Checklist of short term tweaks

[Fucille]

So I've been experimenting with little changes to the game's more easily tweaked assets after installing a few mods I liked off the forums and generally getting a handle on the .xml structure. Aside from the AWACs plane, the carbine+shotgun mod, Armoured Assault, true laser beams, I started on easy mode expecting a brutal game, but wound up manually editing all the Easy difficulty values to those of Normal because there was no way to change after the game had already started.

Small tweaks I've already done that improved my enjoyment of the game:

Increasing default sight to 30 tiles long from 16 and a 120 degree cone instead of 90 to emulate more natural human sight. Makes scouring the map for stray aliens far less painfully time consuming, and allows firefights to happen more often.

Doubling of all weapon ranges to compensate for the increased sight distance. Gets to the shoot-outs faster. Includes burst fire reaction distance.

Halving the LMG type weapons burst shot count and TU cost. The default sound effect is already for 5 or 6 shots anyways (despite a 10 shot one existing oddly enough) and a 40% TU cost means that the gunner actually gets to fire some shots during the mission instead of being absolutely required to camp. Movement penalty still applies.

Adjusting the max chance cap to 99% to correspond to the minimum 1%.

Some AI pathing from Into Darkness as far as I could work it out to make the AI more aggressive and less likely to be cheesed by opening doors, unloading and then closing them.

Reducing the damage randomization to 25% instead of 50%. The roulette was just kind of ridiculous and only really advantaged the aliens in the end since it allowed them to oneshot your highly trained soldiers with sufficient luck. There are many more of them than you, and an individual soldier takes more shots over their career than any one alien.

Now with those in mind, I'm thinking of experimenting with other features, but I don't want to ruin what is still my first playthrough too much:

Airstrikes. Currently a ship that gives me 90k from stripping its resources and killing its crew nets only 25k for striking it and no alenium, alloys, or soldier experience. I'm only in november, I've had no terror missions, base attacks, or enemy bases, and yet I'm already well into the 30s of crash site raids despite shooting plenty of UFOs down over water. The same scouts and corvettes are starting to get old when I'm simply trying to build up gear for my guys so they don't die, yet I really can't afford NOT to go on every mission because of the huge wealth disparity and the way funding is so tight. Is there any way to mod airstrike values so I can safely skip a few fights in maps I hate (industrial nighttime) and not lose a ton of money? I've pored through the files and haven't seen it.

Overdamage. So far I haven't used a single rocket or grenade in the entire playthrough because of aforementioned money grind. Actually looking at the stats however, they seem pretty well balanced for what they are. Is there any reason to slap on this extra penalty? Does the game become really easy if you can use them fairly freely?

Manufacturing. It takes forever compared to research. With 45 engineers and 30 scientists, I can't even fully equip my A team with the latest gear before I'm already a tech level ahead. I'm into plasma weapons and I have yet to fully arm my squads with lasers after I outfitted them all in wolf. My B and C teams are all still using ballistics. This is with the shop running 24/7. Is there any reason not to cut these times in half?

Likewise, is selling things for profit, or at least at their original value, such a game breaker? Losing money on each investment seems like an incentive to skip tiers rather than gear up progressively so you waste as little as possible. Especially since you can't transfer gear between bases, leaving you to wait for a workshop and engineers just to kit out your transfers.

Pistols. What reason is there to use them other than wanting a shield? Proactive shooting and good armour usually means your guys don't take that much damage, so a shield is rarely necessary outside of the very early stages, at least before heavy weapons show up I assume. I get that you need to trade some offensive power for that defense, but they shoot at the same rate as rifles despite being weaker, shorter ranged and having no aimed mode. Would reducing the TUs to fire them, or else giving them the 3 shot burst mode the have the sfx for, make shield troops OP?

Lastly, base cost. 500k just to build a command center? 10 days to wait, then 250k for a radar and another 10 days, plus the cost of a hangar and plane? That's without factoring in the transport and crew facilities. Considering all the countries outside your sphere constantly take funding damage, prompting you to rush at least 3 bases for coverage, how does the game expect you to come up with this kind of cash so early? I'm only at 2 bases with a team prepared to move to a third and my upkeep is at 2 million of 2.8 million monthly cash. Would dropping that cost to make a few unmanned outposts for nothing but radar and interception make the overworld gameplay really easy?

