X-COM OpenXcom Thread

[Grotesque]

About 8 months ago.

nightly release =/=final release, you schmuck

 

[ArchAngel]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/30/x-piratez-xcom-mod/

This article motivated me to play this mod ASAIFS (as soon as I finish Siege of Dragonspear :D)

 

[Lucky]

I get what you're saying, but something that upgrades the battlescape sprites would be nice.

If you're only looking for more map variety then these should suffice:
http://www.openxcom.com/mod/darkened-ufo-vanilla-variants
http://www.openxcom.com/mod/lukes-expanded-terror-rework

For mods that add gameplay changes on top there's:
UFO Redux, which adds more terrain types, bug fixes and reworked missions; the aforementioned Final Mod Pack, which adds more of everything and saves you the effort of getting all the different mods it uses to play nice with each other; and X-Piratez, which is a really good total conversion that I'd recommend holding off on until you've given the regular game a try.

Make sure to check the instructions for each and what nightly build you need to use, because the base milestone build usually doesn't suffice. You can also tweak your game as you like with the tons of different individual mods floating around, but they don't always work well together. Same goes for big mod packs, use one at a time.

Side note, has anyone given this mod pack a try? - http://www.openxcom.com/mod/hardmode-expansion. It looks promising.

 

[Average Manatee]

About 8 months ago.

nightly release =/=final release, you schmuck

It plays just fine. The game IS a reskin of X-Com, any bug in openTFTD is going to exist in openX-Com as well (and there have been a few).

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/30/x-piratez-xcom-mod/

This article motivated me to play this mod ASAIFS (as soon as I finish Siege of Dragonspear :D)

Piratez is absolutely brutal. I've still not finished a terror mission (though I'm obstinately playing on Superhuman when I probably shouldn't).

 

[Stompa]

I've still not finished a terror mission (though I'm obstinately playing on Superhuman when I probably shouldn't).

I found terror missions more manageable than some of the regular shippings, to be honest. At least there you have a chance to get an easier faction (Spartans, Bandits, Humanists) and no extra tricks like with supply ships. Though God help you if you land in an oil refinery, no civilians will be saved that day.

 

[Average Manatee]

Regular shippings with power armored units still go down to grenade launchers and mortars, and you need their armor pieces to make your own. Plus assuming its a landed shipping you're guaranteed lots of good material (The version I played it was mega profitable to manufacture ships, which required Slave AIs only found on landed shipping, turning something like $700k of loot into $1.5M in a week or so).

Terror missions just overwhelming you with insane numbers. 50+ enemies, with even the weakest enemies taking 3+ shots from a rifle that has 5 bullet to the clip. Furthest I got had to be aborted when at the end I encountered two tanks that were completely invincible since I had run out of everything but popgun ammo. And you don't really get much besides monthly rating, in my experience most of the enemies are either carrying no weapons or carrying weak stuff not worth using.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Why would aliens use Lasers? I don't like that.

Supposedly the Sectopod is meant to use a laser according to lore, its just that they gave it a plasma projectile effect.

 

[Stompa]

Terror missions just overwhelming you with insane numbers. 50+ enemies, with even the weakest enemies taking 3+ shots from a rifle that has 5 bullet to the clip. Furthest I got had to be aborted when at the end I encountered two tanks that were completely invincible since I had run out of everything but popgun ammo. And you don't really get much besides monthly rating, in my experience most of the enemies are either carrying no weapons or carrying weak stuff not worth using.

I dunno, in my experience the minor factions weren't that sturdy as they're basically humans with some minor armor in Spartans' case. It definitely helped that I was fielding multipled boarding guns and had a gal with a sniper rifle (also assault cannons are love, assault cannons are life) with melee gals not being rookies anymore. Tanks are a bother, sure, but I had some nukes stashed on Bonnie for that case. As for reward, it is still worth it simply for prisoners and those weak guns, since researching either of them can unlock advanced weapon designs.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

brofisting for shared interest.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Are there any bugfixes I'd need on top of openxcom? Any good sprite\map packs?

