EchoZeroJ Posted January 27, 2016 Share Posted January 27, 2016 I think, I can see the issue here.Basically, the unit sprites exist for the converted pistol in both in choices part2 (where the pistol originates and part4 (where all the armours are) The log is complaining because its being told to overwrite the values in part4 but does not have the modmerge replace value present. If you delete the folders mentioned in the log from the choices part2 folder, this may well fix the issue. Unfortunately, I cant test it as I am now running choices version 3. True, i did some tests and by deleting those files like you said it fixed the problem. No more errors. Allthough some of Reactor Core savegames are still not working. i noticed there's more people with this problem. But we better wait for Version 3. really like your mod. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 That may have fixed a superficial error somewhere else, but the save games are still corrupt and dead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EchoZeroJ Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 (edited) That may have fixed a superficial error somewhere else, but the save games are still corrupt and dead. Yeah some people say it's a known bug, so maybe it's not a mod error, but the game itself. As i've read there are many people with corrupted savegames in the past years. Nobody seems to have a fix for this so far. At least not that i know of. https://www.reddit.com/r/Xenonauts/comments/2bp9up/the_game_keeps_crashing_whenever_i_load_savegames/ http://steamcommunity.com/app/223830/discussions/0/864978109853447293/ Edited January 28, 2016 by EchoZeroJ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 Man, I hope it isn't the same bug. X:CE has been updated many times since the time of those links you found and I've never had this bug happen before, even with a lot of different mods. I'm going to wait for two weeks and leave my campaign paused. If a fix is not found, I'll resume the game and see if it happens again. If it does, I'll do a ceremonial funny log where I end my playthrough with a bang, using one of the last working saves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EchoZeroJ Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 Man, I hope it isn't the same bug. X:CE has been updated many times since the time of those links you found and I've never had this bug happen before, even with a lot of different mods.I'm going to wait for two weeks and leave my campaign paused. If a fix is not found, I'll resume the game and see if it happens again. If it does, I'll do a ceremonial funny log where I end my playthrough with a bang, using one of the last working saves. Haha nice And in the end the aliens ruled the world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TideofKhatanga Posted February 1, 2016 Share Posted February 1, 2016 (edited) After one in-game month of killing aliens, I've found somes stuff I would like to report: 1/ Regarding the economy, I'm pleasantly surprised by the extreme profitability of raiding crash site. Since the selling price of alien weapons is so high, the game encourages making sure that one raids the most UFOs possible for the maximum loot. Which in turns allows the player to set up a lot of bases and face the high amount of UFOs zooming around in the atmosphere. It really feels like a war. For reference, by the end of the first month I had raided 12 crash sites and secured enough money for two full bases on the 1st of October, with two more coming online in a couple weeks. This is without manufacturing for profit, since I was busy building fighters. 2/ I found a small but rather significant bug: the SeaHawk (rank 2 Assault Dropship) is available right from the start. When delving into the tech tree, I found that the SeaHawk research projet doesn't do anything beyond adding a Xenopedia entry. This explains why the Charlie (and, by extension, ground vehicles) seemed so poor relative to other choices. 3/ There's some weirdness around weapon tooltips and their fidelity to in-game stats (or themselves). Like the M16-SAW has a TU cost of 70% according to the text description and 80% according to the statline (it also mentions being lighter than the LMG, which it isn't). Likewise, the Rank 2 Sawn-off Shotgun is supposed to be twice faster to shoot than the Rank 1 (to offset having only one barrel) but its actual TU costs are the same. One of the autopistols (Uzi I think?) also mentions firing seven bullets per burst while the statline says three bullets per burst (didn't test in-game to see which one is right). 4/ Does UFO armor actually work now? The MIG-31 can't one-shot a Scout with its twin Avalanche payload, despite what the Xenopedia entries say. I must say that I love this mod, it certainly adds a lot to the game without feeling cluttered. I'm currently running squads full of carbines, with shield/sawn-off on scouts and a couple heavy weapons. The mix of extreme overwatch with the carbine and excellent breaching ability from shielded shotgunners has done wonders for me. I didn't try the pistols yet (though they look sexy) and couldn't find an opportunity to properly use the semi-heavy guns (grenade launchers and alt shotguns) when I tried them. I certainly enjoy the various playstyles that are possible with just ballistic weaponry. Edited February 1, 2016 by TideofKhatanga Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted February 1, 2016 Share Posted February 1, 2016 Just a word of warning: If are running Part 5 (buildings) of XMC, upon researching Reaper based stuff, namely the medcenters, your savegames will be corrupted. Avoid any research relating to med centers! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aajs Posted February 1, 2016 Author Share Posted February 1, 2016 Just a word of warning:If are running Part 5 (buildings) of XMC, upon researching Reaper based stuff, namely the medcenters, your savegames will be corrupted. Avoid any research relating to med centers! Yep that's a good idea. Hopefully I am nearly at that point in a new version 3 playthrough, soon as I get there I will fix and post up version 3 of my mod. It should be able to work as an upgrade and allow anybody who has not researched the medical centre upgrade to then do so. Hopefully will not be long. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 Playthrough LOG 7: I'm back and alive from the corrupted void too! Since the cause of the save-corruption was identified as the Medcenter upgrade research that are gotten from capturing & killing Reapers, the two saves that I still had before that event were now confirmed as safe. As long as I don't research the medbay, that is. Thats simple enought to avoid and its not campaign critical, so my playthrough can continue on. I continued on downing more corvette and scout UFOs, containing androns, caesans, drones and sebs for the most part, successfully raiding each ufos with minimal wounds. One of my best snipers was gunned down by two caesans crossfiring him as he entered a room inside a UFO, shredding his shield and himself too, tragically. RIP. He was not wearing armor, so I corrected that by manufacturing a few more suits of combat wolfs, which have been quite impressive in protecting my soldiers, once even resisting 3 plasma shots in the face at point blank range on one of my Antimat soldier. She was ridiculously lucky. During the manufacturing screen, I was browsing casually through the various guns and ammo to perhaps give to my soldiers, until I came accross something I felt was absurd: the Disposable rocketlauncher. That thing costs 3 alien alloys to make. 3 ALIEN ALLOYS for a single-use rocket launcher that doesn't even come preloaded with ammo! The only trivial advantage is the 2 spaces smaller inventory size and weight, but those become very trivial with strong soldiers or anti-grav devices. Whats more, the quad launcher is already available at this point, so I could take that or the Rank 2 launcher, which is infinite btw, and use it as a disposable unit. Thats absurd cost for a single-use item and the gameplay usefulness is very poor. An infinitely better option is to use the airstrike targeting device, which can wipe out a massive area, is small, light and easy to handle. Speaking of the airstrike laser designator, my primary base is currently manufacturing those things 24/7, to amass 48 units for the final mission. I don't have to spare anyone there, so outfitting 12 dudes with nothing but dual wielding airstrike designators is the most obvious choice. (Most fun one too!) I think a couple things need to be addressed here: 1. Rethink the alien alloy cost/time to manufacture/monetary cost for all manufacturable items that reflect their ingame usefulness. 2. Reinvent the disposable rocketlauncher. That means either make it a direct upgrade to the Rank 2 launcher by making it non-disposable, lighter, low-TU cost, same damage, higher accuracy variant. OR make it a single use disposable barrage weapon like the airstrike caller is by firing 6-8 rockets. 3. Reinvent the airstrike device into a tactical nuke. Make the thing very dangerous by having it leave a violent gas/fire (radiation) effect where it hits, causing the area of impact to be very hazardous, if not lethal to go through for atleast 20-30 turns. It would become a last-resort weapon that will create a massive area denial effect, halting any progress you do for all but anyone equipped with hazmat suits, while also completely annihilating any chance for recoverable loot in the area. Increase the cost, time to build and include alenium requirement to create them. Meanwhile, I also felt the amount of alenium and alloys required by vehicles/aircraft/dropship in the mod was too high. The amounts I'm getting from after a good 20 missions with light scouts, scouts and corvettes so far, using any of the materials recovered from those just doesn't make any sense to invest in mid-range upgrades, like the tanks, fighters and dropships, which all by the way, can be wiped out permanently if shot down by ufos (unlike in vanilla where they are recovered at the cost of super extended repair time). I'd really want to field some of those things, but the cost makes it much too efficient to stick to soldiers and basic transport/condors to get the job done. Anyway, there was a Terror mission for the first time in the campaign! My troop transport barely had enough range and fuel to reach it, but we did anyway and the attackers on the ground were lightly armed caesans. It was a fun mission since the maps used for terror maps don't show during crashed or landed ufos, so I got some variety out of it. My soldier were well equipped, by this point with a wierd assortment of human plasma weapons, converted alien plasma weapons, grenade launchers, quad rocketlaunchers, Antimat snipers and a bunch of Rank 4 reserve weapons in the backpack. Grenades were not used at all, C4 is present, but never really used either, I never ran out of ammo for any weapons and most secondary weapons stayed in the backpack. I think that there is a lot of variety to be had, but since they're either too inconvenient to use compared to the other stuff that works more conveniently gameplay value wise, I tend to not really use other equipment much unless I intentionally handicap myself arbitrarily. I think things could be better if the items/weapons/devices were all balanced according to their gameplay significance, which is determined by their nature (long range, accurate, low TU cost, multi-shot, burst fire, fast reload, high ammo cap and such contriburing to more cost or other draw backs that make it good, but not better than another alternative). I hope that makes sense. Until Next LOG... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EchoZeroJ Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 Great! I'm happy to see you guys found out what was causing the CTD And you can finally continue your campaign! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 Thank you EchoZeroJ, I'm happy the obstacle was solved too and I'm also happy to hear you enjoy reading the logs I post. They feel worth it more. Playthrough LOG 8: The First Landingship Arrives! After the previous log, I had 3 corvette missions with one crew that did not go back to base between each victory to rest. The team was really tested, they got hit, most of their shields broke and their armor was greatly diminished. I did not run out of ammo, though. No a single reload was needed. Despite all this, they got through with minor wounds and scratches. However, after a few more waves, the thing I've been waiting for finally shows up, the Landingship! The moment it was identified as a landingship, I had four squadrons of condors chasing it from multiple bases, trying carefully to shoot it down over land, so I'd get a crashsite. This all happened on a different continent than where my ground team was positioned (because I'm too lazy to dedicate seperate teams for each continent with their own transports and equipment, hehe), so I had to haul my guys for 9 hours across half the globe until they reached the place. Luckily the time of day was on my side, so I managed to get there during the day. As I usually start off my missions whenever I have troopers with buzzard armor, I took one them up to the 3rd height and spun around to see whats around me (useful to know whats over walls and see a bit further at the start of a mission) and look at that, a Harridan standing in a corner very close where I start off! Literally within the very first turn I arrive at the scene, I have 3 guys smack the poor Harridan unconcious with stun batons. Heck yeah! Along with