daishiw

Hi, thanks for the help guys. I am using Xcom CE and xcomutil. After editing UFO Defense.exe then copying it twice and renaming to tactical.exe and geoscape.exe I found that the entry for the Power Suit in the UFOpedia did in fact update to the new values (110, 90, 90, 80, 70). However I think simply copying UFO Defense.exe and renaming it did away with a lot of the xcomutil changes. So I guess I can either try using that splitter/merger or just run XcuSetup again to get my xcomutil changes re-implemented. Anyway, cheers guys.

I've tried following Zombie's directions - running command.com under WinXP then in C:\ufo running edit /100 UfoDefense.exe. I copy pasted the characters for the flying suit armor values over on top of the values of the power suit (I don't like using the flying suit but it has better armor values!). When I started a new game, the UFOpedia still had the old values for the power suit when I research it. Does that just mean that the armor values aren't linked directly to the UFOpedia entry? Or have I screwed up and failed in my attempted changes?

it seems there's a unique plot mission for the Biomass sample. the mission intro is something like "This is a good opportunity to attack the Biomass. Go there and destroy it." I cropped up for me a while after I did the Grays mission.

Sequel wishlist: Detailed geography and actual human populations programmed into the game. What I want is a basic political map on the geoscape with the capitals and major cities programmed with stats like population size, health of the population, satisfaction with your anti-Alien efforts etc. Then when aliens visit the cities they can affect those stats - kill people, make them sick or infect them with a mutating virus which would create more missions as you have to hunt down and destroy the mutants, or repel hidden clusters of aliens within a city. If we have cities like this then each city can be relatively unique - for instance all the largest cities might have weapons production facilities, each city would contribute troops to your team every now and then, and certain cities can house Universities and research labs. Basically replace bases with cities and give each city its own unique characteristics. Then you can be "oh no I lost Constantinople to the aliens! Now I will have x% less research points and x% less recruits to draw on". It would also make the big cities really important, and if the AI is programmed to try to isolate and take out these cities it could make the game more satisfying strategically.

gimme a freakin chopper speed upgrade or something. don't randomize troop deployment on base defense missions, you arrive by chopper or teleporter so they should all be together. rework armour settings so you start with infinite light, combat and heavy armour like with uzis and shotguns. then change it so that research "ehancer xxx armour" just upgrades and replaces the armour you have in stock, not requiring you to manufacture it. rebalance armour and weapons so that you don't have to use alien armour almost exclusively. Make it so when you have a group of troopers selected, and they all have the same voice-report (e.g hostile killed) only one of them makes the report, not all seven reply repeating themselves. Perhaps mod the planter UFOs so that you don't see many of them earlier in the game, and when they do show up they come in waves of 4 or 5 and try to play biomass as deep within your territory as possible. at the moment does the biomass growth even have any correletion with the planters landing, or is it just scripted depends on what region you begin the game in?

sifn't get some technical minded peeps to start digging into the game and do a Xcom total conversion + rebalancing. Rebalancing: - simplify the research tree (i.e. cut out the "enhanced" crap and the alien/human variants of each type of weapon.) - rebalance armour types and reduce their number (i.e. no "enhanced" crap and rebalance the armour types so that each is actually worth using depending on the situation - e.g. light, medium, heavy armour in warcraft 3, so that it makes sense to have some people wearing different armour types so they can specialise in taking out certain aliens). - rebalance psi Extra stuff (more difficult to add): - more custom missions (maybe a few missions where you fight humans allied with the aliens? would be surprising to come up against some dudes with powerful assault rifles that do hard damage) - modify geoscape somehow to bring in an actual strategy element. at the moment even with the delegate command the missions get boring and repetitive very fast, most of the time it doesn't really matter if you can take the next territory or not, it only gets hard if you are unlucky and biomass is eating your bases while your other borders are full of alien bases. Maybe someone could add a fixed layout of alien bases and forces, and some way of making the AI reinforce itself throughout its territories. So it becomes more like a war - e.g. you take out one alien base in a region so the AI brings reinforcements into nearby bases and they become harder take. Then you would need to find a base with say an Alien General and kill him so make the bases become easier to take again, or encircle the territories with your own bases or something. At the moment the aliens really don't threaten your territories much except with the Battleship attacks, and even if you lose a base to one of those you generally have plenty more and the non-existent AI doesn't capitalise on it and start attacking other bases, it all just seems to be random attacks.

Personality is great, so great in fact that I always have to dismiss a certain soldier-girl because her "distinctive" voice causes stabbing pains in my ears !

I get the movies but occasionally they come out all green and fuzzy instead of clear. There's no apparent cause, I haven't alt+tabbed out or anything.

When I set my guys to start moving, then put the mouse over an enemy it gives me the chance to hit calculated as if my units have already moved to the position ordered, instead of from where they actually are, so I have to cancel the movement order if I want to see if anyone is able to shoot the enemy.

first time round i lost 2 guys from the rocketlauncher ambush, then inside the base everyone ended up dying except for one dude with SLAW and heavy armour (rest had been in sun or combat armour) who had to trundle all the way to pick up the files and back.

is there anything in the tree dependent on alien power cell research that we never get to see, or does it just stop you from making the better type of ammo?

Are shotguns actually useful :<? I basically used uzis exclusively until I got some decent rifles, either laser or assault-rifle types.

