Thread #2317887
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"Recruiting" more hybrids.
>OXCE?
OpenXcom is a free open-source game engine for the original 1994 X-Com: UFO Defense (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) and 1996 X-Com: Terror from the Deep games.
OXCE extends OXC modding capabilities and is home to megamods like X-Piratez, X-Com Files, 40k ROSIGMA and more.
>Game
https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense
https://openxcom.org/downloads-milestones/
>Mods
https://mod.io/g/openxcom
https://www.moddb.com/mods/x-piratez/downloads (XPZ)
https://mod.io/g/openxcom/m/the-x-com-files (XCF)
>Resources
https://openxcom.org/forum/
https://www.ufopaedia.org/
https://xpedia.netlify.app/ (XPZ)
https://xcf.trigramreactor.net/master (XCF)
https://www.ufopaedia.org/Hidden_Features_(OpenXcom)
https://www.ufopaedia.org/Ruleset_Reference_Nightly_(OpenXcom)
Previous thread: >>2293303
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where update
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>black lotus something shrine something mission
>spot a literal flying naked woman with a force field
can she surrender? like i feel like i should capture her alive because i've never seen this enemy before, so it must be important. i'd stun her but she's literally flying 2 levels up so can't club her
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pic related as a real turn based(time based?) game
i guess something like valkyrie chronicles but with ayys
yay/nay?
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>>2318900
Yeah. One of the alien missions is 'crackdown,' which will spawn a number of heavy ships to fly around a region looking for hideouts. They will then attack any hideout they find in sequence. Multiple factions may deploy it but the list is short, so if you're mildly unlucky you'll get star gods.
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>>2318885
there are other options than the electric prod, that's just the method i can guarantee will work.
if she's flying i think the best bet might be the grenade launcher with blunt grenades in them
alternatively you can try shooting her like >>2318707 says but you'd run the risk she dies outright
black lotus avatar is definitely the most annoying catch of the 4 cult leaders because of her flight
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>early-mid game is full of divergent tech paths, assembling your faction out of the modules of class, codex, and recruitment, with tons of shit to do and different teams with divergent doctrines handling specialist tasks
>lategame is 28 gals in annies with blasters, plasma and vibro-axes, plus two hovertanks
>none of the plots actually go anywhere, you just get gear that's inferior to what you can mass produce except for edge cases
>endgame combat complexity and difficulty drops to the floor and starts digging, but the missions get bigger and more tedious
piratez was such a fucking disappointment
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>>2319588
Compared to the best sniper in the game? Yes.
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Some xpiratez fanart
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>>2319280
I think it is a mistake for any xcom game/mod to give the player access to the literal same end game weapons as the enemy. Because the engine has nowhere left to go to increase difficulty at that point, the only way to go is 'bigger', which, as many anons here who have played huge maps with tons of enemies, is not what the xcom engine is built for and is more tedious than fun.
tl;dr: to possibly make it fun for yourself again, try throwing away all endgame weapons (though that won't make the slog any better)
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>>2319999
I think it's a mistake to extend the game past that point. The original UFO Defense understood this well: ultimate armor, ultimate tanks, and the technology required for the Cydonia mission are all tied together, and you will likely have access to Cydonia before you max out all your psi-troopers and make flying suits for everyone.
In something like piratez or xcf, however, you'll be doing dozens, and if you're unlucky, hundreds of missions with the same kit and crew before the game allows it to end.
I did try runs without certain key endgame technologies, but in piratez specifically this is a path to tedium and frustration: endgame enemies are extremely well armored and shielded, throw explosives that level whole sections of the map and wield weapons that easily one-shot soldiers wearing lighter than ultimate armor. Many missions thus devolve into managing the spotted tag and slinging massed explosives from multiple layers of cover half the map away, which is a safe, tedious, and largely predictable tactic that drags already long missions past the point of nausea.
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>>2320190
Agree with this - why I only mentioned dropping endgame weapons is because endgame armors, on the other hand, are absolutely essential. One part of xpiratez endgame feeling stale is that because all enemies basically start getting blasters and one shot laser/plasma cannons, and basically every soldier has sniper/spotter 3, max ThV etc, is that all of these things, mainly intended to scale for difficulty, basically restricts your possible tactical options to just what you said. Sniping with your own fuckoff blaster bombs or plasmas.
Gone are the times you can park 1 supremely armored gal and take 1 turn's worth of bullets from the entire enemy force with only minor damage. No longer can you sneak lightly/unarmored catgirls to knife fighting range and then retreat unscathed. Heck, even the damage types you can use are generally restricted by the type of shields you're expecting to see - red and you drop all lasers, blue and you drop all bullets.
Even one of the more fun tacticool things I enjoy with piratez early/mid game, that is, going room to room in small houses, is basically made at least nearly impossible because of more and more common psychic enemies and every mook having a grenade or launcher that can level the whole thing three times over with a single shot.
All of this combines to an engame paradox where you technically have access to a huge list of toys, but missions where you only have 1 or 2 ways to do them or fail spectacularly.
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>>2320249
I don't think mods should have an 'endgame grind' at all. Doing the same handful of missions you've already done a million times adds nothing to the game, especially when you're forced to adopt the least engaging tactics and weapons.
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>>2320259
Yeah that's why there should be an op last tier in the tech tree, to make sure you have the tools to wrap it up. For comparison in the original game you have:
>Blaster Launcher
Guided nukes that can turn normal ground maps into parking lots in a single turn and delete everything on a direct hit
>Psionics
Basically a doomsday clock for the aliens starting from getting a psionic captive, sorts out even easy commander capture if you can't get it done otherwise
>Avengers
Doing a ground mission? Bring an entire army
Snakeman terror ship? No thanks
Ethereal battleship on a retaliation mission? No thanks
Turret? No thanks
Mods can drag on for too long in the end because the player doesn't have the tech, the materials or a problem not present in the original, super elite troops to wrap it up. For example something like Rosigma could use "get me the fuck out of here" research at the end, like some bullshit archeotech gear and being able to just buy high tier soldiers and armors from the shop with imperial requisiton dollars.
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Selling laser rifles in Xcom really made me wish there would be a game similar to it with more focus on trading and how it affects other factions. Like having dynamic markets where equipment prices can change or selling advanced weapons to a faction and seeing their soldiers start using them.
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>>2320420
Yeah. Buying all the shit off the market saw prices increase. Flooding the market by selling all the alien crap saw their prices fall. I don't think it influenced what other organizations had access to though, I think that was purely tied to the passage of time. Apoc is worth a look at for its attempt at real time combat, and what it could have been if it were a Judge Dredd game.
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>>2320408
OXCE but you actually want to build storage space because prices can fluctuate, especially with alien tech etc
>some city gets terrored
>price of specialist medpacks rises
>produce some quickly before demand is gone
would be a pretty cool gimmick imo
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>>2320458
They exist to be used as cows. Go milk them.
Seriously though, those strix zombies must be captured alive and shoved in a "zombie juice farm" of sorts. Dio, you stupid kurwa, where is my zombie dairy industry!?
