X-Com and its clones thread

Would you recommend Open X-Com? I grew a sudden interest due to this thread and memories and that's the first thing jewgle gave me.

Yeah it's good

Yeah do it, I think there are even a few mods to make shit better.
One that I can think of off the top of my head is the one that gives you more money but leaves your based undesigned.
So you don't have to do the annoying shit of deconstructing hangars to get decent base lay out.

Great game but it's so easy to break. There's literally no reason to buy or use half of the daemons, weapons, augments, missions or agents available to you.

Could still be percentage based like in Xenonauts 1, they might just be experimenting with the cover icons. It was kind of weird in Xenonauts 1 where green cover icon was cover in that direction, yellow/gray icon was partial cover given by an adjacent green/red cover with yellow being better and finally red cover icon was 100% full cover.

I thought it was green = good cover, yellow = average cover, red = bad cover and gray = no cover, but after modding Xenonauts I learned that wasn't the case.

Why even bother with the icons when you could drag free aim over the cover piece and see what the cover percentage is

They can be useful in seeing what directions you're covered.

k

k

...

not
>x

apparently it's too hard to recreate x-com with prettier graphics.

Xenonauts didnt have cover indicators for every tile side and corner?

Right you are Chet.

Yeah no idea why they downgraded it to only cover the cardinal directions.

wow, nobody posted UFO:AI ?
the hack happened to Holla Forums?

ufoai.org/wiki/News

How's OpenXCOM for someone who's never played anything of the sort?

It's literally Enemy Unknown but with support for modern PCs and a few quality of life improvement tweaks you can toggle on/off.
As for the gameplay expect your ass to be plowed first time ayys start using psionics, cyberdiscs or mutons in any significant capacity. And also when you don't know what techs or soldiers to prioritize.

How do I git gud at JA2 1.13 ? I always get fucked in the arse by the Drassen's counter attacking force.
I t made a squad with 6 player created characters but it's too easy so I'm going to start from scratch.
Any tips ? Any mercs that are good to start with ? What's the best build for the PC ? I usually go full commander for muh militia.

Here's a tip git gudyou've also got the scrubs way out to just disable the massive counterattack in the ini

Why? There's like 5-6 cheapass mercs and even 3-4 free ones that are simply made for sitting on their asses and churning out militia. Go autoweapons or night ops/stealh. Ambidex is also loads of fun.

You can take a (few) topend merc(s) and kill DeDee in the first ten days, the initial grunts can barely cope with Tarballs or Shadow. Or just grab someone cheap with preferably decent wisdom, sign longterm and punch some cows and shit.

Was X-COM 2 patched and fixed to a point where it's as playable as the first X-COM or should I wait for the inevitable GOTY Director's Cut Ultimate all DLC edition?

I've seen some anons say that the last patch helped, but right now firaxis is just focusing on porting it to consoles.

Does anyone have recommendations for bullshit free(or at least low bullshit) Long War settings? Where the airgame doesn't shit in my mouth every six minutes?

The former.
Or just play Long War again until Terra Invicta

The graphics are awful. You can see some obvious NuCOM elements. It looks like it already has less options.

Calm yer tits.
The only NuCom-like thing is the cover icon.

The ground combat is confirmed to be standard fare, with time units, 3D projectile, accuracy and cover calclations, unit inventory, etc..

Would that really be a bad thing? XCOM2 is easy on the eyes at least and the general art style is OK if you ignore the dlc crap.

I think he means gameplay and not graphics.

i like MercenaryCom…

now if i could get a game with JA shooting/reality and Xcom management that woud be lovely…

IMO nucom and nucom 2 are both trash tier with how simplified they are. Walking one foot takes as many time units as walking ten feet?

As if you never got trashed on cheap beer, heart-stopping grease tier burgers/pizzas/whatever or eaten a whole cake :^)
Now I'd love a ayy removal game that combines the base management of Evil Genius with the gameplay of Silent Storm, the promised features of Apocalypse and the character development of Valkyria. And that also has Mechwarrior 2/3 and Rogue Squadron like segments with personalized mechs and other craft. But this is the future we chose.

I chose jack shit.

what exactly sets UFO:AI apart from any of the other clones?

what exactly sets UFO:AI apart from any of the other clones?

