makus

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makus, on 09 July 2020 - 01:29 AM, said:

More or less done, although there are a couple of things I still need to alpha-test (alien tech levels might need to be slowed down given the somewhat-increased amount of UFOs, and I need to make sure the Battleship and Mothership loadout fixes actually work). Once I've done those and done my own playthrough test it'll be beta-test time.

That's awesome, thanks makus!

- Zombie

In TB mode, given that a turn lasts 11 seconds, the given rate of fire of a weapon is attained in Auto mode.

However, in RT mode, the given rate of fire of a weapon is attained in Snap mode i.e. all weapons fire twice as fast.

Anyone else noticed this? Am I going nuts? (OK, yes, I'm going nuts. But more specifically am I imagining this?)

This is in relation to the infamous "why don't the Psimorph in Battleships and the Micronoids in Battleships and Motherships spawn" issue.

I have some testing data, but while I can grasp the general shape of it ("aliens are in squads, some aliens can go together in squads while others can't, and there's a maximum of 6 squads and 6 aliens per squad"), the exact details don't make a lot of sense to me.

So, I figured I'd post some of the data I have and see if anyone else can make sense of this, because I sure can't.

If a line starts off with "+", then whatever's after the + is in addition to the previous line.

3 Multi 1 Anthro 1 Skele 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
+ 1 Egg = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
3 Multi 1 Anthro 1 Skele 6 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
   + 1 Spit = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
4 Multi 1 Anthro 1 Skele 6 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
   + 1 Spit = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
4 Multi 1 Anthro 1 Skele 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
3 Multi 6 Anthro 6 Skele 6 Pop 6 Mega 6 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorphs appear
3 Multi 7 Anthro 1 Skele 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
7 Anthro 1 Skele 5 Spit 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
7 Anthro 1 Skele 3 Spit 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
7 Anthro 1 Skele 6 Spit 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
7 Anthro 1 Skele 1 Spit 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
7 Anthro 1 Skele 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
7 Anthro 1 Skele 1 Spit 6 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
6 Anthro 1 Skele 1 Spit 6 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
5 Anthro 1 Skele 1 Spit 6 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
7 Anthro 1 Skele 1 Spit 4 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
6 Anthro 1 Skele 1 Spit 5 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro  = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
24 Anthro 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro   = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
20 Multi 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro    = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
21 Multi 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro    = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
22 Multi 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro    = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
24 Multi 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro    = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
25 Multi 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro    = no squads for Psimorph but Megaspawn appears
20 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
21 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears
24 Pop 1 Mega 1 Psi 1 Micro = no squads for Micronoid but Psimorph appears

After all these years, I finally know that it's real and I finally know why it's so elusive.

The Apocalypse mission, in which all UFOs swarm into Mega-Primus and start tearing down the city, is triggered when you destroy the Control Chamber and cut off the stream of UFOs. It's the aliens' last act of spite.

The reason it's elusive is because usually you've wiped out the UFO fleet by then, leaving the aliens nothing to execute it with. It'll only occur if you start doing the Alien Dimension missions while there are still UFOs flying around to fight you.

For building, I like to build the Explorers for a couple of reasons:

- They look cool
- They're almost identical to Hawk Air warriors (Except the 3x2 equipment slots, argh! Still two small shields is plenty of protection with a bit of skillful flying.)
- They're the 3rd fastest ship in the game (Annihilators are Second, Dim. Probes are the fastest)
- They're small, so they can turn around very quickly, as compared with the retaliator or annihilator.
- They can arm one medium disrupter beam, and if anything can arm one of these babies, well, it can shoot down a battleship, and that's okay in my book. With enough of these, they go into the alien dimension and mop up the alien fleet every week until the Annihilators take over.
- Best of all, like all hybrid aircraft, no matter what you build, you'll always be getting the better deal. See, all hybrid aircraft sell at x2 their building cost, which never fluctuates, so when you sell the explorers when better ships arrive, you'll always gain more money than what you spent on building them.  

