Mask

Well, the way I'd figure the formulas would be something like: Damage = Attack - Defence ArmourDegradation = Attack * DegMod Stun = ( Damage * StunMod + (Attack - Damage) * 0.3 * StunMod ) * Rand(x,x) The 0.3 is a placeholder. I'd have to do some thinking to work out how much stun is inflicted through armour.

The operations feature being added to the game is interesting, and I thought I'd discuss some possibilities for it. It's possible I've missed some of the recent details about its intended mechanics, so please forgive some inaccuracies. Combat / Espionage / Diplomatic You would have three categories of activities. These would let you know quickly what kind of danger you can expect, what sort of characters/attributes are best, and how risky the operations are and in what ways. Espionage can damage your reputation in the bloc it takes place in, combat is more likely to injure or more rarely kill your operatives, and diplomatic missions are generally safe. Leveling Up with Operations I think Operations should raise the stats they involve. This would make them a lot more useful and interesting, and we could training up our second-string team with operations. Stats and Missions There is the question of what stats you would have for operations. I presume all the original stats of Xenonauts are still in play. We can also assume Researchers and Engineers will have at least one stat to show their skill at their jobs. But should we add some more? I guess we should start out with some examples of missions, and figure out what stats would be good for them. If we notice a few types of missions lack a good stat in the existing lineup, we can add a new one. I will try to list the stats in order of most important to least important, including when I list X or Y. General Here is a list of trends I noticed, while making the list below. Bravery = Charm: Without a dedicated charm stat, this is the best one to represent it. Diplomacy: Your full charisma bonus seems to be your rank, bravery, medals, and possibly your kill or mission count. You can't really use this in Espionage operations, as those are undercover, of course. This reminds me of King of Dragon Pass, where some stats are made up of several others. Intelligence Stat: This seems to be pretty useful to most operations. Maybe it would be a stat that helps with all operations, some more than others? It would make sense. Escape: TUs and Reflex are the stats used to evade danger and return to base. Needing to get away safely is common in Espionage missions, and maybe some Diplomacy or Combat ones. Evasion: Maybe we should just have an Evasion stat for Operations, based off your TUs and Reflex? HP to Survive: Any time injury or death is a possibility, HP would determine how likely you are to survive unhurt. Wow, Technology: Technology should add to a lot of these rolls. Everything in Combat: Even if not listed, I figure every stat should help somewhat in Combat Operations Spoiler tags I apologize for the formatting. Spoiler tags are completely broken on this forum, and are basically impossible to edit or even copy text out of. So I've left it in this unfortunate state. Espionage

Excellent point, Fritz! You could do that quite easily by layering several vision cones on top of each other, at different sight ranges. I hope the option gets added to the files, as then it would be easy to mod.

I would like to recommend long and realistic sight ranges, for X2. I have seen this work very well in Xenonauts 1, and think it should be part of the sequel. So far as I've seen, short sight ranges don't accomplish much, aside from making it necessary to research the technology of glasses. In a night mission, it makes sense to have limited visibility, and so you can have a terrible feeling of claustrophobia. But in the day time, it doesn't make sense for aliens to stand outside of your sight range and shoot at you. It's one thing for aliens to hide behind cover, but it feels silly for them to hide in plain sight (they kind of stick out). Sight Radius A lot of people seem to agree they want a reasonably wide vision cone. How wide is difficult to say, but I figure the maximum would be close to 180 degrees. Between 120 and 180, I'd guess. I forgot to account for tunnel vision, a serious issue in battle conditions. 90 or 100 degree vision might be reasonable, in that case. However, short range peripheral vision, as Frutz suggested, might be nice.

The modular system should work well with this. In games with %s, the worst issue is when players work out how to stack % bonuses, and sometimes end up with a 100% value. With real armour, stacking a lot of bonuses can help, but not armour is immune to failure. XCOM inspired games seem to work very well with realistic armour, the original XCOM had front and side armour values, which made being flanked tremendously worrying, and gave the feeling of being a human tank.

