X-COM OpenXcom Thread

[agris]

3D vector math; does anyone know their Mythos lore? Who on the dev team had an engineering background

Sorry to disappoint you, but the programming was done by the Gollop brothers, who were already experienced with video games at that point.

Why would that disappoint me? No surprise regarding flight sims, to my (simplistic) thinking, the inclusion of full-space ballistics calculations and requisite mathematical description of all map geography and objects, when the game is presented in a 2D view, spoke of at least an interest in mathematics since 3D wasn't a development requirement - as it is in flightsims.

 

[eXalted]

Reminded me of Wolfenstein 3D. It is the opposite. The game is actually 2D and it makes ray-casting calculations on a 2D surface and scales the sprite size of the objects depending on the distance.

 

[oldmanpaco]

Was going to run though Long War again (I got the itch again after 4 years) but the time investment is too daunting. Put over 100 hrs into the last LW game but got burned out.

Whats the best way to play this - mods and whatnot? OR is Xenonauts a better option?

 

[eXalted]

XPiratez v.L5 30-Oct-2020 New Energy Released

- OXCE upgrade to 6.7.2 24-Oct-2020
- Fix: rare Party Dress crash
- New Enemy: Assault Ninja
- New Enemy Mission: Ninja Patrol
- New Enemy Craft: Ninja Jetbike
- New Mission: Taberna Del Diablo
- New Facilities: Disruptor Shroud, Alenium Chamber
- New Craft: V-8 (Cadillac El Dorado by Alex_D), Little Bird (by Alex_D and Perekrylo)
- New Craft Equipment: Shadowshield
- New Soldier Type: Damsel (recruited from DILDO, has her own special armor)
- New Armors: Scale Mail (Shield), Cybermage (Bugeye; thanks to XOps and Solarius)
- New Weapon: Quicksilver Cutlass
- New Ammo: Combat Bow PS Arrows
- New Equipment: Armored Corset, Magnificient Pirate Hat, Cigar 'El Commandante'
- New Terrains: Nuke Zone (by Luke83), Nuke City (by Luke83)
- New Maps for CoS temples (by Wolverin)
- New Events
- New Music (~EnV~Tranceish; A New Energy)
- New special mechanics for Handcuffs (modified Kozinsky's script)
- Retouched Charts GUI (by OAK Group)
- Added flash messages for personal shields hit and breached (copied from Nord's Chronicles mod)
- All trainings now give some sort of Soldier Bonus to keep track of them.
- Due to the above: Repentias cannot undergo Gladiatorial Training anymore.
- Chocolate added to loot here and there; More goods from crushing rocks
- Potions of Freshness (added to super-long missions)
- Extra loot for Space Freighter
- Increased radar range for Outpost and some defensive systems
- Airbuses can now be bought from Car Thieves
- Airvan got a weapon
- Fighters go faster (some of them)
- Annihilator Armor has shields now
- Govt Fines added
- Removed Best Exploit Ever
- Melee terrain damage and other new OXCE stuff
- Tech tree adjustments, Tweaks, Map Fixes, Other fixes

https://www.dropbox.com/s/283q9guqe3mdb66/Dioxine_XPiratez_L5.rar?dl=0

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I should keep playing my J15 saves before stating with newer versson.

 

[lightbane]

Xcom Files also got updated to 1.6 and a 1.7 version is incoming. It has lots of improvements and changes, the biggest of which is that now AI Units require a very limited resource to be "recruited", so you no longer can spam scout drones everywhere. On the plus side, they can be rebuilt as long as you got their body intact. It seems remote-controlled drones became an unknown technology in the grim world of XCOM.

There's also minor improvements such as units flashing red when they're hit and damaged (flashing in a different color if a shield absorbed the hit), although it requires the latest version of OXCE, which must be acquired separately.

 

[eXalted]

Best thing in the newest update is that with the newest OXCE you can now use melee weapons to tear walls. Feels good.

 

[geno]

Best thing in the newest update is that with the newest OXCE you can now use melee weapons to tear walls. Feels good.

Am I remember it wrong or could you do it already in previous versions? One time I missed an attack with a hammer and broke a wall.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Best thing in the newest update is that with the newest OXCE you can now use melee weapons to tear walls. Feels good.

Am I remember it wrong or could you do it already in previous versions? One time I missed an attack with a hammer and broke a wall.

Hammer & chainsaw were special weapons for that kind of breaching.

 

[geno]

Best thing in the newest update is that with the newest OXCE you can now use melee weapons to tear walls. Feels good.

Am I remember it wrong or could you do it already in previous versions? One time I missed an attack with a hammer and broke a wall.

