Tobbzn
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Posts posted by Tobbzn
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1) I like to leap-frog, i.e. first get scientists to unlock stuff worth manufacturing, then get technicians to produce them the next month. This corresponds nicely to where in the research I get, as well.
2) I've done the same, but it sounds like odd game design if the optimal way to play is to stop every few seconds to "unplug" a scientist. It's probably a measure diminishing returns saying that each scientist past that point is less than 20% effective or some such.
3) By the time Landing Ships show up, Foxtrots are very nice to have. Yes, they can frontload their damage from afar, but their true benefit is in the 33% increased fuel capacity, allowing you to intercept Terror UFOs further away and to do hit-and-runs multiple times against an enemy heading towards your base. I usually get two Foxtrots early, and send one to my first expansion base.
4) Right now, the Hunter is overpowered, as most early enemies ignore it. It does keep up for a fair while even late-game, but the main issue is that you won't be getting experienced soldiers in those two dropship slots. Therefore, I only start building vehicles once I have a transport ship upgrade, since bringing rookies at that point is really painful.
5) Dropships > Explosives > Armor > Everything else. Dropships as early as possible makes the transition less painful.
6) I start the game with assigning my two or three strongest soldiers as "Commandos" that field shields, pistols, grenades and rocket launchers. These get a bunch of Reaction Shots as they function as forward scouts, so they quickly get very high reflexes. The rest use rifles and shotguns for general combat and use the Commandos for cover. If things get tough, everyone gets a shield, and my Commandos get TWO shields.
Once I hit Laser tech I start producing Precision Lasers, which go to my three highest TU soldiers. I also produce Laser Pistols and assault shields to keep them alive when they have to move, since sniper rifles are heavy, and they have the lowest prio on armor.
By the time my pistols and new armor is done manufacturing, I'm close to getting Plasma. I fit 2 or 3 guys with Plasma Casters, then start upgrading my Snipers to Plasma. When I get a dropship upgrade, my old Precision Lasers trickle down to my new rookies.
7) They're very useful for destroying cover, especially on Industrial or Base tilesets. In addition, Stun gas forces aliens to move out of cover, giving you Reaction Fire, and Smoke grenades can save a guy from bleeding out as he limps past the aliens who would love to reaction fire on him.
8) I don't see how you can handle mid-game terror missions without Precision Lasers to pick off high-priority targets. It's not as important to upgrade the other weapons, unless you're swimming in cash and technicians.
9) Everyone should get the best armor you have available, but hand them out in an order that makes sense. The snipers shouldn't get shot at, and sniper rifles are quite heavy anyway, so they get theirs last. Commandos already have shields, and rocket launchers are really heavy if you're carrying extra rockets, so it's natural for the first armor to go to your riflemen.
Jackal for everyone -> Wolf for non-snipers -> Predator for LMGs -> Sentinel for everyone else.
10) You'll definitely want at least 2 bases, possibly three. I do two Chinook bases early on when having a rookie squad doesn't hurt too much, and I use my secondary squad to clear the smaller crash sites while leaving the big ones to the properly fitted supersquad.
That way, when I get a Transport upgrade, I get a bunch of Captains instead of a bunch of Corporals - and I can supplement any losses from my supersquad more easily.
11) At least 3 interceptors per base, but I consider 5 to be optimal. You need to not be completely crippled from losing one fighter, and redundancies for your redundancies are great. When you get new ships, send your old ships to a new base if you don't want to build another Hangar.
12) Shoot down Cruisers for Shrikes (12 Soldiers) or Carriers for Valkyries (16 Soldiers)
13) Shields and explosives are invaluable in close quarters. To defend a base, note that the lower health the landing ship has when it lands, the fewer crewmembers will survive to assault you.
14) If you're not losing soldiers, you're ahead.
15) If you're on Iron Man, have more than your base squad, and rotate anyone who gets even the slightest bit hurt - you don't want to take any risks. If you're save scumming, you don't need more than 8 soldiers.
