DamarStiehl

It was nice to revisit the old stomping grounds, I liked the new maps and new options. Totally worth thirty bucks. Especially since I had to decide between buying EW and X:Rebirth, and EW won by coin toss. And then we all know how X:Rebirth turned out.

The farther you are into the year, the more difficult aliens will show up. Furthermore some new enemies are triggered by plot points, namely the UFO captains and their guards.

I never saw an ethereal in the base defense mission... or a muton elite... I feel cheated. As for BS moments... when MEC troopers shoot a muton or a cyberdisk or a mechtoid or a sectopod point-blank or from 1 square away and somehow still manage to miss. My grandmother could hit that shot, every time, with her eyes closed (and she's dead). It really should be impossible to miss given that the MEC's gun barrel is practically touching the target. And the target is of the size of a small building. Yet they manage to miss anyway.

So if you don't buy Expanded Storage for the MEC trooper, after you purchase Ammo Conservation at the Fountry, he ends up in an awkward position where his gun still has "some" ammo (according to the icon), but not enough for a shot. Same thing happens with the plasma sniper, but to a lesser degree. Is it possible to expand or shrink the ammo count for an individual weapon? I poured all over DefaultGameCore.ini, but can't seem to find what defines how many shots a weapon has.

Could someone confirm that dirk45 changes also work with EW? Don't know about dirk45, but you want this mod - under Optional Files there is a working deco unlocker. Be sure to follow installation instructions.

Thanks for that, I'll see if I can make it happen.

I remember modding that "feature" out with ToolBoks in the EU, but can't for the life of me remember what I need to edit in EW. Is it a binary hack of one of the UPKs or an edit to one of the Configs? Reminder appreciated.

You have to hack XComGame.upk to apply this, easiest to do ATM with XComModHelper, until ToolBoks is updated.

One of the first mods I grabbed for the original XCom was a binary hack that prevented explosives from ruining alien loot (a completely arbitrary and upsetting nerf to big boomsticks IMO). The author was Drakous79 and the thread is here: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/859544-fragments-friendly-explosives-disabling-explosives-kill-narratives/ Unfortunately it no longer works for Enemy Within, so I made my own modlet that does the same thing for EW. Tested and confirmed working. You need to search XComGame.upk for this pattern: BE C7 00 00 20 73 52 00 00 16 16 14 2D 01 0E C3 00 00 27 And replace it with this pattern: BE C7 00 00 20 73 52 00 00 16 16 14 2D 01 0E C3 00 00 28 This flips the "true" check to "false" in the function OnDeath where it check if the target was killed by an explosion. For added convenience, I am attaching a config for XComModHelper that will apply this change. Have a blast!

It's unbelievable how bad the Nexus has gotten. I'm a premium member but I feel as if I was suddenly relegated to "third world table scrap eater" tier of service. 502s are pretty much guaranteed every time I pull up the site from anywhere (home, mobile, another location, etc). It takes forever to switch from tab to tab, and both the site and the NMM periodically forget my premium status. And download speeds are giggleworthy in this day and age, it takes five minutes to pull down a five megabyte file sometime. Welcome back to the early nineties, if I was operating a site at these speeds, I'd hang myself out of sheer shame. And DDOS attacks have nothing to do with it unless the site is being DDOSed 24x7x365, this happens at any time of day or night. Fun stuff. When my premium expires, I'm definitely not renewing until the site's performance is sorted out. There's such a thing as biting off more than you can chew, and that's what seems Nexus has done, it's gotten too big for its britches and is now paying the price. Which is hella unfortunate, I always thought that the Nexus network was the go-to place when mods were concerned.

Same thing here. I'm in the middle of a release too.

Ghost already has grapple by default...

Yes, oddly enough it worked. I fully expected to pooch my game though. Three cheers for the authors of this mod and ToolBoks.

This is cool. Can it be wrapped into a ToolBoks mod?

This rocks so much it should be illegal. This + Customize Unique Soldiers + Zhang + Archangel Armor + Deco #12 = flying tank with a badass Chinese accent. Now my guys can rock "all business" dull menacing black armors (deco #10) and girls get the sexy "shoulderpads and metal bra" deco #1.

Wonder if anyone actually succeeded in figuring it out. Are animations really tied to individual armors?

You have to stun a Muton or a Heavy Bloater. Regular Bloaters do not carry grenades. Cyberdisks cannot be stunned (not even with Drone Capture), and all their stuff (including the alien grenade) blows up upon death.