the harridan, I also encountered Sebilians. These guys were no pushovers, though. Unlike during my corvette missions and lesser UFOs, I was almost always one-shotting them with my plasma weapons. These guys actually have armor and were able to tank a lot of damage. Most still went down in only two shots, but the amount of damage they needed to be taken out was over 100 HP, with armor to protect that too. I landed a direct hit with the massive Anti-Materiel rifle on the officer, a weapon that is difficult to operate, is super heavy and very powerful, but that guy didn't care much even though he just recieved 93 damage from it. Man, the guys in the later UFOs must be real badasses, I guess. I was lucky that the crash had killed most of the aliens, so I only encountered a few during the whole thing, but upon entering the UFO I noticed the nasty layout of some landingship UFOs have that I would have to deal with, possibly with much more aliens with much more dangerous positions. I'm referring to the main landingship entrance hallway, which in Kabill's fire-in-the-hole mod, has a second floor that has open balconies that allow aliens to shoot below at my troops from all sides, making the place very difficult and dangerous to go through. They also have great cover up there too, while my dudes are exposed almost completely. Nasty. After the mission I finally got more research with the alien scatter gun and heavy plasma cannon, along with alien armor plating and harridan damage boost from the captured guy I got first turn. I'm feeling things are gonna get more dangerous now that teleporters and more advanced aliens are introduced. So far, no aliens have ever thrown grenades at me, which allowed me to be more bold in grouping together my guys during assaults, but I'm guessing the more advanced guys might carry grenades in landingships and better UFOs, so I'll have to be more careful. Currently, my fighters just shot down another landingship, so thats where I'll continue from with the next session. Until next log... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EchoZeroJ Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 Nice to see you're still making progress! I also use just 1 or 2 ground teams max. The more experienced team you will have eventually. I have not yet come this far to research buzzard armor. Great for scouting the area. Will give it a try tonight! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted February 4, 2016 Share Posted February 4, 2016 (edited) Thanks EchoZeroJ : ) Playthrough LOG 9: Alien Base Raid, Marauders, Stealth Troops, Robot Wars and Caesan Whack-a-Mole oh my! After the second landingship, I recovered the alien reactor that was busted in the first one, so I got a whole lot more research done this time. These include ASSAULT SHIELDS, MARAUDERS, PREDATOR ARMOR (and its alternatives) and PLASMA EXPLOSIVES. Now I'm really playing with POWER! *Marauders guarantee my ability to take out any alien UFO, including the battleship. So my airgame is practically won. *Assault shields allow my soldiers to finally tank heavy alien fire without breaking instantly. I can be more bold in assaults. (as long as I'm sure reapers are not present in the battle) *Predator armor gives me human tank, basically. While they can't use 95% of the equipment, they CAN use things that matter, namely grenade launchers, machineguns and quad rocketlaunchers. They're also armored so heavily that I'm confident to have them walk in open ground with no need for cover and use them as giant human bricks of metal for my other soldiers to hide behind. *Plasma explosives I'm most interested for aircraft weapons, but turns out plasma rockets for the quad launchers are brutal in GC. I've reintroduced a few plasma grenades for soldiers that can carry them and upgraded all C4 charges with the plasma equivalents. However, all this is good and nice, some bugs/annoyances occured. First the Assault Shields made all my soldiers invisible that carried them. It was a bit tricky to use them in GC when their faint shadow is the only thing that allows me to see them. Cycling through soldiers via numbers and the interface allowed me to use them anyway and I was grateful that the game doesn't just crash when there is no specter information for them, but still. Please fix. Same also happened with Predator Seeker Armor + Quad Launcher. Poof invisible soldier. While I also unlocked the boomerang, because the alenium requirements are so high and getting alenium is hard, also that there were no stats displayed for the boomerang in the xenopedia and the fact that killed aircrafts are permanently lost, I decided to invest in what I know will work for sure; Marauders. This means that in my campaign I only ever used 2 types of planes, ever. Condors and Marauders. Only. I also wonder if it was intentional that I did not recieve prototypes of any of the Predator armors for my soldiers after research. They are quite powerful, I do understand that, so I don't hold it against you for not giving a free prototype there. With plasma grenades and rockets, it was wierd that the rockets required alien alloys for me to build them, meanwhile grenades didn't require alloys. Anyway, continuing to the alien base. One landingship managed to dodge my condors and sneakily land in Greenland, dropping off an alien outpost, the smallest type of an alien base. At first, I was excited as it meant base upgrade, quantum comms and compact 3x radar. Then I realize its an Alien Outpost mission (a place with narrow corridors, lots of places to hide, lots of corners where anything can come out of, doors that obstruct vision and so on) that has Reapers and Sebilians in it. Fuck. For me that means two things. 1. I must set up a killzone with enough space that a reaper cannot reach me instantly. 2. I must camp at this killzone for as many turns as I must wait for the reapers to come and get turned into minced meat, while I pray reaction fire RNG doesn't screw me over. If I don't do that, my soldiers would have been reaper chow. On any alien base mission with reapers, they're AI is based on coming at you directly, no matter how far they are, so the best strategy is to hole up with as many guns pointed at a single exit and obliterate anything that tries to pass into view. Luckily, I learned that outposts can only contain two Reapers, so it wasn't as tense as it can be with Alien Fortresses that sometimes contain Alpha reapers and normal reapers that all charge at you. The final control room had two entries, one a sealed door that I blew up with a rocket barrage, and stormed in, taking out the 3 sebilians holed inside. The new shields were impressive in soaking damage despite the fact that they made my soldiers invisible. After coming back and getting the fun research out of the alien base, all my bases were upgraded with