Hammer & chainsaw were special weapons for that kind of breaching.

I see, so swords that only work if you're facing an enemy can destroy walls now?

 

[eXalted]

Version 026 of the Warhammer 40k mod is going live soon, yet another new faction - the Adeptus Arbites! Plus, enjoy grenades no longer flying all the way across maps!

Update 31-10-2020

- New features require OXCE v6.7.2
- Added Arbites as a new playable faction!
- Added two new terrains
- Polar maps now have 'death trap' tiles
- Limited throwing range for all grenades (both player and enemy) to 20 tiles
- Enabled melee weapons being able to damage terrain (only for 1x1-sized units and not on a diagonal)
- Reduced size of battlescape maps for Ork vehicle encounters
- Reenabled some cutscenes that were accidentally disabled
- Added missing recoil/strength required lines in codex articles
- Added codex help articles for globe icons, following enemy craft, turret destruction, and terrain destruction
- Editing pass on codex article text in general
- Fixed Sister of Battle standard and repentia armor codex articles being visible to other factions
- Fixed the Traitor Marines from the month 1/2 terror missions not being researchable
- Fixed validation crashes for running on newer OXCE versions
- Fixed some maps blocking exits from the Chimera
- Fixed crashes when shooting down Ork vehicles
- Fixed some tyranids missing weapons on the space hulk mission

Marines Content:
- Master of signal sprites corrected
- Signal armor now provides airstrike
- Librarian sprites corrected
- Nerfed chapter banner
- Fixed sideoperations mission 8
- Chapter corruption now depends on chapel and librarian research so those don't get locked out once you corrupt your chapter

Sisters Content:
- Fixed dominion armor ufopedia sprite

Guard Content:
- Added carapace armor for Commissars

Spoiler

Has someone tried it?

 

[lightbane]

I did, briefly. You can go Chaos! And turn corpses into "honor" a special resource to buy special gear. You also can get corrupted by researching too many Chaos-used weapons, lol.
The "research" is more like unlocking already known but high-tier stuff from WH40k lore. I hope the last faction are the Adeptus Mechanicus, the closest thing to actually innovate and that would fit a XCOM mod.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Version 026 of the Warhammer 40k mod is going live soon, yet another new faction - the Adeptus Arbites! Plus, enjoy grenades no longer flying all the way across maps!

Update 31-10-2020

- New features require OXCE v6.7.2
- Added Arbites as a new playable faction!
- Added two new terrains
- Polar maps now have 'death trap' tiles
- Limited throwing range for all grenades (both player and enemy) to 20 tiles
- Enabled melee weapons being able to damage terrain (only for 1x1-sized units and not on a diagonal)
- Reduced size of battlescape maps for Ork vehicle encounters
- Reenabled some cutscenes that were accidentally disabled
- Added missing recoil/strength required lines in codex articles
- Added codex help articles for globe icons, following enemy craft, turret destruction, and terrain destruction
- Editing pass on codex article text in general
- Fixed Sister of Battle standard and repentia armor codex articles being visible to other factions
- Fixed the Traitor Marines from the month 1/2 terror missions not being researchable
- Fixed validation crashes for running on newer OXCE versions
- Fixed some maps blocking exits from the Chimera
- Fixed crashes when shooting down Ork vehicles
- Fixed some tyranids missing weapons on the space hulk mission

Marines Content:
- Master of signal sprites corrected
- Signal armor now provides airstrike
- Librarian sprites corrected
- Nerfed chapter banner
- Fixed sideoperations mission 8
- Chapter corruption now depends on chapel and librarian research so those don't get locked out once you corrupt your chapter

Sisters Content:
- Fixed dominion armor ufopedia sprite

Guard Content:
- Added carapace armor for Commissars

Spoiler

Has someone tried it?

Well, time to install Xcom again.

What factions are there? Can you play Necrons, Orks and Admech? SoB maybe?

 

[lightbane]

What factions are there? Can you play Necrons, Orks and Admech? SoB maybe?

Marines: Ultrasmurfs, Blood Angels and Imperial Firsts.
Imperial Guard: Duh, with Ogryns and vehicles included.
Sororitas: Faith and flamers abound.
Adeptus Arbites: For lawbringers. Expect using prisoners as "volunteers" from minute 1.

Only one last remaining faction. Chances are it will be Admech.
No chances for playing dirty xenos so far, as it should be, since you're defending a planet from a Warp invasion (unless you go Chaos).

The difficulty level is fixed, for good and bad.

 

[dehimos]

Can you play chaos?

It looks like a very interesting mod, it reminds me of Chapter Master.

 

[lightbane]

Can you play chaos?