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>>2320160
It's a kitchen sink with zero thoughts given to feasibility. If something works it's by accident. 95% of the ROSIGMA posts are are posters asking how to proceed or complaining about how dumb it is, and the other 5% is someone figuring out a cope way to play the game and spreading the word. Which is nice, but the first step to playing ROSIGMA is recognizing that there is no plan here.
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>>2320617
I am the 5%. That's what makes it fun.
It doesn't need to be balanced as far as difficulty is concerned, but I get that it has a lot of design inconsistency. It doesn't bother me that much, everything I play is jank to some degree and I play games long enough to find jank even in the most polished AAA slop.
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>>2320617
Rosigma has three main problems
>tech tree not tall enough, lategame feels like you need something more
>endgame armors bottlenecked by tokens, promotions, sometimes some extra limited thing
>equipment pile not even remotely secured for how easily it will get blown the fuck up
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>>2320408
Starsector kinda has this. Item prices vary wildly depending on supply and demand so you can do shit like attacking trade routes to jack up the demand. But more importantly, if you sell blueprints in black markets, what they make will start showing up in pirate equipment. You can ruin everything by selling some really nice blueprints to pirates, waiting a few months, and watching the pirates go from low quality crap ships to the best ships in the game.
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>>2320811
They do something, but by the time you get them the enemies are rolling in Cataphract/Saturnine armors, so you're still fucked.
>>2320841
If only they really did melee. The fuckers have a ranged attack with a 100% hit rate from the other side of the map that ignores armor and makes your unit completely useless for the next couple of turns. And it's AOE, so it can perfectly disable the entire squad.
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>every time someone mentions ROSUGMA in this thread
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>>2321629
The classic definition, which is turning the relevant option on, and then repeating the same action until the desired result is produced.
Don't do that, it's tedious and sucks life out of the game. Otherwise, do what you want; personally I save at the start of each mission so that I can repeat it if something goes IT'S XCOM BABY and one-shots the run by putting half my troops in traction for a year and the other half directly into Yarrhalla. Otherwise I accept the outcomes and save on exit.
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>>2319815
here is the complete version
https://files.catbox.moe/s8nx3v.png
this is what peak performance looks like
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>>2321847
Nice, it looks much better with the background and highlights for contrast.
The original is way too big to be posted anywhere though, have a two-in-one.
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>>2318336
Been a while since I did XCF, but IIRC I used a couple tazer blasts, and a light minigun spray. Its actually really effective if you figure how the math works.
a few tazers will do (hopefully) around 80 stun damage maybe, while the gun will drop their health rapidly. But once they hit the point where they have more stun than hp, they pass out and likely won't get hit more. This is even easier since bullets deal a small amount of stun, so its almost fool proof.
its important to remember you never need a unit PRESTINE, you need them not dead. I've captured red dawn people with incendiary grenades, same concept.
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>>2321946
The napalm bomb takedown is the most silent way to capture aliens
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Can i do joint research with multiple bases on the same topic?
I need to get jetpacks before assaulting cryssalids base.
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>>2322234
>internet
>1994
el oh el
Not enough bandwidth. Sneakernet was still much faster for transferring data.
The nominal connection method available to xcom bases in any region would have a phone line. So, analog 56k modem is the best you can realistically expect. But let's say they were fancier than that and their local telco always had equipment to support ISDN. And so you get two-line fully digital ISDN for whopping 128 kb/s. That's 16 kB/s. To put that to perspective: that's over four minutes to download a single image off today's 4chan. You could, at best, have transferred 450 MB of data over the course of a full business day (lol), assuming no packet loss (lmao). At which point you're much better off mailing a 650 MB CD. Or a hard disk. And bear in mind that this example is already assuming unrealistically fast connection. Bases in many regions of the world would have been stuck with a spotty 56k connection doing less than half of that. With these facts in mind, it's easy to see how daily xcom research sync and collaboration would be a pipe dream without alien tech.
I guess today's kids don't understand that internet used to be MUCH slower than local data transfer. 100BASE-TX ethernet was already a thing back then and it's still used today.
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>>2322367
Wow, you really don't get it. internet was slow.
They are stuck with the local telco infrastructure and global internet backbone infrastructure. At best a base in a developed country could buy out a telco, kick all other customers out and hog a whole ISDN primary interface for about 1.5-2 Mbit/s bandwidth, but at that point they might get bottlenecked by global internet routing between bases. There literally wasn't anything better with reasonable global availability. Even ADSL was still on the drawing board, and it was consumer-oriented crap with horrible upload bandwidth. Internet backbone was slow because nobody needed ludicrous amounts of bandwidth and the total number of users was low.
Yeah nasa was doing insane stuff with even less bandwidth. The communication to voyager probes is measured in bits per second.
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>>2322354
>So, analog 56k modem is the best you can realistically expect.
If you want to stick to small-scale widely commercially available, then bonded ISDN could comfortably get you to 128k in the 90s, without getting into Serious Institutional Grade Internet also available at the time, which would be T1 or T3 hookups, which is where you start getting into connections capable of handling Mb/s
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>>2322523
I already covered all that, read >>2322376
T-carrier was a north american thing and never used anywhere else afaik. Everyone else used the much better E-carrier which was later made into a global ITU-T standard.
When I mentioned ISDN's primary interface having 1-5-2 Mb bandwidth, the 1.5 figure was for america. (Same as T1.) Everyone else had 2 Mb B-ISDN.
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>POV
>progression critical mission just appeared
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>>2317887
>gnomes count as hero units
I was wondering why I wasn't getting any more of them after I converted a few to brainers
Is there any chance of getting more of them eventually, or have I cucked myself out of a gnome squad?
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>>2324024
>protecting your funds from lolsorandomxd events that deduct them if you have too much money or do too well for Dio's liking.
Isn't there a hidden check which verifies whether you have more than $5 million in cash, and triggers a "steal funds" event if positive?
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>>2324178
I don't remember the thresholds but there are multiple such events for different levels of dolaros. Don't keep large amounts of cash if you can't afford to lose it.
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>>2319810
Depends on which Strategy of Sisters you're playing. Dominion is the easiest one for beginners (start with some of their best gear, skip the novice stage). All the strategies (except repentia) get very strong late game stuff, heavy armor with shields.
If you're playing Novice Strategy, closest to normal x-com, it's about researching the better armors and upgrading to proper sisters. You start out with decent armor (against cultists) but bad/no long ranged options and total rookies. Get shotguns/flamers that care less about accuracy.
Don't take every fight that pops up, use your brain to consider if its winnable with what you have. Avoid huge enemy ships, chaos bases full of daemons etc until you can gear up and get some XP on those novices.
The Sister Superior can use "Inspire" to buff, but dont get her wounded/killed, will be a while before you can get more.
Research Arsenal of Faith when it pops up. This should get you some long ranged bolters like the Arche and the Elohim.
Tech up to mid-tier by april-may (melta weapons, medikit/medicae, motion scanner and adamantium.
Medicae armor (and later Hospitaller) is your medic armor, vital to keep sisters alive + put out fires + get rid of corruption. Bring like 4-6, especially vs daemon heavy lists. Until you research that you can bring servitors to do the job+repair damaged armor.