If you read that wall, congratulations! Now gimme your opinions!

EDIT: On further inspection, pistols actually do the same damage as rifles despite my experience to the contrary. Probably no change needed then. Bad luck is all.

Edited June 25, 2014 by Fucille

[Skitso]

Without sight/shooting range changes these are pretty much what I've thought... Pretty spot on changes, it seems.

[Fucille]

It seems Airstrike values can be found in airplanes.xml at the bottom string of each craft type. That's another one down.

[fugo]

Is there any way to nerf elevated scouting during ground combat?

I tend to fly around with 1 guy early on in the mission and scout a lot of enemys that are killed by sniper and heavy machine gun in the first turn. It kinda kills the suspense for me... no shots from the dark or aliens to run into me on accident.

[Ragnarok]

How about you edit your OP indicating where you found the files and what exactly you edited to get the various alterations ?

[kottis]

@Fucille To summarize, you make the game easier....

There is no more fun than an industrial night mission, especially with a rookie team + iron man.

[cleft_asunder]

I want to mode the LMG to fire 3-round bursts. Is it difficult to do?

[Ragnarok]

I want to mode the LMG to fire 3-round bursts. Is it difficult to do?

open weapons_gc.xml

search for string weapon.machinegun

find shotcount

alter 10 to 3

EDIT: For some reason, that aint working, even though is should.

Can someone answer cleft's question and enlighten me as well

Editing strings (like description) works ingame, but alteration of a weapon doesnt, neither on load nor newgame. ty.

Edited June 25, 2014 by Ragnarok

[Felicity]

open weapons_gc.xml

search for string weapon.machinegun

find shotcount

alter 10 to 3

EDIT: For some reason, that aint working, even though is should.

Can someone answer cleft's question and enlighten me as well

Editing strings (like description) works ingame, but alteration of a weapon doesnt, neither on load nor newgame. ty.

If you're trying to test it by immediately loading a savegame into a battle, sometimes that doesn't work- you have to go to the global map then engage a new target after changing the files. It does work.

If you change the shot count to 3, remember to change AP values as well. 80% cost to shoot 3 bullets isn't great.

@Fucille To summarize, you make the game easier....

There is no more fun than an industrial night mission, especially with a rookie team + iron man.

That's not fun at all.

[Fucille]

How about you edit your OP indicating where you found the files and what exactly you edited to get the various alterations ?

I don't want to make the OP any more wall-ish so I'll do it here if that's okay. I've experimented with all of these (didn't keep all of them though) so I know they work. Just make sure you install all your mods FIRST (though I think you know most of these).

____________________________________________

Config.xml contains the default LOS angle and distance which the aliens use. armours_gc.xml sets the soldier's viewcones by armour type. I put the predator to 90 and everything else at 120 to preserve its limited vision disadvantage.

Doubling all weapon ranges is as simple as going into weapons_gc.xml and editing props range= to twice whatever the value shows there.

The LMG fix is done by going to each of the 4 machineguns, looking under <burstfire and changing AP to 40 and Shot Count to 5.

The max percentage is under config.xml as MaxChance in the first paragraph near the top.

Same for DamageRandomChance.

Unfortunately the AI pathing bit was just a ton of selective copypasting over the pathing weights in aiprops.xml.

Airstrike values are in airplanes.xml as the last string in each group (you'll see 15000, 25000, 35000, etc in the first few UFOs).

Overdamage is as simple as going to grenades and rockets in weapons_gc.xml and vehicleweapons_gc.xml and changing the overdamage=1 flag to 0.

Giving pistols burst fire means going back to weapons_gc.xml again, copypasting a burst fire line from a rifle, inserting it under the pistols singleshot/>, and then altering the delay to 0.3 and the sound file name from rifle burst to pistol burst, etc. Giving them lower TU costs and lower ACC is as simple as looking under <singleshot and editing the ap= and accuracy= values.

