X-Com Thread

TFTD and Xenonauts are really nice. TFTD is my favorite, with UFO Defense just behind it.

Anyone playing X-piratez?
Its bretty gud.

does the game scalates to something more than looting?

It's definitely more focused on looting but the end game is get codes from all four top factions and going to mars to fuck the gubbamints shit up.
Also the tech tree is huge which makes my dick hard.

The feminism thing is kinda pissing me off though

Please explain.

Grenades exploding immediately after you throw them with timer set at 0: Yes or No?

You're joking, right? Your entire outfit is exclusively female to the point of even the support staff and contradicting their own lore with obviously combat effective male mutant raiders and mercs.
And I remember at least several lines to the effect of "fighting the star gods patriarchy" in the 'pedia.

Still hell of a mod.

I thought that meant at the end of your turn they would go off, like what the charges do.

One of the Open X-COM options is to have them explode immediately after throwing if it's set to 0.

Fuck no. You throw a grenade it should be clear of friendlies. Popping a grenade and it blows up immediately for the rest of the squad to jump forwards is bullshit.

Pretty sure it was just an excuse for an entire organization to be run by ripped mutant amazonian women.
If it is a feminism thing than its low key to the point of me personally not giving a fuck.

Also found this gem

Difference is in the game there ARE some societies that treat the sexes differently. Most of the high ranking units are always male.

Give them money if you want results.

Been playing XCOM2 again recently, with a modlist ~180 mods strong. I enjoyed Vanilla well enough, but it was way too easy. All of the modded in variant enemies, new mission types and the Attrition Mod that replaces timers with escalating reinforcement waves has finally made the game somewhat difficult.
This is the kind of shit that X-Com is made of, and what XCOM should have been. It's a damn shame mods had to fix it, because there's gold buried in both XCOM and XCOM2 - it's buried deep, but it's there.

I also installed the Music Replacement Mod that replaces XCOM2 music with X-Com: UFO Defense music. It completely alters the feel of the game, and in my opinion enhances it significantly. Just having those creepy tones and bleeps, and that twangy midi synth makes the game feel so much more atmospheric. I was pleasantly surprised.
What didn't surprise me was that the music ultimately made me just want to replay X-Com again.
So that's what I'm doing right now, and boy howdy have my X-Com skills rusted. I was going at a good pace losing only 1-2 rookies per terror mission until the Cyberdiscs showed up and taught me the very important lesson that I'm shit. Four of them just hiding on rooftops and popping out during their turns to kill 2-3 units each and then return to hiding - I'd been wondering what I'd possible need the HiEx that I unconsciously bought for, and this answered my question pretty handily.

Beyond the basic tweaks built in to OpenXcom, I've never been able to play X-Com with mods. To me, the base game is basically perfection - just iron out the bugs and the game is absolutely flawless. Adding mods to it just allows mediocrity in.

I'm amazed the damn thing still runs with that many mods. One thing I did do in XCOM2 to quell my autism is mod out the amplifer so it looks somewhat like in XCOM where they are channeling their psi powers themselves.
A lot of the weapon mods can make the game a bit too easy, but units like the attack dog are just too amusing to not try at least once.

Any of those mods fix shooting through walls and ceilings?

Seems a bit excessive. Got something you'd recommend?

If there's any sort of angle on a target, you can shoot through walls/ceilings at them. That means if there's a shoulder sticking out or a foot sticking out, that's good enough to be "visible" and thus you can take potshots. It's kind of crappy, I guess, but I never saw the problem here myself.
In X-Com you can shoot through things, too, you just have to explicitly target the cover blocking line of sight with an auto-attack and one of your burst shots will destroy the wall while the others have a chance to hit your target. As long a single member of your squad has line of sight, you can do things like this.
In fact, I just killed the final floater on a map this way, by spotting him with a unit that had run out of TUs, and using other units across the entire damn map to drill a hole through cover in a straight line and then launch an aimed rocket through the hole they psychically knew how to create.
So I don't really see the problem with this, I guess. It sucks that you can sometimes hit an enemy that shouldn't be visible, but cover is just an accuracy debuff in XCOM whereas hit chance is unchanged in X-Com but you just have to make a hole or get a slightly different angle.

There's no noticeable performance hit, except for a 2 second hang when I open up some prop lists for the first time. I'm amazed the game even runs at a stable 60fps now, modded or not, when its performance was such dogshit for more than a month post-release.

I can recommend a few, depending on what you're looking for:
really fun but broken as fuck unless you have mods that also up difficulty significantly
allows any forcelevel-appropriate enemy to drop in reinforcement pods, rather than just sectoids and advent - makes for lots of FUN
new Advent "Aegis" variants with personal shield generators of various strengths that add some nice wrinkles, especially if they drop in on you early
adds Lockboxes with randomly modded gear in them that you can spend research days to unlock, also brings a suite of enhancements to gear such as being able to upgrade sidearms, swords and gremlins and so on
removes most timers and adds an Attrition Timer that drops reinforcements every time it hits zero. reinforcements escalate in power, number and frequency as turns progress. also gives units a limited number of reloads per mission before their ammo runs dry. also allows and requires you to call for evac and pull your troops out to successfully complete most missions - can't call for evac on ground you don't have eyes on, and can't call for evac within a certain number of tiles of enemy troops
pretty much what you'd expect, complete with a nice stabbing animation lifted from the stunlancer - makes for some tactical shanking rather than silly katana swinging
several nice variant objective types to mix things up, as well as a Haven Defense style retaliation mission where you have to hold against escalating waves for a certain number of turns
adds a third tier of perks to every unit, all of them ported over from Long War; makes for some nice additional choices. also adds one more rank - Brigadier
all of these mods serve to cut out all of the padded bullshit that can make the game drag, like all those times Bradford tells you about the same shit you heard on your first playthrough, and so on
makes suppression much more effective, basically locking a unit down for a turn - this obvious counts against your squad as much as against ayys
makes Hunker Down slightly less OP, but also allows it to be used when not in cover to provide modest defensive bonuses - also extinguishes fire on burning troops
because god fucking damn Firaxis what were you thinking with 90 degree snap?
if you field slavs, should be a no brainer
lets you pixel-hunt for that perfect hail mary nade to get you out of a bind
if you like FashionCOM
adds a double-check + confirmation roll to all crits and misses, making the RNG more closely match the %chance the game tells you for any given shot
if it's still not hard enough
adds in new alien types, including the one it's named for as well as a return of the EU drones