Motion scanners are also very handy inside cities and big ships to get the drop on enemies. Remember you can use melta weapons and force fire (ctrl click) to melt walls/floors/roofs.
Melta damage drops off with distance so dont try to snipe with it.
You might need to build/upgrade the barracks to unlock straight recruiting full sisters instead of upgrading them.
Get Bionic surgery to halve Sisters (long) medbay stays + give them a stat boost.
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>>2326595
Early game tips: Use craft turrets first to draw enemy reaction fire, kill any enemy with reactions that faces your transports disembark points but otherwise dont let these turrets hog all the XP against weak enemies..
Heavy bolters (and the heavy bolter sentinel) provide some decent midgame ranged firepower. Rotating the pilot of the Sentinel and using it to only engage from a safe distance can rack up lots of kills and xp for various promotion requirements.
Kraken Penetrators is your "ignore 50% of enemy armor" ammo. Master crafted ammo, once you research it, is also a good damage boost to any weapon that can use it.
Melta is your bread and butter against heavy armor, daemons etc. Only short range downside.
On normal AI (not Brutal AI/BAI), walls of fire will keep most enemies at bay/wasting TU. Use those flamers to protect your novices from melee enemies this way (+reveal sneaky enemies), Flamers will kill a good chunk of daemon types (except well, Flamer daemons). Having lots of units looking a certain direction will also prevent most enemy melee types AI from beelining them (they'll try to flank instead).
Adeptas special trait, Spirit of the Martyr can save a great deal of your "killed" units. However, it requires a turn or two +kills to reset after its been triggered. Exploit that to your advantage when making risky moves (Martyr'd sisters can still die to bleedout/fire after being downed, so have medicae nearby to rescue them).
Two good mid-tier Bolters: Hellspite (underslung grenade launcher, get them melta grenades) and the Jove (fires standard sized bolter rounds). Late game is the Dominion bolter with its good bayonet and ammo.
Capture a flying enemy (ork stormboy or blackstone jumptrooper/chaos raptor) and research them to unlock the sisters flying armor tree (Seraphim). They can't stay airborne forever, but can reposition like in normal x-com to better positions.
Power weapons (melee) can kill all daemons.
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>>2326602
Other OXCE things:
Flamers bypass energy shields on enemies (blue flashing). In rosigma, armor (especially power+) still protects from flames, but there's a few witches and such that only have energy shields.
Flamers can also put out smoke (and smoke put out fire on tiles). This can be situationally handy if you have enemies without heatvision/see through smoke optics.
Enemies camo (stealth) values are also usually diffferent between day and night, but the engine has incrimental lighting values, so a lightsource flips "dark" tiles into "light". which means units in a light source (or on fire) uses their daylight camo values. Very handy.
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>>2326605
Why you should always bring some flamers:
-The one neverborn daemon thats resistant to bolters/physical damage gets nuked by fire.
-Any Nurgle enemy not wearing power armor (and most mutants/beastmen of other factions) take 30-70% extra damage from INCendiary (flamethrowers, "I" or "INC" bolter ammo) sources.
-Nurgle daemons all take +50% damage from fire/INC weapons, they also have low armor values but high HP.
-Flamers are arcing weapons, which means they dont use the same firing accuracy formula of normal guns. The only tricky part is to not burn your own units, but you can force-fire a flamer 1-2 tiles further than 0% accuracy range (and even 0% is more like... 50-80% chance to hit with a flamer). Just dont try to fire it with some map object between the wielder and the target that can be hit.
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AIshit? In my XCOM thread?
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>>2326996
Rookie is 0 commander is 5, you can find exact names for each race in the xpedia, for slave soldiers it would be
Slave Soldier · Free Soldier · Boss Soldier · Master Chief · Pirate Lord · Pirate King
Boss soldier would count as 2 since slave soldier counts as 0.
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>>2327000
so what else is in the formula?
I gave my clean-shaven noseringed pirate princess a luger and the average hits to kill went up to 3-4 on highwaymen. With deagle it is 1-2, but it's roughly the same damage prediction if I Alt-hover over the gun in her inventory.
Also somehow deagle and big iron sometimes feel more potent than scoped magnum, which should be strongest of them all, numerically
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>>2320420
It is also the most bottom-right political compass game ever, I never saw the "no step on snek" aspect of it when I played it in the past, but after my last playthrough I just couldnt unsee the NAP underpinning mega-primus.
And cult of sirius has clearly violated it (by existing)
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I'm playing with F5/F9 because its my first XPZ playthrough and I hate losing gals - but a hovertank almost made me lose some. I chased a MERC corvette on a Firefox, and then it landed. It was at night and I was able to plow the map with two knight girls (chainmail/shield+vibrosword), but then I had the tank left sitting in the center of the flat map. The only thing that worked was first lobbing two WP mortar shells at it, then rushing my knights through the fire to cut through remaining force field, and then springing whatever I had left on it, which was 2 14mm bullets, few hits from a dshk, and finally a LASS.
The armor girls went to hospital for 45 days, but a MERC ship with a captain pow feels worth it.
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>>2327128
>drop the run
Fucking hell
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>>2327331
You should be doing it from day one, even it's just scavenged minibombs and thrown explosives at first. Try to unlock higher tier bounties asap, too, the humanist missions will keep you supplied with rpg ammo and panzerfausts long before you can buy or build any.
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>>2327557
I am pretty confident now around human enemies, mostly thanks to 14mm rifles. The thing that worries me is mutons and on a rare occasion, imps. Mutons I cant penetrate at any distance except melee, and the have shielded hovertanks. Imps are just hard to manage in numbers.
I might need to do something soon because there are at least two alien bases on the planet now. But I have no ideas other than knights.
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https://gofile.io/d/gDimvV
Greetings, Commander. I have just come into possession of a most sensitive delivery — straight from the Kremlin, prepared specially for you. “From Moscow with love”… ah, charming. Behold the crowning triumph of brilliant Soviet scientists: the Kremlin Pill!. See that your troops receive them at once — I am confident their performance will improve dramatically. To your health, comrade.
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>>2328014
I've tried this build before, but I've found it to be inconsistent. Instead, I've gravitated towards using chem against merc soldiers (except shock troops who have too much armor to melt down in good time).
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>>2328014
poison dagger is good enough for the merc soldiers and commandos, but will need many hits to put down the tougher ones. Toxi-lance will fuck up all of them.
But honestly, >>2328268 is right. There is not much incentive in hitting the mercs early on, pretty much everything you get from them is locked.
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>>2328454
They don't matter nearly as much in piratez. You can offset the score they generate quite easily, and even recover countries that have signed a pact. One thing to note, however, is that Dio hates the idea of you farming supply ships, so while the risk is negligible, the rewards are barely worth it. You can hold off assaults until you need to get particular captives or technologies, and think of the bases as holding them for you until the time is right at a modest score cost. In the meantime, you should scout the bases to determine which faction they are, and if you need something from there you can conduct a raid and steal it instead of trying to win the assault.
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What the absolute fuck
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>>2328761
Nah, that's the glownigger cred, that you loose by fucking with them. Would be cool if there was some true black market with cool shit unlocked by doing piratey shit or something. That's when street cred would come to play.
