PALU
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Posts posted by PALU
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Antimatter rifles are definitely very useful, and I do use them, as well as antimatter Miniguns (the Mk-1 are getting outdated against shield bearing Caesans in phase 4). I don't have antimatter Mk-4, and I suspect I won't be able to get it until after I've encountered the elusive capable psionic unit (I've researched Ancient Weapons, but lack the last weapon for Advanced Ancient Weapons). One reason not to go all antimatter is shields, as I'd rather have something with more punch to deal with those (I've got a Rail Minigun Mk-3 on my A team, together with a still unused Antimatter Minigun Mk-3 in the inventory). The Robodog Ghost would be a squad killer against a squad equipped with only antimatter below the top level as well... However, I've considered whether to eventually replace most Sonic weapons with Antimatter Mk-4, and will probably replace at least one rifle with Antimatter Mk-3 before that (My A team has 5 Sonic, 2 Antimatter Mk-2/3 (the Mk-3 replacement in production), and 1 Rail rifles. The remainder are two shield bearers with Rail SMGs [probably replaced with the older Electron Pistol against Androns], one Sonic sniper, and one heavy Minigun wielder). "Shield Bearer" is a misnomer in my case, as everyone except the sniper and the heavy bring shields. The two flyboys drop their shields while scouting, but I've very much into using shields, in particular since breaching craft has a tendency to chew up a few shields, so replacements are needed there.
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@Dr. Ethan No. The only thing I do is to provide an updated Xenopedia. My guess is that you'd get it by enabling it in the mod loader, but note that I have no knowledge of whether that works or not, and, if it does, you'd have to start a new campaign to get it to work properly (but probably not, as it ought to effect crash site generation). I haven't read the initial post in a long time, but I know there are warnings about changing anything but cosmetics. Fire in the hole definitely shouldn't be enabled by this mod pack by default as it changes the game play, but the fact that it is in the mod loader at all indicates it might be considered somewhat compatible with it. Note, however, that I'm just guessing: I don't have any actual knowledge.
When it comes to Charon's behavior, it's doesn't make sense to me either much of the time. If you're interested you can dig far back in the thread to see what resulted in a warning aimed at me from the moderators, but I won't comment on that further.
Charon's mention of me regarding development refers to changes made that might reflect onto Xenopedia entries, and the parts beyond that can probably be chalked up to what Charon finds interesting.
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Feedback: I don't dispute kinetic rifles get better for each generation, but that amounts to little when each generation of enemies improve faster, so what sucked in phase 2 sucks utterly in phase 4 in its improved version (in phase 2 robodogs could be damaged a little with kinetic rifles, while the Ace can just forget about kinetic damage). For each phase the relative strength of the current level kinetic rifle falls further behind in performance. A large part of it is that the enemy is generally biased against kinetic from the start, and strengths basically improved relative to the current strength, so kinetic resistance skyrockets on most units, and there aren't any units that kinetic damage is sufficiently much better than energy to warrant lugging around a next to useless weapon on the off chance that this soldier happens to be near that enemy. Harridans are supposed to be more vulnerable to kinetic weapons, but I generally manage to handle them just fine with energy ones (or, fairly frequently, mechanized "machinegun" fire: the mech "machineguns" are brutally effective).
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Feedback: Sonic weapons suck in their own way, but at least they don't seem to be worse than the Pulse ones in general, which means they're about as useful as those.
I mean that Rail Rifles are rather useless at a distance compared to other rifles. At least the Pulse ones seem to hit reasonably often (I haven't used Sonic ones long enough to get a feeling for them). The Antimatter Mk-2 ones have impressed me with their accuracy (again, I haven't had Mk-3 long enough to get any feeling for those). The fact that most enemies have better protection against kinetic weapons just makes it worse. Kinetic rifles can take out small drones, but that's about it (and that can be done with other rifles as well). In theory they should be useful against Harridans, but that requires you to hit the buggers with a sufficient number of bullets. They should also be useful to wear down shields, but, again, that requires that they actually hit.
