karadoc

If you'd like to try a mod in which toxins aren't as dominant in the end-game, I suggest trying my mod. I've only ever played the mod in turn-based mod, but I expect it would work fine in real time as well.

I've essentially just done two playthrough - and in one of them I was still making changes while playing. For me, I think the changes worked pretty well. I do think they make the game more fun. I think the best thing is remains viable to have different weapon combinations even as more things are researched. The main thing that motivated me to make a mod in the first place was that toxiguns were so powerful and easy to get that it just wasn't worth bothering with anything else. But now they are blocked by shields, and some weapons are more effective against shields, it isn't a bad idea to use a variety of weapons; and it's much harder to keep a good suply on shields up on ones own agents. Before uploading the mod, I made a few notes in the readme about how I thought the balance changes affected gameplay. But it's kind of hard for me to really tell how well balanced it is because I tend to use roughly the same kinds of tactics each time I play. I haven't played at all for quite awhile now, so my memory is a bit rusty. I don't realy have much to say about it other than what's already in the readme. I'm intending to play again some time and perhaps do some more rebalancing after incorporating this change, but I can't really say when that will happen. I just have to wait until the time feels right...

Thanks for this. I haven't been playing the game for awhile, and I just found this thread by chance, but I'm very interested to try this next time I play the game. It might have a large effect on tactics and balance, and I might have to readjust my balance mode if I include this fix. I wonder if this was actually a 'bug' (as in unintended behaviour), or whether it was a deliberate design decision by the developers - perhaps they thought it would be a good idea to encourage people to use their TUs each turn, or thought it would be unfair if stationary units could have a full turn worth of reaction fire or something like that... In any case, I think it's definitely a bad thing that weapons with > 25% TU cost can never be used in reaction fire; and reaction fire in general is weak in this game compared to in XCom 1 and 2. Anyway, as I said, thanks for the fix - and I look forward to trying it next time I get back into the game.

I was mistaken about "Morale? (copy 1)" & copy 2. I guess I just thought I'd tested that when I actually hadn't. I just tried it then, and I can't actually see any connection between those numbers and morale at all. I tried changing them, and I didn't notice any effect, and I had some agents suicide to the aliens to lower morale, and those two numbers were unchanged. -- The morale number attributed to zaimoni does match the number shown in the game.

After a lot of tweaking and testing, I'm ready to upload a new version of my mod. It's basically just a balance mod. There's no new content or anything special like that. My goal is improve balance so that gameplay tactics are a bit more varied and interesting, and also so that the game is a bit more difficult. This is the second version of the mod, and it's actually quite a lot different from the first. One of the core changes is that toxiguns no longer ignore disruptor shields. This is the main keystone change that I really wanted to do in the first version of the mod but couldn't do so at the time due to technical reasons... Anyway, as a result, I've been able to achieve a lot of the goals that I hoped to achieve the first time around. Previously the mod was basically just harder - but this time hopefully it will be more fun too! The download link is here. So please, download, play, and enjoy! And if you have any feedback, I'd like to hear it. - For a more detailed description, here is a copy-paste of some of the info in the txt file that comes with the mod:

That's interesting about about the European Union. I'm not sure if a table like that exists in Apoc or not - but I reckon that even if Apoc does have the same problem, it isn't what's causing the missing disruptor shields. The few alien inventories I surveyed for my previous post were in missions that had hardly any aliens. My own troops were armed to the teeth, so that would have taken up a lot of space in any equipment table; but if the total limit was being reached so early then I'd expect there to be a much larger problem in larger missions - so I don't think that's what's happening here. Incidentally, I saw a weird bug with an alien inventory yesterday. I had the alien mind-controlled, and I saw in their inventory that all their stuff was stacked into the same equipment slot (except for their gun). The left leg box thing had a bunch of entropy clips, a couple of vortex mines, and a couple of other things - all stacked into the same spot (which can usually only hold one item). For such a bug to be possible I guess the item data must point to the inventory slot rather than the inventory slot pointing to the item data. But I got that when outside of tactical missions it was the other way around. ie. the geoscape save games seem to store items by listing what is in each inventory slot - in which case the bug I saw would be impossible. So based on that, my guess is that the tactical mission data does use an equipment table. - Nevertheless, I don't think it is the cause of the missing shields.

