Big Z
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Posts posted by Big Z
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Aha, I knew I wasn't crazy.
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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.
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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.
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Having an Alien Base on the map means you have failed to detect and intercept the UFO that built it. Why should you be rewarded for that?
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.
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When first alien base assault mission?
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.
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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.
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They were changed from beelining to wandering about precicely because people complained about how predictable they were. The pendulum swings one way... then swings the other.
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.
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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.
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Chris said 40 ground missions was the average he wanted for a playthrough.
Oh sweet Mary and Joseph, in my last half-dozen runs since V22 I've done 40 ground missions by mid-November. If that was the intent, something got lost in the translation at some point.
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1 Alien base...that I had to farm for because I wanted the base upgrade.
1 Terror mission in the early mid-game.
No base assaults, considering how they work I can't imagine ever naturally getting one.
Air superiority is king these days due to nation funding, getting world-wide coverage and a sufficient airforce to burn an entire wave of alien ships out of the sky in a handful of hours is the only way to keep the world happy, and that keeps any of the "fun" invasion stuff from happening.
Skitso: If I had to guess based on my own experiences, it all comes down to Construction mission ships meandering around the map all day before they pick where they want to set up shop, meaning almost all of them are getting shot down mid-joyride. Shouldn't they have already scouted a location (with maybe, I know this is crazy, Scouts?) before they pack up for the mission?
If the time needed for Construction missions to pick a place and land could be shortened to a fraction of the current time it takes, we'd likely be seeing a fair deal more of them in most playthroughs.
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There was a point where airstrike monetary rewards were anywhere from 80-90% of the loot value of a round of GC combat against a given ship (and said loot was more valuable then as well), but things have gradually shifted towards Nation Funding being king of the crop, and all other monetary sources have been relegated to supplementary income at best.
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I tend to keep a Corsair on hand per base explicitly to deal with alien Interceptors, but yeah, by the end there's no reason not to have fat stacks of Marauders guarding the planet.
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It wasn't at the time, at least. GHI got bamboozled pretty hard by their first lead programmer and are still suffering for it to this day.
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There's a been a smidge of discussion on the concept lately; at the core level it seems doable, just a lot of work. Someone mentioned a setup where thanks to the new CE coding, you can assign most of the stats relevant to a soldier to their armor, and thereby make each Alien race it's own set of armors that you apply to a statless template (recruit), accompanied by the proper in-base and ground combat sprites for whatever they're supposed to be.
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I like these recent ideas posted quite a bit; make the absolute last generation of UFO (I like the Destroyer, personally) so ungodly powerful and fast that Marauders can hardly catch up and Fusion Torpedoes hardly scuff the paint, and their appearance marks the point where you absolutely have to build a Fury or two or start losing relations by the truckload as these things zip around the map carpet bombing the planet or putting up constant Terror as they go.
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Air Combat progression balance has always felt wonky to me ever since the Saracen interceptor and two larger UFO types were struck from the planning.
The Fury feels like the answer to a question the game no longer poses.
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There's been an intentional shift from a wreckage and manufacturing-based economy in Xenonauts compared to XCOM, the idea being that funding from protected nations should be the bulk of your income, not loot pinata UFOs.
It's been a fairly hotly debated issue, but as it stands it is very readily altered to one's choosing with elementary modding know-how; you can easily spend all of 10 minutes in a text editor shrinking nation funding and boosting the crud out of alien artifact prices to better reflect the sort of gameplay you're shooting for.
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Ooh, something else of interest comes to mind; is there any chance we can add extra flexibility to the stat-increase triggers during missions?
I know there's a fair bit of contention over how comically easy some stats are capable of being increased (TU, STR, ACC) while others barely get an increase once in a blue moon (Reflexes, Bravery). Being able to set up additional triggers beyond the hardcoded ones might be useful.
Xenonauts: Community Edition 0.34.3
in X:CE Release Announcements
Posted
Hot damn, just got the news, and I'm just finishing up a JA2 1.13 run; no respite from grid tactics for me.