No chances for playing dirty xenos so far, as it should be, since you're defending a planet from a Warp invasion (unless you go Chaos).

I don't know how exactly, but it seems you have to do multiple "forbidden researches" in a row, ignoring the warnings about the growing corruption, until your side becomes corrupted. I think it only works for the Marines so far, or at least it was last time I checked, perhaps they changed it by now. Don't expect much change though. IMO You cannot realistically play with a Chaos faction in a serious manner because by nature they are meant to lose, due how stupidly evil and retarded they are. Nevermind defending a planet from a Warp invasion. The average Chaos Commander would sacrifice half of the population to save the other half... Only to enslave and/or mutate the survivors, rendering the choice pointless.
Either way, a Chaos Faction wouldn't work well with a XCOM system.

 

[Average Manatee]

Tried the 40k mod and I really don't get how its supposed to be played.

Basically every starting weapon you have has an effective range of about 5 squares autofire and 7 or 8 squares snapfire. Only the sniper rifle is able to shoot past that but its both insanely heavy (33 weight, troops have around 30-40 strength) and incredibly slow (90% TUs). Coupled with this is the incredibly shitty drop pods, which will leave you exposed on all sides immediately in round 2. Every fight I've been in has around 8 or more enemies within starting sight range ready to fire on turn 2, with no cover at all available. So you don't exactly have time to set up a firing position, you're likely to eat constant reaction fire immediately, and at the end of the enemy turn you'll probably eat grenades that will massacre your balled up infantry (also the AI will constantly destroy your weapon stockpile in one of the drop pod squares, EVERY FUCKING TIME YOU LOSE EVERYTHING). Worst of all, you can't buy more smoke grenades to try and hide your position if you can only kill half the enemies on turn 2. You start with 5 smoke grenades and will receive no more (at least until you get some esoteric research that I haven't found yet).

Also loot from enemies sell for very little while your equipment is expensive as fuck. Want 10 normal frag grenades? 100k cash.

So, any tips? So far my only reasonably successful mission (didn't get all my weapons blown up or half my squad killed) was by getting absurdly lucky and snapshotting a dozen guys @ around 5% accuracy rates on turn 2 which caused an immediate panic.

 

[lightbane]

Haven't played that one but I read that the grenade spam is fixed in the latest patch, as the range is more limited. From what I saw with drop-pods, they're meant to be used by Space Marines and people with power armors, as they "detonate" to simulate the explosive entry bit from lore, and create smoke and cover, as well as damaging nearby enemies (hopefully). Unfortunately, the "being exposed" is from the lore as well, so be careful while using them. Heavy weapons need to be used by strong soldiers and preferably while crouching.
The research bits are strange since you have to research stuff to unlock lasguns. You know, the most basic weapon in the Imperium. To be fair, it's more like getting the paperwork done to use that gear (same with the smoke grenades, I pressume), but it's still weird.
That's the issue when you attempt to fit WH40k in XCOM.

 

[Average Manatee]

Well I'm on the latest patch (downloaded this morning) and I get around 2-4 grenades thrown at or into my drop pods on most missions I've tried. If I'm lucky they miss a bit and only damage dudes, unlucky and they get several kills and half my squad immediately panics.

I'm using 100% space marines but all but 2 of them are in scout armor, which is... well its like personal armor from X-Com, its something that gives you a chance to live through a hit but combat is still incredibly deadly. It does give a huge TU and Reaction bonus so if you can actually get to cover you'll be really good in close quarters ambushing. But lots of maps are just wide open to begin with, e.g. in deserts and plains and shit. With this all I can do is run at the enemy and try for an autoshot at 10-20% hit rate or stand at max range and spam away with 20% hit rate snap shots. Its not a weight or need to crouch issue either, checking the weapon stats their effective range is around 5/15 tiles fire auto/snap and they drop -5% for each tile afterwards. Considering base accuracy for most of my guys is around 20% auto 30% snap, you can see how hitting anything is such a crapshoot when I have 15+ enemies in sight range with some of them around 30 tiles away. From what I can tell all of the early lasguns have exactly the same accuracy dropoff issues. Nothing has aimed shot besides the sniper rifles and heavy weapons (all of them are >60 weight).

Sadly the smoke from the drop pods seems mega weak. If it was strong smoke it might work, maybe someone should tell the mod author to bump it up a few notches.

I've been going the devastator route (since its supposed to be about long range firepower), and the devastator suit is reasonably tanky enough and their bulky autocannon can work at range. But its just two guys and they can't possibly mow down the hordes before the entire rest of the unit is demolished. Maybe I should try just sending the 2 devastators to see if they can handle it all

 

[AgentFransis]

Are you doing terror missions or something? From what I've seen from let's plays you should have a lot fewer enemies in an average early game intercept. In any case it sounds like the old piratez tactical rule No. 1 applies here too: if it looks too hairy just bug out immediately.

