Big Z

Hot damn, just got the news, and I'm just finishing up a JA2 1.13 run; no respite from grid tactics for me.

Is it possible to have different mission types possibly come with a guaranteed bravery boost? Would be cool if Terror missions, or even normal Night missions would give a bravery point on principle due to how harrowing they are for the poor troops involved.

It's in the thread title: ([v1.59/X:CE v0.34.2] X - DIVISION v0.99+ Alpha Test) Sorry for the confusion, damn shame that's apparently a typo then.

Out of morbid curiosity, I see you have XCE 34.2 mentioned as far as compatibility goes for this mod; Is that a typo, or do you have an inside scoop on what's going on with XCE development, and therefore a reason to know what's in/access to an early version of 34.2? Any sign we're getting anything past 34.1 would be a godsend at this point, I hate seeing the XCE wither on the vine like it looks like it has.

In my experience the aliens generally don't move around or pull much in the way of flanking maneuvers; if you're getting popped from the sides or an area you thought was clear, odds are there was an alien hiding somewhere around there the whole time and just now decided to say hi. Also, your men have the same vision range as all standard alien types during daylight missions, so if you're constantly being stomped on from beyond the fog of war, either A: there's an alien closer nearby acting as a spotter that you haven't seen yet (basically using the tactics I described earlier against you), or B: you're playing a mission at night, which is functionally suicide until you get your mitts on a vehicle (searchlights) since the aliens are unaffected by the dark and your men can barely see their hand ion front of their face.

I strongly advise a 2 Shield, 2 Shotgun, and 2 Machinegun setup early on. Sniper rifles and assault rifles occupy an odd middleground where they're mediocre at pretty much everything; you'll get way more luck "sniping" with machine guns early on due to sheer range and volume of fire, and taking an assault rifle into a close combat situation is suicide due to the relatively weak reaction fire stats and high 3-round burst TU cost. Scoot forward with shield-using scouts, identify enemy, then the machinegunners a couple tiles back lay down lead in its general direction until its dead. Repeat until you get to the saucer, then introduce the survivors to buckshot and pistol rounds. The game changes significantly once you start developing armor for your troops, but while your men are running around in baby-blue fatigues, overwhelming firepower at either extreme or close range is the order of the day. Also, really, turn the difficulty down. The game is already to new players at low difficulties and just gets more brutal from there.

Hoho, checking in to the forum at ungodly hours of the night finally pays off. Here I thought the mod tool sorting thing was just me.

Aha, I knew I wasn't crazy.

I'm running into a strange issue where I'm consistently getting Assault Carrier-led Base Attack and Terror missions at around the 200 ticker mark. I've confirmed that the ticker hasn't erroneously risen somehow (Corvettes barely show up two weeks before the Assault Carrier party starts) and the AM files state their correct 425+ values.

This will probably sound weird and superfluous, but would it be possible to add armor values to the combat and assault shields? I'm tinkering on the side with re-implementing proper armor values for Aliens and NPCs to bring them in line with the same math the Xenonauts themselves use instead of the current system of armor-less HP bloat, but since the shields count as weapons, it seems they don't currently support armor values. It's a pretty arbitrary thing, but since I'm trying to put armor values back into every nook and cranny they were removed from over the last couple years, it'd be nice.

But you are, very much so, just in an entirely different way. No paltry cash reward stands up to the sheer overwhelming benefit capturing a base in the early-mid game provides in terms of research and production values.

Never, if you're playing decently. It baffles me that so much focus was put on achieving overwhelming air superiority balance-wise, but then nothing was implemented to keep said air superiority from locking you out of 3/4 mission types in the entire game.

I feel that the Rifle type weapons in the game are rather weak; I'd last played back in the V19 days and it did not seem to be the case there, and I don't know what happened in between. Hordes of shields, shotguns, a sniper or two, and precious mass LMG fire seems to be the order of the day now; the Rifle feels like a 3/10 in every category instead of a jack of all trades. The only use I've seen for them is switching my snipers to them in the end stages of the game where massive UFO fighting becomes the order of the day and the advantages of long range combat are negated by level design.

I'd like to think most players' top priority is any alien ship even remotely near their base, whether it looks aggressive or not, so I don't think the beeline behavior is a problem. Quicker to shoot down and rearm the planes, quicker to get your team to the crashsite, it just makes sense to blast nearby targets as a top priority. If anything, a quick and dirty solution would to make Base Assault missions always be carried out by a ship a generation or so higher than whatever is currently normal for ground missions for added toughness, and have the ship itself spawn a couple hours into the wave, so most of your planes are either hours away from intercept, or are already spent and mid-refueling.

Were you using Lore+ or any other mods that fudge around with strings.xml or things like that? Grab an updated copy of the mod if you do and hope the maker has merged them already.