X-COM OpenXcom Thread

[lightbane]

IIRC most of the new mechanics can be disabled by tinkering with the game files, I believe the scripts+"extended scripts" ones hold most of these, including the sniper-spotter mechanic.

 

[hello friend]

So ey - how should I set things up for a first time playthrough of UFO? Anything to keep in mind?

 

[Demo.Graph]

So ey - how should I set things up for a first time playthrough of UFO? Anything to keep in mind?

Vanilla?
Have openxcom, so that soldier inventories would get saved between missions.

On geoscape:
Always have some spare rookies (or savescum).
Beeline to medkits and then to laser rifles asap, then laser cannons, alien alloys and personal armor.
Max out a workshop or two and start making medkits (later laser cannons) asap.

On tactical missions:
Rifles are about as good as pistols, but need a free hand for accuracy. Your scouts (with stun rods) and grenadiers should carry pistols.
On night missions give everyone a flare or two.
Have a guy or two with missile launchers.

 

[Cael]

So ey - how should I set things up for a first time playthrough of UFO? Anything to keep in mind?

Vanilla?
Have openxcom, so that soldier inventories would get saved between missions.

On geoscape:
Always have some spare rookies (or savescum).
Beeline to medkits and then to laser rifles asap, then laser cannons, alien alloys and personal armor.
Max out a workshop or two and start making medkits (later laser cannons) asap.

On tactical missions:
Rifles are about as good as pistols, but need a free hand for accuracy. Your scouts (with stun rods) and grenadiers should carry pistols.
On night missions give everyone a flare or two.
Have a guy or two with missile launchers.

My standard complement at the beginning of the game in XCom 1 is 10 rookies with rifles and stun rods, and a Rocket HWP. Occasionally, I give my snipers the heavy cannon with AP rounds. I dislike explosives as they tend to destroy loot.

 

[KateMicucci]

I used to love X-piratez but over the years it's gotten way too bloated with annoying and un-fun features, and joke weapons and armors and researches. X-piratez is one of the few games that would be more fun if it had less stuff. At the start of the game it's fine because you have only a very small team, but the game eventually spirals out of control, having to manage multiple factories with a dozen or more production lines going at once, dedicated training bases, tons of different crafts with different loadouts, multiple landers and ABCD teams for different mission types so that you don't have to keep switching out their inventory every time an underwater/space/stealth mission pops up. And then you still need to go into each gal and give them protective gear for hot/cold/acid/fire/whatever missions, which is fine when you have 6 gal crafts but not when it's 16+.

And Diox still hasn't implemented, in all these years, the most important feature: making the gals not ugly.

 

[lightbane]

I used to love X-piratez but over the years it's gotten way too bloated with annoying and un-fun features, and joke weapons and armors and researches. X-piratez is one of the few games that would be more fun if it had less stuff. At the start of the game it's fine because you have only a very small team, but the game eventually spirals out of control, having to manage multiple factories with a dozen or more production lines going at once, dedicated training bases, tons of different crafts with different loadouts, multiple landers and ABCD teams for different mission types so that you don't have to keep switching out their inventory every time an underwater/space/stealth mission pops up. And then you still need to go into each gal and give them protective gear for hot/cold/acid/fire/whatever missions, which is fine when you have 6 gal crafts but not when it's 16+.

And Diox still hasn't implemented, in all these years, the most important feature: making the gals not ugly.

Mod bloating is real. And there's like 3 endings paths still to be done IIRC.
What do you think about XCOM Files then?

 

[KateMicucci]

What do you think about XCOM Files then?

I didn't play it very long. All the early missions where you're just gunning down wildlife or searching a huge map for one guy got boring fast.

X-piratez is still a lot more fun despite the bloat.

 

[Average Manatee]

So ey - how should I set things up for a first time playthrough of UFO? Anything to keep in mind?