I want to give Grapple ability to Titan and Psi armor. I went to DefaultGameCore.ini and found the Skeleton armor entry: Armors=(ABILITIES[0]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[1]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[2]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[3]=eAbility_NONE,Properties[0]=eAP_Grapple,Properties[1]=eAP_None,Properties[2]=eAP_None,Properties[3]=eAP_None,iType=eItem_ArmorSkeleton,iHPBonus=4,iDefenseBonus=10,iFlightFuel=0,iWillBonus=0,iLargeItems=1,iSmallItems=1,iMobilityBonus=0) I copied out the Grapple property to the Titan armor, and also changed the SmallItems property to 2: Armors=(ABILITIES[0]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[1]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[2]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[3]=eAbility_NONE,Properties[0]=eAP_DualWield,Properties[1]=eAP_PoisonImmunity,Properties[2]=eAP_Grapple,Properties[3]=eAP_None,iType=eItem_ArmorTitan,iHPBonus=10,iDefenseBonus=0,iFlightFuel=0,iWillBonus=0,iLargeItems=1,iSmallItems=2,iMobilityBonus=0) But it did not work. I got another SmallItems slot after re-equipping the armor (as expected), but the Grapple ability did not show up. Fine, I thought, maybe the game cannot interpret that many properties. So I replaced the eAP_DualWield ability (which doesn't seem to do anything) with eAP_Grapple ability: Armors=(ABILITIES[0]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[1]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[2]=eAbility_NONE,ABILITIES[3]=eAbility_NONE,Properties[0]=eAP_Grapple,Properties[1]=eAP_PoisonImmunity,Properties[2]=eAP_None,Properties[3]=eAP_None,iType=eItem_ArmorTitan,iHPBonus=10,iDefenseBonus=0,iFlightFuel=0,iWillBonus=0,iLargeItems=1,iSmallItems=2,iMobilityBonus=3) But it still didn't work. Needless to say, adding Grapple to the Psi armor was equally unsuccessful. What's the matter here? Is this outright impossible or am I barking up the wrong tree and need to make these changes elsewhere? EDIT: Funnily enough, if I added eAbility_Grapple to the abilities section of the Abilities section of the armor, the Grapple ability showed up... except when I tried using it, the soldier fired his primary weapon at where I told him to grapple, and then teleported to that spot. So TECHNICALLY it worked, it just looked ugly as hell. Any way to make it look less ugly?

All this is good, but you really need to focus on the site's performance at this time. Nexus has been downright AWFUL in the last month or so, moreso when accessed via NMM. Last few NMM updates were a disaster. Incomplete downloads, hangs galore, interrupted downloads, yay. The site reports files as hidden when they aren't, comment pane needs extra clicks to refresh, etc, etc. To sum it up, it's been a mess lately, and it needs to be straightened out.

Mighty Magick 1.0 for Skyrim is mostly done, and seems to be in good shape, but I'd like people to beta-test it for a week or so before I release it. It's relatively unobtrusive this time, and very modular. If you hate it, you can disable parts of it or all of it, and everything should go back to Vanilla. Of course if you bought any extra spells, money won't come back to your wallet, but that's about it. No new game necessary, no save corruption/bloat or anything like that. Want to beta test? PM me with your email address and I'll send it over.

Yeah, so I once said that I won't touch Bethsoft stuff ever again, but I've bored lately and someone gave me a copy of Skyrim for my birthday. In utter boredom, I decided to look under the hood of the magick system (what else), oddly enough it's nowhere near as heinous as Oblivion was, and with spellmaking gone, modding is really a cinch... I'm taking a minimalist approach this time, trying not to fix things that aren't broken to begin with. The first version is about 75% done, on tap for the first pass: - Dynamic spellpower scaling with skills (praise Sheogorath, there's actually a stock way of doing it in a fairly clean fashion) - Better Destruction Master spells... better Destruction in general, less redundancy, more power to melt face (and I don't even think I went overboard this time, but do I ever?) - Better cost discount with skill growth - Some minor adjustments, like Paralysis being moved back to Illusion school, what genius stuck it into Alteration anyway? - Dual-casting adjustment, 3x the power for 2.5x the cost - My usual spell sorting method with prefixes, like (D1) for Destruction Novice for example. If there's any interest after 1.0 is released, I'll do some extra spells (Feathers for Alteration, Cures, Resists and Fortifies maybe for Restoration, that kind of jazz). I'm taking my time to test MOAR this time... I hardly expect to be able to script the Tempest spells like they used to be in Oblivion... ffs jim, I'm a modder, not a programmer... why didn't they just write the whole goddamn thing in C++ or whatnot? Frigging papyrus... Anyway there you have it... this is probably the only place where I'll post the mod up, since I hate Steam Workshop with a passion, and I have a lovely 100% red bar under my portrait at the official forums courtesy of Matt Smallstaff... excuse me, Grandstaff... never has a man had a less apt name, but I digress. Booyah.