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Warspace Extension Discussion


BlackAlpha

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I wanted to add some feedback about 1.60 concerning my experience about Warspace 1.60 on ironman impossible marathon mode:

 

I'm learning that marathon + impossible + warspace suddenly makes month 4 UFOs insane overkill and makes it actually impossible to beat the game, due to Warspace 1.60's changes to UFOs and total dependency on powerups for aircraft (that will take like 6 months to get to thanks to insane research times of Warspace + marathon mode). Marathon mode seems to multiply on top of Warspace's extra long time to research anything, making it impossible to get the air weapons/powerups without which you can't do anything to the UFOs that suddenly pop up. I went from holding my own and doing well (invested heavily in interceptors and rushing to the NA bonus) to being annihilated no matter what, on every continent.

 

For the first 3 months, you see UFOs that take you 1-2 interceptors to shoot down. Undefended satellites will very likely get shot down- fair enough: I never had a single satellite shot down in my vanilla classic run, since I get stealth satellites before that ever started happening. It's also nice that you can't shoot everything down with just 1 interceptor all the time.

 

However, after the first 3 months suddenly Warspace 1.60 spawns only UFOs that are impossible to shoot down. These start dropping mutons on all their missions, even though the game up to this point only had sectoids and floaters on missions! These swarm every continent and you can't shoot them down even if you invested in having 3 interceptors ready. I had 10 fights in month 4 with 3 interceptors sent at ship at a time and even on the fights where every hit landed not a single UFO went down!

 

After you fail to shoot them down, they blow up your satellites basically 100% for sure. As if this wasn't bad enough by itself, this causes that whole continent and the country that lost coverage in particular to panic like crazy. As if THAT wasn't bad enough, Warspace 1.60 lets countries leave the Council permanently with just 4/5 panic, much less 5/5 panic.

 

So basically you go from aliens and UFOs that can be countered with the proper investment in troops/aircraft to, in the next month, the sudden appearance of crazy UFOs that are invulnerable, spawn constantly, and drop aliens that are a huge ramp-up in difficulty (especially when the removal of enemy AI limits means multiple patrols will constantly wander into your fights with the mutons). I'm surviving the squad fights fairly well because I rushed for vests and carapace armor (which are mandatory versus thin men and mutons since Warspace 1.60 ramps up plasma crits even more it seems like)...but of course this means I am months away from researching the powerups and air weapons that 1.60 apparently makes mandatory for UFOs in month 4!

 

In sum: In order to survive the 1.60 changes in light of marathon mode, I think I need to go into the DGC.mod and tone down the appearance rate of tougher/mid-level UFOs, their health/speed, the cost of satellites (still around 150 spacebucks even with like 35 engineers), the odds of satellites being shot down in the early game when you are like 6 months away from stealth satellites, and the research time of marathon mode in general. I'm not sure how to do all this but hopefully it is as easy as changing other things about the game.

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Yeah, that was my conclusion also. However, marathon mode, as far as I know, just makes things take longer to research, mainly...it doesn't explain why the first few months have very easy troops and UFOs, and then suddenly overnight it skips to mostly mutons, chrysalids, and only various UFOs that can't be killed by even multiple interceptors. It would feel much better if it got harder a little earlier, but not super-hard quite as fast.

 

I ended up compensating for not being able to shoot down UFOs by making satellites much harder to detect and panic easier to keep down, which in turn made the game feel too easy again....the big panic increases and satellites being shot down easily early on make things much more exciting, so maybe if I'd been able to get to interceptor powerups faster it would be less catastrophic...

 

I really need to try 1.60 without marathon mode, haha. Oh well- I'm having a wonky experience, with marathon making everything much harder but some of my specific DGC tweaks making things significantly easier...

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Hello!

I seem to have experiencing a bug. Well not exactly a bug, since you stated, that i need to start a new game, with 1.6.2.

The problem I'm experiencing is, that all interceptors (firestorms as well) are marked as damaged and automatic repair won't start.

It's really annoying, since, if I want to play using the new patch, i need to use 1.6.2 but I can't continue my saved game, which I just started not so long ago.

This is kind of annoying. Is there any workaround, for starting new games on every 1.x update?

 

Edit: I've restored the game with steam, to the original before installing 1.6.2 and still ended up with the above.

Edit2: Nevermind me, I just started a new campaign. However i find the new air warfare a little bit too hard for my taste.

Well, this is just ridiculous I was playing on classic with warspace, but after the 3rd patch by firaxis, the teleport bug just seems to be worse for me... (even when i reverted to normal and therefore let a kitten die)

http://p.coldline.hu/2013/01/13/857315-20130113-WntZmJ.jpg

Edited by Cyberbird85
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Great mod! Enjoying it very much :)

 

That being said....accuracy seems to be quite skewed in favor of the aliens. X-Com operatives will fire 4 or 5 shots at a thin man with say....55% chance to hit and miss 90% of the time. Reverse the situation and one thin man with 1 bar of health will unnerringly headshot an Operative from halfway across the map. Repeatedly/

 

Other than that this mod is a blast and a definate improvement over the vanilla game.