Took a screenshot from my current game. Just look at all those yummy weapons. We have shotguns, assault rifles, tactical sniper rifles with explody ammo, flamethrowers, large medicits, incendiary grenades, machineguns, grenade-launchers, revolvers and swords.

Did you name that bukake soldier or is it an ingame name? :D

 

[baturinsky]

Speaking of PirateZ, is there some guide somewhere? Research order, at least?

 

[Alienman]

Are there any bugfixes I'd need on top of openxcom? Any good sprite\map packs?

Took a screenshot from my current game. Just look at all those yummy weapons. We have shotguns, assault rifles, tactical sniper rifles with explody ammo, flamethrowers, large medicits, incendiary grenades, machineguns, grenade-launchers, revolvers and swords.

Did you name that bukake soldier or is it an ingame name? :D

Ingame hehe

 

[Average Manatee]

Speaking of PirateZ, is there some guide somewhere? Research order, at least?

Tech tree here: http://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,4106.0.html

The thing is that Piratez is highly non-linear and depends on what you find and random luck (interrogations and some data researches unlock totally random stuff). So its hard to give a real research order.

General tips I can recall:
- X-Grog is your best thing to manufacture for profit most of the time. It's also your best healing item, you'll need a medic to keep your girl's stamina up while they sit in smoke and to cure fatal wounds from enemies knocked unconscious (captures are very important money and research wise). Aircraft are the best manufacturing items I've found but require some limited equipment that you recover from shippings.
- At the very beginning most of your girls have absolutely awful carry capacity. Give them runt armor to increase what they can carry. After they level up a bit (it happens quickly), give them Tac armor, which is the best you'll have for quite a while. There's also a night ops armor which lets you see in dark as if it were day time, its pretty neat.
- Anything that looks armored is best dealt with through explosives. Grenades/Grenade launchers take care of the weak ones, Mortars take care of the strong ones. Heavy Machine Guns are also quite useful and at least one enemy seems to have near-immunity to mortars and therefore requires HMGs or something else at least as powerful.
- Melee is kind of shit because most weapons have horrible accuracy and some enemies have dodge. Use Chainsaws/Hammers until you get really high stats, they are implemented as guns with a range of 1, so they almost always hit. You'll also find cattle prods eventually, but you should get a few random KOs per mission which can be captured if you have a medic ready to nurse them on the brink of death, watch for the lack of death sounds.
- My general-use guns were most often Hunting Rifles (upgrade to scoped rifles, insanely accurate) and Boarding Guns (upgrades to custom shooty gun/super shooty gun, insane amounts of auto fire but very heavy).
- Certain Shippings are government and attacking them hurts your score. Most of them have red/blue lights on the UFO in the intercept mode.
- Instead of dumping all of your brainers (scientists) onto one research, it's better to have a bunch of projects going at the same time with one brainer each. This minimizes overflow loss, which leads to a pretty large benefit in overall research speed.
- I don't really recommend relying on air combat. The reason being that its highly dangerous, the ammo is insanely expensive compared to the much less valuable loot you return compared to vanilla, and the highly decreased value of shot down craft. Basically most weapons you find are nigh-worthless in terms of sale price and are mainly just research stuff, the profitable materials come from intact craft.
- In combination with the not relying on air combat, if you feel as daring as I did, try selling your starting craft for huge cash and investing in workshops/barracks along with a cheaper troop carrier (skyranger or AWACS). Skyranger has horrible speed and radar, AWACS has good radar for finding enemies beyond your radar but only 8 crew spots IIRC. You'll need to be a lot better at your ground missions to win with less soldiers and you'll probably miss one or two shippings, but you can snowball your cash much quicker this way.