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Thanks for the answers. I'll still let the supply through (only to take it out when it takes off again, assuming it works like base builders), as I should at least be able to bag a Sebillian Large Base Operator from it (not that I need it, I think, as I've got all Data Hacks, but that's one of the reasons I let the base be build in the first place). It was the second Sebillian base building mission total in my game: the first one came in the wave preceding that one, and I raided that base to let the second one grow, as I thought it would grow a lot faster. Raiding the first one eventually gave me Antimatter Mk-3 though, so it was definitely worth it.
"Capeable": I'm referring to the text in the lower right corner of the geospace saying my mission is to find a capeable psionic unit. I don't know where that text comes from (but I haven't searched for it).
Feedback: Well, I do have significant issues with Sonic weapons: in particular their poor ammo capacity and heavy ammo, and I'm not really convinced they're better than the tier 3 weapons... However, using a Rail Rifle in the open desert is rather pointless anyway, as it won't hit particularly often, and when it does hit it generally doesn't cause any damage worth mentioning. I fire Gauss/Rail rifles more for the sake of it than with any expectation that it will produce any useful results. My teams have one kinetic rifle bearer each, again, mostly for the sake of having something that might be useful against anything that might show up to be Energy immune (ignoring meta knowledge).
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- I've reworded the sentence missing the word "Technology" and adjusted the descriptions of the top Harridans a little to match the upcoming changes. I don't think the Praetorian, top Xenomorphs, or Shock Gun changes affect anything described in the Xenopedia.
- Feedback: I've found both the Gauss and Rail Rifles of the Mk-3 status to be rather disappointing, with rather poor performance against everything (well, if they manage to hit with at least two bullets they can destroy small terror drones), while the Mk-3 Rail SMG was a very positive surprise (4 bursts from one shield bearer [3 as reaction shots, 1 the next turn, emptying the clip], plus 2 from another at more or less rifle range managed to destroy a killer cyber disc, and two bursts at point blank or slightly longer reliably killed wraiths, while the rifle failed to kill a Wraith with the 4 bullets a Guardian wearing soldier can manage to fire in a turn. All 4 bullets did hit, while a single burst from a Sonic Rifle Mk-3 had no trouble eliminating other Wraiths at similar distances). To add insult to injury, it seems the kinetic rifles are less accurate than the energy ones (based on experience: I haven't checked the actual weapon stats). I'm seriously considering ditching the Rail Rifle Mk-3 in favor of another SMG...
- A meta gaming question: I've waited for a mighty long time (I think over a month, all during phase 4) for an alien base I allowed to be established to grow into an Alien Fortress, as I suspect that's where I'll find a "capeable" psionic unit (it would be good if that text was corrected to say "capable", as it's displayed rather prominently once you reach that stage in the game). I've shot down everything appearing, but now I get a supply ship seemingly aimed at that base. Will the base grow faster if I allow the supply ship to reach it?
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Pen & paper... The Xenopedia shows the ones you've "processed" through interrogations, but the list gets rather long fairly quickly, and isn't available while on a ground mission (and the ones you've captured but haven't interrogated yet are available through the research screen).
There are certain Xenopedia entries that list aliens and roles that may be encountered during various phases. However, all "operators" of a given species look the same.
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Is it intentional that movement in high grass is extremely costly for mechs (and, I think, other vehicles)? 19 AP for a single step seems rather excessive, given that grass shouldn't have any effect at all on a mechanical vehicle (and probably not on power armor either, although that may be harder to separate from other infantry movement).
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@Ion Mage Thanks. Will be fixed in the next version posted.
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OK, I've finally figured out how to deal with bomber dreadnoughts: If you fly into a corner you can get out of the firing (but certainly not hit) range of the missiles long enough to shoot down the last missile and escape. It's the only part of the battle area that isn't covered by the firing range usually (and I guess I've been lucky on the previous instances I've escaped).
Edit: Something completely different: Why is the reward for bombing a downed Mothership 0$? There are good reasons for raiding it, of course, but bombing it ought to give you something, if your A team isn't in shape for taking it on (I would guess it's a bug/oversight, of course).
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Fought another Andron landing mission, and the two medium killer drones behaved normally, i.e. no weird refusal to move happened after taking them down (the first one was destroyed with an AP Singularity Rocket, and presumably resulted in no "corpse", while the second one was killed "normally"). The Andron that should transform into a Robodog Ghost went stealthy as the shield went down, however, but the mission ended as it was "killed" and morphed into a box (as it was the last unit, so that's not unexpected: the shield was taken down while there were still two other units around).
