3419 replies to this topic

[haerzog]

My problem is with the medium scout, it takes 6 missiles to take down. This comes after a small scout takes only 2 missiles. Wouldn't a linear progression, or a slower initial scale up, work better? to have the Medium require 4 hits, so that it is within the realm of possibility to take down with one fighter, up to two, not requiring three?. A large scout could take 8, and the abductor could take 12, with the Battleship requiring 16 avalanche missile hits (or the equivalent) in damage to take down. I also wonder if you can add ship classes to the list of potential threats. Imagine having to deal with a fighter component. Said fighters could be a 1 missile threat, even smaller than a small scout.

Edited by haerzog, 13 January 2013 - 07:56 PM.

[johnnylump]

First of all, thanks again for the thoughtful feedback and for being an early adopter of the mod. I would LOVE to be able to add new ships to the alien roster; even giving them same hull design and combat screen maps as existing ships, just different capabilities on the map. But right now all modders can do is edit certain settings, change numbers and text, and mathematical signs (like > to <). A few caveats: 1) There aren't "small scouts," "medium scouts" and "large scouts" -- there are small and large scouts, and the large scout has a "medium" hull size. 2) The vanilla game isn't linear in interceptor combat, and I think linear would make the game far too easy. I'll explain below. 3) I'm overhauling interceptor combat for the next version. Based some other changes as well as your feedback, I'm making the large scouts a bit slower. Everything after this is wordy sort of a SPOILER as it about the guts of the interception game; if you want to keep it somewhat of a mystery, don't read past here. I'm posting it for anyone who has ideas to irmpove it. There's six UFOs, three UFO weapons, and two XCom craft and six interceptor weapons. Five of the UFOs, in order of size and difficulty, are Small Scout Large Scout Abductor Supply Barge Battleship The sixth UFO is the overseer, which I'm going to leave out because it's essentially a plot point that requires you to have developed the Firestorm; after that it's a pretty easy kill if you have decent weapons developed, but it's always too fast for an interceptor to catch. And once you shoot it down and assault it, it doesn't come back. The weapons, in order of power, are Avalanche Missile Phoenix Cannon Laser Cannon Plasma Cannon EMP Cannon Fusion Lance UFOs also have a certain amount of armor, and weapons and craft have "armor penetration" -- if armor exceeds armor penetration of an attacking shot, the weapon does less damage. This is how vanilla manages weapon and ship tiers. Large Scouts have a small amount of armor; Avalanche has no penetration, so it fights Large Scouts and bigger ships at a penalty. Phoenix Cannon has a small amount of penetration, enough to overcome Large Scout armor, but not that of bigger ships. These tiers exist to pressure the player to upgrade their weapons, and that's a mechanic I like -- if you're fighting large scouts with Avalanches, it supposed to be tough and costly, and the idea is to force difficult research and spending decisions on the player -- do you spend on laser cannons, or another suit of carapace armor? My complaint is it's way too deterministic in vanilla; once you get a certain weapon tier, all UFOs below it are pretty much solved. The other factor in 1.02 is the way abductions work. Unlike vanilla (and, frankly, unlike most mods except Long War and Warspace, because it takes more than an .ini change to make it work), alien abductions generate two UFOs, a large scout, and later, an abductor. If you shoot down the large scout, the abduction is cancelled and the abductor never spawns. Part of why I made the large scouts tougher to make it harder to cancel the abductions; otherwise, once you have enough satellites, you spend all month shooting down the scouts. In 1.03, I'm trying to leave the rough tiers in place -- it's a little flatter with abductors and supply barges pretty close in capability. But I'm trying spread out the out the probabilities more. Every weapon has a reduced chance to hit -- the aliens chances were cut in half, but the damage they do were increased. For the player, the idea is to give a horde of low-tier weapons a longshot at bigger ships. I'm also making it so you can't cancel the abduction by taking out the scout. And the Firestorm is reduced from invincible to merely awesome. In both 1.02 and 1.03, on the player's side, the penalties for a missed UFO are reduced compared to vanilla, so you don't have to stress as much about taking them all down. (Despite getting a low council grade each month, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't actually affect anything). As long as you try to shoot every UFO down, there's no panic penalty. And follow-on UFO satellite hunters aren't nearly as effective at shooting down satellites. (And, in 1.03, the satellite hunters remain large scouts for several months, so you won't see battleships till later). Anyway, there are a lot of moving parts with all the variables, and I suspect I'll need to keep adjusting them in future versions.

Edited by johnnylump, 13 January 2013 - 11:23 PM.

[Sepherose]

I followed your instructions to the letter, and no such luck, it always crashes on startup. Yes, I do have the most recent patch, no I do not have Slingshot. Any ideas?

[johnnylump]

Try updating your .net framework (via Windows update) and Java and reinstalling the mod from scratch.

