X-COM OpenXcom Thread

[Cael]

what is blm

BurnMurderLoot.

You know, your typical RPG :D

 

[somewhatgiggly]

Yeah right, son. A couple.

With full abuse of all available tactics you can definitely avoid most losses. Mostly it's about using smoke, spot and snipe, and motion detectors. Of course also spamming rockets everywhere, but that's normal X-Com play.

Sure, and that's the tactical way to do it, but man I still reminisce about a terror mission in Open Xcom, in the mod that gives LaserWeapons a few more tiers and ammo - I want to say...Final Mod pack...I was fighting snakemen or floaters, (who has reavers? Floaters, right?) and I eventually blew this whole city neighborhood to smoldering bits, bodies everywhere, but it was so colorful...and I had one, two guys left at the end of it, but we made it.

Old X-com is just a bit more filling with high casualty rates, I guess. New X-com is...ehh. Puts too much value on human life.

 

[lightbane]

More modder drama: Author of a relatively unknown game ragequits and removes all of his stuff after being pissed off with the modder community's lack of respect for his work:

https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,7587.msg129722.html#msg129722

Before...

https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,7587.msg131088.html#msg131088

After.

Reasoning:

Hi XComfan, I am touch by your interest for my mod. Seeing your reply, I have given some thoughts to your concern. Personally, I have no more interest in sharing any resources or contribution to people that has absolutely no interest or appreciation in my modding effort. It is insulting for me to continue in fact. Yesterday, I have seen the true colours of the modding community in discord and for me to remove all of my contribution in openxcom.mod.io is the hardest thing I had to do. You can thank DaManWithGun for that on discord.

However, again, I do care about those whom still show concern and interest for my mod. I do have plans for version 2.9 to have Sea Hangers and Triscene the missing assets that make the Hybrid mod more complete. Now, those plans are a few months a way.

 

[Average Manatee]

Been hearing a lot of stuff about a similar more modern one (that uses newest additions from OpenXcom Extended) - Reaver's Faithful Megamod for OpenXcom. It also wants to be something like an expansion to the vanilla experience and not an overhaul.

Gave this a spin. To start off with its not for OpenXcomEx, it will crash if you try to load it with that.

Major highlights:

* The Lightning is bigger and can now carry tanks.
* The Interceptor, Skyranger, and Avenger have each been split into two different ships. In the case of the Interceptor and Avenger, this is an overall nerf. It's more of a buff to the Skyranger.
* More craft. In addition to the three craft splits, there are extra early and late-game craft for a total of 16 craft. Several of the craft have advanced radar and patrolling capabilities.
* More aircraft weapons and harder air combat. Every air weapons system has a short range (high DPS) and long range variant, and you'll no longer be able to out-range every ship you come across. You will also need to manufacture ammo for your plasma weapons. Fusion is far more powerful now, and can easily destroy even the bigger ships. It costs a lot of elerium, however.

Does anyone really use those special troop transporters and radar craft? I've literally never cared. His base transporter ("Custodian") has 18 crew slots and all the aircraft I've unlocked have less. So I don't use them. Does anyone care enough about speed to invest that much into it? And then to perform all of your missions with around half as many troops as you could? Alien ships wait around long enough on the ground and doing missions with 10 troops is suicidal.

Similarly, air combat is still kind of meh. You can kill small ships easily and I presume 4 high-tier ships still massacre everything.

* The Heavy Plasma no longer has autoshot and is more cumbersome, but its damage has been increased.
* More weapons iteration. Each weapons tier has a pistol, rifle, and heavy paired with an automatic counterpart. There are also more options for launcher ammo and explosives.
* More tanks. Every tank tier has 2 weapon types, each with 3 size variations for a total of 18 tanks. Guardian tanks are very durable while assault tanks can smash through heavy armor.
* General tiericide. Things at the same tech level are no longer lined up with each next one being a clear replacement for the previous. Instead, you are given choices, and multiple items in the same tech level will each be unique and useful.
* When you research laser weapons, you will immediately unlock the laser pistol and laser rifle. Other weapons research will frequently unlock multiple items at a time. Weapons research is now branching, rather than placing everything in a direct line, giving you more room to choose what you want to research. Rifles/heavies are no longer better than pistols; all weapons are viable and valuable.

The automatic counterparts are mostly kind of shit. Like, pistol at 26 damage is workable. Autopistol at 18 damage is a joke. Only the heavy-level automatics (autocannon/auto heavy laser/auto heavy plasma) really do enough damage to be workable. Aside from the pistol vs. rifle (pistol was already better than rifle in vanilla xcom and is unchanged here) there's absolutely no reason to carry pistol or rifle variants of weapons compared to heavy weapons. I don't know what he's saying about them being viable. Low damage weaponry is not viable as soon as you start facing armor. There's no instance in which 60 damage plasma pistols (let alone 42 damage plasma auto pistols) are workable when going up against enemies with 30 or 40 armor.