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>>2328774
They pay you for destroying star gods and their lackeys. They don't pay you for destroying them.
That being said getting negative score because of glownigger raid is retarded. FAFO bitch. If you don't want to loose them spooks don't send them my way, and if you do then stop bitching about loosing them.
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Governments not playing by the rules? Well gee what a crazy coincidence.
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>>2328774
Yeah, it's nonsense. If anything, your reputation should rise with the other factions. Why would e.g. Cleopatra be unhappy that the EuroSyndicate is unhappy enough with you to raid you? The factions don't think about each other as fellow factions, they're competition.
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>>2328834
Infamy should have nothing to do with states. It should represent your share of the solar system's underworld, and states should be enemy factions like everyone else, save that you might be able to negotiate with or corrupt them via the contact system.
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>>2328851
2 reasons
1 - making a game like this is difficult and resource/time consuming. to have it sell reasonably, you'd have to make it to the quality level of, say, Troubleshooter. for that, you need a team of people and a few years, or you could try and 1MA it for like 10 years or something - option 1 costs a lot of money (few milion in the absolute lowest), and option 2 will take 10+ years of your life, and it will have the quality of a 1ma project, unless you're a magician like Tarn Adams, Pixel, ZUN, Thomas Biskup, etc. so hardly anyone will dabble in this, unless they have a lot of time and/or money, and that brings us to reason 2
2 - people who have time/money will have people telling them what's a good game to make to make more money. and 99.99% of the time, that game is some sort of fotm AAA garbage like anime bitches gacha, and not "anon's dream tactics project". Nucom was a success, but corporate minmaxing has reached a stage where nobody wants to make these kinds of games, because it's more profitable to just make whatever bullshit is popular at the moment, simple as.
and that's why you have people like dio making mods, because you don't have to make a whole fucking game from scratch, you "just" have to mod it, which cuts out a significant chunk of difficulty from the project, i.e. actually making your fucking game.
t. am a developer
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>>2328963
words straight from my soul,
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Am I dumb?
How do you purchase the hand flamer? going off the tech tree, it says you can buy it JUST from recearching it (hand flamer [i]) but I reserch it and get nothing in the store.
shame, id love to use it on raids in piratez
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>>2330147
based
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>>2330831
If it's not your main base with the Old Earth Lab, losing it is recoverable. It'll suck, but you can rebuild. Crackdowns are decided at the beginning of the month, so that's how far you need to reload if you want to try rerolling the attack.
As for fighting them, a gal with good stats can take the soldiers out with a blowgun, but it's not particularly easy. You'll probably have to expose yourself to reaction fire. Melee works, especially with poison daggers, but the mercs are also pretty good at melee. And even if you can kill them, that leaves the hovertanks. Do you have anti-tank rockets? Or regular rocket launchers? RPG HEAT shells and recoilless rifles can damage them, but it'll be a gamble. What about Arena Slaughter Cannons? Those are effective at stripping shields.
The last option is always to cheat. You can debug kill the attackers and "win" that way. I'd recommend against doing that though, unless it's a truly existential threat.
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>>2330852
I'm actually managing. I sold the facilities that link hangars to the living side, so I had the elevator chokepoint. Besides 4 gals and a kot, I also had 5 dogs that I strapped with two landmines each. Amazingly enough, the DBIEDs were able to hold off the first wave with few redcoats and a melee dude, and then tarnish hovertank's shields enough so that a combined volley of rpgs and dshk rounds down the corridor wrecked the tank. I am facing a dude wearing a red shield now, and he reflects everything so far. I have two blowguns with poison darts and two laser guns (a heavy and a hydra) but they seem to not do much. Electric lasso also seems ineffective. Or I need more than two turns to mess him up. I also have a toxigun and a flamethrower around the corner on the floor, and a cryssalid gas grenade, whatever the fuck that does.
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>>2330842
I gathered that attacks on the bases are pretty common. And I need many hangars because there are so many vessels to try out.
So far making same-ish bases works. Each has a Piranha to police local airspace, main base has a Fortuna and a Firefox and the angriest crew with a mortar team. Second base has a Convoy for pirate airfields, an Airbus for mansions and an expedition for sea adventures. Third has a Pigeon and a Zeppelin, although those kinda suck, plus a pirate princess with few valets that does small and mid size stuff. 2nd base has plantations, third has a factory coming up, 4th and 5th are just radar/hangar/prison combos with few gals for the smallest missions.
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>>2330866
Congratulations on killing the tank! Hope that was the only one.
Red shields are resistant to electricity and plasma, so those aren't going to do much until you take it down. To do full damage, you need cutting, plasma, chem, bio or daze. If you got enough darts for the blowguns, those should be able to take him out.
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>>2330876
Yeah, that was a typo, I meant to write electricity and lasers.
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dwnq
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>>2330871
I managed with blowpipes eventually. Got a blaster launcher in the loot.
How am I supposed to go about doing voodoo? I have few people with high power (a gal, a peasant, and a stalker) and I have persuadotron and few wands. I just go out and try to use them, and the skill will grow?
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>>2330932
Nope. The wands are usable without voodoo skill, but until a gal gets voodoo training, it won't grow with use. Even if you get a commendation that increases voodoo skill. Bugeyes come pre-trained, but everyone else needs time in the voodoo school.
You can build a witch cave early, but it only has one spot for voodoo training. If you took Gray Codex, you can upgrade to an Astrosensorium pretty easy, otherwise you'll be stuck with it for a while.
Also, unless you did take Gray Codex, there isn't really a lot you can do with voodoo until quite late in the game.
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>>2330946
Caveat: Bugeyes can be developed up to the point where they can semi-reliably mind control people from the moment you get them. They won't be particularly useful on a mission until then, but if you have the space to stand them in the vessel spamming fear until they run out of freshness, you can have them trained up to usefulness in a couple months.
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>>2331153
There's honestly not much that's a "for the love of god don't start here" in Piratez, beyond starting in China or Egypt (which get you a shitload of CapitatoryTax items; and a big infamy hit plus government raids, respectively). All of the codexes work. All of the captains work, although if memory serves Sore-ass disables a bunch of "Your hideout is visited by-" events, so maybe not ideal for a first run if you wanna see stuff.
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>>2331250
If you open the HTML bootypedia thing and go to Events, then you'll see a long list of Location: Wherever, Country: Wherever events, which are all Execution Odds: 100, First Month: 0, Last Month: 0.
Those are the events which trigger to give you your 'starting bonus' for your first base. You can look at 'em and see what they give you. It's not necessarily a complete story though, because there's various other events which are triggered by base location. So far as I'm aware there's no way of seeing that in game. And doublechecking,
If you're the guy looking for a first run recommendation, I'd not necessarily advise going through and dedicating time to working out Most Optimal Start or anything though. You'll be fine if you stay away from Thebes and China (Technically "Central Asia").
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>armored zombies
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>>2331743
>350-400+ total HP with two phases behind a 40+ armor and a stiff dodge
What am I even supposed to do here?
Like, what weapon or a combination of weapons has such damage output.