16) Suppress with Flashbangs and Stun Gas so the officer spends his TU running out of the gas instead of firing at you, then hit him repeatedly with a Stun rod. If suppression fails, toss a Smoke Grenade and run behind him.
17) There's no tech tree overview currently, but you can open Researches.xml in your assets folder and use the search function to see what requires what.
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Confirmed, with Heavy Plasma gunners in Predator armor.
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Yeah, it's a little odd to always find the large drone inside the completely fine gas station, just to have it smash through the wall and blow up everything on the turn it first sees me.
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The developers probably won't support multiple geoscapes, but if you want to mod it in, it'd probably be easier to recolor the new sea than to use the old version, due to the country shape changes.
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You used to be able to manufacture it for free from an unmarked research project. At the moment, you should go to items.xml and search for "assaultshield" and edit its part to
<Row ss:AutoFitHeight="0" ss:Height="15"><Cell><Data ss:Type="String">weapon.assaultshield</Data></Cell>
<Cell><Data ss:Type="Number">0</Data></Cell>
<Cell ss:Index="4" ss:StyleID="s72"><Data ss:Type="String">UnlimitedOnResearch</Data></Cell>
<Cell><Data ss:Type="String">weapons/airplane/rocket</Data></Cell>
<Cell ss:StyleID="s65"><Data ss:Type="String">Item.Dispose.Destroyed</Data></Cell>
</Row>
EDIT: Or you could just open it in Excel for ease of access I guess - the point is to make it UnlimitedOnResearch
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And Alien Battle Rifle. At least, that's what I think it is.
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About the RPGs you menioned - role play them
It is far more interesting, don't think what is the optimal choise; think about what the character you are playing would say in such a situation. And usually most options get evenly rewarding in the end (there can be some exceptions - but you can always finish the game 
)I can do that in games like Skyrim. There, I just faffed about having fun despite the somewhat limited in-game roleplaying capabilities, because the game never put a number on how well I was roleplaying. Dragon Age tells you "Your choice lost THREE points with Morrigan! Christ, how socially inept are you?"
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At the moment, my only idea is to straight-up replace the Desert tile set with an Aquatic tile set, merge the current Desert and Middle-Eastern tile sets, and draw the old Deserts onto water in the tile set mask. Then, edit "Desert" to "Aquatic" in strings.xml.
I'm not sure the game still cares about those tile set masks, though. I had a base in Cuba and never saw any Arctic missions there.
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Pick-up-and-play games that focus on gameplay over story often come with high replayability, and will see me coming back to them from time to time. FTL and XCOM, for example.
However, I haven't finished any of the Mass Effect or the Dragon Age games, nor The Witcher 2, even though they are all very much relevant to my interests as someone who is somewhat-above-average interested in both epic fantasy and sci-fi.
My hypothesis is that the "social" aspect of those games drives me mad. I have to look up walkthroughs whenever a conversation appears to make sure I'm not accidentally saying no to a +10 Vorpal Blade or, in the case of Dragon Age, making a character disapprove because I brought them them to an unforeseen event where another character would have approved of the optimal choice. Leaving behind my most powerful spellcaster because the game says she doesn't like seeing me be kind to a kid makes my inner perfectionist rage.
In many of these games, this means I spend more time in my browser than in-game. I've concluded that I much prefer my character-driven epic fantasy in book form primarily due to this effect.
Oh, also, I think Quantum Conundrum gives me nausea and headaches from all the flashing color changes. Either that, or I've just happened to have eaten something bad every time I've played it.
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Well, the question asks about the possibility, and when it comes to possibility, sprite availability is a non-issue. Besides, I'd say Sentinel-equipped soldiers would qualify for TFTD-style swimming, so you'd only really need to put a blue overlay on the existing desert tileset and possibly change the music track to get the basic TFTD experience.