Add some stronger weaponry like heavy cannon/auto cannon/rocket launcher, put them on your best accuracy soldiers and keep them a bit in the backline. Have a lot of smoke and regular grenades. Get motion scanners ASAP, and after you manufacture a few for your troops set them to be manufactured for profit (in openxcom right click the up arrow for "units to produce" and the game will automatically produce and sell them indefinitely). Have a lot of flares if you are going into a night mission.

Buy scientists to fill your current lab and build a new one immediately, buy scientists to fill the 2nd lab at the beginning of feb (save on monthly costs).

Medikits and lasers are the other two researches to get early, unless you want to try and skip to plasma. Armor is kind of unreliable in XCom, you're basically paying a bunch per trooper to have a chance to survive one shot, but weapon upgrades always deal a lot more damage and even if the soldier dies you can still pick up his weapon and re-use it. Laser Rifles are worthy weapons to give to your standard trooper all the way to the end game if you want, though plasma is better.

Capturing live aliens really isn't nearly as important as you might think, so no need to rush it.

Trying to just give general advice rather than a strict guide of what I consider optimal. If it's overwhelming trying to manage all this equipment at once it's fine to take a more limited selection of equipment.

My standard complement at the beginning of the game in XCom 1 is 10 rookies with rifles and stun rods, and a Rocket HWP. Occasionally, I give my snipers the heavy cannon with AP rounds. I dislike explosives as they tend to destroy loot.

Single explosives are fine and won't destroy loot unless you overlap on something you've already killed. HC HE has a pretty good aimed shot. The big reason to use small arms HE is that HE rolls damage from 50%-150% rather than 0%-200%, so you are almost guaranteed kills on sectoids and floaters if you hit. In general I would also say that pistols are almost always better than rifles on their own with the advantage of having a grenade in the other hand. My problem with rocket HWP is that it won't have the 68-70 accuracy your best soldier probably has. Soldiers with rocket launchers only need about 75% Firing Accuracy to get 100% accurate aimed shots while kneeling.

My normal loadout is something like
2-3 rocket launchers on best accuracy recruits
2-3 HC w/ HE rounds
1-2 AC w/ AP rounds (for breaching UFOs). Have a few in reserve to hand out to more breachers if need be.
Rest Pistols.
Everyone aside from rocket launchers (who needs to carry all the rockets they can) with weight capacity available takes as many grenades and smoke grenades as they can handle. High Explosives if they are really strong. Depending on my mood I might have the autocannons start with something else and just organize a congo line throw to equip them on anyone going into a ufo.

 

[Cael]

The no auto-mode is why I don't use pistols.

 

[hello friend]

I was thinking more along the lines of settings or additional QoL mods. I understand openxcom makes some changes in gameplay from the base game, but I assume(?) these are good changes. I appreciate all the suggestions, though.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I used to love X-piratez but over the years it's gotten way too bloated with annoying and un-fun features, and joke weapons and armors and researches. X-piratez is one of the few games that would be more fun if it had less stuff. At the start of the game it's fine because you have only a very small team, but the game eventually spirals out of control, having to manage multiple factories with a dozen or more production lines going at once, dedicated training bases, tons of different crafts with different loadouts, multiple landers and ABCD teams for different mission types so that you don't have to keep switching out their inventory every time an underwater/space/stealth mission pops up. And then you still need to go into each gal and give them protective gear for hot/cold/acid/fire/whatever missions, which is fine when you have 6 gal crafts but not when it's 16+.

And Diox still hasn't implemented, in all these years, the most important feature: making the gals not ugly.

Another possibility would be to play an older version of X-Piratez, as I don't recall such problems with my playthrough in 2016, although I did eventually need to edit save files to give myself certain non-appearing items and tech that were necessary for completing the game.

 

[panda]

IIRC most of the new mechanics can be disabled by tinkering with the game files, I believe the scripts+"extended scripts" ones hold most of these, including the sniper-spotter mechanic.

Thanks! Found it.

To disable freshness:
Go to ...install_dir\user\mods\Piratez\Piratez_Globals.rul

mana:
     enabled: true

Change true to false.