quantum comms and compact 3x radars, freeing up more space for another workshop to speed up production of anything I want. I began producing Predator armors and soon got a chance to test them in a terror mission. The attackers couldn't have been more suitable: Androns. It was going to be full blown Terminator Robot Wars with Predators vs Androns. These images are what happened in a nut shell: Beep boop, tin cans, I win. The predators, armed with plasma casters, rockets and grenades were unstoppable demolishers. I really enjoyed how aggressive I was able to be with these soldiers, sweeping through the whole level fast enough to ensure no civilian was harmed by alien gunfire. Civvies don't usually survive terror missions man. They did this time. I encountered an interesting thing during the Terror mission regarding the Quad Rocketlauncher. Turns out, Predator armor equipped soldiers can shoot and carry the thing, but they cannot reload it. I had to drop the launcher along with my preferred rocket on the ground, step away from it, have another guy come pick it up into his arms, load the rocket into it, drop it on the ground again and then have the predator soldier pick it back up. It added a fun element of team work to the game I must admit. Meanwhile, I also had a hilariously wierd encounter with Caesans on a landingship mission: I have never seen them spawn like that ever. The sniper guy in the first frame was showered with plasma bolts as he was moving closer to a cover position, but luckily they all missed due to all the range and obstacles between them. The predator soldiers came with heavy weapons and did the same thing as they did to the androns on that terror mission, so their shenanigans were cut short. On the geoscape, I'm still producing tons of alenium grenades and have amassed over 110 million dollars so far, so thats neat, but all my alenium was spent on the marauders as I planned, so now I'm running dry, needing to grind UFOs to get more. Not a fan of grinding I must admit. Next up I just shot down an Alien Cruiser UFO and accidently ended up starting it during the night time. Gotta capture a leader, do my first night mission in the entire campaign and bring back the cruiser tech. Until next log... Edited February 4, 2016 by Reactorcore Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TideofKhatanga Posted February 4, 2016 Share Posted February 4, 2016 (edited) Nice log as always ! As for me, I had a bit of play going from the first of October to mid-October. Seeing that my first base of Khartoum Network (no, I'm not sorry) was storing nothing less than four million bucks in alien loot, I decided to go wide rather than tall and build bases all over the place. As it turned out, I got slightly overenthousiastic in building four new bases, which had a nasty effect on my bank account and redirected part of my manufacturing efforts towards pumping goodies for the black market. Oops. I also decided to take my R&D to the next level. With only 15 scientists and 10 engineers to work with in September, I was behind on the air game. Well, I thought Scout would be nice and get murdered by any MIG 31 too, which wasn't happening. So, the priority of Alenium Explosive jumped high up and so did my R&D payroll, getting me those sweet torpedoes just in time for the Scout onslaught of mid-October. Talking about air superiority, Fighters filled the hole left by the now-obsolete Scouts. I chose the MIG 25 as my dedicated dogfighter and, besides my own tendency to take missiles in the face, it's doing its job quite well. No F17 for me, their range is just too horrible IMHO and cannons are just more versatile than light missiles. I didn't test Hellfire pods on the F17 though, maybe they can change my mind. On the ground, things are going rather well. I have enough Jackals for my entire A-team and boy does it help, shield bearers can survive a full burst and I had a soldier survive getting lit up point blank by a sebillian prankster (I hate forest maps and all their dark corners). The rank 2 tranquilizer gun is nothing short of exceptional on rookies : the precision of a sniper rifle, the reaction modifier of an assault rifle and enough power to two-shot sebillians, it allowed my B-Team to steamroll a sebillian Scout. Still not as enjoyable as blowing up the damn lizards though. I could also test the Uzi and boy, it's awesome. A seven shot burst (the tooltip was indeed wrong) from behind a shield does wonder when breaching UFOs. The new guns make an aggressive playstyle so much more rewarding, I'm considering not even using laser pistols. *Edited out: comment on early rockets needing alloys, misread* Edit: wow, I hadn't seen just how bad alenium grenades were. I mean, Stun Grenades were highly profitable (15K every 7 man days) but alenium grenades only take 1 man day for 10 (27K profit). Holy crap. Edited February 4, 2016 by TideofKhatanga Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aajs Posted February 4, 2016 Author Share Posted February 4, 2016 Just catching up on the logs reactocore and they are as action packed as usual. I am currently on a different branch to you play testing version 3 with the crazy manufacturing for profit issues sorted. And I must say I am not having any lack of alenium or alien alloy issues. this is basically because I don't have the kind of money now to build so much ahead of the curve. which means there is more than enough alenium and alloys. My challenge is now paying the monthly rent. This feels much more balanced now, and makes you think a little bit more strategically, which I guess is what we want. I must apologise about the missing sprites, Its the first time I have ever play tested this far as previously I was adding and fixing content. So Hopefully I can get all the missing sprites handled as I get nearer to where you are currently playing in the time line. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted February 4, 2016 Share Posted February 4, 2016 @TideofKhatanga: Glad to see you and aajs enjoying the logs. I was surprised about the uzi you mentioned. The whole reason I didn't take it was because I believed the outdated tooltip info that made it look really poor compared to the semi-auto pistol. Looks like the descriptions will need a quality pass too. Not having accurate information ingame seriously affects the decisions I make before embarking on missions and what to produce. Playthrough LOG 10: Cruisers, Valkyries, Vehicles (finally!), Mags and Supersquad Display. Luckily the crashed Cruiser that I accidently ended up assaulting in GC during the night ended up landing in the shiningly white arctic tundra, right next to a base camp that had lamp posts set up pretty much everywhere. Darkness was not even close to being an issue this time. The burning fires of the crashed UFO made things even more brighter ironically. So much for my first night mission this campaign. Luckily, despite the insides of the UFO being wrecked, especially the antigrav generator being visibly broken, I managed to get literally everything I was hoping to get this mission; the antigrav gen, a cooperative sebilian leader and a cruiser datacore. This led my R&D team to finally get what I wanted... the Valkyrie dropship. I had skipped practically every other dropship except for the seahawk, just to hoard the alenium for something I was eventually going to replace anyway. And with an actual dropship and not just a simple troop transport, I could finally take vehicles with me. I took the free Rank 2 Jeep with wasp missiles on the next subsequent Cruiser raids and it looked cool and worked great. Although I gotta admit my troopers were packing atleast twenty times more firepower and versatility than the poor jeep I was supposed to use waaaay more early in the campaign. I ended up using it to mow down weak walls and barricades for my troops to walk more freely around the level. I'm hoping to try other vehicles just to explore the content. The aim is to use the old vehicles as agressively as I can, hope they blow up so I can build more stuff. I'm a bit scared of building the large garage due to the errors reported, so I'm keeping the original 3 slot garage in my base, since its sure to work. It still houses the Rank 1 and Rank 2 jeeps which I intend to bring on every mission I can, along with my other 13 troopers. Meanwhile, things on the geoscape are fun and exciting, thanks to the new quantum comms which allow me to pick and choose which aliens I let live and which ones I shoot down and wipe out. Along with that, the loot from the Cruiser and another mission where Wraiths finally appeared, was put to great use to seriously boost research. I also accidently picked up an alien battle rifle too without realizing it. All this means: Sentinel suits, Mag weapons, Capture the Praetor Objective. Aside from that, I'm noticing the Cruisers leave a lot of Alenium and Alloys, especially if I take over one that has safely landed instead of crashing, so with just a single intact captured Cruiser I can build a single expensive Marauder fighter. Thats significant, since those cost 20 alenium and some alloys a pop. If I keep raiding more cruisers and later on carriers, I'd have enough to do whatever I want, so I think the Alenium and Alloy drop rates are fair midgame and lategame. I still think the early game UFOs should drop double the amount of alenium than they do now, otherwise it really encourages me to skip a lot of the tech than actually play with it. I also skip a lot of ground missions, opting to nuke the crashsites than actually visiting them, sometimes because the speed of troop transports is too slow to reach them during day time, sometimes because I think they wouldn't be that entertaining since theres nothing to capture to unlock tech or otherwise advance the story and sometimes on the lesser UFOs the payoff just isn't significant enough to bother with it, thus focusing more on the larger UFOs to acquire proper amounts of alenium and alloys. After a couple weeks, I had my entire team outfitted with MAG weapons and a mix of various sentinel and predator armors. I made an animated gif slideshow to show their loadouts: As you might notice, they're a completely random mix of what I have in the storeroom and how much stuff I can fit on them just for the sake of it. The drone anti-grav devices are a really cool addition to the game that really allow to sacrifice some space to get a whole lot of more carryweight. I really love this piece of content. One thing that I wanted to request is to make pistols only take 2x2 space in the inventory instead of 3x2. It'd be more versatile to what I can give my soldiers in terms of backup sidearms. The 3x2 takes too much space that I'd rather fit in something more potent than put that in there. If it were 2x2, I'd have more options with how I can configure the inventories. But yeah, my soldiers are super charged right now, capable of once again almost always one-shotting most aliens below leader rank. I also still use the vibranium knives even now, despite how early I got them in the campaign. I think having an upgrade like a fusion blade or a plasma blade that has the power of the old vibranium knife, while making the vibranium knife itself weaker would be a good idea. I've also been using the Plasma Cutter a couple times and I really like it. I can cut a hole and attack aliens from places that dont allow for surprise reaction fire. Big ups on that. Althought it has a bug that shows it has 5 ammo in the inventory, yet in combat it only has 1 ammo. It still works and can be reloaded, so I'm not complaining. While sorting the soldiers out with the new stuff, I went to look at the vehicle loadouts too and... Holy shit. The Rank 1 jeep can be armed with a nuclear warhead. Alrighty then. I still think the airstrike designators are crazy OP and have very little drawbacks (and I also have 126 of them sitting in my base, to be used on the final mission mwhaha), but getting a free single shot per mission for the Rank 1 jeep so early is a pretty scary amounts of firepower to have access to that early in the game, I must say. I took the thing out for a spin and scored a multikill on a few missions, while also annihilating a quarter of the map as seen in this image on its left side: Fuckin brutal. Please do make that thing more dangerous to myself by making it leave long lasting radioactive fire and raise the cost of manufacturing those things require something rare and expensive. By the way, I just remembered to mention that the Quad Rocketlauncher's burst fire uses the same amount of TUs as the Snap shot does. I thought the burst fire would use more TU considering the difference between firing one rocket versus four of them. Thats all for now, on the geoscape, I have something brewing for the next LOG: I mentioned earlier about letting some UFOs live and others to be shot down. Alien bases can convert into larger facilities over time when they recieve supply ships to them (and probably on their own too, over time), so this little bad boy is going to grow into a fortress, which will allow me to assault and bag me a Praetor before even facing a single Battleship, and maybe even not a carrier too if it manages to upgrade before those come. I may be looking to win this game very soon. Until next log... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TideofKhatanga Posted February 4, 2016 Share Posted February 4, 2016 Nothing quite as tasty as home-grown vegetayyybles, I see ! I've now finished October but I think I'll put this playthrough on hold right there. Or rather, bin it and wait for Version 3 to do a fresh start. I mean, I find it difficult to appreciate a mod when I've been breaking it since the start and there's no way I'm finishing the current run before 3.0 anyway (not with today's release, you know). So, I'll be back later with more MIGs and perhaps a nice log of my own. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EchoZeroJ Posted February 5, 2016 Share Posted February 5, 2016 Man those cruisers are huge! And those Marauders and the soldiers look badass It's also nice you haven't lost a single region yet from what i have seen from your Geoscape. I lost australia at month 3. But i'm also going to wait for version 3.0 and start fresh. Also not going to buy Xcom 2 yet. Though it has a great start, everybody is really positive about this game. But for me i think its best to stay with Xenonauts for now. I like it, and still haven't finished this game yet so that will be my first objective, to save the earth! And probably in the meantime people will have made alot more mods for Xcom 2. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted February 6, 2016 Share Posted February 6, 2016 (edited) I was thinking about picking up XCOM 2, but the minimum requirements are too high for my PC. : ( Watching Beaglerush on youtube play it makes up for it though. : ) Playthrough LOG 11: Victory is near! ...or is it? As mentioned previously, the Alien Base finally grew up into a ripe Alien Fortress, keeping a Praetor deep inside it for me to capture. As far as I remember, if I get him, operation endgame research will be available once I've interrogated it back at base. Fortresses can be one of 3 types, Caesan/Wraith, Sebilian/Reaper(worst) or Andron/Harridan. I got the Caesan one. The place was fairly big with elite caesan/wraith soldiers armed with alien battlerifles and plasma cannons. Turbo sentinel suits allowed me to close up on them and blast them away one by one with a mag carbine efficiently. The wraiths never seemed to bother teleporting, which I found wierd, but they did put up a fair fight. By the time I got to the command center in the fortress, most of the shields my troops were carrying were either gone or very damaged, so decided to make things less suicidal by ordering a friendly delivery of a nuclear airstrike to clear out 90% of the room, while carefully making sure the praetor was not hit. I followed it up with a stun baton beating to put the praetor to sleep. The turbo sentinel suits ensured that the praetor did not manage to fire even once from his deadly gun. Prior to storming in to the room, the aliens mind controlled one my troopers, namely one suited up in seeker predator armor with a magstorm cannon, so I had all the more reason to swiftly end this mission as soon as possible. I tried shooting the MC'd trooper with some stun darts, but they bounced off the heavy armor like nothing. Scary stuff if I had gone on for one more turn. Returning to the base with a captured praetor at hand, before even a single Carrier or Battleship UFO had even been introduced, I was confident I was a winner already. Excellent, now when I press 'CLOSE', I'll have the "operation endgame" research available to me... Oh. Well. Huh. Thats akward. Guess someone fixed that exploit. Looks like I'll need to actually sieze a Carrier UFOs hyperspace engine before I can get that. Ahem... the campaign will continue for now, but victory is getting close. But hey, atleast I've generated 400 million dollars from those alenium grenades! Until next log... P.S. BUG REPORT (from the future): Researching fusion explosives does NOT unlock manufacturing for or make them available for use. Please fix. Edited February 6, 2016 by Reactorcore Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted February 6, 2016 Share Posted February 6, 2016 Playthrough LOG 12: Carrier & Battleship UFO Assault. After a few weeks after the Alien Fortress, the first Carrier UFOs finally show up. With the sentinel/predator armors with mag carbines/magstorms, assaulting through two Carrier ships was a piece of cake. I really like the armors introduced in XMC, the sheer power they offer to the soldiers is incredible. However, sometimes its slightly unclear what their stats and bonuses are until you use them in combat, since unlike wolf and jackal armors, that have fully listed stats in the xenopedia article, which is a really good idea, the predator and sentinel variants don't offer that. As this was being the second to last UFO that I'd be doing, I reflected back on the aliens and the weapons they used. XMC, as far as I noticed during gameplay, only introduced a neural stunner and another stun gun for the alien... but those were really rare and not significant during gameplay. Even after I got them myself for my soldiers, their usefulness was not impressive compared to the human tech. During the whole playthrough, after encountering those two new alien weapons and the new caesan spy, I was really excited and thought that the aliens would get more advanced and dangerous weapons above the alien battle rifle or other more exotic choices as the human side gets in XMC. Heck, maybe more prominent use of caesans spys as a UFO crew that is mostly only them, featuring a very different kind of tactics with some new exotic weapons. Felt like an underused opportunity there. In general, I thought the addition of new aliens and weapons is really cool as it complete adds more layers and depth to combat, along with new tactics that I as the players would need to adapt to defeat them. Anyway, after clearing out the two carriers (the first one had a busted hyperdrive, so I couldn't research it and thus had to fight another carrier to get it), the road to the final mission was finally open: Now, at this point I already had everything I needed and could have just started the final mission, but since I'm playing XMC to explore the new modded xenonauts experience as much as possible in a single go and give complete feedback to make sure it'll be better in the end, I decided to wait for a battleship to show up and complete the full research tree. The battleship was definitely the hardest challenge yet. The first one that showed up was a EliteSebilian/AlphaReaper/Praetor crewed Terror mission oriented Battleship. I scrambled my Marauders to take it down before it could actually start the terror mission, but despite taking it out, I was really hoping it didn't contain Reapers. Especially 5 of them. And those 5 were upgraded Alpha Reapers. Eeesh. With reapers threatening to pop out of out of viewing range to insta-gib my troops into zombies, heavily armored and armed elite sebilians tossing lethal plasma fire behind heavy cover, lots of precarious teleporters to go through to reach the final floor and on top of that and a praetor that was really enthusiastic at mindcontrolling my troops, which could easily end up in a massacre, was really dangerous every step of the way. A lot of