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In your own time. It's not urgent, so post them when you're done, and I'll try to come up with something in my own time
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Yes, it would be useful to get the designs, as well as any themes they might have that might explain similarities and differences.
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What about this:
"Sir, I have an idea that I think you're going to like... You know how we've been having such a hard time taking down those alien capital ships, what with the incredibly dense armour and shielding and whatnot? Well, I've come up with a simple-yet-effective solution...more firepower. If we could just hit those alien ships with twice as many torpedoes I'm pretty sure we could start taking them down without the current high fatality rate, but the only planes we've got that could carry that much weight are our troop transports. As I'm sure you've noticed, they aren't exactly great at running down an alien ship... they are far too slow. There's only one plane that I'm aware of that could lift the kind of ordnance I'm thinking about while still having the speed to catch the alien capital ships... the NASA Archelon. That's right, Commander...I want to steal NASA's best bird and load it with torpedo bays. It's normally used to lift an entire space shuttle up to the edge of space, and with the same weight allowances I believe I can get a full set with a mixture of torpedos and missiles onboard, along with all the control hardware. I also intend to cover the exteriour of the plane with hardened alien alloy to give it some durability...now that I think about it, perhaps the entire skeleton of the plane should be molded from hardened alien alloys. Actually Commander, I think I'd rather steal NASA's Archelon blueprints than the plane itself... I bet we could build a better one from scratch if I can include alien tech into the design. I'll give our engineers the completed technical specifications once I've had a few hours with those blueprints. Be a pal and make the call, Commander, NASA's not going to give those blueprints up without some... encouragement.
Thanks for explaining to NASA that providing us with their blueprints might allow them to actually be able to continue their operation once the war is over, provided we're able to end it, with their help.
In the process, we've done some significant calculations and even performed some wind tunnel experiments, and it turns out we'll have significant issues with turbulence whatever we do to turn this beast quickly. However, what we CAN do is to change the speed rapidly thanks to our extremely powerful (and heavy) engines, and the fact that alien materials have allowed us to actually reverse the engines to slow the craft, which means we should be able to almost stop, turn, and then accelerate back up to top speed in with both the deceleration and acceleration phases taking a mere 3 seconds (so the pilots will actually have to wear G suits to handle the G forces, which no other bomber pilots need to bother with)."
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I'm using Drakes because they reach the target slightly faster than my Lotus craft (I'm using those as well, and some have delivered their payload). I'm just over a month into phase 4 when the dreadnoughts show up (this is the first time I see them), and while I've researched the tech for Lotus craft a long time ago (in phase 2), I have to raid a lot of sites and disassemble a lot of cores to get the critical resource for phase 4 craft (and I'm producing craft as quickly as I get cores: there's no core backlog). So far Drakes have worked just fine, so I've spent the resources building some Interceptors (no heavy ones have shown up yet), and have been working or replacing the completely inadequate Corsairs with Contrails (and the single use of them seems to indicate they might just be acceptable, although I'm still not sure it wouldn't have been better to produce half as many repurposed Interceptors instead).
There's a slightly better bomber than the Lotus, but it uses 8 rather than 6 of the Extreme critical resource, which is what you might be able to scrape together from a complete wave, and so far I've seen nothing indicating 3 of those crafts would provide me with any benefit that's actually worth anything, let alone a fourth Lotus. Thus, my plan so far is to produce that one only when I'm full up on Interceptors (and I'm not convinced I should switch from Interceptors to Lotus yet anyway, as the problems I have aren't the ability to deliver damage, but the ability to participate in the next wave, and unless a bomber craft had enough HP to withstand both a pea shooter AND a missile hit, I don't see anything indicating there's any worth in sacrificing damage delivered [i.e. number of craft provided by the available resources] for fancy craft stats).Phase 4 is a bit of a shock when it comes to production time: weapons take a bloody long time to produce (one fully staffed workshop takes more than one wave to produce a single Sonic Rifle Mk-3 from scratch), resources for aircraft are scarce, and production resources in workshops are scarce. I've upgraded the production yet another notch, but the staff for the first new workshop hasn't arrived yet, while the two other workshops are still in production.