 

[Average Manatee]

This is what my first mission (shooting down the first thing I see and going after it, around Jan 10th) looks like on turn 2

And there's no difficulty selection, so that can't be it. In Piratez or normal xcom this would be superhuman level of spawns. I've restarted several times and they are all fairly similar. The best one I had was an urban terrain where I started off hidden from most of the map, but the number of enemies was the same and I still started with 5 or so enemies needing to be killed immediately to avoid getting grenaded.

Tested out Imperial Guard. They start out with 3 tanks that nicely enclose the troops like the skyranger. They also have two invincible turrets with infinite ammo who can each put out 2x 10x autoshots per round, a total of 40 free shots per round to just spray the shit out of everything. WTF, this is insanely easier. They even start out with sniper lasguns that can hit things from long range along with smoke grenades buyable. And of course the imperial guard comes with more dudes (which, since the space marine scout armor kind of does nothing, is entirely a net positive).

 

[lightbane]

The mod is far from finished, so expect not balance. Don't expect balance AFTER it is finished as well, this is not like XPiratez where Dioxine autistically retouches stats every 2-3 updates or so. From your comments, the IG is massively easier to use, which is funny since I thought they would be harder to use due their subpar gear.
They have a vehicle transport that can carry like 50 soldiers. I hope whoever plays this uses multiple vehicles, because that many dudes in the battlefield will likely crash the game something fierce.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah I assumed the same, space marines would be the easy mode while IG would just die like flies and barely hurt anything. But I think the Xcom mechanics kind of mess it up. Armor is just never really reliable in XCom, even though scout armor is 50 vs. weapon damage 60 you end up getting killed or almost dead after single shots fairly often. Even full power armor with 110 frontal armor can be killed by an unlucky roll of a single heavy weapon shot (or heavily damaged by a single grenade). The way to play X-Com is always 90% about not getting shot 10% praying that you don't get an awful damage roll while shot. On the other hand just bringing more guys with more guns lets you do everything better even if the guns are only 50 damage rather than 60. Of course the massive tactical advantage of enclosed deployment + turrets + smoke grenades vs. drop pods can't be overstated.

EDIT: Checked out other factions.

Adeptus Arbites are basically a remixed Imperial Guard. Not much to be said about it.

Sisters of Battle are space marines except instead of all their soldiers starting with scout armor (50) they start with Sororitas Power Armor (100), which is just insanely better. Granted they don't get +30 TUs from scout armor or really high strength from the stronger armors but just 100 base armor just means everything when trying to be a tanky, aggressive faction. Seems like Sisters of Battle are just all out better at being space marines than space marines. Also doesn't have retarded drop pods.

 

[Cael]

Yeah I assumed the same, space marines would be the easy mode while IG would just die like flies and barely hurt anything. But I think the Xcom mechanics kind of mess it up. Armor is just never really reliable in XCom, even though scout armor is 50 vs. weapon damage 60 you end up getting killed or almost dead after single shots fairly often. Even full power armor with 110 frontal armor can be killed by an unlucky roll of a single heavy weapon shot (or heavily damaged by a single grenade). The way to play X-Com is always 90% about not getting shot 10% praying that you don't get an awful damage roll while shot. On the other hand just bringing more guys with more guns lets you do everything better even if the guns are only 50 damage rather than 60. Of course the massive tactical advantage of enclosed deployment + turrets + smoke grenades vs. drop pods can't be overstated.

EDIT: Checked out other factions.

Adeptus Arbites are basically a remixed Imperial Guard. Not much to be said about it.

Sisters of Battle are space marines except instead of all their soldiers starting with scout armor (50) they start with Sororitas Power Armor (100), which is just insanely better. Granted they don't get +30 TUs from scout armor or really high strength from the stronger armors but just 100 base armor just means everything when trying to be a tanky, aggressive faction. Seems like Sisters of Battle are just all out better at being space marines than space marines. Also doesn't have retarded drop pods.

XCom has a weird damage calculation.

Armour absorbs between 1 and the armour value (so 1-110 for front power armour), IIRC

Weapons do anywhere between 50-200% (again, IIRC) damage (so a heavy plasma at 115 can do upwards of 230 damage) before armour absorption is subtracted from it.

It ends up that you can and will die to piddly laser rifles even in the best armour available in the base game.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

It ends up that you can and will die to piddly laser rifles even in the best armour available in the base game.

Doesn't lasers have additional effect that deteriorates armour?