Edited by johnnylump, 14 January 2013 - 05:08 AM.

[haerzog]

also, dont forget that after you validate the game cache subsequent to removing the mod, you have to restart Steam, or it wont handle the mod properly when you attempt to run it. or so I have heard, it just works out that way for me anyway. I have another question, how do you want to handle tactical combat? More or less tactical than Vanilla? Because so far, I dont have to worry too much about cover, seeing as how the aliens have around a 30% chance to hit me even with full cover, so trying to flank isn't as sound a tactic as it might be. So far, i have been best served by methodically moving forward and grenading the hell out of whatever cover the aliens have, or relying on overwatch. As an example, Terror from space, and warspace, reduce chances to hit full cover to as little as 1%. It makes for very boring combat if you are stuck fighting in a corridor, waiting for the aliens to destroy your cover with their plasma, but it does force you to employ some tactics to try to get around their guard. On the other side of the coin, such individuals as international soldiers should have sufficient skill and equipment as to invalidate many types of cover, such as cubicle walls, which would cause full cover to mean even less than it does now, though a wider damage range. This might also be reflected in additional weapon types, such as a portable grenade launcher, or nerve gas grenades, or claymores. It would be nice to show a silicoid what happens when you try to sneak up on an entrenched sniper. Boom.

Edited by haerzog, 15 January 2013 - 07:00 PM.

[johnnylump]

@ Haerzog: Just curious, what month are you in, and what difficulty are you playing on?

At this point, I don't have huge plans to change the tactical game beyond what I've already done. I may try to buff sectoids, floaters and muton elites.

And I'm afraid it's not possible to add weapons within current modding limitations. We can just change values (like damage or strength of cover). Those are great ideas, though.

[haerzog]

March, for this mod at the moment. Impossible difficulty. I lose a soldier or two almost every mission, good thing they are extremely cheap. I haven't stuck to one game too much, since I cant play the game all the way through the way i want. I crash when I am on a sunk Battleship, as well as when i am on one of the Alien Base maps. I think that it is because of size or something, but I have never been able to assault a grounded battleship. I know, there are a few suggestions for this issue, but for me lowering my resolution and playing the map in windowed mode just doesn't stop the crash. On a previous run through this mod, I got as far as mid July, then switched to another mod, Terror from Space i think, so as to take a look at one of the changes that were made in a patch at the time. By the way. I dont think that enemies need much in the way of buffing. As it stands, an assault rifle has a chance of not killing a sectoid, as it can do as little as 2 damage, even without random damage activated in the second wave, and only up to 4 damage before a critical. So it already is insufficient to kill a Thin Man without two shots or a crit. Also, that would require that Grenades be brought back up to the damage they dealt before (4 i think), as 3 damage is only just barely enough right now to be any sort of useful in handling crowds. If you are curious about what i meant in my other post, I generally fade back after contact and just kill the enemies as they come with overwatch and snipers. It can get really easy on some maps, because Firaxis still hasn't patched out the teleporting enemies bug, so all i have to do is sit just outside of view of an alien spawn point and the groups periodically spawn there and will move into view, bang bang bang done.

Edited by haerzog, 16 January 2013 - 05:13 AM.

[johnnylump]

@ Haerzog. Thanks; I don't think I'm buffing any of the aliens in the next version; sectoids still make March a little easy, but I'm thinking that perhaps it's good for people to get some skilled troopers before the difficulty ramps up in later months.

[haerzog]

yes, i agree. Except, i think that Hardened shouldn't grant a -%100 to crit, more like -%50. Cause as it stands right now, you cant do terror missions unless you throw the civilians to the wolves, which is the opposite of what should be going on. With a reduction on the effect of hardening, a group of snipers and assaults at least have a chance to not get their ass royally handed to them while trying to rescue the civvies. Also, planes need their repair rates changed. As they stand right now, the abort button is meaningless. At levels of damage they take where the abort is relevant, they are already too damaged to recover, so would be scrapped anyway. I also found a problem just now. Knocked out soldiers are having drastically shorter recovery times compared to regular wounded. I had one match where a solder was bleeding out, and his recovery time was 14 days, whereas another soldier that didn't get knocked out has a 24 day recovery time.

Edited by haerzog, 18 January 2013 - 05:15 AM.

[johnnylump]

@ Haerzog --

Hardened -- Still using vanilla settings on hardened, but will keep your idea in mind. Don't want to make melee critters too easy in later game.

Interceptor damage -- In my experience, interceptor damage is rough, but not quite that rough. It should change in next version with wider range of interception outcomes. I've dropped a few fighters, but not every one that's damaged like that. It's not as bad to miss the occasional UFO, compared to vanilla.

Injuries -- That's an odd outcome. I've only played with the DFC.ini settings on this, so it may be an outlier in that the game rolled low for the gravely wounded guy's days out, but I know this can be modded.