X-COM OpenXcom Thread

[AgentFransis]

Gobbos make good pilots.

Not sure about research building prereqs but I doubt it will work across bases. You could make a save and just fast forward on max speed to check.

Manor missions are hard. Might wanna wait on them until you have larger craft, more experienced gals and good small weapons. Throwing stars and such are very deadly at close range and you need good high power pistols. Seductress can also be very good.

 

[AgentFransis]

If I remember right the eagle is really heavy for a pistol and that can sometimes be a factor with certain loadouts and heavier armor, especially if you use it as a sidearm. Eventually the specialized custom weapons make for the best one-handers for assault gals (kustom handcannon line).

But don't forget the most important rule of Piratez - don't sweat it too much and pick what looks cool or fun to you. There's no real need to minmax the shit out of everything. Personally I like giving my best marksgal twin Silver Snakes as a mark of prestige and because a true master doesn't need a rifle to headshot a motherfucker from across the map. And because I think having a gal cosplay as Revy is dope (I'd use a Beretta equivalent but they suck too much).

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I don't use 2h Melee because I prefer having the ability to shoot if needed at all times

I've had some very good results against tougher foes with gal armed with shovel or 2-handed ax, for example.
Besides other hand could be used for grenades if need arises.

 

[lightbane]

(I don't use 2h Melee because I prefer having the ability to shoot if needed at all times)

You can carry a small side-arm/item in a nearby pocket and/or the quickdraw slot, use it on the other hand when needed, then drop the thing onto the ground for 0 AP. Works in most XCOM type mods.

So Lokk'narrs can actually shoot worth a damn? Interesting. They also seem to have good stamina as well.

They can also ride certain vehicles that replace the mini-tanks from the OG game. In fact, they are the only ones that can ride said vehicles due their small size (in Piratez's world, radio-controlled tech is a myth).

 

[AgentFransis]

While you can use a 2h melee with a sidearm, a 1h melee and pistol has the advantage of being available for reaction fire.

Besides gals are so strong that a 1h axe or mace will oneshot almost anything, and even a sabre is enough for most.

 

[Average Manatee]

There's nothing inherently wrong with having a twohanded item in both hands. Dropping an item is 2 TUs and picking it up the next turn after you've done what you need to is 8. If that means you can have a much better weapon available for both jobs then its a good idea. Although I don't know if this is applicable to Piratez since I haven't played it in years.

 

[Optimist]

My XPiratez playthrough is chugging along. God, this game/mod is humongous, despite putting quite a bit of time into it (I'm at the end of November 1st year), it still feels as though I've barely scratched the surface (literally, I'm only now considering procuring an aquatic transport).

I remember feeling like I got to the Little Bird super late when I picked the game for the first time, but it seems that I forgot what techs had to be researched for me to put it together so it took me a while this time around as well. It's... not terribly useful. It's generally unable to keep up with anything but the slowest craft, and even after uparming it with some of the weapons I collected across the missions, it's still not able to shoot down some of the stuff it can catch up to. I think I was able to get it to shoot down 4-5 small transports throughout half a year. It's still nice to have it, though. I became able to procure cars and speeders a while ago, but only got to a point where I am able to construct hangars a few in-game days ago. My plans are to grab the submarine craft and a car to utilize as a weapons platform. I've been initially thinking about grabbing the long-range van as well to cover Australia, but I think it's going to be easier for me to just plop up another base there, especially seeing how I'm approaching the maximum size for the initial one.

It'll actually be my third one - having started in the Hive area, I was getting the "Eurosyndicate is cross with you, -150 infamy" every now and then which was a bit annoying, so I put up a shitty farmhouse there. I posted a small security detail there, but, uh, forgot about sending them some weapons as well, so the moment the Academy team arrived all my gals and clones were empty-handed. It still worked out surprisingly well, though - one of my gals punched out a cattleprod-toting medic, which another gal picked up, and used it to disperse the first wave of assaulters. Clones then managed to pick up enough weaponry to mount a sufficient resistance. Sadly, this resulted in some fatal wounds to proudly bear - here's hoping I'll be able to heal those at some point.

I really like the setting. The hodgepodge of aliens, secret organizations, technobarbarism, and post-apo feels like it would be good material for running a tabletop RPG session. It's pulp, but the good kind.