I've got a single Archelon, and it's on the way to one of the bombers. If it's faster than other bombers it should be given a chance to wear away almost all the remaining HPs of that craft, but not the last 5% (it's the first wave I've got it, as the Mothership was gained in the previous wave).
It doesn't matter how long you stay in the danger zone, as there is no way to exit it before the dreadnought has fired its first missile, and after that it doesn't matter how long you stay (apart from the damage the pea shooter causes, or if you're using the very first countermeasures so you might run out of ammo for it): the danger is in leaving the area. Unfortunately, I've found you have to stick to mines as the only thing that works on everything: missiles might work on dreadnoughts, but they don't work on craft sporting powerful cannons (i.e. most everything else), and it takes forever to change the loadout, so all other weapons are nice decorations of little practical value. It's not possible to have enough aircraft to have loadouts adapted to different sets of targets, as it takes too long to actually get to the appropriate targets, and you're bound to get waves where large parts of your special purpose aircraft are useless because their types of targets didn't show up.
Evasion ability is useless to counter this situation, as the game will not activate it automatically while you've no longer got any control of the aircraft (and I've tried a mixed squad of Hunters and Interceptors, and while they did cause a decent damage, marginally better than a Drake, one of them was downed after exiting). I've considered sending bombers in full squads to reduce the losses to 1:3, but it's too late for this wave, as all the remaining bombers come from bases far away and have been in the air for quite some time.
If I was trying to play "honestman", I would leave the dreadnoughts alone, as I'd have to be lucky to recover a single bomber if sent them one at a time. For full squads I'd expect to lose 3 per dreadnoughts (and 2 Lotus crafts per dreadnoughts, or one Archelon, assuming I had a pair, but I've only seen two Motherships so far, and the core of the first one was lost to research, as usual). Actually getting away without the missile killing the craft has a rather low probability, and so would be a lucky exception. Those losses would mean I'd be down 9 Drakes for the next wave (assuming I was using full squads), which means I'd be unable to take down all craft in that wave instead. Now, losses suffered up to gain specific captives might be worth it, but it's not useful as a general strategy: the losses are simply too large.
If the Archelon has a lousy turn rate but good (?) acceleration, it sounds like the turbines are actually fixed, but capable of providing a high thrust... (The question mark indicates I have no idea if that value is good or not. I have no idea what numbers other craft have in comparison),
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Slowing the rate of fire of the missile slightly might provide a somewhat larger escape window (far from ideal, of course, but a lot better than the current situation). I tried to hack it, but it had no effect: it's quite possible the XML files are used only when the craft are created, but once created the info is in the crafts themselves.
A couple of battlefield oddities, with insufficient data to provide real bug reports:
- The single Robodog Ghost spawning Andron I've encountered went stealthy when the shield was brought down, i.e. its enemy indicator disappeared, and it could only be targeted by selecting the tile (but the "body" was marked when that tile was targeted, just as for a robo-sadist "corpse". Likewise, no damage indications were shown when it was fired at, but it nevertheless was brought down (and it did move and attack, so it wasn't a passive "statue")).
- A small number of times (4?), all in phase 4, I've had the odd experience of movement ceasing to work. It was possible to select a path for units, but confirming that path did nothing. It was possible to select other units, but all I've tried refused to actually move. I haven't tried a vehicle, and I don't think I've tried firing at anything. This issue cleared itself after saving (in a different save than the previous one) and reloading. The last two times were in turn 1 of an Andron base building mission: Two Medium Killer Drones waited outside the drop zone (plus an andron and a small drone). I exited the area, moved the Mech two or three steps, and then fired twice at one of the medium drones, destroying it. After that I couldn't move any units (the mech was out of TUs). Save/reload, and a couple of soldiers moved into position and destroyed the other medium drone. Again, the odd movement refusal occurred. Save/reload, and things worked correctly again. I haven't encountered any medium drones since that, although there should be some waiting on at least one mission when I've finally downed the pesky dreadnought bombers (although they might not show up if that particular bomber has to be downed into the drink: I don't remember which craft they were on: such info is usually not of interest until it's time to equip a party to deal with them).