You're an experienced modder, though, so maybe you know where in the code one would go to cause the game to pick up on an aquatic mask image in assets/earth/continentmasks, or, more generally, where the code that governs which pool a map is chosen from is?
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I had a dream about a special base defense mission being generated when the base turrets successfully shoot down an alien assault force, and spent a few hours trying to find the scripts that govern that, but I haven't found any way to make the game consider other things than base assault, base defense, and crash site missions.
I think there's quite some flexibility, though most of the flexibility I've seen is with respect to graphics, maps within current categories, and stats, Sadly, only some of the .xml files are actually commented, and none of the .lua files are, so I'm guessing it'll be up to leeter haxors than I to figure out how to implement this stuff.
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Merging mods can be problematic unless you want to go through all the files that the mods affect and look at variables on a case-by-case basis.
In this case, if you want to mod alien ships per wave, go into the assets folder and use whatever OS search function you prefer to find the files you're interested in. In this case you're interested in:
gameconfig.xml
aircrafts.xml
Specifically, in gameconfig.xml, there's the following:
Money:
<!-- STARTING MONEY -->
<startingMoney value="1000000" comment="The Xenonaut funds on new game start (before buying first base)" />
Alien mission count:
<!-- GEOSCAPE AI VARIABLES -->
<minMissionCount value="4" comment="This is the mininum number of mission for a wave." />
<maxMissionCount value="8" comment="This is the maxinum number of mission for a wave. The number of human bases will be added to this one." />
<highBandTicker value="600" comment="This is the ticker value from where the maxMissionCount missions are going to be spawned." />
<parabolicPower value="0.6" comment="Hard to explain here." />
RADAR range:
<!-- GEOSCAPE RADAR RANGES -->
<longWaveRadarRange value="1000" comment="This is the detection range in KM of the base radar building." />
<trackingRange value="1.5" comment="The radar tracking range multiplier. Radars will continue to track acquired UFOs within this range but will not detect additional UFOs." />
The simplest thing to mod is just to increase startingMoney, minMissionCount and maxMissionCount to satisfactory levels.
With increased mission number and enough starting cash for two bases, you could also reduce RADAR ranges slightly without gimping yourself, and, by opening aircrafts.xml in a spreadsheet program, you can change the Chinook dropship's fuel capacity. If you really want to run a macro game with a lot of bases, that's how you do it.
The "Ticker" that's being referred to is a measure of how advanced the aliens are. The higher it is, the larger ships spawn, with more elite crew. If you want, you can make alien missions generate ticker points. If you do, the alien tech will advance if not shot down, so there's more of a snowballing effect if you fall behind.
You'll have to find your own balance, though.
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As far as I've gathered, aliens "know" your armor value, and if they think a shot wouldn't do any damage, they won't fire.
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I'm not an actual modder, but I "modded" away some bugs like Assault Shields not appearing after being researched, and the game hanging after certain research completes. Those should both be fixed in the hotfix version, though.
I'm compelled to try what you did, albeit in a slightly different way. I'd increase starting money enough for 2 fitted interceptor bases off the bat, but with 50% more alien stuff per wave, and reducing Chinook fuel supply. That way, instead of having one super-squad covering the entire globe, I'd have to balance production for two bases. It'd also reduce the randomness of research progression, as I'd have a better chance of the first of any given ship not spawning on the other side of the globe.
On the other hand, progression could be very slow if you wanted to clear every site for squad experience, so I think I'll wait for the next patch to test it.
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I would actually want it to speed up, too. I don't mind pause spamming for fine control, but the starting approach, as well as any retreat or standardized kiting tactic, takes a flow-breaking aeon to finish.
At least, it feels that way once once the crash sites start tallying over a hundred. As for speeding up or down...
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There could be a Xenopedia section for it, and if it doesn't require research, you could have it function like Datacores.
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For every pod that gets away a Reaper is added to the next mission?
I want a mission like this to have aliens in buildings. Having to hunt through cellars and bedrooms for the telepad sounds hectic, especially if you have sniper fire from nearby houses without the pad necessarily being there.