From what I gather, there's been a lot of talk about how armour should be handled in the game. Whether it should be ablative (HP), whether it should work like a spring (% damage reduction), or whether it should work like armour. A scifi setting can justify ablative armour, or DUNE like armour that increases defence according to the level of the threat. But when you're talking about human armour, you're talking about level III kevlar vests using level IV ceramic inserts. It makes sense for human armour to be well within our understanding and seem plausible. Otherwise, what makes the alien scifi armour special, if you start with inertial dampeners or pseudo-magical armour? % Based Armour The issue with % based armours is they feel downright magical, and that any improvement in armour has massive effect, and yet is pretty darn pointless and useless at lower levels. If you have 100 HP and a 5% reduction to damage (we'll ignore types for now), there is very little it can do for you. Any hit above 105 damage will incapacitate you. If damage averages high relative to your health, those 5 points don't make a difference. And if damage averaged even as low as 1 HP of damage, it just means it will take 105 hits to kill you, instead of 100 hits. Meanwhile, if you make it 80%, boy does it look weird. A pistol that inflicts a maximum of 60 damage now only does 12, shaving off 38 points, but still taking off more than a tenth of your health. A .50 cal rifle of 500 max damage is reduced to 100, shaving off 400 points. So, with any damage variance, you can quite easily survive a shot from an anti material rifle, yet can be killed by 9 pistol shots. Balancing % based armour is also really annoying, and it's the same work as balancing straight-damage armour. Ablative Armour Chris covered one of the points against this in the past, HP-based armour. Skilled players make good use of cover, so rarely get shot. Ablative armour is also basically a free hit, which allows you to perform suicidal tactics. If you know you can take three hits before dying, then you might as well act like a maniac until you get hit at least once. You can then rotate other troops in with full armour, until everyone has had a turn playing Rambo. This might be interesting for an action game, but for a tactics game it's just a droll sort of meta game strategy which makes you feel totally secure while fighting 'horrifying' aliens. It also has the issue of turning everyone into MMORPG style bullet sponges, as the game progresses. If you have an armour upgrade, of course it will give you more HP. Whereas before gunfire might've been dangerous and intimidating, it becomes laughable. The suicidal tactics I mentioned become the obvious strategy, as there's no reason to fear Reaction Fire as you rush through the open. To get things back on track, you add in guns with massively more damage, fixing the armour and undoing what it did. Soon, you all wear increasingly bigger pauldrons and use sillier looking axes, until you look like this. The weapons at the start of the game become toys, and you enter an epic league beyond human interest. Balancing ablative armour isn't really hard, it is just pointless. It's great for padding out recent games by turning them into mind-numbingly boring RPGs, that sell XP boosters so you can get them over with faster. Real Armour Real armour has some of the qualities of the above. Like the Ablative, you can try to tank some hits, and play things more riskily. And it is risky, Since like % armour it is possible to be killed by enough pistol shots, so long as one of them goes through your visor. You can't ignore tactics, you still want to use cover and avoid fire, in case your armour fails you. Yet you still get that feeling of power, from wearing armour that lets you shrug off attacks that would surely kill your unarmoured allies. Still, you never shake the feeling of dread, of when an enemy sends a plasma bolt your way. There's not a lot to say about genuine armour... because there isn't anything wrong with it. Straight-damage armour serves its purpose, and it does it well; even if it does it without the fanfare and flashy numbers of modern games. Balancing this isn't as easy as Ablative armour, where you can just pick whatever numbers you feel like, but it is straight forward. Armour is built to withstand certain levels of gunfire, and weapons are designed to pierce that armour, each piece of equipment has its class and its uses in the tactical meta. Additional details: Below are some additional ideas and details for the handling of armour.

I always found the doors way too abuse-able in Xenonauts. The telefragging sounds disconcerting if it were just impossible to deal with, but otherwise everything sounds good. It sounds like X Division is the way forward, as it seems to be an improvement over XCE. Thank you for the help, Charon.

The question still remains. Would I be better off playing Xenonauts, or Xenonauts Community Edition, or X Division. Do you have a recommendation between them?

At that rate, I might prefer to just install X Division and not worry about other mods, if they'll ruin stability. I haven't much time to mess with mods, these days. What about the Community Edition mod? Is it compatible with X Division? If not, I'm not sure which one to choose.

I didn't notice any posting guidelines specific to X2's section, so I guess I can just write this up here? Premise At first, I presume we once again start off with one base and a small budget. I suggest that, after you have proven yourself, one of the nations/conglomerates pays you to set up a new base in their territory. Mission The nation pays you up front, enough to set up a small outpost. You would get a mission to protect their region of the globe from alien activity for a period of time. You get a score for the mission based off what percentage of alien schemes you thwart, with a bonus for the number of schemes. You then would then get an increase in funding from that group according to your mission score. If you score badly, they may reduce funding as they feel you took the money and didn't spend it towards protecting them. Afterword I think a mission like this is logical, interesting, and useful for gameplay. As the alien threat increases and starts hurting nations, and as you show yourself capable of resisting the threat, other nations are going to want some of that. This helps and encourages the player to start up their second base/outpost. You could balance the game around similar events, if you wanted to. Have expansions happen at the correct point in the interest curve, to give the player more to think about once they're used to running one base. Line it up with alien escalation, so that the player is in a position to help more of the world before they get hit hard, and etc..