It occasionally feels to me as though the Infamy rewards and bars are a bit odd. On a good month, it's easy to accrue a bunch of Infamy - plus there are some events and techs (like researching the Codex) that can throw quite a bit of it at you. Then you get promoted and move to a worse month, where you're being hit with Infamy penalties for gaining too little Infamy this month, as well as scoring too little for your rank, which results in, you guessed it, even more, Infamy penalties.

Gambling is really good. Some of the weapons you can win from Jack feel as though they could break the progression mechanics in exciting ways.

The game fucks with you with how efficient the Gals are in melee and how they usually have solid AP growth. It encourages you to run into enemies and beat them into submission. Thanks to the CQC mechanics (which I absolutely love) this can work out rather well, but I already lost two gals by getting overly excited and charging a dude only to realize that he had some bros with him. I also didn't have much luck teching towards armor so far, although two tac vests and tac armor I got from gambling make the gals wearing them into real tanks.

The Brigador OST used as one of the Geoscape themes does odd things to me. I really think that it'd be best to replace all the music there with chiptune shanties.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

preparing ground for another attempt at xpiratez. noob advices? like, for instance, selling the heavy cannon in vanilla and buying rocket launchers instead.

 

[Average Manatee]

HC-HE is great, what are you doing son? Best and most reliable weapon for general use other than grenades and can swap to AP ammo when alien tech is on the ground and you don't want to damage it. Arguably best aimed shot weapon when you take into account how many shots pistols often take to drop even sectoids.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

preparing ground for another attempt at xpiratez. noob advices? like, for instance, selling the heavy cannon in vanilla and buying rocket launchers instead.

Hmmmm...
- Early on, you DON'T have armor. Your gals can survive and even no-sell potshots from smaller pistols, but shotguns are your bane until you get some real armor.
- Replace handles with stun prods as soon as possible. I usually use Stun Prods and Ball Bats, and later Fans for that. Fans are useless if the enemy is heavily-armored tho. Pipe, Fistycuffs and Whips might also do it but I never used them for that, actually (Pipe seems too capable of killing)
- Early on, you want to do most missions at night, if possible. Exceptions: Ratmen, Lokk'Narrs.
- Dogs, dogs, dogs. Dogs are GUD. They can kill most early-game enemies with their bites (I've killed multiple GOs/low-level cultists/Academy Nurses and Researchers close to one another in a single turn), and their barks are an excellent way to sap enemy TUs. Shotguns and melee enemies are your banes (bark from 1 tile before engaging meleers). I like to ride around with 3-4 dogs. If the enemy is mainly melee, one trick is to always have dogs on teams - one dog barks the other bites. They can also serve as improvised motion detectors with their special ability, but that saps their morale so best do it sparingly and tactically. If your dogs can't damage 'em, bark away.

- Always carry a hammer and/or pick on missions, you will likely have to crack some scenery at some point. Hammer can also crack heavy armor with a strong gal.
- On Temple Raid missions, you might wanna waste a few cultists just to keep your morale up and demoralize the enemy, at least early on. Which will cost you points. AFAIK the only cultists that won't cost you points are Priests and above... I think, I can't remember if Shrine Maidens cost points or not.
- If you can get a good bow gal early on its great.
- I recommend having at least one moonshine or atom beer in every gal, if possible. You can use that to recover energy for sprints.
- Talking about that... sprint, sprint a lot. You need to do that to close to melee range. Know when to sprint right and count your energy.
- In my experience, peasants suck early on and are best left on support, using some highly-accurate sniper gun like the Varmint Rifle/Ol' Carbine, or a short-ranged gun like a shotgun. They're pretty much cannon fodder until they git gud, althrough I think elite peasants are better left at ranged combat as they lack the sheer speed and health of gals.
- Research grog and chateau as soon as possible, to make cash. If you can't make grog nor chateau, distill Hellerium to get some cash.
- Try to increase your amount of brainers as soon as you can, you can get a lot of infamy points from Brainers. I think I took too long to get my fourth Brainer in my game.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Best and most reliable weapon

tell me again how your starting men are able to hit anything with it. please do. rocket launcher is the way. and perhaps a single heavy autocannon to hit walls or burn fields.

 

[Average Manatee]

Pistol is 18% TUs for 60% accuracy snapshot, HC is 33% for 60%. HC is 56 damage vs. 28 for pistol so expected DPS is higher. If you use HE ammo your damage range is 50%-150% rather than 0%-200%, so its a guaranteed kill on weak things. HC also has 90% accuracy aimed shot which is 103.5% when kneeling. 3 or 4 snipers with HC can reliably take out anything early game.