The alien explosives variant is absolutely fucking broken. Its basically a blaster bomb replacement for the high explosive, at lower weight so you can throw it further. You can blow up 1/3rd of a small map with it, including blowing large holes in UFOs. As soon as I got these I just started chucking 4 or 5 per battle and it did most of the work. You can unlock them around March/April and hand them out to every soldier before the late game comes up.

* Large base facilities. Several facilities have large versions for better space efficiency. The large radar is now a large facility, thus lending some purpose to the existence of the small radar. The radar range of both has been increased.

Needing more space is a good change and encourages multiple real bases (as in not just hangers and radar). Labs/living quarters/workshops all give half as much capacity as before, but I don't see a point of the large variants since they are simply 5x the cost for 5x the benefit and 4x the space. But since you are already forced to use two bases there's not much point to them, spending 1 or 2 extra spaces isn't a real cost compared to the incredible up-front cost of these large variants. The expanded radar range is kind of OP, small seems to be bigger than vanilla large and large is 50% larger radius than that.

* The aliens have been adjusted and rebalanced. Their UFOPedia entries sometimes explain their weaknesses, and are far more reliable now. Armor piercing damage is actually good against armor, the cyberdisc resists explosives, the reaper is properly killed by incendiary (which has been massively buffed), the chryssalid is actually weak to explosives now, and the sectopod's laser weapon has been ascended into the UFOPedia article as well as its attack animation.
* Difficulty setting makes a bigger difference. Play Beginner for a really easy experience, or play Superhuman for a big challenge. Choose Experienced or Genius for something more akin to the vanilla Beginner and Superhuman.

The difficulty changes are completely ridiculous. By Vanilla each difficulty should only add 4% TUs, 6% accuracy, and similarly small increases to other stats per difficulty level (so superhuman is 16% more TUs and 24% more accuracy). This mod ups this to an absurd degree, with +25% TUs/accuracy/psi strength/reactions/health per difficulty level, or +100% to all stats other than armor on superhuman (edit: its actually +50% accuracy and +50% armor). So enjoy every fucking enemy having over 100 TUs, 100% accuracy, and everyone losing psi rolls across the map.

The "adjustments" seem OK-ish. Never bothered to bring incendiary for reapers who are shitters anyway, Cyberdisks were never fought because they come with psi sectoids which are generally instant death unless you really exploit things. Noticed Chryssalids being somewhat weak to heavy rockets though.

* Plasma weapons must be reverse-engineered to be used by X-Com, and their monetary value as loot has been decreased substantially.
* Manufacturing profit has been rebalanced. You can no longer make laser cannons for huge profit, but you can make huge profit by manufacturing any of several items which require advanced alien craft components. Rule of thumb: the more difficult or expensive the recipe, the better the profit for making it. This rule of thumb does not apply to ammo.

The weapon selling price is fine. Its pure autism that you have to research converting alien weapons to human and then schedule a manufacture job to do so for every clip and every weapon. Pure annoying bloat.

The manufacturing of "civilian and military aircraft" for sale definitely breaks the economy anyway, it just takes a little longer to get to. Sure you can only do it once or twice per mission you go on but when it gives $4-8 million per mission you're well past needing money.

* You must perform some research before you can build an alien containment. The game content is stretched out longer now.

I'm not sure if this bugged out on me, but I never got alien containment even in june when I researched everything. Supposedly you need to research the useless crap in large UFOs like alien food and entertainment. Well those UFOs are suicidal to attack when there's anything psi inside (see above note on alien stat bloat), and when I finally got one large snakemen UFO landed in May it apparently didn't have the right stuff. Not gonna wait around for another. This way of "stretching" the game is pure annoyance. The nerf to the building capacity already stretches the game out long enough by forcing a much longer build up, artificially delaying the game until you get one specific item is bullshit.

* Psionics have been fixed, involving a nerf to both sides.

What this means is that its nerfed for you (starting psi for soldiers seems to be 40s-50s, and from there you can "train" 1 or 2 per month), while aliens have stratospheric psi stats due to the difficulty modifier. I have no idea how you are supposed to defend against psi or use it yourself. You'll never get high-strength soldiers in a reasonable timeframe and in the meantime every psi-capable enemy on the map can fuck with you. In vanilla x-com you could hire and screen soldiers for 80+ psi and generally be OK, but not here.