It tanks what an actual tank can't often take, like a full dshk burst in the back.
I could wittle it down from a distance but there's a dozen coming at me through the elevator.
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>>2331759
Melee them. Set up and ambush in good place and when they get close run, fuck them up and escape. You may also leave 2 full tu gals next to a door and only take out phase one and run behind them, the zombie will then default to jenkins mode in phase 2 and be raped in melee by reaction fire.
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>>2331697
hard to say for xpz, most weapons are actually pretty useable based on the time an d context you acquire/research them. for example, a shitty old revolver could be in the running for the shittiest gun in the game in terms of stats, but at the very start of the game you'd probably be pretty stoked to loot one off a corpse so you can have a gun that can shoot more than once per turn. of course, the moment you find any other such guns, like automatics, you can just throw it away no problem.
a lot also depends on what girls you have and what their statlines are. higher tier bows are not useful for anyone who hasn't trained up on throwing - that's what the basic bitch hunting bow is for. but once you do have maxed out throwing, you can actually rely on them well into midgame (outside of tunnels and close quarters). if you're running cats, you have enough TU to run across the map and shank people with fast, low damage melee or throwing stars. gals have much more strength and early on are quite slow so they are better equipped with the biggest guns you have or the thickest metal bars as melee or throwing weapons. they also have easier access to very high protection armors early on so you will have better mileage on short range weapons than others. if there is really any utterly shit line of weapons, I'd have to say it would be the entire underwater weapon line - but then again you're forced to use them if you go undewater
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Gonna make a little mod for myself. Transformation "Super-soldier serum":
tu: 30
stamina: 120
health: 30
bravery: 50
reactions: 50
firing: 160
throwing: 100
strength: 30
psiStrength: 80
psiSkill: 50
melee: 100
What you think? Pretty balanced, huh?
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>>2331837
Get inside a pyramid and destroy the portal. Use timed explosives, the portal explodes anyway so if you try to hammer it you'll hurt yourself. THEN kill all the zombies.
That mission is a bitch and a half, mostly because of the pyramid turrets. Those fuckers hit hard and are really difficult to kill. I like having a tank before taking them on, though it's not the only option obviously.
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>>2333062
Thanks anon, I was going mad
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>>2332963
You don't have to destroy any portals, if you kill all zombies the mission ends. You can get portal remains from fire witch. The only thing you must do is get tomb guard alive. I also wait for a second one to get its corpse for research to satisfy my autism (you get nothing from that).
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>>2333628
Academy hoppers start appearing in may of the first year and contain an esper, but unless you have the hawk from gold codex you are very likely unable to shoot them down. They very rarely land though, you could get lucky
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>>2333734
>>2333699
>>2333689
>>2333639
Thanks, lads. I'm mostly seeing church bois and I'm not rolling many bounty missions.
Here are two more questions:
>what is your preferred gun once the eternal heavy shotgun starts to struggle with armored enemies?
>what do you do for money with your runts when you are out of apples?
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>>2333862
>armored enemies?
Depends on how "armored" we're talking about.
Can it stop a RCF carbine, as in, Stormrat or the like? Ax them to stop.
Is it power armor, the kind used by Humanist supersoldiers or Merc breachers? Bad touch.
Whichever the case, I should be able to buy either those lasers Jack sells, or Hydra lasers, by the time I'm fighting Mercs.
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>>2333901
I don't think I've used bad touch more than a few times, to no effect. What stats govern its effectiveness again? Makes me nervous getting no feedback like with normal damage
>axe
I like the way you think but what about range? I do use great clubs/hammers/auto-axes to kill.
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>>2333862
>what is your preferred gun once the eternal heavy shotgun starts to struggle with armored enemies?
Tends to be a combination of CAWS/AP for noobs or any scaling gun for vets, silver snakes, sniper rifles, custom shooty guns, smart magnums, there are a load of options.
Dakka dakka is just preferred if possible, 0-200% is a bitch and having auto fire of 4-6 rounds is what you really want for armor piercing.
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>>2333862
If you're a patient man, you can also try chem rounds. No, you still won't be penetrating, but at least every hit you make goes toward a cumulative armor burn where eventually you can just outright shoot through using even your pea shooters. Also chems go through one of the most common shields in the game - blue.
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>>2333993
It's just a better story arc than x-piratez. Btter balance and more interesting story that adds to the cannon lore. The only thing x-piratez has over x-com files is that you actually get to see bare boobs instead of just gratuitous cleavage.
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>oh another pogrom, nice, I'm good at those
>hope it isnt a refinery map, hate em
>step out of Fortuna
>a sectopod
>...
Two sweaty hours of savescumming later, I pulled it off. I am weak and scared now. 10 star gods and two chickens. Didnt lose anyone but that was damn close. If it wasnt for two melee knight gals, I'd just run out of ammo for everything, trying to pen the fucking robots. And I had an armored car with 14mm, a dshk flysuit, two 14mm rifles, two mortars, two rpgs with 4 shots each, a lass, and even a barrel bomb. I used everything, down to last rocket, mortar shell and rifle round, and still had to hack at the damn sectopod with vibroswords. Have three purple bases looking at me. Things are NOT looking well, I need some tool against the mechs, pronto. EMP minibombs? Will those help?
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>>2321946
Yeah, this is a really odd problem to run into. Truth be told, I just shoot everyone with lethal weapons and still end up with a ton of prisoners somehow because a fair number of enemies are wounded at end-battle and not dead. In the late game I just field a few Auto Rifles or Blackmarch SMGs with the Electro-Pulse rounds that just pile on stun damage and put people to sleep, even though power armor.
I don't think I've ever had to rock handles, tasers, cattle prods or any of that except maybe in the first 2-3 combats to make sure I get someone alive for the Who's Who? research.
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>X-Com Files update is out
If history is any indication, Piratez should update within a few weeks.
Is the Files update as much of a nothingburger as it looks? After all this time, and with such a big, round version number, I expected more
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>>2335513
Not your problem
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>>2335752
Pretty silly.
All of those LZs had plenty of unobstructed space, so why risk damaging or destroying the craft by picking the worst possible landing spot? Rule of cool is not an answer. It's stupid not cool. Even drunken gals can park better than that.
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>>2335513
>Will [EMP minibombs] help?
Very much so, yes. But you need a blaster launcher to fire them, which are locked behind a lot of research you most likely don't have access to right now. Try to get lasers to plink at the sectopod shield; they're much better at this than the bullets you mentioned. After you defeat the shields, use HEAT RPGs. AT rifles and the HMG on the armored car won't cut it.
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>>2336128
Noted. I was wondering why I dont have those minibombs in the inventory, I thought they were for this arquebus mortar thing from day 1.
Meanwhile, took out another pogrom, this time with snakemen cykloning the locals. First I went in just to see what it was about (it was about poison gas, fire and chryssalids), then I checked my vaults and decided to go with Firefox with two 14mm armored cars, three space suit catgirls, three tac(h) gals and a mortar specialist. The armor worked amazingly well, catgirls saw through the smoke, tac(h) held ok vs. choke and fire, and mortar girl helped with blue shielded warchief.