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You don't need to reinstall, just validate your installation via Steam.
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Disclaimer: I have yet to get a proper impression of Large Farm maps.
I find the scales of the outdoor battles to be a little small for most crash sites (not true for Terror sites or Base defense!), but that could be due to the "bug" where the weaker aliens retreat instead of engaging something heavily armored, or due to being balanced around the Shrike being Landing Ship tech. I don't think the map size needs all that much adjusting, I'd rather just move the Shrike tech ahead a bit and add a bunch of redshirt aliens with a nice new AI.
Would it be difficult to have the game randomly transpose the size and props of a map, so the approach isn't always on the same axis? Or at least have the two orientations for the UFOs submaps - Cruisers in particular feel a bit tedious to approach, but that might be alleviated somewhat if UFO hulls were destructible.
With randomized spawns and building submaps, it now takes longer to realize what map I'm on and even longer to triangulate where the Alien Craft might be. This encourages more exploration, which is nice. I hope it carries over to more than just buildings - a different plant being farmed, differently painted fences, the roads sometimes being dirt instead of pavement, etc.
I haven't noticed any realism change compared to previously, but it bears mentioning that there could be more buildings at a farm than just haylofts.
By the way, are you mapping with future changes in mind?
For example, I was under the impression that aliens would start utilizing buildings more and even climb stairs at some point to compensate for the engine-enforced flat landscape, which I'm really looking forward to. If so, it hopefully has the side-benefit of accommodating jetpack armors.
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Another physicist, how nice! I'm a theorist, myself, so take my statements on materials tech with a grain of salt, but I think the rationale goes something like this:
1. Lasers become viable weapons
We analyze alien materials, and the insight allows us to produce improved batteries and light circuitry with high enough efficiency that handheld lasers can be utilized effectively. However, there are still hardware limitations on just how much punch we can pack, especially since we require the soldiers to carry their own ammo.
2. We reverse engineer alien plasma tech
Through some handwaving Alenium-inspired means, we produce "Plasma Cells" that have a far higher energy density than any battery we know of, but are still isolated and stable. Evidently, simply tossing the Cell at someone won't do much, so we must do something to it to cause it to enter its volatile state.
3. How to use Plasma Cells.
We "ignite" part of the Plasma Cell-material and launch it before it melts our weapon.
4. Hypothetic rationale
Even though we can use modified modern tech to turn the energy contained in electrochemical batteries into lasers, it does not imply that we have the tech to utilize the energy contained in a Plasma Cell in that way. For all we know, the energy could be stored in the nuclear binding energy of this hypothetical Alenium, so we'd be firing tiny chernobyls that decay into quark-gluon plasma or some such, and our Alenium grenades could be the equivalent of a small nuke.
5. Analogy.
Why don't we currently plug uranium, grenades or petrol directly into handheld laser guns, considering they contain a lot of energy?
Because flamethrowers and grenade launchers are easier to manufacture, and if you want electrical energy from the uranium at any sensible rate, you'd need to be carrying around a sizeable power plant.
Granted, the Predator DOES have its own Alenium reactor, but giving a Predator-wearing soldier a Laser bonus is something to post in the Suggestions forum.
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In my opinion, there are too few researches. Even with the new research speed, I run out of stuff to research - not only the stuff I want for my specific strategy, but I even finish off all the other researches too.
On the other hand, there are "timesink" researches such as Alien Plasma Technology that do nothing and only unlock Laser Weaponry, begging the question of why the projects aren't rolled into one.
I think researches that do something irrelevant to your current strategy or that branch into multiple options are more fun than linear research paths, so I came up with a few suggestions in the hope that the finished game lets you dip into all the strategies, but not fully specialize in everything at the same time. If there's just one strategy, replayability suffers.
UFOs
[ship class] Radar recalibration
Prerequisites: [ship class] datacore.