Rocket launcher is fine but destroys expensive pickups if you have to keep hitting the same spot. If your soldier's lives are the most important thing to you then spam rockets, but a slight increase to their safety isn't worth destroying $1M worth of hardware every mission. Autocannon is awful for the same reason, better to pack lot of high explosives. In fact nowadays I tend to carry more high explosives than I do grenades, just so much more effective and reliable as long as you are keeping track of who has the strength to lob one far enough. Only use autocannon AP in CQC e.g. clearing UFOs.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

if the enemy is heavily-armored

if i recall correctly, x-com has no way to show an enemy's armor if not through a mind probe. it was hardly an issue because the enemies weren't that many, weapons weren't that many, and they all were of increasing strength. as far as i understood, this mods has a thousand weapon and a million enemies. am i supposed to trial and error and memorize everything? holy fuck it's never going to happen.

 

[Optimist]

if the enemy is heavily-armored

if i recall correctly, x-com has no way to show an enemy's armor if not through a mind probe. it was hardly an issue because the enemies weren't that many, weapons weren't that many, and they all were of increasing strength. as far as i understood, this mods has a thousand weapon and a million enemies. am i supposed to trial and error and memorize everything? holy fuck it's never going to happen.

Researching an enemy gives you some details on it, although there's no way to look it up in combat.

XPirateZ is relatively diegetic in this regard, though. Does the character model look like it's wearing armor? If not, then anything will work, if yes - bring out rifles and handcannons. If it's heavy armor, preferably use AP or explosives. If it's a tank, it's time for recoilless rifles and launchers. Furs don't like flames, etc.

Also, you can press Ctrl + H to check what effect did an attack hit have on enemy (although it's only the last attack, so if an enemy counterfired it'll show his attack). No value means a miss, 0 means that a shot connected, but failed to do any damage (bring out the bigger guns!), hit means some effect, and HIT! means that you've caused serious pain. X-com's damage swinginess can confuse things up a bit every now and then, but this is usually enough info to decide how to proceed.

As for the tips - on top of what my Brazilian sensei typed up, I'd add:

- Select a good location for your first base. Preferably northern Africa or Southern Europe - with the range of your initial airbus this should give you good coverage of the geoscape, anything but Australia would be within your reach, really. Northern Africa also gives you a way to procure 12 well-equipped Assault Clones, which are a godsend in early game.
- Don't sweat too much about getting a combat-worthy vessel ASAP.
- Gambling is good! Gamble as soon as you're able to unlock it. Save the 1000-credit chips for it.
- Tommy guns are great for early game.
- Don't be afraid to sell stuff - you won't find any use for AI cores and ship parts in the first year or so (or at least - I haven't found it yet). Only stockpile apples and remember that you'll need 10 medkits for a sickbay. Other than that it's better to sell stuff, procure brainers and expand the base(s).
- Even if you don't need any buildings urgently, dig around and build burrows. You can quickly convert them to actual buildings later on.
- Base defenses are going to happen relatively early and often, and while the enemies will be manageable, make sure that you have a combat-worthy detail in each base.
- Early game the best way to destroy a tank seems to be to have a gal sneak up to it, and smash it up with a hammer. At least this is what worked best for me. This is why you should grab the hammer for early pogroms. The Gothic Raygun you start with should work as well.

 

[Optimist]

How much point is there in re-researching techs which have this option? There seems to be quite a few of those, but I'm worried about wasting my braining-hours.
- Crazy Hassan's leaflets seem to be good to re-research, as they unlock new items in the shop
- Re-interrogating captured enemies mostly gives you lore details, right? I know that there are some events that can happen while interrogating, which can grant you an additional brainer or something, but this doesn't feel like a terribly good investment of time.
- Does test flight shape up to anything at some point?
- Examining decrypted data and briefcases also mostly gives you background info, I think?

 

[lightbane]

We need a separate thread for Piratez, all of that info is golden. IIRC, Test Flight was necessary in order to unlock the more advanced vessels, but it's been 3+ years since I played it.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

if the enemy is heavily-armored

if i recall correctly, x-com has no way to show an enemy's armor if not through a mind probe. it was hardly an issue because the enemies weren't that many, weapons weren't that many, and they all were of increasing strength. as far as i understood, this mods has a thousand weapon and a million enemies. am i supposed to trial and error and memorize everything? holy fuck it's never going to happen.