In summary: As far as general gameplay alterations go its kind of a mixed bag. Some stuff I really like, some OK stuff, some stuff that you kind of ignore. As a difficulty mod it went full retard with stats and thereby forces you to avoid the risky stuff that actually makes X-Com fun. Vanilla sectoid terror missions in January are fun and difficulty but you can push through and do them because psi isn't boosted to the stratosphere and enemies aren't ubermensch. In this mod you don't even bother and instead just farm small UFOs. Hence by making the already difficult parts more difficult all it accomplishes is forcing you to avoid them.

 

[eXalted]

In summary: As far as general gameplay alterations go its kind of a mixed bag. Some stuff I really like, some OK stuff, some stuff that you kind of ignore.

Thank you for the review, I think I am going to pass that mod. Have you played the Final Mod Pack? Been eyeing it for a while but I've been playing mostly XPiratez (and a lil bit of X-Com Files).

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, Final Mod Pack is good. It's much more about adding stuff, a lot of which you probably won't use, but is generally pretty balanced. Some of the very high level equipment (e.g. beyond plasma) is OP but it feels like a reward for playing that long and getting them. Not like Reaver mod where you unlock incredibly OP alien explosives two months in. IIRC from when I last played over a year ago my only real complaint was that a few of the new alien races look kind of goofy.

 

[Luka-boy]

Would you say The X-Com Files is roughly as much of a time sink as Piratez? More? Less?

My playthrough of Piratez lasted a year and a half playing a few hours every week and if The X-Com Files is on the same level I'd rather wait until Christmas or even next Summer before I start playing it.

 

[Syme]

Would you say The X-Com Files is roughly as much of a time sink as Piratez? More? Less?

My playthrough of Piratez lasted a year and a half playing a few hours every week and if The X-Com Files is on the same level I'd rather wait until Christmas or even next Summer before I start playing it.

Yeah it's easily on the same level. I'm 284 missions into my current playthrough and have unlocked 25% of the research screen. As with Piratez, there's lots of smaller missions with only a few enemies (as few as 1 on some "strange life form" alerts) and you can skip a ton if you want to without having to worry too much about your monthly reports, but I don't think you can get even close to finishing the game without doing like 600 missions.

 

[Average Manatee]

Damn, that's long. Here am I as someone who thinks vanilla x-com has about the right length, maybe 50% longer would be ideal.

 

[AgentFransis]

As the saying goes - it's not about the destination but about the friends we killed along the way.

 

[Strange Fellow]

There's another saying as well: modders gonna mod. 600 missions, christ.

 

[eXalted]

I am playing both knowing that I will probably never finish them but I'm having hell of a good time with them.

 

[lightbane]

X-Files is way less "modder issue" than Piratez at least. The endgame is the same, you can use the same tactics from OG XCOM once you unlock enough stuff, and you're not forced to micromanage EVERY LITTLE FUCKING COMPONENT! to build power armors and other hi-tech gear.

 

[Average Manatee]

How is X-com Files nowadays? Last I played it I quit after shooting Fallout's radscorpions and Diablo 2 abominations for 4 months straight. Does it have better content progression now?

 

[lightbane]

How is X-com Files nowadays? Last I played it I quit after shooting Fallout's radscorpions and Diablo 2 abominations for 4 months straight. Does it have better content progression now?

Much better, I think. Missions are more varied and there's more stuff to research, but the start is still too slow IMO. I usually bend the rules a little to quickly progress to Promotion 2 to unlock proper guns and armor.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, I don't really see the point of spending at least 4-6 months doing missions that involve hunting 20 radscorpions with 4 agents. My understanding is that after a year it turns into normal xcom with the usual alien invasion so if half the mod's content is just tedium then I find it hard to pull through.

Think I'll try Hardmode Expansion again. It looks like the modder took some of my advice w/ regards to not making enemies unbreakable (110 bravery) psi-gods (near 100% chance to mind control across the map even with high-psi strength soldiers). Adding more psi power to the AI in "difficulty" mods is basically always the worst idea possible.

 

[oasis789]

I think the problem with XCF early game is that the four human factions are too similar at low levels, so it feels like fighting the same bad guys over and over again. Whereas Piratez early game is so varied since you will be fighting rats, ninjas, nazis, robots, yetis etc from day one, and its full of surprises like showing up to a church to beat up believers and finding it full of zombies instead. Also, XCF doesn't start with as many toys as Piratez, so you're always using the same weapons in the same ways.

 

[Luka-boy]

Question: Can you update X-Files mid-playthough and get any new released content added seamlessly to the game? I could do that with Piratez but with X-Files it seems like the storylines are an even more important part of the experience and there still are a few ones missing or in progress right now, so I'd like to know it beforehand.