Effect: Improves pickup range for [ship class] by x%
Motivation: Along with a focus on fighters and the improved fuels suggestion, this would allow for tailoring your research plans to a specific air superiority strategy, enhancing the strategic layer.
Weaponry
Gyroscopic Scope
Prerequisite: None
Effect: If you haven't moved, your first aimed shot reduces the TU cost of subsequent aimed shots by 10 and grants an effective 10-point accuracy boost against that enemy. Lasts until the soldier moves, shoots another target, or loses line of sight. Does not stack and does not affect alien weapons.
Motivation: Gives you the ability to invest in weaponry right off the bat and reduces the agony of rookies with rifles trying to use aimed shots, especially considering they don't have the TU for sniper rifles. Later on, it enables firing multiple aimed shots in a turn if entrenched and encourages a sniper staying put after firing if his target is still up, as opposed to firing then moving every time.
Laser trajectory analyzer
Prerequisites: Advanced Lasers
Effect: If a laser shot would cause friendly fire, it fails to execute. TUs are still spent, but ammo isn't.
Persistent plasma
Prerequisites: Plasma weaponry
Effect: Increases the chance of missed plasma shots causing fire. A shot that ignites a flame suppresses more than normal.
Portable plasma cell converter
Prerequisites: Advanced plasmas
Effect: Lets plasma weaponry reload using scavenged alien plasma cells.
Vehicles
Improved vehicle armor
Prerequisites: Alien Plasma Technology
Effect: Improves vehicle (front?) armor.
Motivation: Referencing the Iceland incident, previous tank models were sliced to pieces. Using the same logic that has our soldiers start out without armor, it seems reasonable that our vehicles are relatively lightly armored too. Once data from alien plasma tech is in, however, armor can be improved, even before we get to the Scimitar.
Vehicle engine upgrade
Prerequisites: Alien reactor
Effect: Increases vehicle TU by 10. Allows a vehicle to enter "power saver" mode, spending 60 TU to generate one charge for its laser weapon.
Vehicle fusion engine upgrade
Prerequisites: Alien fusion reactor
Effect: Further increases vehicle TU by 10. Power Saver mode TU cost reduced to 50, and can be used to generate ammo for a plasma weapon. Bigger explosion when vehicle is destroyed.
Motivations: Beyond weapon swaps, vehicles feel very static, and large alien bases leave vehicles useless pretty fast with their limited ammo capacity. More upgrade levels enables you to focus on vehicles, enhancing the strategy layer.
Aircraft
Dropship power outlet
Prerequisites: Alien Reactor, Laser Weaponry
Effect: Lets a laser weapon be recharged without any batteries when standing in the dropship. Also holds for vehicles.
Effect 2: Improves dropship refueling rate by x%
Dropship supercharger
Prerequisites: Alien Fusion Reactor, Plasma Weaponry
Effect: Lets a plasma weapon be recharged without any plasma cells when standing in the dropship. Also holds for vehicles
Effect 2: Further improves dropship refueling rate by y%
Fuel upgrade
Prerequisites: Alenium
Effect: Increases effective fuel capacity for all planes by x%
Motivation: A low priority for most strategies, a player focusing on air superiority with multiple interceptor bases but only one dropship would prioritize this.
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Please refer to the pictures at http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5331-Alien-Class-Analysis-Mod. Alien Officers also have hats on.
Leaders are not found in Small alien bases, but in Large bases, Carriers and Battleships.
Note that StellarRat is being silly, as Alien Biology is prerequisite Stun Weapons, which again is prerequisite to having bats in the first place, which you say you use.
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I agree with the OP.
Wait...
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How about 30 shots in your heavy weapon but each battery only reloads 10? You'd last longer from the start of a fight, but you'd need to spend longer to reload between encounters.
Assault shield doesn't appear once researched and the combat shield vanishes.
in Xenonauts Bug Reports / Troubleshooting
Posted
Looks right. As far as I can tell, a lot of sprites aren't implemented, including Assault Shield sprites.