Bumpan
I wonder if I should reinstall Long War and try and finish it for once.

what are the odds of the devs making xenonauts 2 casual for the normalfags?
and why are the humans not using their ayylium tech?

EBIC
I REALLY FUCKING LOVE THAT FEATURE

GET HYPE

Do it faggot and then realize how fucking boring the late game grind is and quit like I did.

It's not really boring, it's just that by the time I get gauss the airgame starts shitting on me and I lose interest.

user…

I quit Long War simply because it takes fucking forever to finish a single campaign. If you're going to make a mod that's merciless and requires you to do almost everything right in order to not get completely fucked, then don't make the campaign take three fucking years to finish. I'm okay with a much longer campaign than in the vanilla game, but they went way overboard with that shit.

Late game long war can get absurd, I'd definitely recommended anyone that plays it to go into the .ini and modify it to your personal taste.

I do like the longevity of the mod however it's the ridiculous grinding of resources and psionics training that takes me out of the game. When I do start up a new campaign I will be taking down some of the later game tech to about 70% of what they are.

Considering that Enemy Unknown is the name of the reboot and this guy has clearly never played any of them, it's probably a better idea to say UFO Defense.

Considering that Enemy Unknown is the name of the reboot and this guy has clearly never played any of them, it's probably a better idea to say UFO Defense.

Xenonauts was a really ugly game, I couldn't get into it due to the aesthetic. Classic x-com had the best art.

Never played X-com on DOS back in the day. Never could find the time to get into playing the DOS version in current year. However, hated how simple XCOM: Enemy Unknown was but generally love turn based tactical RPGs. Xenonauts looks good but I'm skeptical that its just an indieshit. Is it worth it? Or should I just stop asking and take the time to honestly play the DOS UFO Defense?

yeah, give it a try, if you like tactical rpgs and watch how your qt soldier die horribly

It got """""""""performance patches""""""""" that just made the graphical options that were horribly optimized not on by default (AKA MSAA, SSAO, subsurface scattering, and I think screen-space reflections). As someone who pre-ordered the Deluxe edition, the game itself is a mixed bag- very much two steps forward, two steps back.
>stealth system means that you don't have to cheese pods as much, in exchange you can't cheese pods as much
>TURN LIMITS
And most of those complaints are in the base game. I could rant about the shitty DLCs for a while. Hold off for now, the fact that they're working on an EW-style expansion is the worst-kept secret in the gaming industry right now.

Xenonauts is decent with mods. It's pretty much X-Com with some tweaks and additions but with less micromanaging and a more involved air war. Just pirate it if you're unsure and play with the community edition, it's pretty much essential.
OpenXcom is always there though if you want to go back to the original.

Holla Forums is shitting itself today eh? Anyhow the first X-Com was actually named as UFO: Enemy Unknown in some regions. The reboot reusing that as a subtitle adds to the confusion.

maybe

I wouldn't recommend it. It's pretty much straight old X-com, only with less content, a shittier artstyle, and dull gameplay.
Only thing it seems to add much of is vehicles.

Oh, I forgot to say that the new Geoscape is utterly forgettable.
Mods coming up in a sec.

I'm aware that it's X-COM: UFO Defense in Burgerland and UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe, but seeing as how people don't call this the UFO franchise and that Enemy Unknown is now the subtitle for NuCom, I think it's a better idea to call it Old-COM/X-COM (1994)/UFO Defense.

Don't forget that Sharpshooters are shit and can be out performed by both specialists and grenadiers. You can probably do every mission with 1 specialist and 5 grenadiers because that's how powerful they are. Dodge is a shitty mechanic that makes shooting fucking worthless on Archons or Vipers. Archons already get a defense bonus so adding dodge to the mix just makes me want to spam grenades on them instead.
And the greatest sin to me going from nuCOM: EW to 2 is
THE GAME IS TOO FUCKING EASY!
I brought the deluxe edition too and I'm not too pleased with my purchase.

I love xenonauts.

Adding onto that I forgot one major detail.
They changed the RNG again but this time it's similar to the way dice rolls work in D&D work. It's possible to get crit in full cover more often than Thin men in EU/EW. Now every ayy that shoots is a thin man.