I don't build very many retaliators. But if I do, they're specialised for carrying multiple plasma-multi-systems, alien rockets or maybe a few missile defense systems. Nothing special really. Mostly used for inter-city skirmishes to speed up those annoying gang air raids.

As for annihilators, the cream of the crop, once I've got a few and bolt on a few shields and disrupters, air superiority is mine. With two or more of these, I can start retiring my explorers.

- NKF

As you know there are many good ships out there that can easly be made (or bought) by x-com. So i was wondering which ships do you build (or buy) and why.

(My answer) When i get the tech to build all the ships i normally stick to building retaliators. There faster to build, cheaper, and look cool. For every three retaliators that i make i make one annihilator.  I like to think of retaliators are as the average ship.  Fast, powerful, yet not too pricey. Annihilators on the otherhand are more of the all powerful, unstoppable, heavly armed command ships.  Its just my opinion but making nothing but annihilators seems to just take away the value of this ship.

(side note: why does the annialator have two 3x4 hardpoints? there is no 3x4 gun and its just a waste of space. It seems as though it should be two 4x4s and a 2x4)

-PSY GUY-  

Booted up Apoc'd and took a look through the UFO loadouts, and was very surprised by what I discovered.

The Psimorph is supposed to be on Battleships (albeit only one), and the Micronoid Aggregate is supposed to be on Battleships and Motherships (3 each).

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe this is because Megaspawn and Psimorphs take up four unit slots and the aliens run into the 36-soldier limit (this would also imply that the game does the alien types in order, and that if there's not enough spawn slots left for an alien type it completely skips them rather than doing as many as possible).

Now I know why Wong's guide lists aliens that don't appear; they're supposed to.

Thanks karadoc, I'll add those to apoc'd.

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Unkown 20 will probably be the amount of VPs then, as you can find in this table here: http://web.archive.o...es.com/xcom.htm
Or possibly it is a counter for the number of wounds the agent has had.

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You may be right, I never checked if damaged armor had to be repaired or not - just assumed so .Let me know if armor effectiveness drops vs weapons fire & explosions if the remaining durability is low.

I don't think you're right about the armour. In apoc'd, if I select 'Edit Battlescape' -> 'Agent Equipment 2', and change the 'armor rating' of, say, the megapol helmet to be 150 - then in the cityscape it will only say '150', but in any tactical mission it will be 44/150.

Incidentally, the hunch was that 'unknown 2' for armour might be a brain-sucker resistance thing - because I know from experience that x-com armour gives better protection against brainsuckers, and that's the only one with non-zero for that unknown...   But it didn't seem to make any difference when I set it to something very high. Furthermore, I when I tested the effect of the 'armor rating' I found that helmets with high armour rating give protection against brainsuckers. So that's that.

The results of these brainsucker tests are actually very relevant to the discussion about armour durability. In the brainsucker tests, only the second armour number was set high. ie. agents wearing a helmet with a rating of 44/150 always successfully resisted brainsuckers. With that in mind, I reckon that if I set the armour to be 4/80, or something like that, the result would be armour which offered excellent protection but was easy to break. (It would certainly offer excellent protection against brainsuckers, but I haven't tested it for other damage types.)

Anyway, I now have no idea what 'Unknown 2' for armour might be.

For weapons, I wonder if one or more of the unknowns might be related to how the AI handles the weapon... eg, so that they don't try to fire a heavy launcher at something standing right in front of them...  but on the other hand, the AI sometimes does make blunders like that. -- I don't intend to do any more testing on that in the near future, but if I work something out I'll let you know.

@jos, I don't really know much about that stuff either, but I suspect that you might be able to decrease the durability of the armour directly. In apoc'd, armour has 2 'strength' values in different places. Notice that when you're in-game, if you point to your armour it will say something like "protection: 32/32", well each of those '32s' correspond to a number in apoc'd. ie. you can change them independently.