There's a ton I'm skipping over that work well to enhance a lot of these mods, but this is the basic skeleton of my modlist here.

Oh yeah, also:
removes timers until your concealment is blown, letting you get more in position before you have to start counting your turns; plays nicely with Attrition Mode

This is pretty much what I got after going over nexus. Fuck me if I know where you got 180

Couldn't get that shit to work for some reason

I have a shit ton of cosmetic mods.
FashionCOM is a hell of a drug, and every single soldier that makes it out of Rookie status has to look absolutely unique.

As a guy with a 163-strong modlist, it's half weapon mods, because only one or two weapon modders make all their shit in one mod.
If you're ever planning to go crazy with cosmetic mods, watch out for voice mods- if the game ever starts chugging, uncheck those first.

I picked up the habit of treating my troops like your average clone army, they're all XT-four digit random number Alpha>>Omega with only slight difference in uniform and camo to distinguish their classes and whatnot

I'm either missing something or steamworkshop really became the go-to place for mods

There's currently 2,091 on the workshop. Most are trash, but a fair number of them are worthwhile.

Yeah, it pretty much is. Far as I know, you can only buy NuCOM 2 on Steam and the community mod launcher works fine with Workshop mods. Nexus is for piratefags and people who really dislike Steam Workshop, which is disappointingly small.
Also, I'm considering doing another OpenXCOM play-by-post starting tomorrow night. How many people are interested, and what kind of mods should I run? Right now, if there's any interest, I'm planning on using

(checked)
Crying shame that. And I'd go for piratez, really hard to beat it's variety.

I felt really good about it this time, too.

Some people just don't deserve to be saved.

wew.

Gas stations are very hazardous to your health in the midst of an alien assault.
Unfortunately, the damn civvies are kinda retarded.

Civilians just need to learn to run away from the exterminatus rather than toward it.

From the original X-Com series, I had heard only the first game was good so I didn't bother with the rest, should I actually try them?

Also is XCOM 2 unfucked with patches and shit yet?

It's all in the hyphen.

No civilians in huehue land

Yes on both accounts.

They were probably trying to communicate and fuck the chryssalids.

Of the originals, UFO Defense is the best all-rounder, TFTD is much harder but in the end it's essentially UFO Defense but reskinned, Apocalypse is a beautiful clusterfuck of not-quite realized ambition, Interceptor is decent from what I've heard, I've never actually played it, and Enforcer is garbage-tier that's as bad as if not worse than The Bureau.

Apocalpse is my favourite game despite all its flaws. You can really tell that it needed a few more months in the oven, though. I will never understand why they made ground vehicles die instantly when the road under them gets damaged.

More like a couple of years. That game was supposed to be Covert Action: X-COM Edition with a shitload of spying, subterfuge and the occasional military raid.

Was Syndicate fun or is my memory shit?

Syndicate and Syndicate Wars were fucking fun, user. They haven't aged terribly well, and their mechanics are some of the clunkiest and least intuitive in history, but god damn those games were fun once you let yourself acclimate to them.
FUN

The original Syndicate? Fantastic.
I'm not too sure about the American Revolt, which was an expansion, Syndicate Wars was supposed to be somewhat fun but not as good as the original.
EA Syndicate is pure fucking trash from what I've heard.

There's also a game called "Satellite Reign" that's supposedly either by old devs of Syndicate, or designed to carry the torch, but I don't remember hearing anything good about it.

The old games are great fun

This website is rotting your brain, take time time off.
You play as a band of post apocalyptic Amazonian mutant pirates. If that attaches to feminism in your head, you need it checked.

The mods the tits, long though. My first play through I somehow triggered a stargod base invasion and had to reset. I feel like I just get worn out on the combat sometimes, same with regular xcom.

One thing I've never really definitively figured out is how useful smoke actually is in the original X-Com. I've always used it to cover my troops unloading from the Skyranger, and I generally also lay a blanket of smoke as I advance across a map, but I don't know how much it actually does for me.
Theoretically it would make it hard for aliens to see me, but I've always found that they have perfect vision at unlimited distance and can pinpoint you across an entire map in the dark.

Is smoke their one weakness? Or is this just placebo?

Smoke does help, it makes it so aliens have to be closer to see troopers in the smoke, but it degrades does over time.

I have great memories as a kid with a flight stick playing interceptor.

That's more or less what I'd always assumed; it's nice to finally have some confirmation.

I still don't understand how the game calculates this. For instance if the red dot was an ayy behind full cover and behind a wall, would only squaddie 2 have a shot on the ayy since squaddie 1 doesn't have an angle?

This "feature" was the only reason I dropped XCOM2 because it was never clear on how this worked.

