rest of the earth keeping things together. One of my favorite moments was the other day, when a base gets attacked, and the rifle guys are there taking turns suppressing shielded ceseans over and over, ultimately keeping half the map pinned until we got there and promptly electrocuted everything. You see cops clearing floors during terror missions, and most of the locals pouring into your dropship, trying to leave. It feels so alive.
Air Game-
Every UFO has different types, different loadouts, and these update for every phase of the invasion. They feel like they came ready, and the kinds of options of planes you can make feels like two sides adapting to each other. Early scouts are fast, so you make maneuverable planes. They start to dodge and get side guns, so you make faster ones. They get air mines, and suddenly dedicated rapid fire dps builds that can get them through their defense gaps feel appropriate, etc. Changing loadouts constantly feels great if the enemies do it too.
In summary:
It addressed every problem I had with the original. Units dying one step out of a drop ship? Armor does its job. Maps feel dead sometimes? Locals everywhere. Advanced tanks dying to a single shot? Nope, they can take some serious punishment from the front. Units panicking in optimal positions? Noticeable Leadership bonuses. High HP units? Sensible health, but in armor. Air game consisting of being able to survive entirely on Corvettes until Marauders? Nope, you need to adapt to a lot of different UFO styles, and this whole bit is crazy expansive.
Plus who can say no to having Robot T-Rexes?
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58 minutes ago, Emily_F said:
@Chris another blonde question, but how do I take screenshots in the game?
Alt-Print Screen
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Save game I can do, originally I had a screenshot with this post, but it timed out and I got distracted afterward.
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That's what I mean, though, this one shows 6.3, and it updated to it before I saw the above.
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It just had an update, that's weird. Any word on when the Steam stuffs might be going out?
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1 hour ago, stewpidbear said:
Just to say even Chinooks have door and ramp gunners............
Reality doesn't need to make special rules to code them in, though. The problem sounds mechanical.
Best mods / improvements for Xenonauts 1?
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
While not a mod, a thought came to mind today.
If you've ever looked at Darkest Dungeon, they lean very heavily on their stress mechanic. Generally, 2/3 times, if driven to panic, they start acting weird, like trying to get themselves killed, refusing healing, panicking everyone around them, or just babbling like a loon. 1/3 times, instead of being broken, they become heroic, maybe shrugging off some wounds, or inspiring the people around them, or taking a guaranteed crit free action, etc. Is there any way to apply something similar, where a panicking rookie might so something amazing besides just getting lucky with a Berserk shot?