May 8, 201511 yr You would just about have to rewrite the game engine (and make it a different game), but try to imagine going the way of the Worms games and allow wind to cause a lot of misery and hilarity when using missiles and projectiles. Or even sniper rifle rounds at long ranges (I've been watching Mythbusters). It can do a lot of bad things to smoke and fire as well. Blowing a smoke cloud aside, moving and fanning fires, etc. Simple particle effects that don't affect the gameplay would work. Like rain and snow. Back during my university days, when dabbling with a bit of programming, I made a very rudimentary rain simulator that animated a series of pixels with short tails that fell down the screen like rain drops. The drops would vanish after moving a set amount of pixels, briefly draw a splat and then respawn at a random coordinate on the upper half of the screen and repeat the process. This whole thing was then overlaid on top of an X-Com battlescape screenshot. It had quite a convincing effect. I followed up turning into a bit of a thunderstorm by making a value layer to brighten or darken the image in the double buffer before drawing it to the screen. Nothing really came of it, it was just a moment of fancy. - NKF
May 8, 201511 yr I'm quite glad you eventually gave up trying to thread that rocket through the UFO door at such a difficult angle. The odds of it succeeding were slim at best. Please take more care with the rocket launcher. It's dangerous. - NKF
May 8, 201511 yr That's interesting, just for visual effect or would it actually effect the play? Actually effect the play. We were discussing being possible to customize the game to add fire to maps when they are generated since it is already possible to add items to specific maps. Then I thought about the current smoke system and how it could be used for fog, the only thing required being a system to cover entire maps rather than having to add each individual square of smoke. And, if you add smoke, then it would be possible to add rain or snow and have them limit visibility or movement. This is possible with the current OXC engine, although Warboy has other priorities at the moment than to implement it. But what I also thought was that it would be nice to have weather (clouds) added to the Geoscape, so that the map conditions would be determined by the weather on the mission location. And have the Geoscape replicate Earth's axis tilt, which is what causes the seasons, which would also allow for midnight sun in the summer Arctic/Antarctic. But this is something that would need to be designed and implemented from scratch. Aren't soldiers in power armor safe from rockets ? Nope. Their under armor is 70 and a large rocket can deal 50-150 damage points.
May 8, 201511 yr I'm not sure if explosives always hit under armour. I see soldiers sometimes have injured arms, head after explosion.
May 8, 201511 yr Author I'm quite glad you eventually gave up trying to thread that rocket through the UFO door at such a difficult angle. The odds of it succeeding were slim at best. Please take more care with the rocket launcher. It's dangerous.You'd think I'd learn to be more careful with rockets considering my past experiences, but man that would have been an amazing shot if he could have gotten it off
May 8, 201511 yr I'm not sure if explosives always hit under armour. I see soldiers sometimes have injured arms, head after explosion. We're both right. Quoting UFOPaedia.org: "Explosive and area-effect stun damage will target Under armour if the target is at or adjacent to the centre of the explosion (i.e. a Direct Hit). For all other ranges in the blast radius are treated as directional damage originating from the centre of the explosion."
May 9, 201511 yr Power suits do offer a bit of protection from explosions, but you have to be standing a reasonable distance away and facing towards the source of the explosion. They certainly allow you to be standing closer to explosions than if you were not wearing any armour at all. Those two guys that were standing near the entrance in the video were only about 1 - 4 tiles from where the rocket might have landed. If the rocket had fired and hit either side of the doorway, they would have taken a bit of a battering at that range. Power suits and flying suits are quite resistant to Autocannon HE rounds. They're also good against Heavy Cannon HE rounds, but not invulnerable to direct hits. - NKF
May 9, 201511 yr That is why I like that in TFTD there are more resistances than in EU. It should have been added in OX from start.
May 11, 201511 yr Author Nice and easy small UFO this time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hey-Tj0J6is
May 13, 201511 yr Excusing the terror site massacres, which are perfectly understandable considering the circumstances, you've been doing fairly well to get away with only a couple of losses for the recovery missions in the last couple of videos. Also it's worth noting that you seem to be killing aliens better with the weakest weapon in the game in the last two videos. A bit of pistol gun slinging action. Loving it. I was rather surprised the snapshots had such a reasonable range with the Extender ranged based accuracy. - NKF
May 14, 201511 yr Author I may have to load a few more pistols on the craft, I've never really used them assuming they were weak compared to the rifles, the low TU costs are quite nice.
May 14, 201511 yr That's their only benefit. Accuracy and stopping power is much lower than rifle. And you have better weapons for close quarters.
May 15, 201511 yr Author Small UFO's are nice for the bank account... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giEQhusYCU8
May 17, 201511 yr Author Time to put the cowardice aside and take down some cyberdiscs... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ochzudgDK-M
May 18, 201511 yr Quite a cliff hanger of an episode. Part of the trouble here appears to be the your rocket soldiers being stuck at the back of the Skyranger. One suggestion for future missions is to not arm all your launchers, but instead leave one or two armed launchers on the equipment pile. That way you have access to one right away if you find a bunch of aliens or cyberdiscs right outside the Skyranger on the first turn. Also Kaazak surviving 9 shots to the face. That's a plasma pistol all right. Thank goodness for the power armour's strong front plates. - NKF
May 19, 201511 yr Author One suggestion for future missions is to not arm all your launchers, but instead leave one or two armed launchers on the equipment pile. That's a good idea... I haven't really figured what to do if there's something looking at me out the back of the skyranger, I don't really trust the smoke everytime but I know if I shoot and miss then someone's probably dead.
May 19, 201511 yr Author Commander?? Clearly I've made some terrible mistake... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB71gCDUheE
May 19, 201511 yr Everything is good. My personal opinion. I think it's not worth firing rifles and pistol at cyberdiscs will make a dent in them (wish ufopaedia showed armour values). I have to ask, why are you using rifles anyway. Auto Cannon would be much more powerful with AP rounds.
May 20, 201511 yr Author How is the accuracy of the auto cannon versus rifle? I've never looked but whenever I do use the autocannon (this is from 15 year ago memories) I seem to remember it being a bit lousy on accuracy.
May 20, 201511 yr Slightly worse and slightly costly to operate. More useful for breaching UFOs. And come again, with the extenders accuracy penalty Heavy Cannon would be even better option. Even more damage and only little worse aimed shot than the rifle.
May 20, 201511 yr For comparison in accuracy, Rifle autoshots are 35% accurate , and the Autocannon is 32%. For a rookie, that small drop hardly matters. It's all about luck at that stage anyway. I do agree that using the rifles and pistols aren't particularly ideal for fighting Cyberdiscs. Here are the numbers: Pistols do 26AP on average damage and Rifles do 30AP. Cyberdiscs only take 80% from AP, so that's 20 and 24 AP damage respectively. The damage rolls in UFO for AP/Laser/Plasma go from 0 ~ 200%, so actual damage is beween 0 - 41 and 0 - 48. Cyberdiscs have 34 protection on all facings. It nearly absorbs all the damage. It takes on more damage as you chip away the armour. So you can indeed do some damage with Pistols and Rifles if the game rolls a high number. Just not very often. To compare, Heavy Cannons do 56AP, Auto Cannon 42AP and Tank/Cannons do 60AP. After damage resistance, 44, 33 48 average AP damage respectively. All three have slightly better armour penetration potential. Of course, dont' go arming everyone with cannons just because of that. A variety of weapons is still better. - NKF
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