It's funny how Interceptor was actually a pretty okay spin-off. Not the best, but fun on its own. If you anons have any means to play it give it a try at least.

"Shit man, did you see that fucking monster bite Todd and turn him into a zombie?"
"I KNOW WE BETTER RUN TOWARDS IT AND ALL OF THE OTHER EXPLOSIONS."

Well, by default the game has a LOS indicator, so when you're deciding where to move a unit, you see a red crosshair appear next to the health bar of any enemy that you'll be able to see/shoot from that position. There's a mod called "Gotcha!" that enhances it to turn yellow when that position will also let you flank them.

As far as shooting through walls goes, if a unit is next to a opening, like a door, window or corner, they're considered to be behind "open cover" - that is, even if it's full cover like a big-ass box, it's still like hiding behind a lamp post: everybody "knows" you're there even if they don't directly see you.
The way to avoid being shot at completely is the same in XCOM2 as it was in EU/EW/LW - you have to completely break LOS by hiding 1-2 tiles away from any opening: if you can't see them, they can't see you.

The monsters.

If anyone is into Xenonauts I might as well shill that I'm adding a tropical and swamp tileset to the game. The guys that worked on the tropical tileset before abandoned it, so I decided to pick it up and fix it and also make a variant of it with swamp themed maps. I will post it on nexusmods when it's done if this thread is dead by then.

Will there be any special attributes to go along with going through the swamp?

Yes actually, double TU cost for movement.

Nice, also xenonauts is great game (especially with mods)

When? Where? How long?
I have so many questions I want to ask that creepy fucker, but I can't because now he's a crispy fucker.

It's pretty great that even after all these years, this game can still occasionally give me chills. I wish NuCOM could have gotten the atmosphere appropriately creepy.

And then everything was terrible.

There's always one left over.

You don't really understand how horrifying nids are until you play higher difficulties. I though they were a meme until I bumped it up on another play through.

Anyone can recommend good mods for Xenonauts?

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So is someone going to start playing a round or is this just shitposting for the sake of shitposting?

I would but I have to study.

Jesus christ, is that how small HiEx is supposed to be? I haven't modded it or anything, but the blast radius of that shit in my openxcom is double that. I've had trouble finding people who can throw it far enough to not get killed by the blast.

/r/ing a Gestapo agent interrogating an alien.

I'll be starting one in about two hours, when I get back from my final class for the day.

There's a couple of tricks to that.
#1. Strength >30
#2. Bomb relay. Have one person prime and throw a bomb to someone else who picks it up, throws it, then the second or third or fourth thrower has more than enough TUs to back off.
#3. Take advantage of walls and corners. Walls have their own abilities to soak explosive blasts. I've had a blaster bomb go off near alien alloy walls and even though it slagged the walls my soldier was completely unfazed by the explosion.

The community edition and its included mods for starters, especially the map packs. Haven't tried the x-division total conversion but it seems to be the best one and most up to date if you want a new experience. I also made a mod that adds ambient sounds to ground combat nexusmods.com/xenonauts/mods/20/? and one that adds more friendly AI on terror missions nexusmods.com/xenonauts/mods/21/?

Sorry for shilling my own mods but those two were the ones I considered good enough of my personal mods to share. I'm also working as stated earlier on a tropical/swamp tileset/map pack. Need to create maps for the swamp tileset and then I'll upload it to nexusmods.

Are there any graphics replacement packs? I enjoyed Xenonauts gameplay, but something about the presentation just puts me off. I'm not sure if it's the pseudo-vectorized artstyle or the washed out palette or what, but looking at Xenonauts just drains my soul away.

That's a cow

Nothing for the tilesets/ground combat but there's several mods that replace the look of armors and soldiers in the equip menu. Real Fighter portraits and armors are the most comprehensive ones. nexusmods.com/xenonauts/mods/2/ and nexusmods.com/xenonauts/mods/1/

Personally I shared the same feeling towards the graphics at first, but the mundane look grew on me.

Nah man it's totally a genetically engineered giant mutant hamster made out of mutilated cow parts.

It's meant to be, but I see two small ears, two beady black eyes and a round black rodent snout.

Those certainly give it a more interesting look. I'll give them a go.

The only thing that matters for line of sight and shooting through walls is Full Cover. The fix you desire would require a complete engine overhaul.

Should I research/interrogate these "in order", or does it not matter? Just stumbled across a small UFO packed with Ethereals and somehow accidentally captured two of them alive during my standard berserk carpet bombing procedure.

Top pleb

I'm using the "openxcom" filter because I couldn't get xsplit, obs or dxtory to hook into it for some reason. I don't think it's that big a difference from the way it usually is, but I do generally play without filters if I can help it.

Ethereal Soldier, Alien Origins, Ethereal Leader, then go for Psionics.

Sorry about the delay, getting a few mods set up.
Openxcom.com's search function doesn't work with spaces and downloading mods is slow as shit.

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Shot down a terror ship full of Ethereals according to the hyperwave decoder, but they brought pets.
Are these sectopods? Or am I forgetting some other intermediate alien death machine?

All I know for sure is that they give no fucks about lasers or explosions.

Nope, that's a sectopod, the only thing that looks similar to it is the reaper

Well, fuck. I probably should have researched plasma by now.
All 14 troops unloaded everything they had into the leftmost secto, including five alien grenades and a barrage of laser rifle and heavy laser fire. Most shots actually hit the target, too, but it amounted to fucking nothing.

Silver lining: the smoke saved my ass. Nobody seems to know where I am, though one secto and an ethereal are wandering over towards my smoke cloud to get a better view of the earthling laser lightshow.