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>>2335801
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>>2336494
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>>2336559
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>>2336559
ah yes, overengineering, the single overriding instinct of every failed dev of our time. this is why classic game systems remain evergreen and why newer games are only palatable for a short while, after which even the most tasteless rube starts to notice the mismatched gears start to grind against each other
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>>2336544
Except that's not true at all? I, personally, hadn't touched Oldcom until I played Nucom 1 & 2 multiple times along with Long War. The base game was easy and short enough that it didn't matter, but trying to play Piratez and Files like the Firaxis games is specifically why I was getting slaughtered at first.
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execute gobs. launch gobs into the sun. force gobs to TU drain a sectopod. give gobs primed landmines and garrison them in your plantation base. use handcuffed gobs as a lightning rod for star god voodoo. give gobs a primed stack of dynamite and run them into a fortified room. make gobs walk the plank.
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>>2317887
In Xpiratez, do you guys usually have a spread of different armors across a team beyond a ranged/melee split, or a go-to universalist build? I can't decide how to outfit my gals and redoing the whole squad's loadout for each mission and enemy type is killing me.
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>>2337353
>>2337353
i am bored, to lazy to shitpost
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>>2336559
You are really showing how little you understand the mechanics. And stepping out of cover (actual cover, not bs where you can still be shot but have a buff) is profoundly different, putting risk into how likely reaction fire is. But when IN COVER, you are entirely safe
Beyond that, I can toss someone a spar magazine, heal someone, shoot someone, and move all in the same turn if I manage my tu well.
It's an objectively better system only rejected because retards can't count higher than their fingers.
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>>2337129
At the moment I'm using guerilla for mortar team (light+carry space+some camo), chainmail/shield for melee specialists, one hover suit for dshk gal, a sniper suit, and assorted metal/medium tac vest for cqb. I suppose the armor follows the main weapon a gal is carrying.
Space team are catgirls and some peasants, diving team is just all gals in underwear with some x-bows, harpoons and javelins
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Is there a way to force a research topic to show on xpiratez? The topic !visiting shadowlands! does not show up (I think I gave Dr.X to the red mage too soon before getting the research topic) and now I'm stuck at late game with 84% of research, but unable to continue the game.
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>>2337420
Well, yes, there is a way but it's been a long time since I had to fix research through save editing.
You might have missed some other trigger for it, but if you're sure:
1) Open xpedia, look up the internal string for visiting shadowlands
2) Open up your save's "discovered:" section
3) Add the entry for visiting shadowlands
This would mark it as researched.
On the next day you'll see researches that depend on it.
On the next month scripts and events that depend on it can start triggering.
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>>2337428
As it turns out I gave Dr.X to The Red mage and built the black tower far too soon, skipping a part of the progression system. Luckily, there were a fix for this exact bug in the forums. Thanks for the tips in finding the stuff.
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>>2339517
Is sad day
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>>2339517
Actually, I'm pretty sure that as long as all primed explosives go off in the exact same time, they will all properly explode. For example, I sometimes put 2x dynamite on my guard dogs to drop on chokepoints becasue mines can sometimes be pre-detonated by just 1 dude moving forward first rather than explode in the middle of a crowd of troops.
In the same way, primed land mines all stacked in the same tile will all go off together, I believe.
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>>2339582
The latter. In both animation and gameplay terms, they explode one after the other. Each damage roll is done independently so you might have the first dynamite kill the group, but then the second dynamite explodes right after, destroying all the corpses and loot. On the other hand, if for example you just throw a ton of grenades at the same target, say something with power armor, none of them will do any damage because not a single one of them can do a damage roll that can defeat its bottom armor in the first place. Just some particulars to keep in mind.
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>>2339496
You getting contradictory replies because the posters aren't aware of what is actually happening. Primed explosives in the inventory will explode, but only if they survive the first (and subsequent) explosions. Therefore you can stack lots of weak grenades, but a strong explosive will destroy the other explosives and prevent them activating.
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>>2333993
Having played a couple days of x-com files because of that post let me give my take. I don't think it's better than x-piratez, more like they're trying to do complately different things. Piratez is gonzo kitchen sink sci-fi whereas files is more like an extended prequel to the base game. It really expands a lot of the alien lore without contradicting anything. As well the different cults you fight are fun in and of themselves and they only get better as aliens start to join their ranks. Just had a cult terror mission called a soul harvest that have deep ones fighting alongside the church of dagon. Was pretty fun. Can't wait to see how the ayys slot into the other cults.
But yes the lack of titties is a huge downside. Although I did see a pixel pin-up on one of the resort missions.
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>>2340278
The exception is if they all go off at the same time. Testing this is easy. Send out a dog with two primed landmines. See how many explosions happen when it's tripped. If your statement is correct, then there should only be one explosion because landmines can't survive their own explosions. If it's two, then the opposite is true.
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>>2341796
there is
durathread factory is a hard mission because it's a bump up in red dawn difficulty (the hardest cult, yes i will fight anyone who disagrees) but it's also an opportunity to get a red dawn coordinator early...
i usually do it with dragonfly, but my current go to is to drop at night and rely on flares / dogs / x-rats / x-bats to do the spotting for me.
it's slight skill issue but red dawn has alot of sniper/spotter nonsense which are the most annoying and dangerous things in current OXCE by far, so i don't blame you for being raped here.
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question, once you've angered the aquatoids and they start doing the whole create hideouts and send waves of ships from there to fuck shit up, can you get a looted sonic oscillator from downing their ships? or is that only a rare treasure from specific missions thing?
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>>2341948
>the hardest cult, yes i will fight anyone who disagrees
Going by who I lost the most agents to, I would say the hardest cult is black lotus with their bullshit invisible ninjas you have to be right on top of to even see and the witches that set your troops on fire
Although they're also my fav so far because they're the only one so far to have some titties and bush on a unit.
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>>2344555
that *was* my lesson
i haven't done it since
>>2344271
black lotus assassins are indeed the single most deadly unit from any cult, but there's a million counters to them. motion scanners, dogs, x-rats, x-bats, fire weapons, proximity grenades, landmines
if you get spotted by red dawn, and you will, because shooting and not killing a spotter unit will count as being spotted, your only counterplay is 'step behind something physical' which on a large number of tilesets, isn't really an option.
it's particularly relevant to the durathread factory mission, which almost always takes place in the arctic tileset, which is just flat snow with some water tiles.
i actually count black lotus as one of the easiest cults, barring the assassins. their weapon loadouts are kind of dogshit and they don't really wear armor. the avatar is an annoying catch, but she's not really all that dangerous. once you learn to cope with the assassin, there's nothing else challenging in this cult.
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>>2344780
you don't always land close to the factory.
if you have to cross open ground you're gonna get lit up by snipers on the top floor.
also i never said the factory itself is particularly hard, i was talking about red dawn in general.
it's alot easier to do if you don't care to stun the coordinator, but you really should. it's the easiest oppertunity to do so.
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>>2344807
I did get the coordinator cause he was on the upper floor along with a couple camo guys. Besides them the only ones left were a few grunts outside. Finished the mission with only a few injuries after bum rushing the upper floors of the factory with cattle prods.