X2 is coming soon to Early Access, so I figured I should play through X1 a bit before the release. I've lost track of the modding world, however. I actually made a mod with another guy, in the early days of Xenonauts. I doubt it works with the current version of the game anymore. Preferences, if it matters: I don't mind a challenge, I tend to play these games on the hardest settings, so long as it is genuine challenge and not just a chore. If there's a choice between realistic or arcade styles, I prefer realistic. I've heard good things about the community edition and X Division, but those are the only mods I'm aware of. There's also, "On the Edge - More Realistic Combat Mod," which sounds interesting, it's the highest rated thing in the downloads page, but it doesn't have many downloads there. Any suggestions what I should use for my playthrough? Thank you for the advice.

The amount you gain for taking an alien craft compared to air-strikes is peanuts. A few missions pay little compared to the expense of keeping another team, dropship and hangar, and possibly a vehicle, as well as the time and risk of playing the mission (sort of wish there was an auto-resolve option for the missions, aside from air-strikes). You could try rebalancing the economics so UFOs were worth more.

I have to commend Coffeepot on this mod. Very impressive work.

Well, there's this mod which is working on redesigning the characters: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11042-New-character-gaming-faces-bodies I'm not sure if there are plans to make new faces. Afraid I don't know of any voicing mods. Someone else might.

Is it possible to have unique characters appear for possible recruitment, in the game? Say, there's a chance James Bond will appear as a possible recruit, with his own face, backstory snippet, and much better stats than other raw recruits? Sorry if this has come up before. I searched the forum but nothing came up.

I concur with Dragon and Thoth (except on the movie). Sorry for forgetting to do so earlier (I saw red, and forgot myself). I like the shaded look of the purple and dark blue. And it must have been a lot of work recolouring all those frames.

Blargh, Starship Trooper the movie... On the bright side, there's talk of remaking Starship Trooper with inspiration from the book (instead of reading two chapters and making your own poor story), and hopefully some inspiration from Roughneck Chronicles (a CG series that did a good job of combining elements from the book and film). I will say the aesthetics were pretty reasonable, the arachnids being particularly interesting in design. The marine armour worked well on the Alliance soldiers in Firefly, as mentioned.

Forgot to mention. Files modified by Quasi Realism Mod: aiprops.xml, aicraftweapons.xml, armours_gc.xml, config.xml, gameconfig.xml, vehicles.xml, vehicleweapons_gc.xml, weapons.xml, weapons_gc.xml.

No worry. The mod isn't going anywhere, nor your thread.

Hey Harriloon. Glad you like the mod. Aliens were tweaked to get more points for completing their missions, so the invasion can progress quite a ways if you don't get radars and jets up all over the place in a hurry. It is possible to get Wolf armour before the beyond medium UFOs come up, I've tested this on the most difficult setting. Of course, that's not to say the difficulty is well balanced in this stage (most people probably don't spend an hour working out their exact base placement and funding for the first two years). Did you place multiple bases to try and cover most of the world with radar? Or set up only a couple of bases? That makes a big difference to the difficulty curve, as you have plenty of funding now but the alien invasion speeds up quite a bit with completed missions. If you did cover most of the world in radar, then that probably is a bug in the difficulty, and we'll see about rectifying it. I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean when you say mag weapons. Do you mean the magnetic railguns?

The Quasi Realism mod is back to being active. Thread link: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/6949-Quasi-Realism-%28Alpha%29-%28Balance-Mod-for-1-0x%29 Download link: https://mega.co.nz/#!iBUBGLYI!eL9vj8gxTEki_QWILPl35oeYBWoWr47o9LUF2gO6-6s Description: Rebalances the game to attempt to simulate some level of reality and improve gameplay.

Thread title is fixed to reflect the fact this mod is for version 1.0x of Xenonauts, thanks to Max Caine. Hopefully that clears up any misunderstandings at first sight.

Quasi Realism Alpha for Version 1.0x of Xenonauts is now up for download! It's still an alpha, so expect bugs. Please report bugs and give any feedback you have. There's some stuff that hasn't been gotten into yet. Aliens troops are still being rebalanced, etc.. Expect more updates soon (don't worry, you can keep savegame data).

Thanks for adding that. Sorry for editing my post so much. Ron also extends warm thanks, and agrees you've earned your name.

Yes! That is exactly what we needed! Thank you Solver, your name is perfectly suited for this moment in the case of the Quasi Realism mod. Again, thank you all very much for helping me with this. I've told Ron, and he's happy to be able to get the explosives working. Will still be a while before a testable version is ready, but this way it won't be the demi-quasi realism unless you use grenades mod.