Sweet fucking christ. I thought I'd be happy to take it down, but instead my dread level just increased.

I don't know what the fuck this guy did to his heavy laser, but he took out the second secto and a third that appeared in a single turn.
Very suspicious. I may have him report to containment for interrogation after the mission.

In the end, there were 5 sectos. I used that one guy to make short work of them.
I have no idea why his particular heavy laser is so much more powerful than the others, but at this point I'm not complaining.

Check the guys stats, he might be special in some way.

And that's how you're missing all shots, there's like either a 50% or 25% accuracy reduction depending on rng, if your soldiers have anything in the other hand while shooting.

Asides from that, yes they're sectopods, they're immune to pretty much everything including heavy plasma. EXCEPT for heavy laser shots, but that's only if the h. Laser shots are hitting the frontal armor (aka the red casing of hyper reinforced glass that spews death).

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that Arabic script is just random letters next to each other, they're not even connected

0/10

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You might catch Islam from reading that stuff, bro.

there is literally nothing wrong with only listening to quran recitations all day every day

Not on my Holla Forums you don't

I wanna fuck that shark.

Next you are going to say you want to fuck Xeno's.

At least it has a chance of happening. The plans for the game seemed so amazing: Having multiple alien dimensions to go in, kidnapping, blackmail, spies, a fleshed out political and corporate system. You would have had things to do in-between alien attacks, Mega Primus would have been so alive: Corps raiding each other, assassinations, actually being involved with city politics.

It's even more painful because the stuff left in the game was made pointless by those cuts. Like you could build this awesome tank-looking thing and give it a nuke but it served no practical purpose(also ground vehicles were gimped severely because destroyed road = insta death).

I built it anyways and fired the nuke at one of the cult's temples. Even though flattening their place of worship was satisfying it left me thinking what could have been.

About to give Xenonauts another shot, and I'm installing various recommended mods, but I'm honestly shocked at how absolutely dead its modding scene is.
No matter where you look - workshop, nexus or official - most of the top mods seem to have no more than 50 downloads, and there are even some very recently created mods that have dependencies on older mods that are no longer hosted anywhere.

I thought that modability was one of the primary goals of the Xenonauts project, and it seems to have failed miserably.

Xenonauts went largely unnoticed. No bajjilion shekels to put into marketing.

It is a great game.

I really didn't enjoy it when it first came out. Lots of little things about it put me off, and it always felt half-finished to me.
I've got it modded up now with XCE and some cosmetic stuff, and I've gotta say I'm having a much better time.

I don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing, of course, but I'm have a good time fumbling around in the dark. In a way, that kind of enhances the "enemy unknown" vibes, I suppose.

I do have one bone to pick, though:
We got some kind of bleeding heart liberal CO or something, I guess.

Another flawless victory criticized by the soviet demoralization agents at Xenonauts HQ.

Now I remember why I didn't really like Xenonauts.

The accuracy of your shots is worse than Long War or X-Com Superhuman, and shooting through walls is worse than even XCOM 2. This game definitely needed another year or two in the over to iron out the bugs.

Other than that frustration, it's still pretty fun. Just running with a team of 8 shield troops now who run up point-blank and shoot ayys in the face. It'd be nice if the shields lasted more than one or two hits before disintegrating, but it's still early days and beggars can't be choosers.
I'd use rifles, or snipers, or anything else really, but even with aimed shots, nobody seem to be able to get above 11% to hit unless they're within 3 tiles of an enemy - and usual engagement range is 15-20 tiles with zero cover in between.

Hopefully I can upgrade my weapons ASAP. Day 20 and I still don't see anything resembling lasers in my research screen, so I'm a bit worried.

Well, the first ufo only has a few sebilian non-combatants.

Protip:
Shields are your friend early on.
Grenades are you friend.

I could write a list of suggestions, but I'll just leave a video of me doing a LP:

do note: I had some INSANE luck and I'm using a mod or two that makes things a bit easier in some cases.

Yeah I seem to recall that only shotguns and explosives were effective in the early game, which meant your guys were pretty fucked if you ended up in an open map. Rifles and miniguns were useful only after your soldiers had gained some accuracy and TUs.

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going to watch your letsplay wile i work

Do grenades exploding destroy other primed grenades lying in the radius of the blast? Then yes.
If they don't, then no.

*too -> either
Shit.

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FPS Syndicate was so fucking bad, the plot destroys the old DOS games with the destruction of Eurocorp while at the same time somehow starting the plot for the first game.

The Multiplayer? PvE, Instead of fucking Corp vs Corp fuckery MP battles its just a shitty blurry l4d clone, im glad i bought it for 4 bucks off kinguin with the preorder gold guns.

I started a new game, taking things more cautiously, bringing a team of 3 shields, 5 assaults and all of the nades.
It's going really well so far.

It's also a plus that I'm not on an open highway map this time, and it's also not a night mission this time.
I like that they give you infinite flares for night missions by default, but the shine radius could be just a little bigger.

Made it the first month with only one casualty this time around, and the first large UFO has just appeared - landed. Nevermind that I've not even seen a medium yet, it's too tempting to pass up.
My weapons are still all conventional with the exception of a single laser rifleman, but I do have a full complement of alenium grenades.

Right off the bat, I noticed a lizardman in the NE building and moved my team behind the wall to prepare to move in.
After ending the turn and watching what unfolded, I can only conclude that there are four or five lizardmen on the other side of this wall. Maybe they're all lined up and tacticool like my guys, too.