Did anyone find that if you have a secure base mission near the biomass and let the biomass spread over the base before you capture it that once you do it seems to be inured to the biomass, which starts to melt away? Also alien bases based on the biomass seem to be immune, after I captured one I set it to anti-biomass but that still takes a day for the base to change over, why doesn't the base die right away?

If waiting and hiding is the only strat that works in an ASSAULT on an alien base then that's pretty lame. How much success do you have once the aliens start getting all their different weapon types which easily tear through your armour (plasma, microguns, alien rocketlaunchers) as well as seemingly 100% effective mind control? Your bait guy walks out and either gets pummeled to pieces immediately, or mind controlled .

Why are there all these threads about the storyline in the Gameplay section? Although I suppose some of the points about the storyline do affect the gameplay. It would have been nice to have more distinct general/hero types in the alien forces so you really got a kick out of it when you killed one. As far as I could tell there was never an actual Reticulan Officer or General, unless ALL the ones with bioarmour are "generals" and all the ones with sky armour are officers or something. As I said in another thread somewhere I hate the mutant aliens and find them boring, I'd rather there was more variation in the anthropod alien types. The only good thing about the transgenants is that they require you to use your full arsenal since some weapons are useless against certain alien types, whereas the Reticulans are mostly all one armour type with maybe a few wearing the next level up scattered in with them. Unfortunately almost all the transgenants are the same white colour so you can't tell what weapons to use visually, you have to go and memorise pages of stats. There really are too many armour types to deal with and theres no readily apparent balance ala scissors, paper, rock.

seems like you have to shoot a ufo down over the biomass or find a mission to do that is actually on the biomass before you can get a node off a ufo. the planters just dont seem to carry them unless you have got a biomass sample first.

The only major preferences I have with regards to the storyline is that at least part of it be based on Earth (or a planet populated by humans) and that we get to see and possibly interact with the civilians during the course of the game. It's always helpful to be reminded of what you are fighting for - it makes the story that much more involving if you get to actually save people rather than it becoming just a sort of intellectual exercise with gore overlaid. It's more fun if your actions or omissions have consequences e.g. you let the aliens run amok all over Asia until reports come in that the Chinese civilian population has taken [insert number] billion casualties and its all your fault :o ! Regarding the interface and gameplay: - don't try to turn back the clock and implement turn-based action. it won't work as a hybrid, and a pure turn-based game is unlikely to succeed and please any but the most old-school tactical gamers. imo the way to go is to evolve the RTS system further, ideally to a stage where it isn't necessary to pause anymore. perhaps you should look to the micromanagement that takes place in games like warcraft3 with the hero-units. make the interface easy but powerful (unit grouping, hotkeys for everything, speedy reponses to all orders instead of taking ages to turn and run when told to) and then the tactical element can be more about the actual positioning and utilisation of units instead of pausing it to grapple with the pathing every 5s. - funding is cool and definitely helps make you care about saving particular nations if for some reason you can't get into the storyline and don't care about saving faceless civilians out of the goodness of your heart. leaving it out just makes time your currency and means if you are crap then you end up having to spend heaps of time doing repetitions of the easier tactical missions which is a turn-off. - the information and pictures on the research and weapons are alright, its more a presentation problem. I want the picture to be BIG and in the center with the information in a larger font and perhaps more concise. It should be more "HERE is your awesome toy you worked so hard for and THIS is what it does" rather than an overly verbose description with a dour spec sheet tucked at the bottom. - DON'T clutter the research tree with too many unecessary items. IMO it doesn't make the game more fun to have both normal and enhanced laser and plasma guns. You are wasting my time if I have to research something again when the concept and place of the weapon is basically the same. The only excuse for this would be if I had all the low-grade stuff right at the start of the game and the upgrades were necessary to keep each weapon-type competitive later on in relation to newer, different weapons. The same goes for multiple types of alien rocketlauncher. I also don't like needing to research 20 different types of slimey-blob aliens. Just give me a generic "mutant aliens the complete encyclopaedia". TBH I don't really care about the various mutant transgenants, I have no respect for those types of enemies in either this game or their other incarnations such as Xcom: Apocalypse. The intelligent aliens with advanced weaponry are far worthier foes and for me it spoils the tension of the game to have zombie/mutant blobs shambling towards you. - Why make the heavy armour so useless and slow? Even more irritating is having the plasma launchers tear through your troops when the aliens first get them, but by the time you research the launchers yourself, the alien armour-type has become massively resistant to plasma damage the alien-cheese gun is now useless. At least give us a little window where we can use them with equal effectiveness, keeping us behind the curve for the entire rest of the game sucks.

Call me a sadist, but I would have liked to see some aliens screaming in pain. Otherwise the end movie was effective enough, I really hated the tiny little box of white text that pops up just before it though. They should have just did it like in the intro, a fullscreen scrolling page of text plus appropriate end-game music saying lalala you defeated the alien menace, everyone lives happily ever after unless of course we make a sequel. Another nice touch would have been a stats page like in those Colonization and Civ games summarising your achievements i.e. number of missions completed, total experience of soldiers, number of bases, amount of research, length of time in terms of the game (e.g. Jan 2005 to whenever). Anyway I have more serious gripes with the game than the ending, if someone makes another thread talking about the campaign from the point of view of those who have completed it, I'd have plenty to say in that.