 

[Stompa]

- Melee is kind of shit because most weapons have horrible accuracy and some enemies have dodge. Use Chainsaws/Hammers until you get really high stats, they are implemented as guns with a range of 1, so they almost always hit. You'll also find cattle prods eventually, but you should get a few random KOs per mission which can be captured if you have a medic ready to nurse them on the brink of death, watch for the lack of death sounds.

I think you're underestimating melee, it is extremely good for taking down armored enemies provided you can deliver close combat specialists to enemy's face unharmed. Load up your machete rape squad with smoke-ops armor and go nuts. Rapier is a very good weapon early on for everyone with 90-100 skill (which rookie gals can have and often do), spiked maces get extra bonuses to punch through defences and scale really well, handles are a decent back-up for stunning and ropes are pretty much one-hit KO for everyone who's not resistant to choking. Hammers are good for their wall destruction, but in direct combat application I found them lacking due to hefty stamina cost. Starting chainsaw kinda lacked the punch, but maybe down the line there's something better.

 

[Average Manatee]

Well a chainsaw is 5 attacks of 35 damage for 30% TUs (= around 15-25 TUs each). Rapier is 1 attack of 20 damage + 40% of your strength (let's assume a good 40 strength for +16 damage) for 9 TUs.

5x 35 damage vs. 1.5-2.5x of 36 damage. Chainsaw blows rapier away. And the rapier can miss against enemies with dodge. Technically the chainsaw still often misses one of it shots but its still far ahead. Against enemies that aren't full power armor chainsaw can usually hit for at least 15 damage per hit when attacking from behind, 2-3 girls can invade most UFOs and its fairly stat-independent so you can throw some chaff at the problem.

Hammer is 28 TUs for 60 damage + 40% strength + 30% melee + 50% stun. If we assume 40 strength and 100 melee then I think that works out to 106 damage and a further 53 stun damage. Can't miss.

Spiked Mace is 30 damage + 70% strength + 50% stun, so 58 damage + 29 stun for 14 TUs. Slightly over half of the hammer's damage for half the TUs, except that armor reduction will be applied twice so only -30% armor ignoring is still a downside and you're probably worse off. You also only have 75% accuracy * (melee/3 + strength), so if we go again with 40 strength and 100 melee then you are looking at only 54.75% accuracy, which is *HORRIBLE*, and again enemy dodge can reduce this.

Also compare to the cattle prod, which is 70 damage for 20 TUs. Melee hit chance is 110% * (melee/2 + 50), so a melee 100 character has a base 110% hit rate, very nice. We see that the Cattle Prod is actually delivering more damage per time unit in most instances than the spiked mace when you take into account accuracy.

Also there is an Auto-Ax down the line which is a chainsaw with 65 damage instead of 35. I unlocked it around september.

 

[baturinsky]

What do you use for live capturing early game?

 

[Average Manatee]

You should fairly quickly unlock slavery. You can then enslave captured people through the manufacturing page which gives a slave with -item space (letting you hold more stuff in your base, I guess the slave keeps it organized?) along with stealing everything they had on them. The rob action is the same except no slave. I think there are certain items that you get more by robbing/enslaving a captured unit rather than killing them on the field, particularly armor parts.

You can also sell them for a pretty good profit. If you don't go big on manufacturing its one of your best profit sources.

Also as I said before interrogations give random tech projects. You can interrogate the same enemy multiple times to learn more and more.

 

[Stompa]

Well a chainsaw is 5 attacks of 35 damage for 30% TUs (= around 15-25 TUs each). Rapier is 1 attack of 20 damage + 40% of your strength (let's assume a good 40 strength for +16 damage) for 9 TUs.

Rapier is scaling off melee, not strength, so it ends up outdoing chainsaw at melee skill higher than 60. Rookies can start with melee up to 100, so in the hands of a capable gal rapier does 60 damage. Melee goes up to 140 without armor bonuses, if wiki is correct. The only upside of the chainsaw is that it can be used by untrained pirates that are shit at CQC.