Also, one of what I assume are the Xenonauts version of chryssalids charged the civilian rent-a-cop, and for once the civilian won. I'll have to recruit him if he survives the day.

Why is XCOM2 such shit.

I mean, I enjoyed Nu-COM Numero Uno but 2 is just blah.

Also the mods are shit. "Mods will fix it!" my ass. I don't need shitty imported textures.

The base game is pretty fun, but Long War is definitely much, much better. Even unmodded, EU or EW are both better than XCOM 2.
There are a bunch of mods that can make it a lot better, though - things that mod more than just "imported textures", for a start.

Check here:

The gameplay mods and the QoL mods there are the ones to focus on, obviously. They'll make the game a fair bit more difficult, but also more tactical intense without the cheap tension of Game Over Timers.

Since both you and the aliens have fucking absurd abilities, there are timers for most of the missons, and taking any damage is punished severely, the base gameplay's less about prolonged firefights and more about killing everything before they can attack and fuck up the entire mission. If you like actually fighting aliens instead of positioning yourself for a huge ambush, you're not going to actulaly see that that much.

Also locking Psionics behind a single class was a bad idea, the core 4 classes are more than enough to beat the game without a hassle.

And since they didn't seem to balance around people having all psyker abilities on one soldier, they're bullshit OP.

Only the jews could have done this.

Did I say two?
Silly me.

I recently picked the game back up and decided to play using the Alien Allies mod and I gotta say, its pretty damn fun using Ayys on your team and kinda feels weird making a team consisting of mostly aliens and one Psionic soldier and a Support to heal. It can be unbalanced as all hell however. Aliens are made via the Proving Grounds and instantly come with level ups to give them their unique abilities. This makes them instantly more preferable to Rookies despite aliens needing materials and time to make. Its fairly balanced in that regard and you can't make an alien without doing the necessary research first. This makes it SLIGHTLY more balanced. The problem is how good some of the aliens are.

Can act as either an extremely mobile scout or sniper able to teleport anywhere that seems to be in the squads LoS and then instantly act. In essence. Codex's get a free flank each turn and can get Implacable after they score the near guaranteed kill thanks to the flank to run away. If you take the Death from above perk and use their "Lightning hands" skill smart you can basically end up killing about 4 enemies in a single round with the Codex and even equip them with the spider suit to get them a free move on top of their one action teleport. If she gets shot as well, even if its a small amount of damage, during the enemy turn she will automatically teleport away from the attacker. They also have access to their Psi-Rift to disable enemies weapons and using this in conjunction with a flash grenade guarantee's 12 - 15 damage on anything you use it on as they can't flee. Plus the enemy AI doesnt really know how to react to it in the first place. She can also take squad-sight allowing her to kill enemies from a distance despite not using a sniper. She also has decent accuracy so you wont miss that often. She's OP as shit and its kinda fun using her in some situations. Nice bonus is that her skeleton for animations is basically just a female human meaning she doesn't look weird in most cinematic cut-away scenes.
Can use shotguns, rifles or even snipers.
Players should self-impose some limits with the Codex as holy shit is it insane. I make it I can only use Psi-Rift once a mission. Otherwise, it makes the game a joke.

Viper (Waifu)
Insane early game and they have extremely good mobility, can buff themselves and have access to their poison spit and tongue pull. This basically allows the Viper to act as an almost early-mid game queen. Advent enemies that aren't smart with their positioning but you can't quite get the kill on can be either instantly killed by poison spit, or instantly disabled with Bind to act as a free kill. Nothing is more fun than yanking that one cheeky Stun-Lancer away allowing the rest of the team to try and focus on the others. Poison spit also does a fairly decent job of tearing through some enemies with armor. Making Gatekeepers absolutely trivial if you can plan correctly. She also comes with a plasma rifle giving her insane accuracy and great damage. I do recommend changing her weaponry to be more balanced. Other than that, she seems like a more competent Ranger and her bind attack is OP combined with Tongue pull, however it does leave her vulnerable as somehow she destroys cover all around her when she binds a target. It also serves as a great method of saving a kill for a rookie too.
Really fucking good and will be your MVP constantly if you make her early enough.

Berserker (Reverse-trap.)
Hilarious. The game and the mod WANTS you to use her as a tank yet she still suffers from getting wounds even if she only lost 1hp out of her 25. Also moving her even one tile instantly breaks concealment making it hilarious to discover on Iron-man mode. If she didn't suffer from the absolute gimp due to the wounds system however, the Berserker could be very fun to use. Their high mobility and ability to make all enemy attacks a dodge for one turn is great. The fact they have two different melee attacks is good too. One is used to close the distance from afar. If the enemy is within sprinting distance she can smack for a guaranteed 1-3 damage with high chance to stun or even knock unconscious. If they are within range of "Blue movement" they can do a guaranteed 12 -15 damage alongside the ability to stun and knock unconscious. They can take the Faceless Regen ability (Which doesnt seem to work for me.) So far however she's served as a nice mop up unit in combination with my Psi-ops inspiration ability. She might get even better once I get Stasis too. Sadly, she also suffers from Muton's counter attacks.

Fuck these teleporting squid-headed faggots forever. Four of them teleporting around my squad at the same time with blaster launchers and plasma HMGs is exactly what I didn't need.
One of my shield troopers got straight-up Yamcha'd, and the guy he was protecting fared only slightly better.

That sounds interesting, but I get really bored with X-Com games if I'm not getting my asshole pounded in on a regular basis.