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I've tried many variants, but the missiles are extremely fast (I initially thought they were cannon shots, not missiles), and unless the UFO is very close to the edge, the second missile is fired before the countermeasures have engaged the previous one. I assume a roll would be able to evade a missile (but if you could perform a roll, the next missile is already on the way anyway, and I don't have any bombers with roll capacity anyway). In a couple of cases I've seen missiles miss the UFO because they get out into the dead reckoning movement zone, where they won't adjust the course, but I haven't figured out what causes that to happen and when it does not. In most of the cases where I've succeeded the second missile somehow wasn't fired.
My least bad results have come from moving towards the edge at an angle, and then change the target to a position with a similar opposite angle towards a target along the edge, resulting in a turn that goes out outside of the area. Once there, it's possible to immediately switch to retreat by moving towards a position outside of the area, and thus immediately block further missiles from being fired. However, I'd need luck to succeed one time out of 5, and since the game crashes when trying to reload, I have to restart the game every time, so each failure takes about 2 minutes, I've got 3 bombers, and each bomber requires at 7 lots of stealth mines to take down (the first one will need 8, because the first 2 engagements didn't hit with/deploy all mines, and so I ended up with 50% damage rather than 60% after 4 Drakes' worth of mines).
There's a reason I play turn based games and not FPS or platformer ones...
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Extremely annoying bug when the Dreadnought UFO is encountered in phase 4: Once an aircraft has fled from the area, missiles continue to follow it (including turning), but the countermeasures are disengaged, so you need a very precise timing to be able to leave the area just as one missile has been shut down, but before the next one has been fired. The missiles are single hit kill ones as well, as far as I've experienced. I assume this can happen with other craft as well, but this bugger fires them so rapidly you need luck to get the exit timing right, and it doesn't have any range restrictions, at least not in practice.
Another air combat bug is that if you try to leave the area when very close to the border, the aircraft can leave, and then turns back in towards the enemy, which is fatal if the aircraft left due to fuel shortage, as it will disintegrate the moment you take control over it (on other cases you may or may not be able to get away by disconnecting the disengage setting and take control of the aircraft and order it to leave again). This bug conspires with the previous one to make whittling away at dreadnoughts a rather time consuming and annoying game of "roll the dice and see if I got away this time".
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There are various issues with going directly from one mission to the next one. Another issue is rocket launcher loadouts which are reset between missions (which means you'll always have to start every mission with replacing the default rocket with a useful one for all crew members carrying rockets). Neither of these issues seem to be trivial to change, though.
The lore explanation for recovery of equipment after a mission is that this is handled by separate recovery crews (who also pick up downed alien fighters and recover the ones you've lost), but these crews are managed in the background (like e.g. purchase of food and cleaning/laundry for the bases, etc).
While recovery taking time would make it more realistic, it will also mess with your own logistics, as you'd then have to remember that gear will be recovered to this base at this time (and what the significant parts of the equipment are, so you can then issue the proper orders), and that happens in several days real time, because this was the first downed craft in a wave, and you've got 5 more to go... I'd say it's a case where realism would get in the way of playability (although I order new production as the previous one is done, so I still have that headache of trying to remember what has to be done where...).
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Sorry, I meant interceptor type craft (like the Asierus). When it comes to missiles, I'm getting a bit foggy about the earlier phases, but later on more and more craft that may be escorted have missiles or other means to make torpedoes hard to deploy.
Bombers (such as Foxtrots) are useful as long as the targets don't have countermeasures, in which case you need to use missiles/torpedoes that fire too rapidly to all succumb to the countermeasures, and the smaller UFOs can evade missiles and torpedoes. It's all a matter of adapting the offense to the target, though (as well as to the resources you have available within range, as well as your play style).
I'm not trying to argue that taking down a terror ship early is impossible, only that I estimated the losses to be greater than the gains (which are considerable if you manage to do it regularly). If you fail (which I hope you don't) I'm certainly not owed any apology.
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If the escorted ship doesn't have missiles, yes, fighters are better, and I've used fighters to take down almost all the alien fighter wings, but when missiles are aimed at you, it's nice not to have to try to dog fight at the same time as you try to evade missiles. For earlier crafts you may be able to stay out of the craft missile range, but that gets hard later.