You're right about the VP points. That's definitely what unknown 20 is. Also, here are a couple of other things about save-games My guess is that Unknown 32 is "max TUs" with the current level of encumbrance. It's the number of TUs you have at the start of the turn. But changing editing it in the save doesn't make much difference because it is recalculated again at the start of the turn. Strength (copy 1) is Max Strength, " (copy 2) is current strength, Similarly for Morale, Stamina, Reactions, and Psi energy -- but strangely, for Psi Defence it's the other way around. ie. Psi Defence (copy 1) is current psi defence, and (copy 2) is max. ---- By the way, do you happen to know how alien equipment is assigned? I've noticed that when the aliens start getting personal teleporters, fewer of them seem to carry disruptor shields. Based on a comment in the "Unit Stats" section, I gather than the equipment for antropods and skeletoids is determined by "Equipment Sets (score)"; but haven't been able to match what I see in that section to what I see in the game. My guess is that the equipment assignment is failing because the aliens don't have enough inventory space. Here's my thinking: I assume that since I'm seeing personal teleporter in the game, that means the aliens are using level 8 equipment sets - because those are the only sets that have teleporters. Now, in the level 8 section, there are lots of different things. There are 10 weapon types, 10 grenade types, and 10 "other equipement" pairs. A first I thought the type numbers were matched for these three things such that, for example, if an alien has weapon type 3 then that means they'll have grenade type 3 and other equipment 3. -- But I just checked the equipment of a few aliens I saw in the game, and they don't match up in that way. So, my next guess is that they just get a random thing from each category. ie. a random weapon type from 1-10 plus a random grenade type plus a random 'other equipment' pair. Is that right? For the 'other equipment', the reason I'm saying 'pairs' is because there is 1A, 1B, and 2A, 2B, and so on. From context I assume this means that the aliens are meant to be getting A and B from whichever 'other equipment' number is assigned to them; but I'm sure this isn't actually happening, because a few of the aliens I've actually checked are only carrying one 'other equipment' items, while every A/B pair at level 8 has two items. My guess is that when the equipment is being assigned, it doesn't allow the 'other equipment' stuff to be placed into the alien's left hand, and the aliens don't have enough room in their backpack, and so the items simply don't get placed. This means that aliens who lots of grenades are likely to miss out on their shields; and same for aliens who get brainsuckers or dimension missile launchers (because the ammo takes up significant amounts of inventory space). It would be nice if it skipped grenades rather than skipping the special equipment. Do you think I've understood that correctly? I'm going to try reducing the number of grenades and swapping the order of a couple of "other equipment" items to see if it helps - but this is a pretty late phase in the testing of my mod to be changing stuff which might break something... -- [edit] Regarding this: I set some armour to be 1/150, and it didn't seem to protect my agent against devastator cannon fire. - So I think the effectiveness does drop when the durability is low. (except possibility against brainsuckers...) Maybe some more testing is needed to be sure.

j'ordos, I think I have some information for you. In Cityscape -> UFO Missions, I'm pretty sure that Unknown 10, 11, and 12 represent a "retreat threshold" for types 1, 2, and 3 respectively. My testing has not been rigorous, but I'm pretty sure the number is the percentage of health below which the alien ships will abort their mission and retreat to the dimension gate. For example, if you set it to 100, the ufos will retreat as soon as they take any damage. But if you set it to 0 they will never retreat due to damage. I've only tested it on 'alien drop' and 'escort', and I've only tested extreme values like 1 & 99. -- But all that has worked, and since most of the normal values are around 20-40, I'm pretty sure it's a percentage.

I just did another set of trials, and the results support my negative relations theory. ie. Hybrids will not be made available for hire if Mutant Alliance has negative relations towards X-Com. They don't need to be 'unfriendly', and they certainly don't need to be 'hostile'. Any negative effect on their relations, no matter how minor, is enough to completely block hybrids from being available for hire. I assume the same is true for S.E.L.F., but I haven't tested that. Here's what I did to get the results: I started a new game on Superhuman; hired everyone at the start of the game, and carried out a single investigation in a Mutant Alliance building (without any aliens being found). This lowered the relations, but not enough to make them 'unfriendly'. ie. Mutant Alliance was still 'neutral' towards X-Com. With that done, I saved the game near the end of the first day. Then just ended the day and checked the hire screen for hybrid agents; then loaded the save, ended the day again, checked again, etc... This is essentially the same test as I did last time except with an investigation at the start to lower relations. I did 14 reloads, and there was not a single hybrid in any of them. So I think that's pretty conclusive. -- I'd appreciate it if someone else would repeat the test on their own computer so that I can rule out the possibility that my game files are corrupt or something. After all, I have modded the .exes a bit; maybe this is a bug caused as a side-effect of one of the modding changes or something like that.

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.