Have you considered using the Fatigue mod? It imposes LW-style ~15-45 day vacations for every troop after every mission, increasing as their rank increases. It forces you to constantly recruit rookies and bring them on every mission, pretty much guaranteeing a fun meat grinder effect.
That would probably work well with your stronk xeno troops mod. Also consider the Attrition Mod I mentioned. There's a tipping point where any amount of OP will still be dragged under by sheer numbers, and if you take too long with your objectives, you could have some FUN that way, too.

In the end, XCOM2's greatest flaw is that it really offers very little challenge. Also, once you realize that all patrolling enemy pods are tethered to your squad position and will always patrol within a certain x/y displacement of your squad regardless of map generation and follow you wherever you move the only real way to bring the magic back is to abuse the fuck out of reinforcement pods and "all pods activated at mission start" / "no activated pod limit" mods.

I would also question why you willingly consort with xeno filth, but if you're using them as expendable beasts of burden that's probably acceptable.

Yeah, I've mostly been playing around with this mod as if the aliens turned out to be weak as trash then I didn't want to bother with starting another game and getting absolutely pounded because they turned out to be too useless to bother with.
I still need to try out the Chryssalid, Muton and Sectoid. Sectoid seems like a decent early-game Psionic alternative. Chryssalid looks to be decent dodge based melee and I have no idea what the Muton will turn out like.

Also yeah. XCOM2 suffers from being poorly balanced around those mission timers and concealment. Being able to just wait for cool-downs, reload freely and sit in over-watch and proceed 1 tile at a time in Base assault missions is the biggest example of this. The attrition mod seems great. My only worry is losing my snek-waifu once the difficulty ramps up. So your mods sound great for balancing.

???

Are you implying something here?

Xenonauts cops are hardcore

What the hell?
I never see that happen before.

The Elites from Halo are pretty cute hot…

...

Holding anything in the other hand lowers your accuracy with a rifle or a rocket launcher by 20%.

The penalty technically also applies to the stun rod, but since melee attacks always hit it doen't matter.

Should I stream some superhuman UFO run?

Sure, or just post pictures.

okay here it is:
twitch.tv/darianbro

Why was XCOM 2 so dissapointing and ultimately the only thing it did well was snake porn?

This user has some good points to this effect. Also Firaxis showed how little they gave a shit to balance not only with psionics, but with the DLC.

It failed because instead of fixing the problems of the previous games they instead dumbed it down further.
Completely gone.
Still unchanged.
Still there. Add performance issues on top of that and you have to wonder who the hell QA'd this piece of crap.
An underdeveloped mechanic. Shame, because it actually goes well with the guerilla theme.
Forces you to play fast. Doesn't even interact with concealmentw as the clock keeps ticking even in scenarios where nothing should happen until the enemy knows you're there. The True Concealment mod actually makes it worth a shit, but it shouldn't be up to the modders to unfuck the game.
Also what said.

Is Xenonauts good yet?

It's pretty good.
The most annoying flaw of it is still present, though: UFO swarms. What a shit mechanic.

Basically, UFOs go into a mating season for one week out of every month, where instead of getting a manageable stream of UFOs, you suddenly get ~10 appearing all around the globe in the same day.
If it was really rare, and it accompanied something sinister like a terror attack, alien base building or a base assault, and you had to prioritize the correct UFOs to thwart it, that would actually be fun and intelligent.
But there's no purpose to it. It's just LOOK AT ALL DEM AYYS like clockwork every 3 weeks. It's both silly and annoying at the same time.

Hey faggots, openxcom's site for mods is being a pain in the ass, can't upload my geoscape mod to it. So I'm dropping a file link to it in case anyone wants the rough draft of the Strangereal geoscape. mega.nz/#!MUoTEAID!UlCBtDSvCVyzDHESRmePWDM0f3gy0J98Nh_DElxu2EA

This replaces the default world.dat and gives you the continents of Strangereal as best as my lazy ass could make. The only problems are you need to change the rulesets to redefine countries names, borders, cities, and where the actual land is so that alien encounters aren't completely fucked. Otherwise, I tested it in OpenXCOM for about 20 seconds to see if it loaded and it looks fine.

Their mod site has never worked for me, I always have to go to the forums page for the mods.

Good to know it's not just me then. I'd upload some screenshots but I don't have it installed on this current computer. I just recovered it from an older box I was using it to work on.

>forget that kings get reaction moves after every single action you take rather than every turn
That was the most sound spanking I've ever gotten from this game. God damn I love this mod.

The shark will fuck you long before you manage to fuck it user.

So I finished the Tropical and Swamp tileset for Xenonauts. Here's the link: nexusmods.com/xenonauts/mods/23

I also recommend the mod Hold The Line that rebalances the morale and psionics.

Are there any mods that do away with the UFO swarms in this game? It's the one thing that just makes the game absolutely tedious every time it happens, and it happens far too often.
In original X-Com, once you had full global hyperwave coverage, you'd almost always have at least one UFO up, and occasionally up to three, but in Xenonauts I seem to get one UFO per week until the end of each month, and then I get about 17 all in the span of a day and a half.
I just don't understand what the point of it is, and it's beyond silly.

Also, those are some good looking tilesets. Installing them and taking them for a spin.

I don't think there's any made but it should be possible by editing these values in gameconfig.xml (Xenonauts: Community Edition).

Thanks, this looks like a good place to start for sure.

I mostly ask because of stuff like this happening with frustrating frequency

Here's some more settings in gameconfig.xml that might reduce the size of them.

Oh, interesting. It definitely looks like you've found the heart of it. Good one, user. I'm going to start tweaking and see how it turns out.

Good luck and be sure to edit the gameconfig.xml in Xenonauts\assets\mods\xce, not the one in Xenonauts\assets.