 

[eXalted]

Question: Can you update X-Files mid-playthough and get any new released content added seamlessly to the game? I could do that with Piratez but with X-Files it seems like the storylines are an even more important part of the experience and there still are a few ones missing or in progress right now, so I'd like to know it beforehand.

Yes, you can. Just make sure your save game is not during a battle.

The easiest way to update is to make the mod folder a git repository and just do "git pull origin master" before playing.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

if your branch is set up to track origin/master anyway, you can just do `git pull`. Lazyness is a virtue.

 

[Average Manatee]

I think the problem with XCF early game is that the four human factions are too similar at low levels, so it feels like fighting the same bad guys over and over again. Whereas Piratez early game is so varied since you will be fighting rats, ninjas, nazis, robots, yetis etc from day one, and its full of surprises like showing up to a church to beat up believers and finding it full of zombies instead. Also, XCF doesn't start with as many toys as Piratez, so you're always using the same weapons in the same ways.

It also takes forever trying to clear whole maps with 4 guys and little long-ranged firepower without doing suicidally risky stuff like running around until you get shot/a bug sneaks up on you.

If maps were ~1/4th the size of the normal smallest one (so your agents arrive at a single medium size building with some suspects in it), it'd probably be a lot better. It'd also feel a lot more appropriate than needing to invade multiple city blocks.

 

[lightbane]

Yeah, I don't really see the point of spending at least 4-6 months doing missions that involve hunting 20 radscorpions with 4 agents. My understanding is that after a year it turns into normal xcom with the usual alien invasion so if half the mod's content is just tedium then I find it hard to pull through.

Pest extermination missions are still there, but there's more variety for what's worth. I recommend editing a save to get Logistics ASAP, then check what's the fastest way to unlock the Military Envoy, so that you can get a Hummer and then an Helicopter, letting you bring up to 6 agents to missions, including stealth ones.
Don't do spider missions unless you're a masochistic.
Try doing an early UFO mission if you have shotguns and knives, the payoff is worth it since you can unlock good armor early. You have until 1999 until the invasion starts "properly", but until then you must deal with cults and other stuff.
The cults themselves also have variations of terror missions each to spice things up.

I think the problem with XCF early game is that the four human factions are too similar at low levels, so it feels like fighting the same bad guys over and over again. Whereas Piratez early game is so varied since you will be fighting rats, ninjas, nazis, robots, yetis etc from day one, and its full of surprises like showing up to a church to beat up believers and finding it full of zombies instead. Also, XCF doesn't start with as many toys as Piratez, so you're always using the same weapons in the same ways.

Indeed, Piratez is wacky, which means you can end up in a mission where you have no way to win and must tactically retreat. To be fair, the same happens in X-Files-COM.

It also takes forever trying to clear whole maps with 4 guys and little long-ranged firepower without doing suicidally risky stuff like running around until you get shot/a bug sneaks up on you.

I do not recommend doing missions with lots of critters until you have the Helicopter. Similar case with the cultist bases, they're not worth doing many until you get the Helicopter or better. As for the mass zombie horde missions, do a few, research until you unlock an Infector to progress the storyline, then avoid/use Debugmode with the rest. They take too long and they're easy once you have good weaponry, not worth the time.
You can also get zombie bodies (including Infectors) and other creatures with the Land Survey research, letting you skip missions where the aforementioned creatures are already researched.

Lastly but not least, IIRC you eventually unlock a research option to permanently deal with the strange animal hordes.

 

[Average Manatee]

Thing is, I can and did do those missions (including taking out a cultist base on superhuman with 4 dudes, bless lighting the map in flares and shooting from the darkness), but the game never progresses. I also constantly lose score and therefore funding if I don't do them. So I don't get what I'm "supposed" to be doing in X-Files. 2 months of bad score and you lose, unless that's changed.

 

[Average Manatee]

Average hardmode expansion mission in january

Spoiler

(aside from the no losses, usually take 2-4 per mission but I did this one flawless despite only 10 soldiers ready).

 

[lightbane]

Thing is, I can and did do those missions (including taking out a cultist base on superhuman with 4 dudes, bless lighting the map in flares and shooting from the darkness), but the game never progresses. I also constantly lose score and therefore funding if I don't do them. So I don't get what I'm "supposed" to be doing in X-Files. 2 months of bad score and you lose, unless that's changed.

Don't play in Superhuman to begin with. The game doesn't really support it, and the two highest difficulty levels increase enemy numbers to ridiculous amounts.
At worst you can enter the missions, shoot someone and then bravely retreat to reduce the score penalty. But seriously, don't do Superhuman doods, it's not wort it, and no-one cares about your e-peen.