Ahh. AAR. I see now. I've never read one of those before. It looks like fun. (But I guess it's a fair bit of work to gather & upload all the screenshots etc... Do you write it up while mid-mission, or do you just take screenshots and then comment on them afterwards?) I read through the first three pages, and I counted how many times there were hybrids available.. I counted with 7 times with, and only 3 without; although, it's a somewhat biased sample because you didn't show the hire screen on every day, and so sometimes we'll actually be seeing a hybrid from a previous day. -- I think this is consistent with the 50% result I observed with my own trials. I'll check out some of the later stages of that AAR later on. It looks like you're doing pretty well so far, but I imagine it going to get pretty difficult later on without using any of the advanced weapons. -- In my own game, I was actually defeated today; which is a shame because I was just getting to point where some of my latest balance changes were about to come into play. My research was good, and I had good equipment (I had toxin B and personal disruptor shields.. and I was researching the small shields for craft), but I just didn't have enough agents to do all the ground missions. I had to skip some missions because all my guys were injured, and so organizations started to go hostile... but I still didn't have enough agents to do anything about it. In the end I figured I had to make a stand before MegaPol flipped to the alien side, so I sent in my last 5 agents... but I got wiped out! and so I had no choice but to resign. Now I'm going to have to start a new game. And I'm going to try harder this time so that I can actually test those late-game balance changes! When I'm done, I'll upload the mod and maybe someone can then use it to do an AAR without any special self-imposed rules. It's going to be hard enough anyway.

Well, in my tests the probability of a hybrid showing up was almost certainly 50%, and same for androids. If that was true in general for the actual game I was playing, it would be a truly remarkable string of bad luck. Failing 50% odds each day for three weeks would have a probability of less than 1 in 2 million; and my losing streak was more than that, because it was for both hybrids and androids, and it went for more than 3 weeks. Using my calculator that comes out as roughly 1 in a million billion. (ie 10^15) -- so I'm pretty sure it isn't just bad luck. Maybe tomorrow I'll try other test in with 'unfriendly' relations to see if it makes a difference. As for having multiple non-humans for hire; in my tests there were certainly cases with an android and a hybrid, but there were no examples with two of either of those. Based on the apatcher info I'd guess that the only way there can be more than one hybrid available for hire at a time is if one of them was carried over from the previous day. Or maybe things change when Mutant Alliance is friendly. But in any case, in the 44 trials I did for the previous test, there wasn't a single case of either two hybrids or two androids. -- @silencer_pl, I don't know what 'AAR' is.

Well, I just did some tests, and the results seem to indicate that info from Apatcher is completely correct. Here's what I did: - Start a new game. - Hire all available agents - fast-forward to near the end of the first day, and then save the game. - end the day, and check which agents are for hire - reload save, and check again, etc. While doing this, I made a tally of how many times there was a hybrid available, and how many times there wasn't. I did this test on Novice difficulty, and on Super-human difficulty. The results for Notice were 21 with and 21 without. The results for SH were 20 with and 22 without. I didn't explicitly count the androids or normal agents, but I did notice that there was never more than 1 android, and never more than 1 hybrid, and never more than 3 normal agents. And so the most number of agents for hire on any given trial was 5 (and this happened a few times); and a couple of times there was no one for hire at all... -- Those results seem to indicate that difficulty level has nothing to do with it; and that the probability of getting a hybrid or an android is 50-50. So then, what can I say about my current game? I still think it's pretty unlikely that I've completely missed through simple bad luck. It's just too unlikely. My guess is that although both of those organisations were listed as neutral for me, they were actually just slightly negative relations... Maybe I accidentally shot their buildings or something, and so they lost enough trust in X-Com to stop offering agents, but not enough to be listed as 'unfriendly'. I don't know what else it could be. Incidentally, in the game with no hybrids, I paid Mutant Alliance to become friendly - the next day there was still no hybrid, but I reloaded the save to test it and on the second attempt there was one. -- So... my guess is that any negative relations with those two organisations completely blocks them from putting up agents for hire, even if the negative relations aren't enough to make them 'unfriendly'.

@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.

Hmm. I was just looking at A patcher, which apparently can edit how many agents appear for hire each day. I haven't actually tried it, but the source code says this: That doesn't seem right to me, or at least it isn't the whole story. It seems to be suggesting that the probability of getting a hybrid or android is each 50% each day, and if that was true then the lack of hybrids and androids in my current game would have less than 1 in a million odds. I'm pretty sure that the relationship with Mutant Alliance & SELF has some effect on it. But do I really have to have them an 'friendly' to get any special units at all? I don't remember it being like that in previous games. Perhaps it has something to do with difficulty level? I haven't tried save-scumming to get one because I just want to play the game without any unnessary reloads, but this is starting to get ridiculous. I've looked every day, and I'm now well into week 4 without a single hybrid, and only 1 android. (The fact that I did get 1 android suggests they don't have to be friendly...) Maybe later on I'll start a test game so that I can experiment to see the effect of relations & difficulty level.