How the fuck and why the fuck did Firaxis fuck up MECs so badly in 2?

The rest of XCOM2 showed they didn't understand what people liked from the first game all that well

I should make an actual effort in beating the first one. I constantly half-ass it and never get anything done but it's too much fun just fucking around with explosives.

Something has to have happened behind the scenes. I can't possibly guess at what, but you don't downgrade that hard on purpose. Then again, a lot of things about the sequel seem fucked for no good reason.

Honestly, if you take EA Syndicate just as a over-the-top shooter and pretend it has nothing to do with the original Syndicate, it's actually not too terrible. Some of the boss fights are hard as balls, and the graphical style is pretty slick.

The real disappointment was Satellite Reign.

I've been tempted to try that for ages, but I keep holding off. Seems like I may be glad I did.
Can you elaborate on why it's so bad?

bump

How are shield units meant to be used in Xenonauts?
Are they just armored scouts? Am I supposed to use them as distractions?
I seem to mostly use them as mobile cover, but I have a feeling this is only going to work so long as the ayys aren't using explosives yet.

I used them as colliers, filled them up to the brim with grenades to blow up fences, hedges, the chrysallid knock-offs. They're also great at running towards lower tier enemies and blasting their asses off.

When you've got a guy with a heavy plasma rifle shooting at you, that shield will also more than likely save your units life.

Yeah, they're definitely durable. I've broken lots of reaction fire with them in this mission alone, which let my assaults and heavies run in and finish the job.
They also seem pretty good for ufo breaching, since they can block incoming shots while kneeling, and then the guys behind can just auto-fire right over their heads safely.
At least until enemies exist that reaction-fire with this game's equivalent of small launchers or blaster launchers.

I haven't found an effective way to use grenades yet, though. In old X-Com, grenades exist as an alternative way to deal damage when you're too far out of effective weapons range, because you can hail-mary those things across an entire map. In Xenonauts, you can barely throw them out of optimal shotgun range, and I've not even found a good way to throw them over walls effectively.
Rockets are fantastic, though. I never touched the so-called "Heavy Cannons" in X-Com, but the RPG in Xenonauts melts face.

Nice, after a small while I started feeling the same maps over and over like oh it's this farm again or of this city etc

Happened to me but I was able to have two teams fight at the same time, euro main base and a Florida base attack.

Never experienced a base invasion in xenonaughts.

How do you field-revive fallen soldiers in Xenonauts?
One of my shield units had his shield breached and it said he had "fallen" as opposed to saying "was killed", but I can't seem to stabilize him with a medkit.
Is it just flavor text and he's dead regardless?

In that playthrough I didn't have the economy to do much, since I was getting slowly crushed under the weight of the invasion. This time around, I might take a page from your book and field more than one skyranger.

Thank fuck for side doors.
It's too bad this thing doesn't have mounted guns, though.

Any magnets for the most recent Xenonauts?

Sometimes lady luck is kind, and then sometimes she's ridiculous.

Latest version is 1.65 and dropped over a month ago, so most torrents you find should be up to date.

That cop is a fucking hero.

>And pretend
What a low energy shitpost

I think what that guy meant, is that it's an okay generic game, but a terrible Syndicate game.
Kind of like second and third Matrix movie - they're entertaining generic sci-fi action movies, but they're shit as Matrix movies because they basically shit all over everything that made the first movie great.

It's an overly elaborate way of saying "it's shit but it has one or two redeeming qualities".

There's nothing to think about, the post is right fucking there.

No need to engage in mental gymnastics to defend Syndicat3™.

You may as shitpost further and say THI4F was good if you pretend it wasn't a thief game; like a Swedish cuckold on anti-depressants which lives in constant denial.

It's not really defending the Syndicate game, though, is it? It's acknowledging that it's shit, but some fun can be mined from it. There's plenty of games like that.
Personally, I from what I've seen, I don't think it's even worth a pirate, but I could be wrong.

I cum on xeno, it lamo at penis.

To honor your multiple consecutive dubs here's a friendly reminder about reacting to goon rejects neo/v/ derailing shitposts

Doing my first assault on an alien base in xenonauts now, and I don't really know what to expect.
It seems like every turn my soldiers roll a die to see if they either cumulatively lose bravery, or flat-out panic simply by being on the map? Is that right?
Beyond that, I expected more of an armed response, but instead I've just been holding the line against waves of reapers. I figured them for terror units rather than base personnel.

Fair point.

There are secret doors you can blow up to get round rooms. you can grenade them open.

Oh, that's kinda cool. Are they marked at all, or do I just have to guess Doom style?

Psionics from certain advance alien units. If it's really annoying you you can grab a mod to tone it down or even go visit their forums and edit the values yourself (just changing lines in notepad).

I think they look like vents.

Secret doors or no, my strategy thus far has been working pretty well.
One team is holding the LZ against the xenos who keep trying to sneak around behind the main squad, while the other team slowly advances down the hallway, always keeping enough TUs for reaction fire. I imagine it'll take me about 200 turns to clear the base this way, but it seems to be the safest option.
It feels like LW all over again, inching forward spamming overwatch.

I installed XCE as well as all recommended mods in this thread, so I've got the psionic rebalance. It's a good one for sure.

Ahh, yeah, I see them. I'll keep them in mind if a room looks too crazy to breach.

I don't know what the fuck I shot down, but the psionic spam emanating from this thing is off the goddamn charts. My squad's getting hit with 7-10 psionic attacks every round.
All I found outside of it were a couple of caesiums and a handful of flying goblins.