@Fucille To summarize, you make the game easier....

There is no more fun than an industrial night mission, especially with a rookie team + iron man.

I think we have entirely different definitions of fun then, because I find the initial stages of clearing the fog of war extremely tedious with a very narrow view cone and short sight range; especially when you're already moving at a very slow pace so your guys have enough TUs to use reaction fire and your gunner either has to barely move at all, or never get to shoot keeping up with the group. Not even the original X-Com took as long to get to the aliens in a night city mission. Having an enemy walk out of an area I couldn't see him/he couldn't see me, and then popping off a lucky shot that rolls a +50% on damage and oneshots an armoured major with nothing I can do about isn't terribly fun either. The AI is a little tepid by default too, so they like to hide on the map rather than actually trying to assault you.

You might be surprised how dynamic the line of sight changes make firefights. It requires a lot more maneuvering from cover to cover and setting up ideal firing lanes to actually hit anything at the full length of that distance without getting shot up in return. I mostly did it so I wouldn't get bored of map-scouring, but now I much prefer it over accidentally blundering into an alien and having the entire group fire on him at practically point blank. I've actually seen someone do similar on this forum and promote it as a tactical mod.

[Ragnarok]

If you're trying to test it by immediately loading a savegame into a battle, sometimes that doesn't work- you have to go to the global map then engage a new target after changing the files. It does work.

If you change the shot count to 3, remember to change AP values as well. 80% cost to shoot 3 bullets isn't great.

That's not fun at all.

Maybe you can help me.

I opened the file, changed burst shot Count from 10 to 6 and altered AP cost for burst fire, the only mode, from 80 to 50.

I tried loading a game and i tried a NEW ! game.

separate changes to the weapons description DOork, but when i try to shot it, the aim says 10 shots and the actual animiation makes 10 shots as well.

!?!

please advise...

Edited June 26, 2014 by Ragnarok

[Fucille]

Can you post your weapons_gc.xml? Also make sure it's in the right folder.

[Ragnarok]

Please advice.

The weird thing is, this is alteration of the assymetric weapons mod, and i can see mac10 and stuff ingame, but further edits dont come through. The fuck !???

http://prntscr.com/3wpztd

[Chaos Blade]

I agree with you, those are tweaks that should be made, particularly the Line of sight one.

I tend to use shields a lot, so I tend to use pistols too, having 3-shot fire should be interesting in some guns.

Manufacture time and resource cost should be revised too, I agree with you, it takes too long and cost too much to equip your A team and the B and C teams Also, the possibility of self funding should be explored, meaning there should be a few items that should turn profit to build and sell to the funding countries, the items themselves we should leave it up for discussion, but probably rifles?

Another issue given how little alloys you get off an ufo compared to how many alloys it takes to build a suit of armor... there should be some logical balance here too.

Finally, ranks, I recall in oldcom that there was a logical limiter to the promotions, meaning there is only one commander, there is one colonel every n mayors and one mayor over n captains. the game doens't keep this mechanic, and thus we have a team of captains colonels and what nots.

this last item is not a tweak, but it is something I've been thinking about and would like to see if it is fixeable...

[Fucille]

Oh I'm sorry I forgot that one. Base building price is in gamecongif.xml under BASE BUILD COST. All the other Geoscape things are there too.

Please advice.

The weird thing is, this is alteration of the assymetric weapons mod, and i can see mac10 and stuff ingame, but further edits dont come through. The fuck !???

http://prntscr.com/3wpztd

If you have a mod installed that drastically changes up the ballistic weapons I'm not sure I can help you there. What might be happening is the game isn't equipping the LMG referenced in the files, but the one it has in default, due to their positions being shifted around. I remember that the Carbine mod I have replaced the M16 with the AK47 and though my soldiers kept their M16s they had already equipped, removing them put rifles in my stockpile and starting a new game gave then no equipment at all so I had to manually outfit them with AKs. Try starting a new game, removing the LMG, doing a mission, then adding the LMG back on. Also does putting stun damage on bullets even work? That might be a problem.