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>>2344960
>is there a trick to the asylum missions
Electric weapons, like the taser, stun rods, shock batons, etc.. The ghosts are immune to almost everything else, but on the other side are rather bad at doing damage. The only really dangerous ghost is the Poltergeist.
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>>2345141
Now you get to hit people with Voodoo scaling weapons better. Gals aren't going to be doing much with Voodoo directly. You need hybrids for that. There are a bunch of voodoo scaling weapons which they can do good work with though, which are usually some combination of too heavy or too "I need you to run into melee" to be worth putting on a grey. Even dedicated Weirdgals are much the same. They're straight up worse at doing Voodoo than a hybrid. But they do have that big fat HP bar and generous quantities of TU and better armours.
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>>2346270
that explains how the weapon stats scale with the stats of the soldier using it
if, for example, the weapon has something like "pwr++ 0.1 bravery" that means the damage it does is calculated with the number listed plus 10% of the soldiers bravery, with a spread that depends on the weapon (most common 0-200%)
Skill means how the chance to hit is calculated. If for example you see skill accuracy that means a soldier with 100 accuracy will shoot at the listed chnace to hit.
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>>2346365
Seems straightforward enough to just call it "damage" and "accuracy" modifiers.
What's the use for bombers and divebombs? There aint things that arent a dogfighting or strafing objects (unless I can bomb stargod bases)
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>>2346667
Divebombs are for crafts to take on heavy targets which would be otherwise too difficult to shoot down with light interceptors. Large and very large ufos have armor so attacking a 25 armor ship with a 20 damage gauss cannon is futile, that's when 150 damage divebombs can come into play. Divebombs are also much more economical than missiles but far inferior in terms of DPS.
Early on against very small and dodgy targets they seem worthless but they do have their uses later on.
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I went from 5% tech tree to 20% and there's still nothing better on the battlescape than chainmail/shield with a vibrosword on a 150+ melee gal.
Far behind is a 14mm armored car, then every (and any) other combination of weapon and armor.
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>>2346742
Openxcom is better cause it's just an improvement on the original games. Although xenonaughts isn't bad and it felt a lot like xcom to me. Play xenonauts if you're a zoomer that can't handle pixel graphics.
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>>2346742
I'd generally say openxcom extended (just openxcom with more features) is better. Old x-com is a LITTLE archaic at first, but nothing in the realm of dwarf fortress or the like. That said if you can overcome that, the controls (only marginally worse than xeno, and better if you consider all the binds and shortcuts in openxcom) i think openxcom is superior in just about all ways besides a handful.
Namely graphics, air combat, and perhaps finer tuned controls for how you fire are generally better on xenonauts, but outside that, openxcom has a better vibe, is the real thing, has far more mods, and far more community, and its been in active development for a decade.
I don't hate xenonauts at all but generally speaking, openxcom is so superior once you start modding its kinda impossible to compare
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>>2346739
>chainmail/shield with a vibrosword
Why do so many retards do this? What's the point of comboing melee weapon with a melee weapon? Chain/plate mail have gauntlet built in which is good enough stun weapon for like 95% cases. For the remaining 5% the shield isn't good for either way.
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>>2347298
My gals use the shield as a shield.
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I have nowhere else to post this so I'll do it here, people like this should be publicly executed
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>>2347910
>>2347911
So true, kings
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>>2347911
> we will eventually run out of rare metals
They won't just disappear from the face of planet unless we shoot them into space in massive quantities.
And if we start doing that, it implies space industry which implies mining materials from outside the Earth.
Sadly we'll never get rid of "smart" devices and increasingly dumb users. It's too late.
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>>2347923
The space freighter? Sounds like you rolled a rare 10% chance for the usual suspects to be replaced with zombies, the zombie variant is really hard to clear the standard one sucks too but it's much more reasonable.
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>>2347923
The normal variant shouldn't be particularly hard by the time you can get to it. Just a huge map that tends to requires splitting your forces between multiple distant locations (the 4 engine bays and bunch of bigger floors above the cargo holds)
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>>2347962
Six Billion Humans? Come on nowssss...
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Are there cursed weapons and/or gals? Like hidden luck modifier somewhere?
I have a gal with decent acc and rea at 100+, she has a light sniper which scales of acc and rea, and sniper gear, and I can swear she misses more than she should given the declared chance to hit. I know there are "casino" shots sometimes which will miss no matter what the % is, but she gets one every 4-5 shots it feels.
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>>2348034
Humans are terrible livestock (18 years to maturation, omnivores that do not convert useless biomatter like grass into useful biomatter like meat or milk, very little meat on body in general), it's a terrible idea to feed Humans their own flesh due to prions, and the Advent would be advanced enough to be capable of direct protein synthesis (we already are with that "impossible burger" nonsense from a few years ago).
There is no point in "human burgers" other than to be comically evil. If you want to kill humans, just shoot them. The meat isn't even the hard part to dispose of.
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>>2348037
I assumed it was from the failed avatar specimens. The Elders processed a lot of human and alien bodies for the various experiments and Avatar bodies. Presumably there were a lot of biological leftovers, so they found a use for them.
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>>2348035
>given the declared chance to hit
Read up on the mechanics, the number displayed isn't "chance to hit" despite it being basically presented as such. To put it simply the higher your accuracy is the tighter your cone where the shot lands is. With enough range the cone is wide enough to sometimes miss even when it shows 200%+ to hit. If you keep shooting across the map with "only" 100% chance to hit there WILL be misses.
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>>2348245
>while oscillators are still in any way relevant?
honestly they aren't, i have enough gauss cannons for every ship with a light weapon slot. I just like the convenience of not even having to spare a thought to stock ammo
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>>2348471
Marching band
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>>2348035
The declared accuracy percentage is not chance to hit.
Please read https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Accuracy_formula#Use_of_Accu racy
Also, take first person screenshot and check how visible the target hitbox is. That should give you an intuitive idea of how hard any given shot really is.
>>2348792
>>try and shoot someone point blank
I don't think anon's gal was shooting point blank with a sniper rifle...
>>2348845
Point blank? Misses happen all the time because of the melee defense mechanics.
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>>2348874
IMO it's insanely hard to make good pixel art at OG XCOM scale. That's why most of the character sprites look kinda bad.
Paperdolls and other inventory art is fine but the battlescape character sprites are just way too small.
You just don't have enough pixels to work with, given that vastly different character sizes and shapes are portrayed in the games and especially in the mods. And the image format / color paletting stuff makes producing XCOM art even harder than most other 8-bit color productions these days. Another challenge unique to XCOM is the whole aspect ratio thing.
And in the first place, hand drawing spritesheets is a nightmare. Sprite-based isometric character graphics already used simple 3D models rendered onto spritesheets in the late 90s for games like Fallout. So the process was simple and automated. That's a no-go for XCOM, the sprites are so small that you need hand-drawn abstraction to fit the necessary details while conveying shapes somewhat adequately. And as you pointed out, hand drawing a humanoid shape object consistently from multiple angles is a huge PITA. That's why most of them look so blocky, unnatural and derivative of each other. It's a necessary compromise.