 

[Average Manatee]

The no auto-mode is why I don't use pistols.

Pistol: 18% TUs for 60% accuracy snapshot (5 shots maximum per turn)
Rifle: 35% TUs for 35% accuracy 3 shot autofire. (2 salvos maximum per turn)

Rifle shoots 3 shots of which you'll hit approximately 1.05 times. Pistol shoots twice for 36% TUs and hits 1.2 times. This assumes a soldier firing accuracy of 100%, the lower you get the better the pistol is. Even taking into account slightly lower damage they are quite comparable. It's also better for massed long range fire since you'll have less deviation and therefore less chance of hitting valuable soldiers in the back (and the aimed shot on the rifle is absolute dogshit at 80% TUs). Hitting once with the pistol and getting a kill also lets you preserve TUs for another action, or maneuver a soldier first and then take a single snapshot if that's all you can do.

The only time you really want autofire is for close quarters enemies liable to shoot back, but for that you have explosives and/or the autocannon. Unfortunately the rifle is weak enough that even hitting 1 or 2 shots on early enemies has a chance to not kill them which means you die at close range, so a much stronger autofire does better in CQC (or go for stun).

 

[lightbane]

The no auto-mode is why I don't use pistols.

There's a mod somewhere in the mod webpage that gives auto-fire to pistols IIRC, although it's better to rush Laser weapons if you can.

The Rocket launchers, while heavy, are surprisingly accurate, and you get no penalty for blowing up stuff as long as you don't hit civvies (other than potentially destroying alien stuff you want to recover), so going full 80s Action Hero mode works well. Have the more useless recruits carry the ammo and throw the rockets by hand to the shooters (don't ask how it works).

With a live grenade, useless recruits are costly-but-somewhat effective suicide bombers and/or scouts.

 

[Cael]

The no auto-mode is why I don't use pistols.

Pistol: 18% TUs for 60% accuracy snapshot (5 shots maximum per turn)
Rifle: 35% TUs for 35% accuracy 3 shot autofire. (2 salvos maximum per turn)

Rifle shoots 3 shots of which you'll hit approximately 1.05 times. Pistol shoots twice for 36% TUs and hits 1.2 times. This assumes a soldier firing accuracy of 100%, the lower you get the better the pistol is. Even taking into account slightly lower damage they are quite comparable. It's also better for massed long range fire since you'll have less deviation and therefore less chance of hitting valuable soldiers in the back (and the aimed shot on the rifle is absolute dogshit at 80% TUs). Hitting once with the pistol and getting a kill also lets you preserve TUs for another action, or maneuver a soldier first and then take a single snapshot if that's all you can do.

The only time you really want autofire is for close quarters enemies liable to shoot back, but for that you have explosives and/or the autocannon. Unfortunately the rifle is weak enough that even hitting 1 or 2 shots on early enemies has a chance to not kill them which means you die at close range, so a much stronger autofire does better in CQC (or go for stun).

The CQC is why I equip them with rifles. When you are breaching a large scout, you don't want to come face-to-face with a floater with a pistol in hand...

 

[Cael]

The no auto-mode is why I don't use pistols.

There's a mod somewhere in the mod webpage that gives auto-fire to pistols IIRC, ...

You can do that in OpenXCom as there is an inbuilt editor, IIRC.

 

[Serus]

The no auto-mode is why I don't use pistols.

Pistol: 18% TUs for 60% accuracy snapshot (5 shots maximum per turn)
Rifle: 35% TUs for 35% accuracy 3 shot autofire. (2 salvos maximum per turn)

Rifle shoots 3 shots of which you'll hit approximately 1.05 times. Pistol shoots twice for 36% TUs and hits 1.2 times. This assumes a soldier firing accuracy of 100%, the lower you get the better the pistol is. Even taking into account slightly lower damage they are quite comparable. It's also better for massed long range fire since you'll have less deviation and therefore less chance of hitting valuable soldiers in the back (and the aimed shot on the rifle is absolute dogshit at 80% TUs). Hitting once with the pistol and getting a kill also lets you preserve TUs for another action, or maneuver a soldier first and then take a single snapshot if that's all you can do.