troops could have been killed back there. Even the nuke jeep finally met its demise. Just outside the Battleship, a shield/mag pistol trooper got mindcontrolled. Now, this guy was in turbo sentinel armor, he is a valuable asset on the team on this mission and all my stun weapons were left at HQ since no one needed to be captured anymore, so putting him temporarily to sleep was not an option. I'd also rather not just cap his ass right there and then. Dude has been a hero in about forty missions. So I did very risky strats and decided to rush to the top floor to take out the praetor as fast as I could. I blocked the MC'd troopers path with the jeep, which valiantly took the hit and blew up for the team, while the rest of the team charged into a multi-floor UFO that potentially had alpha reapers ready to come out of any corner and zombify my whole team. Luckily the MC'd shield trooper ran away after exploding the jeep, so I didn't have to worry about him attacking from behind with his lethal mag pistol, but that became least of my worries as the praetor switched his mind and mind controlled a mag shotgun wielding guy in the middle of my team. Everyone instantly ran the hell away from him and the exits were blocked with shield units preparing to brace for impact from a mag carbine. On the next turn the MC'd shotgunner opened fire on one of the shield man keeping rest of the team seperate from him, but luckily the shield help and most of the shots missed and took out an entire wall instead. Meanwhile, it turns out there was an alpha reaper waiting on the next floor, ready to attack on the next turn, so I had to pray a couple of my troops that barely had TU's to and reaction speed to stop that monster before it reached them. Soon that nightmare was over. The reaper was torn to shreds by reaction fire as I hoped it would be as it came through the teleporter and the Mind controlling wore off. Reaching the top floor, an intact singularity core was waiting and a praetor with his sebilian goons were promptly killed. With that, I had completed the final UFO mission I needed to get the last researchable components, which eventually unlocked the singularity gun, fury interceptor and the saracen, all of which I felt were completely pointless to build and also prohibitively expensive, since singularity cores are NOT easy to get as you saw above. Meanwhile all the tech I got before that was adequate to take out any threat the aliens threw at me. Counsil had maxed out for most regions, so they didn't even bother giving a raise anymore. I didn't mind since after selling the last batch of the stuff I didn't need, along with the alenium grenade stash, I had amassed a whopping 500 million dollars to end the campaign with. Next time, the final mission, the grand finale awaits. Until FINAL log... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EchoZeroJ Posted February 7, 2016 Share Posted February 7, 2016 500.000.000 dollars!? That's crazy, congratz Growing fast. And those carriers get bigger and bigger everytime. Nice to read your logs while im waiting for Version 3.0 lol. Btw about Xcom 2 you don't have to worry too much, it's an awesome game, but there are still some performance issues going on and some bugs. By the time you will get a better PC hopefully there will be ALOT of great mods to choose from Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aajs Posted February 7, 2016 Author Share Posted February 7, 2016 I am playing a little xcom2 but mainly focusing on getting this mod finished and all the bugs out. I have an Intel I-7 superfast gaming laptop and it keeps crashing on xcom2 due to overheating. The good news, is that I am concentrating on finalising this mod. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EchoZeroJ Posted February 7, 2016 Share Posted February 7, 2016 @aajs Awesome Take your time no need to rush. Xcom 2 is probably a great game, but it will take a lot of mods and patches to make up for some missing elements. I've read a lot of missions are short time/turn limited, and there will be no air combat, you can't build more then 1 base allthough it's better now. Not sure if this is all true, but these are the great things you have in Xenonauts! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reactorcore Posted February 7, 2016 Share Posted February 7, 2016 (edited) Wow, sometimes it feels like new AAA games seem to completely disregard older systems that even the lowest settings wont run the game, despite its fully possible to optimize them. That makes me sad. : ( But enough of that, for it is time for the Grand Finale! Playthought LOG 13: - FINAL - Dreadnought Genocide This is it, the final mission. The moment I've prepared for... The one last push to stop the aliens once and for all... I made a small "movie" to capture the action. Lets see how it goes. Let the final battle begin! It was a pure massacre. Nothing could stop it. In only mere 3 turns, the whole dreadnought's interior was set ablaze with nuclear fire, the high praetor was vaporized into thin gooey mist across the floor and all of my troopers were at the exit, safely teleported out of the dreadnoughts doomed interior. Turn 1. The door opens, the first salvo is released, annihilating the first batch of sebilian guards. Gone. Two more xenonauts proceed slighly forward and launch one salvo in each side room, obliterating the androns within. Another two move up and fire an additional salvo into the depths of each sideroom's large engineering rooms, eradicating both alien generators along with the sebilians guarding it. Another unit moves up and a lucky harridan sniper tries one last desperate attempt at stopping the invaders by firing a reaction shot. It connects, but it only causes a scratch. Within the next moment, that harridan, along with his pals guarding the huge room behind them is bathed in yet more nuclear fire. The door to the huge room is also demolished in the explosion, opening the way for one more xenonaut to send one last salvo in to the depths of the huge room. A giant ball of fire later, everything inside the huge room was dead. The team uses their remaining TUs to move up as far as possible towards the high praetor's chamber. Turn 2. The door to the high praetors chamber is open and exposed as soon as I see it. Not wasting any time, a xenonaut points his laser designator and locks on to the target. As the massive explosion roars through the halls of the UFO, a faint *splat* sound was heard in the distance as the high praetor hit by the blast. Subsequent xenonauts move up and confirm that nothing survived that last hit and moved up to get ready to open the door to the exit teleporters. All that was left, was to evacuate the team and let the dreadnought self-destruct once everyone was out. The team moves up towards the teleporters. Turn 3. The whole dreadnought