Good luck! I just waited until I did get the ability to take down the aliens without losing my craft (but I don't care too much if the get shot up badly, as they'll be repaired to the next wave, but they'll obviously won't be good for a second sortie, should the enemy still be around when you've reloaded [well, I DID have one case where a bomber was able to go up again and finish off a terror ship, despite being heavily damaged, and taking more damage in that fight]).
P.S. I did actually get a ship before I was able to shoot it down due to an exploit/bug (which I wasn't aware of at the time: I just happened to stumble upon it for legitimate reasons).
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Note that countermeasures don't engage threats to crafts other than the ones they're mounted on, so flying a craft with countermeasures in between the enemy craft and a bomber is ineffective when it comes to protecting the bomber, but you might lure the enemy to target the closer craft to some extent. I didn't have much luck in my single attempt, though.
I also handle craft with escorts in two passes: First I send a wing of recovered alien crafts to take out the escorts, and then I send in the bombers (I send bombers alone, but if they don't have any countermeasures but would need it, I assume it's better to send a complete wing of bombers to have them act as decoys for each other to a marginal extent.
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As I said, countermeasures are NOT manufactured: they're made available for mounting on aircraft as soon as they've been researched. However, they're mounted on missile and torpedo slots, but NOT on cannon slots. This means they're effectively useless until you have a craft with at least one mount beside a missile or torpedo one. Sure, you can mount countermeasures on Foxtrots, but then you can't mount any weapons... Pure fighters can't mount countermeasures as they've got cannon mounts only.
Thus, you need to wait with actually using countermeasures until you've got some capable craft to mount them on (but you can check your Foxtrots to see that you could actually mount them on those). Until then, you'll just have to gnash your teeth and take the rare opportunities to raid untouchable craft when they land (and terror ships land only as part of base assaults and terror missions, and you don't get any craft cores from those). I believe some people have taken down terror ships by sacrificing a significant number of aircraft on suicide missions (and the aircraft are recovered, but they won't be available for the next wave).
Hacking researches is very risky, as far as I understand, and can lead to permanently blocking you from getting techs.
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Hm, I've encountered an odd desert base(?) map. On the first turn, the first I see as I look outside the Valkyrie drop zone is two dead soldiers. There's no indication I've missed a turn by mistake (no sound of gun fire, etc.). A couple of turns later I look into a nearby building and find two additional dead soldiers, with the exits blocked by a live soldier and a live civilian, respectively, with no enemies inside (although it's a Caesan mission, so in theory a Wraith could be responsible).
Edit: Hm, the corpses must be "decoration", as the number of surviving local forces were 2/5, and there were at least 6 soldier corpses spread over the map (not counting those I know were killed during the mission).
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[1.65/X.CE V0.35.0] X-Division 1.00 Beta (1.00.11c)
in Completed Game Mods
Posted · Edited by PALU
I'm lacking one of the Praetors, and sort of hoped I'd find it in the Alien Fortress.
I used shields as much as possible even before the Force Shield was reached, but that shield makes it almost bearable to use Sonic weapons with their crappy ammo capacity and heavy ammo.
In terms of loadouts I've tried Kinetic HMGs as secondary weapon for the heavy, and that's worked out to some extent. I've never used shotguns (apart from extremely early, after I dumped it when it had absolutely no visible effect), nor have I used cannons. My vehicles have used Kinetic Machineguns (except for the production mistake where I accidentally produced an Energy one for a Mech, which actually turned out to be a disappointment). I can also mention that my shield bearers and snipers are equipped with Katanas, which are very useful (snipers don't use it often, but it's very handy to deal with Wraiths TP:ing to the vicinity). It's really satisfying to have a shield bearer walk up to a Caesan Terror unit and cut it down, optionally claiming its shield in the process...
@Dr. Ethan You're directing the questions to the wrong person, as I don't know if there's a GitHub repo. I post my Xenopedia.xml filed in this thread for Charon to pick them up. As far as I can tell, Charon has actually answered your question about Fire in the Hole: It's included (albeit in a French version) as a result of being part of X:CE, but isn't compatible as it's not a cosmetic issue (nor one of the mods listed as compatible).
I would guess Charon's 100 hour estimate includes more map work than just that particular set. There are invisible props, for instance (including half height walls that can be jumped over in some of the UFOs), which I assume would be part of a map job. Note that I'm guessing here, as I have no actual knowledge.