Now, I'm not certain about this, but I have a hunch that the first number corresponds to how close the armour is to breaking, whereas the second corresponds to how much protection the armour gives to its wearer. -- You could try setting the first number to something low so that the armour breaks quickly. But you should test it to make sure it doesn't actually decrease the protection of the armour! (If those numbers are "current protection" and "maximum protection", then you may just end up with weaker armour...)

@j'ordos, You're right about the names of the weapon damage types. My guess is that the icons are probably in a similar list somewhere, but of course it will be much harder to find the list of icons because they won't be human-readable. And it might be a direct list of bitmap images, or a list of file names, or a list of icon indices or something...   I guess I'll just give up on that particular thing for the time being.

.. and also, the thing I said I was trying to find out... it didn't work. I had a hunch about what one of the equipment unknowns was, but I now think I was wrong.

[edit]
In the save game editor of apoc'd, some of the agent names have random characters at the end which don't appear in-game. By looking at the hex I can see that apoc'd is displaying all characters even after the '\0' which marks the end of the name.

Ooh, new replies Don't really know anything about how armor&damage modifiers work for xcom troops unfortunately.
About the damage types in the battlescape, AFAIK that's hardcoded. There's a string list in TACP.EXE for damage modifier types, I think it just follows the internal ordering of the weapons, so there's no 'unknown variable' somewhere that can be edited. The only way to fix it is to open TACP.EXE with a hex editor, search for hot plasma and edit it yourself. Remember that you may not exceed the length of the original text! Unfortunately there's no way to export such an edit using apoc'd yet. I don't know anything about the damage type icon.
Thanks for the info on the unknowns, I've been working on apoc'd and my other xcom apoc stuff again some time ago. I actually have a new version ready, but it just adds support for another spanish version of xcom apoc. I'll try to finish it up.

There's no really good way to integrate apatcher into apoc'd I can see, apoc'd edits data structures whereas apatcher patches the game's code. Can't really use the existing apoc'd UI for that.

J'ordos! I've just noticed that the latest version of apoc'd has the feature that I've been watching for... as long as I remember:  I can now choose which damage types will ignore disruptor shields!

I'm pretty happy about that. I'm going to start testing and rebalancing a new & improved version of my mod. It's still just going to be a balance mod, but I've got a few ideas.

One minor question:  suppose I want to repurpose one of the existing damage types. For example, I might choose to rename the "dimension destabiliser" to, say "direct plasma" and then make it ignore disruptor shields, and let power swords use that damage type. There's a slight problem: the Battlescape icon for that damage type is a question mark. Is there any way to change that icon? Also, for the plasma sword, no matter what I set the damage type to the mouseover text always says "Hot plasma". I suppose that's hardcorded or something? I'm not sure. --  If I work something out I'll let you know; but I can't see any 'unknowns' which could be used for the damage type icon or mouse-over description.

-
Here's a little bit of info for the savegame editor.

Savegame -> Battlescape -> units:
Unknown 17 = Days of service
Unknown 18 = Total number of kills
Unknown 19 = Number of missions
Unknown 20 affects how many medals the agent has, but I don't know exactly how it works. (bigger score -> more medals, but that's all I can say.)

That's all I've got for now, but I'm currently trying to work something out, so I might have some more info shortly.


By the way, why is 'Apatcher' a separate tool? Can't that functionality be included in apoc'd?

Hey jos, I'm still around, though it's been quite some time since I last worked on apoc'd or disassembling apocalypse!
Regarding a) I suppose editing the damage modifiers for incendiary should work, assuming fire uses that damage type at least, don't think that's ever been tested.
b) sounds like something that won't work without editing the code, kind of like my attempts to edit the brainsucker launcher to fire grenades instead.
c) again could work, if the fire uses incendiary damage type Sorry I can't give any real help here, it's been a while