That kind of sprite compositing usually also brings a bunch of layering issues, but that's mostly a non-issue in XCOM because its sprites are so low fidelity and surrounding level geometry is quite simplistic.
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>>2349876
Maybe. Depends on your mod, tech level and playstyle.
I prefer to have everyone carrying their personal consumables and basic first aid.
But I sometimes use specialized medics if I have medic armors or if my best meds are too large/heavy. But that's always going to limit your tactical flexibility.
Some rarely used stuff like fire extinguishrs I just leave on the loot pile and run back to craft if I need it. I regret it every time and I'm not going to change my ways.
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>>2349876
I usually get by with everyone carrying one or two medkits on their own. But I tend to neglect the non-healing consumables for the most part.
It's definitely worth having one or two dedicated ammo carriers if you're fielding mortars or the like
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>>2349930
I usually just use the ammo carrier as a back watcher for the mortar/launcher/what have you so that they can focus on firing and loading the weapon. Though unless the ammo carrier is limp wristed I also usually have them carry the launcher's meds.
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>>2349876
No, it's a waste Food and meds is better off spread out everywhere, that way it can go to whoever needs it intermediately. You can try it out but you'll soon see why it sucks. There's basically no point and all you achieve is a combatant who doesn't contribute very much to the fight until something happens and then might be too far away to help.
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>>2349876
I think people overlook the big medkit Trauma pack/Field surgery kit in both piratez and xcom files, healing 3/5 hp per fatal wound really adds up in the early game. No need to dedicate a person to just medical duty, but having a person with the fat medkit is worth it.
Late game in piratez there's also nano surgery kit which can bring person from brink of death to full health but by that late in the game the wound timer doesn't matter anymore but it's still handy in those marathon 3 stage missions dio loves so much.
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Sometimes you just know.
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>>2351689
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>>2352101
Then they have enough healing and don't need someone dedicated to healing. And if you do think they do need more healing, then you're still better off distributing items evenly throughout the team. The only exception is if your entire team is composed of heavy weapon-toting maniacs only just able to handle the weight, but that's crazy talk and you should look into something a bit more balanced.
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Fellas, how much variation in gameplay during mission segments does openXcom have in general? I'm an XCOM EW babby trying to branch out
At least in the random gameplay videos I check there doesn't seem to be significant difference between the aliens (you have melee aliens and ranged aliens), nor between the contexts the game places them in, am I just failing to understand something?
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>>2353215
Nah, you're probably right. At least if we're talking about the vanilla UFO Defense campaign. XCOM is almost like a puzzle sometimes, asking for the correct order to use your abilities so the aliens don't get a chance to use their abilities. X-Com doesn't have abilities in the same sense, so there's less of that.
There's still some variation, though. Searching for enemies in the open is different from breaching a downed UFO. And you have a lot more freedom with your loadouts. Nothing stopping you from sending troops to battle with nothing but a backpack full of grenades, for example.
When you get into the total conversion mods, things get more weird. In X-Files you start out with two agents in black suits, armed with basic pistols and driving a car, responding to things like rumoured cattle mutilations. You quickly upgrade to four guys with rifles and a dog in a Scooby Doo van going after weird cults, and it scales up from there. You don't just get bigger battles as the transport craft get bigger, but whole new categories of weapons, and new types of units like the aforementioned dogs. And there's the underwater missions, the space missions and whatnot.
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>>2353321
I actually can't. I've mostly played XPiratez, the other huge megamod. It's less popular than X-Files as a starting point, since it's much more silly, but I prefer the way it's structured. In X-Files, the critical missions you need to do and techs you need to progress are fairly linear. In Piratez, unless you either exhaustively study the tech tree or outright read a guide, it's really not obvious what you're supposed to do, and you only get minor penalties for taking a long time to get to the critical progression stuff. If a mission is too hard, or you just don't get the research materials you need from the RNG? It's fine, there's always something else to do.
By the way, I'd recommend playing the base X-Com campaign at least once before getting into the megamods. It's short in comparison, and you need the data files anyway. Even if you don't finish, it'll be a helpful tutorial.
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>>2353215
On youtube you're seeing veterans playing the game, so gameplay is going to be extremely streamlined and boring. They've already internalized all the lessons and it's not going to be like that for you unless you've been spoiled.
The enemy variety is basic, but the challenges you meet as time progresses will force you to change tactics.
>your first night mission
>your first terror mission
>meeting grenades for the first time
>being able to destroy basic terrain
>meeting Chryssalids for the first time
>meeting blaster bombs for the first time
>getting your own blaster bombs
>meeting Mutons for the first time
>being able to destroy spaceship walls
>getting flying armor
>meeting psionic Sectoids for the first time
>meeting Ethereals for the first time
After you first playthrough, yeah, you end up with a perfect gunline that preemptively neutralizes threats before they appear. You get to choose your own loadouts though, so you can express your own preferences (but with the limited selection of weaponry, it's mostly about what type and how many explosives you want to carry) outside of the stricter more class-based system of Nu-com.
>>2353321
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>>2353321
The megamods (X-com Files and X-Piratez) have much wackier stuff of course, with much more varied and specialized equipment and having to match damage resistance to enemies, and enemies with different damage types. There is a variety of weapons filling tactical niches and playstyles. Faction variety is mostly: enemies with guns, enemies with occasional melee dog-things, stealthy ninjas (invisible until close), hordes of small creatures, zombies (slow with low armor and high HP), various flavors of monsters, various flavors of of big/small tough units (vehicles, vampires, monsters), shielded enemies (no armor, but shields regenerate). Is that unit variety? They might be faster/slower/shootier/melee-er/tougher/vulnerable-er but at the end of the day you just shoot/stab/spell them with the correct weapon before they do the same to you, same with any tactics game, even fantasy ones.
You should at least play the base game, it's short and teaches the fundamentals of gameplay (and background lore) that every mod expects you to already know and appreciate. Really, I don't know why people always ask if they should dive headfirst into a total conversion mod without playing the base game, the answer is always going to be no, no matter the game. You can't truly appreciate the changes if you don't even know what's being changed. Also the difficulty level of the mega mods are massive if you haven't played the base game, they're meant for players who have played the game a lot and got bored, not to mention the sheer size of them means that a single game of vanilla is maybe a hundredth of the mega mods, and I'm not exaggerating. You might as well play vanilla once, it will get you up to speed a lot faster than failing a mega-mod several times.
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>>2353321
While the individual units don't do anything crazily special, factions can be incredibly different. Some factions are more numerous but weak, some have thermal vision which makes smoke weaker, or kevlar that limits small arm effectiveness.
Red dawn for instance are generally a little harder to kill, have nastier guns, and slightly better tactics. They ARE just men with guns at the end of the day, but better trained, better guns.
Something like sectoids are far more limited early on if any, but they have energy shields which refill overtime (think halo shields). This on the surface makes them harder to kill since they can absolutely tank a single heavy as fuck round like a sniper, but once the shield pops they are doughy.
Its far different than vanilla, I'd try it. There's a lot of underlying systems in oxce that change tons especially for megamods