is in flames, torn apart and charred anywhere you look. The team wastes no more time and uses the amazing mobility provided by their sentinel turbo suits to boost themselves all the way to the exit within this turn. The reapers never managed to reach this floor and the sole surviving sebilian that was spared by a nuke during the first turn in one of the siderooms was probably freaking out in panic, not believing what had just happened before its eyes. And with that, the alien menace was over. GG. And now, for a Final Report on XMC 2.0: Overall, it was ok, the variety offered to me was compelling, some of the new items were huge game changers, like the new armors, special soldier equipment, the new vehicles and their weapons as well as the early-game soldier weapons. Its not excellent however. There are some flaws that did reduce the quality of the experience and sometimes felt like the changes weren't prominent and felt like I might as well have played the vanilla game. The biggest thing was the I noticed there is a specific, efficient way of playing the game. Certain things are just better than others in a lot of ways. If I were to use certain equipment, vehicles or aircraft, I'd be doing so while arbitrarily handicapping myself instead of doing the thing that is most efficient and obvious. Another huge issue was that in early game, the speed at which I transitioned from Rank 1 to Rank 2 and to Rank 3 was blazingly fast. I barely got to experience those items before I already had upgraded them. By the time lasers became available, most of ballistics were as good as inferior, even the alenium ones. Conversely, mid-game and late-game had barely any variety the same way there was during the early periods of the game. It almost feels like the best way of playing this mod is to pretend that lasers, plasma and mag do not exist, but instead arbitrarily limit myself to the early ballistic weapons only. The end-game arsenal ended up being the regular pistol-shotgun-rifle-sniper-mg thing as it was in vanilla. This whole "lots of stuff early-in, no variety later-on" was the case with aircraft too. It was even more simple since condors and marauders were the only thing that I ever used and needed. In the early game, there are observational balloons, new dropships, new fighters and all sorts of things, but later on its the same ol' vanilla route with marauders and valkyries dominating the geoscape. The alien weapons also felt comically underpowered compared to human plasma weapons. An alien plasma rifle could only hold 9 rounds, while a human version had 12. Considering the aliens are a superior race with superior tech, I was expecting their weapons and tech to be leagues ahead of whatever the humans tried to imitate. I also thought the new alien gear was underused, along with the caesan spy as I mentioned in the previous log. There is an opportunity to expand the alien arsenal with more exotic variants and special weapons to make for some radically different ground combat scenarios. Vehicles I wanted to enjoy more, but from what I saw in using the jeep, it was pretty cool what type of weapons they can carry. It just a shame the early dropship that can carry vehicles are so slow compared to the regular troop transports. Also the limited ammo that comes with vehicles also greatly limit their utility compared to a regular xenonaut trooper. Armors I felt were really great, especially the late game sentinel and predators and mid-game jackal and wolf armors. Despite that, some of them didn't communicate clearly enough what their stats are, especially the late-game armors, and to some degree, I felt they could have been even more significantly different from one another, as mostly they felt like they're all the same armors, but with a superficial bonus over the other one. I think the sentinel armors did this the best, while the others were less so exciting. Manufacturing and research also felt disjointed. The time to research/build didn't correspond to logical values considering the value of the items in terms of tech complexity, gameplay power and size. Some things required alloys, while others didn't. Some required them more than others, but felt like they were like that arbitrarily defined than based off a standard of any kind. No consistency I felt was there. Some items did not yield profit at all when manufactured. The transfer cost of items from base to base was also astronomical, which discouraged building anything off-site, punishing the player for having a logical secondary base that does manufacturing seperately from another one. I liked the building additions a lot, save for the medical bay upgrades causing crashes and the large garage being unstable. I did think that the building times for the advanced radars was perhaps a bit too much. 20 days is a bit crazy, so I think 15 or even 10 would have been more suitable. I also noticed that I get a lot of alien corpses piling up in my storeroom, but the only ones I ever used for anything were light drone wreckages for antigrav devices, while others had no other use than to be directly sold... so didn't seem like there was any sense for them to be shipped off to my store room and not just simply sold at the end of a mission. It was also interesting that wraiths did not follow the same logic and got auto-sold at the end of the mission and I think I saw one armor mentioning that they needed wraith corpses to manufacture them. It was also strange that the xenopedia article mentioned wraiths before I even met them ingame. And finally, laser designators make me feel like humans are way more powerful than aliens, making the overall feel of the game like the aliens are not really that much of a threat when I can just call down the sun on their heads, splattering them effortlessly if I feel so. Frankly, most weapons, armors, vehicles and equipment in the game make me feel like this. This whole playthrough was more of a powertrip than a desperate struggle to defeat the aliens thanks to the balancing of the items introduced in XMC. Either way I had fun, but will be taking a long break from xenonauts before playing it again. Final Log END. Edited February 7, 2016 by Reactorcore Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aajs Posted February 9, 2016 Author Share Posted February 9, 2016 Glad you had fun. Its funny just fixing all the exploits you told me about has pretty much solved everything. On my version 3.0 playthrough now, I don't run out of research because, I had so much money that I could research everything real fast. In fact I will probably get to the end of the game, with loads of research project not completed. Which was kind of my aim from the beginning. So looks like only things left to do for me now is to fix the building upgrades and then I am done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.