The only time you really want autofire is for close quarters enemies liable to shoot back, but for that you have explosives and/or the autocannon. Unfortunately the rifle is weak enough that even hitting 1 or 2 shots on early enemies has a chance to not kill them which means you die at close range, so a much stronger autofire does better in CQC (or go for stun).

The CQC is why I equip them with rifles. When you are breaching a large scout, you don't want to come face-to-face with a floater with a pistol in hand...

I have another reason too. It looks stupid, a squad of anti-alien commandos, earth last hope, armed like a police patrol.
I know, i know - larping but what i can do.

 

[Average Manatee]

The CQC is why I equip them with rifles. When you are breaching a large scout, you don't want to come face-to-face with a floater with a pistol in hand...

That's why I specifically said to breach with autocannon AC or stun rods, both of which are much better than rifles.

Also use proximity mines to cover yourself. Throw one on the other side of a door and it will blow up any alien that tries to go through the door and shoot you. When you want to detonate it just run up to the door and it will detonate harmlessly on the other side.

 

[Cael]

The CQC is why I equip them with rifles. When you are breaching a large scout, you don't want to come face-to-face with a floater with a pistol in hand...

That's why I specifically said to breach with autocannon AC or stun rods, both of which are much better than rifles.

Also use proximity mines to cover yourself. Throw one on the other side of a door and it will blow up any alien that tries to go through the door and shoot you. When you want to detonate it just run up to the door and it will detonate harmlessly on the other side.

You can throw stuff to the other side of a closed door?

 

[Average Manatee]

You can throw stuff to the other side of a closed door?

Open door, throw in one tile, walk away and don't enter any tile adjacent to the mine unless you want it to go off. You've now created a door that you can use at any time but the aliens will get hit when they approach. Use motion scanners to check that it's safe to open the door obviously.

If you want to be super cheesy and preserve loot you can continually do this with the entry door to UFOs until the entire crew is taken out, having 2-3 soldiers with both hands free carrying out the loot in between mines before someone throws another in. This does stop working past the early game since later enemies will often survive the blast. Still the grenade can soften them up and alert you to the fact that an alien is about to flank you while your team is going back and forth through some of the more winding ship layouts.

 

[Cael]

You can throw stuff to the other side of a closed door?

Open door, throw in one tile, walk away and don't enter any tile adjacent to the mine unless you want it to go off. You've now created a door that you can use at any time but the aliens will get hit when they approach. Use motion scanners to check that it's safe to open the door obviously.

If you want to be super cheesy and preserve loot you can continually do this with the entry door to UFOs until the entire crew is taken out, having 2-3 soldiers with both hands free carrying out the loot in between mines before someone throws another in. This does stop working past the early game since later enemies will often survive the blast. Still the grenade can soften them up and alert you to the fact that an alien is about to flank you while your team is going back and forth through some of the more winding ship layouts.

XCom 1 doesn't allow you to open doors without going THROUGH them first. Which means you are already face-to-face with the alien and any move is retaliation time. You pray it is only one and you have a rifle in hand and not a pistol.

 

[Endemic]

XCom 1 doesn't allow you to open doors without going THROUGH them first.

TFTD does.

 

[Cael]

XCom 1 doesn't allow you to open doors without going THROUGH them first.

TFTD does.

There is no autoshot mode in TFTD, though

 

[KateMicucci]

In openxcom you can right click behind the door to open it without walking through

 

[Average Manatee]

XCom 1 doesn't allow you to open doors without going THROUGH them first. Which means you are already face-to-face with the alien and any move is retaliation time. You pray it is only one and you have a rifle in hand and not a pistol.

Yes, I'm assuming openxcom.

Again, no reason to ever use a rifle since autocannon is better. Autoshot rifle is incredibly risky at a few tiles away where you might only hit once or twice.