Just look at them. Armored Enemies usually look armored. Security Armor and similar "armored vests" are mostly armored in the front and no so much in the sides and back, while Personnal Armor is armored on all sides.

If you capture an enemy and interrogate, you can get info them, their resistances, night vision, etc.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

How much point is there in re-researching techs which have this option? There seems to be quite a few of those, but I'm worried about wasting my braining-hours.
- Crazy Hassan's leaflets seem to be good to re-research, as they unlock new items in the shop
- Re-interrogating captured enemies mostly gives you lore details, right? I know that there are some events that can happen while interrogating, which can grant you an additional brainer or something, but this doesn't feel like a terribly good investment of time.
- Does test flight shape up to anything at some point?
- Examining decrypted data and briefcases also mostly gives you background info, I think?

I personally leave stuff like Gun Almanacs, leaflefts, decrypted data and journals alone for a while, while I get most easy-to-get info from captured enemies and such. Expedition Reports are probably the easiest way to get data on Provincial Govts.

- Re-interrogating captured enemies mostly gives you lore details, right? I know that there are some events that can happen while interrogating, which can grant you an additional brainer or something, but this doesn't feel like a terribly good investment of time.

Ideally you want to really wring out the research from every enemy, you can even get some gameplay tips and a few special things, plus aparently useless things might connect to researching others.

Plus, once you have enemies all researched out, you can use them for other things, like Ransoms or Slavery. Some enemies simply have no value beyond their interrogations and thus, you can now go and kill them on sight at all times.

 

[Optimist]

- Re-interrogating captured enemies mostly gives you lore details, right? I know that there are some events that can happen while interrogating, which can grant you an additional brainer or something, but this doesn't feel like a terribly good investment of time.

Ideally you want to really wring out the research from every enemy, you can even get some gameplay tips and a few special things, plus aparently useless things might connect to researching others.

Wait, so captured enemies can unlock a few techs? How can you tell that you got everything you could from a given type of an opponent, do they just stop appearing on the list?

 

[Demo.Graph]

Wait, so captured enemies can unlock a few techs? How can you tell that you got everything you could from a given type of an opponent, do they just stop appearing on the list?

I think they stop appearing.
Also, if you want spoilers, middle mouse button on research item (including prisoners) shows all possible results, prereqs and approximate research cost.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

xpiratez has just too much stuff going on to be used on such an archaic engine and its interface.
and honestly boobs ruin everything. it's like ghost in the shell manga, those fucking 5 pages diminish its possible audience to one tenth, maybe lower.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

xpiratez has just too much stuff going on to be used on such an archaic engine and its interface.
and honestly boobs ruin everything. it's like ghost in the shell manga, those fucking 5 pages diminish its possible audience to one tenth, maybe lower.

Yes, it's magnificent product of sheer insane dedication.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

xpiratez has just too much stuff going on to be used on such an archaic engine and its interface.
and honestly boobs ruin everything. it's like ghost in the shell manga, those fucking 5 pages diminish its possible audience to one tenth, maybe lower.

Heck, like 99% of what PirateZ (and X-COM Files) does is only possible because of Open X-COM Extended. Its such a hoot to look at old threads on the forum and see them talking about insane mod ideas, then look at modern mods and lo and behold, they have been doing things thought impossible before!
The archaic engine is going to get bent and dominated into doing what we want it to do, and it will like it!

 

[Optimist]

and honestly boobs ruin everything. it's like ghost in the shell manga, those fucking 5 pages diminish its possible audience to one tenth, maybe lower.

I like boobs

 

[Demo.Graph]

and honestly boobs ruin everything. it's like ghost in the shell manga, those fucking 5 pages diminish its possible audience to one tenth, maybe lower.

I think, a demand for a complex tactical games is very limited. There's no point trying to reach the audience that likes 2AP move&shoot mechanics or modern tacticools.
And those who want complex games have usually seen some boobs in their life.

Also, I've been trying to indoctrinate my wife into gaming. So far we've moved from Sonic and pixel-hunting "quests" to Black Book and XcomFiles. She's on second or third month in XCF and kinda suffers through the 3rd difficulty (she forgets to buy proper gear, sends meeples on missions half-naked and doesn't really use tactical placement). But she had already asked for more gameplay several times, so I consider "old engine with ugly graphics" a success.