I don't doubt the power of the hammer, but what stopped from using it is 16 energy cost, which is 2/10 of maximum starting energy. Considering how much of it is wasted on movement, I too often found myself in situations where I could not take a swing because my gal was too tired.

Spiked mace is more of a specialist weapon as you need high strength to wield effectively.

Cattle prod's big drawback is the need for both hands to be free along with its big size and I very much like having an off-hand grenade\bandage\vodka\pistol. I have it on some gals to capture highly armored targets but for the rest it's an overstun.

hat do you use for live capturing early game?

Handles, ropes and fisticuffs.

 

[Average Manatee]

Well a chainsaw is 5 attacks of 35 damage for 30% TUs (= around 15-25 TUs each). Rapier is 1 attack of 20 damage + 40% of your strength (let's assume a good 40 strength for +16 damage) for 9 TUs.

Rapier is scaling off melee, not strength, so it ends up outdoing chainsaw at melee skill higher than 60. Rookies can start with melee up to 100, so in the hands of a capable gal rapier does 60 damage. Melee goes up to 140 without armor bonuses, if wiki is correct. The only upside of the chainsaw is that it can be used by untrained pirates that are shit at CQC.

Ahh OK, read it improperly.

All I can say is that I've tried Rapiers and had some long streaks of very poor performance, even though they are probably the best melee weapon. I don't know what the average enemy dodge chance is but I missed a lot even with over 90% accuracy. If its like your armors and is 30-60% of your reaction score then your average tough enemy could very well have 40%+ dodge chance. Hell is having 4 strong melee specialists standing around a high level unit and being unable to bring it down. Chainsaws are reliable, 10+ hits of 35 damage into the back of most enemies is going to kill. Should also be noted that the chainsaw is really good at leveling girls up since there are so many individual hits.

Might try one of my superheroic 130 Melee Accuracy girls with Rapiers now that I know the damage scales so well. Hopefully that's enough accuracy to reliably hit everything.

I don't doubt the power of the hammer, but what stopped from using it is 16 energy cost, which is 2/10 of maximum starting energy. Considering how much of it is wasted on movement, I too often found myself in situations where I could not take a swing because my gal was too tired.

It's pretty comparable in energy cost to weaker weapons once you take into account that you need to swing them several times. 3 swings of a melee weapon that takes 4 or 5 energy each is sucking energy away too.

Girls level up fast through, energy quickly becomes not an issue for high level characters. I use chainsaws on everyone weak/low energy and gradually switch to hammers.

Cattle prod's big drawback is the need for both hands to be free along with its big size and I very much like having an off-hand grenade\bandage\vodka\pistol. I have it on some gals to capture highly armored targets but for the rest it's an overstun.

Protip for twohanders: Dropping an item on the floor only costs 2 TUs. I often have troops dual wielding with at least one two handed weapon (melee + ranged or either + grenade) and dropping their off hand if they need to use the two hander.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

By the way, that RPS article is bringing lots of people to Open X-COM:

http://openxcom.org/2016/04/psa-xpiratez-and-you/

 

[Alienman]

That's nice!

 

[ArchAngel]

That is very cool. I got lots of games to play first and this xpirates is still far from version 1.0 it seems. I will wait a bit

 

[Jaedar]

Tried to play Piratez. Raided two enemy shipments (one with black armor dudes+ drones, one with... pirates and fat naked dudes?). Then most of my women were injured and needed to rest, so timeskipped for 10 days, than a base assault appeared, with a bunch of plasma weapon, power armored guys and some form of psi. They wore me down and slaughtered me to the last(in part because they camped the hangar and that was too much reaction fire to deal with).

GG, re?

 

[Average Manatee]

Base assaults are painful in Piratez, the layout makes it much worse than normal.

That's still way too early though. Do you have aggressive retaliation on? Turn that off.

 

[Jaedar]

That's still way too early though. Do you have aggressive retaliation on?

Nay.

Is there something in this mod that counts how much you piss stuff of which invites retaliation or something? Maybe I just got really unlucky though.