I'm tempted to buy xenonauts because of this thread. Is it worth it?

If you like original X-Com, then probably.
Whether you buy it or pirate it, make sure you install XCE (Xenonauts Community Edition) and look through this thread for other small mods.

This is where the game gets easy I guess.

It's pretty good, it's basically just X-COM with more quality of life.
I've never actually finished a game of it though, for some reason I always get bored after a while. It just doesn't have the same atmosphere as X-COM. I'd say it's at least worth pirating to try it out though.

Any idea how the linux port is?

I agree with this.
While it doesn't completely solve this issue, there's a mod that replaces all of the music with the X-Com soundtrack. Ever since I installed that, I've been having much more fun.
I never really realized just how important music was for a game's atmosphere before now.

There's a similar mod to replace XCOM2's music with X-Com's soundtrack, but it just made me want to play X-Com instead.

Those upgraded tactical shields may just be big slabs of alien alloy, but they sure do work.

1.65 is the newest official (which just mostly adds fixes from the community edition) but it's still preferred to use the community edition for mod compatability and it is also getting a new update soon.

Exactly why I made it. There's a new version by the way with some fixes and that replaces all the old somewhat buggy tropical maps with new ones I made. Manually remove the folder of the old version to be sure that the old maps get removed out of the rotation.

Depending on how much negative health they get when dying/falling they can either get wounded or KIA. I.e if they get hit when on low health they get much more negative health and has a much higher chance of dying. You can't revive while in combat like in X-com.

Is there a way to speed up combat animations in Xenonauts?

I don't believe so. Maybe through modding, but the in-game options seem pretty bare bones.

wew

I didn't think it would last this long.

It's a shame the reaction fire in versions of UFOAI 2.5 and after are screwed up to the point of unplayability. The idea of using Quake engine physics to resolve gunshots, grenade bounce, and locational damage with actual 3D simulation involving the onscreen models in a turn-based game, with randomness just being imposed by a Deus Ex-style aim cone delta, is extremely cool. The only inherent problem with the game is a lack of terrain destruction, which really isn't too bad.

But the current bizarre reaction fire system is precisely backward from anything that makes sense, counting down each TU of LoS from an attack's entire TU cost regardless of whether it's something that actually takes initial time, like lining up a carefully aimed shot with a pistol; it's something that happens immediately but has a long interval between shots, like firing and cocking a bolt-action rifle; or it's something that happens immediately but just keeps happening a long time, like magdumping a heavy machinegun. This also aggravates all X-Com alikes' (unlike, say, the Commandos series) inability to distinguish between reaction fire at an area you already have a bead on (like a doorway you've set up an ambush at) and something you notice out of your peripheral vision (like an unknown hovernet popping up over a long fence).

If I knew how, a mod or fork completely rejiggering the reaction fire would turn UFOAI back into something fun.

These things die hard

post best autopsy/interrogation

I fucking love how the lead scientist in Xenonauts just gives Zero fucks, even in his written reports.

I'm starting up a new campaign of nuCOM 2 with over 150 mods. Should be the most unstable, crash prone shit but it will at least be better than vanilla.

X-Com autism is strong.

That and the art in the research screens almost make it better than X-COM. Too bad that the Psi spam and panic system is even dumber than UFO Defense.

>friend asks me for some XCOM 2 mods

Has he played any of the other games before? XCOM 2 vanilla is too easy with grenadiers, normal just makes is a cakewalk.

I think he played a tiny amount of EU, but he's mostly new to the series. Talking with him, I think he's just bad at positioning- he's getting constantly flanked and loses like two rookies a mission.

The hold the line mod makes the psionics and morale system much better.

Might as well say this before the thread completely dies. I've updated the Tropical/Swamp tileset for Xenonauts again (nexusmods.com/xenonauts/mods/23/) so that treetops fade out when you move near trees/press the remove roofs button. See pic related.

I played all XCOMs released but never managed to finish even one of them.

What stopped you?

What did you consistently lose your squad-'dies' ?
Just curious user.

It looks like the Goldhawk site requires creating an account to download all mods now and there doesn't seem to be a mirror on Nexus. Well shit.

The first and only XCOM I beat was XCOM 2

How about X-COM or any of the UFOs?

Here's a link to download it from steam workshop without steam. steamworkshopdownloader.com/view/335228616
Just add .zip at the end of the filename if it's missing it.

Look like a cruiser.
And you have plasma guns, so I'm kinda surprised this is your first one

The second one is best and has the best mods.
The story behind the aliens is kinda meh

Why does no one seem to notice that terror from the deep is just enemy unknown with sprite swaps?

Because it just isn't. No ammoless weapons of mass reaction fire spamming aka laser pistols? Weapons that flat out don't work above water? Regular multistage missions? TFTD changed a lot more than most sequels do. I wouldn't say for the better but claiming it to be just a different coat of paint on the original UFO is a blatant lie.

Can't agree.
It's about on par with a decent expansion.

It's always bothered me that reaction fire/overwatch just covers a vague direction.
You should be able to set a target square to watch, with a major bonus to reaction time at that square and it's neighbors fading to a penalty farther away.

I've only finished XCOM: EU and XCOM 2 once of Commander and again on Legendary. I only did it the second time because I was surprised by how piss easy it was. Now I'm modding the shit out of it so it's actually an enjoyable game. I should just go back to play Long War and try to finish the classic games but my desire to mod this game to be good outweighs it.

I hope you realize you might be trying to do something that's impossible.

Is there an ayy purging game that plays similar to Invisible Inc, but with more of a hit and run combat tactic against a vastly superior force rather than just complete ghosting?