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Great mod! Enjoying it very much :)

 

That being said....accuracy seems to be quite skewed in favor of the aliens. X-Com operatives will fire 4 or 5 shots at a thin man with say....55% chance to hit and miss 90% of the time. Reverse the situation and one thin man with 1 bar of health will unnerringly headshot an Operative from halfway across the map. Repeatedly/

 

Other than that this mod is a blast and a definate improvement over the vanilla game.

 

Please double check the mod is installed and started correctly. See number 1 in the FAQ:

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/834174-warspace-technical-support-v150/

 

 

Hello!

I seem to have experiencing a bug. Well not exactly a bug, since you stated, that i need to start a new game, with 1.6.2.

The problem I'm experiencing is, that all interceptors (firestorms as well) are marked as damaged and automatic repair won't start.

It's really annoying, since, if I want to play using the new patch, i need to use 1.6.2 but I can't continue my saved game, which I just started not so long ago.

This is kind of annoying. Is there any workaround, for starting new games on every 1.x update?

 

Edit: I've restored the game with steam, to the original before installing 1.6.2 and still ended up with the above.

Edit2: Nevermind me, I just started a new campaign. However i find the new air warfare a little bit too hard for my taste.

Well, this is just ridiculous I was playing on classic with warspace, but after the 3rd patch by firaxis, the teleport bug just seems to be worse for me... (even when i reverted to normal and therefore let a kitten die)

http://p.coldline.hu/2013/01/13/857315-20130113-WntZmJ.jpg

 

A new mod version is out (within the hour) that will make Battleships a bit weaker, allowing you to take them down more easily, making it so the entire strategic game is much easier.

Edited by BlackAlpha
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Thank you!

I just installed the mod, and will test it out tomorrow, but other then the vanilla teleport bug, I'm really enjoying the game with Warspace.

Having easier battleship kills, would probably make it even better for me, since i was struggling even with plasma cannon interceptors (without other enhancements).

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I've just finished playing through a 1.62 Impossible Hardcore game, and am just about to start an Impossible Hardcore Second Wave game.

In my experience, at least for the hardcore version, you should not severely weaken Battleships. As it stands in 1.62, it is possible to take down battleships pretty reliably as long as you have a decent number of well equipped interceptors and some power-ups for them (I absolutely adore how you've made them actually useful by the way), and I think that's just about the way it should be.

If you want to make the strategic game a bit easier, I would recommend instead decreasing the maintenance cost of the interceptors: thereby allowing one to maintain a significant fleet of craft while also having a decent monthly income.

 

In regards to suggestions, I think that rebalancing psychic abilities would be a good addition. Currently, the only real reason to get psychic abilities is to win the game. If you could buff mindfray (Increasing the aim penalty it imposes? Increasing the damage it does? Increasing the innate defensive bonuses and lowering the will of some late game alien types?), then they would be much more useful. Also, the changes you made to panic (specifically, severely decreasing the chance of firing at an ally) make psi-panic practically useless, as there is a significant chance that it just gives the enemy a free shot at you, I'm not sure how you would deal with that (making panic more likely to cause a unit to run out of cover? This is tough because any change to panic affects all panic in alien and humans). Psi inspiration has the potential to be really useful as a defence against psychic enemies, but due to it's inconvenience of use and how short the effect lasts, it's not that practical. I think mind control and telekinetic field are probably fine (though telekinetic field is practically the same as a smoke grenade, and so is kind of obsolete, and mind control is so difficult to use since you can't shoot ally units and, unlike in UFO defence, you can't disarm them either). Rift is pretty good, but only being able to use it in the last mission is kind of silly; I don't think modifying the exp needed to get rift would be a problem, but it would need to be de-buffed severely (decreasing the damage it does would probably be a good start) in order to avoid it being too powerful, and I have no idea how that would affect story progression (I think that you could still use the Gollop chamber as a level four psychic to find the Temple Ship). If you were to do changes such as these to psionic abilities, then you would have course have to make the gift rarer and require more work to find (decreasing psi gift chance and reducing the capacity of the psionic training facilities might work)

Anyway, these ideas are just from my experience, and may not be possible or practical.

 

PS: thank you so much for making this mod, I can hardly play XCOM any more without it.

Edited by DersitePhantom
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i currently play 1.63, destroyed the alien base and building firestorms to destroy the overseer UFO. At the moment, i am swimming in cash and alien alloy but elerium slows me down.

Fusion lance launcher and such kind of research cost too much elerium,maybe you could make it so shot down ufo give more elerium or reduce resarch req with elerium.

 

Reg reduced interception time for small UFO, i guess you made it so in order to make the player buy more aircrafts but it is a bit too much.

Reg recovery time, i dont know how you compute it but as a general rule when it is more than 3 months better to have the soldier killed

 

My 2 cents, thx again for your awesome work on this mod it improved greatly the vanilla game

Edited by eltroubabadour
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