Oh, lad

My faggots earn their names

I agree with you that it should be generally referred to as X-Com for the original and XCOM/NuCom for the reboot, but that guy didn't seem to refer to the reboot. Eh let's just say fuck the jews for the shitty reboot meme causing misunderstandings with shitty naming conventions.

...

I pirated it early on, when it first came out. Glad I did, because that thing was absolutely shit.
Missing half the content EU had, replaced it with shitty, unbalanced, and generally dull content, didn't even try to put in the EW content, and beyond that the missions were just plain shittier in every way.
The overgame was crap, and the base management, while it looks like it might be better, is actually worse.

EU was okay, if not good. EW made it pretty damn solid, if a tad easy. 2 just took the bare bones of EU, ignored all of EW, and threw in a bunch of garbage.

Is NuCom as shit as I hear people say it is?
Could someone give me a basic rundown?

The ayys do that for me plus muh clone trooper fetish :^)

Amen. But I'm not apologizing for how I referred to the original name of the original name or for triggering some burger.

original game, even

Arcadey, shiny, grindy. That work for you? Also memes and snek.

The thing that i hated about that game was the % for hit being a lie and no projectile paths, except for the bazooka.

EU is an alright BOARD game. A lot of the complaints about it are fairly valid.
EW Makes it pretty good if a bit easy since the early inclusion of MECs makes it easier to snowball. I recommend trying out EW and see how you go. If you can tolerate RNG bullshit, the lack of TUs and the lack of the major base management of UFO defense you'll probably enjoy it. Then play LW and bitch about it like me and a few fags here since it's a amazing overhaul mod but has a lot of bizarre design decisions and kind of a technical marvel with how it was made.
2 on the other hand is shit. Steer clear from it at least until the modding scene has one great overhaul that everyone can get behind and an expansion released which we know is coming.

Yep. I didn't want to get into the shit about how unbalanced the classes were, but an overview:
Sharpshooters:
Ranger:
As stated above, swords scale like shit, which isn't helped by how garbage their perks are in comparison. Until Lieutenant, the sneaky tree is better for almost any situation. If you're going on the left, you're giving up melee perks but said Lieutentant choices are based on either being sneaky or using your gun when you'd need to use a sword. Implacable is pretty nice to let you get in, kill a guy, and get out, while Bladestorm is your already-worse sword chance-to-hit with Overwatch aim maluses. Plus, I'm pretty sure that you'll still Bladestorm Mutons. Deep Cover, as with the two Sharpshooter perks, is pretty bad, but it's better since at least you can dash and go into Overwatch this time around. Meanwhile, the other skill means that you can ensure that you won't take damage at least once, which is really goddamn good in a game where any damage taken is penalized. Rapid Fire is Rapid Fire, and Reaper is only good for mopping up trash that Grenadiers can clear.
Specialists:
Their biggest problem is that they would be really interesting if you were able to take damage and hacking/anti-robot attacks weren't so important for missions and dealing with mid-late game missions. Since most of the choices are essentially choosing between healing and damaging enemies in a game where a good offense is the best defense, the only really interesting choices the Overwatch-affecting perks that're more personal preference regarding how you move your dudes.
Grenadiers:
Grenades are still the most important things in the game. You remove cover, short-circuit RNG, and can now do bonus damage if they had the bad luck to be on a second-story building. Since they have god-fucking-awful aim progression, they're almost punished for doing the gunner-related perks on top of missing out on the incredibly-powerful grenade perks.
I'm going to talk about DLC in a sec.

The % lie shit is only relevant to Normal and Easy. Classic and Impossibe have the aim bonuses turned off while in 2 only Legendary has them turned off. You could just edit the ini files to turn them off you know.

I found gunner Grenadiers to be the most powerful class in the game. You just need to throw on Perception mods on them and they can toss a nade at cover then blow them away with 110 aim. Like I mentioned earlier, you only really need grenadiers since explosives take care of the cover and gunners sweep them up. Then you need a specialist whore because she's doing the objective.

It's like you don't enjoy making the game stupid.

In my last Legendary mission I did run 2 psykers and dominated 2 gatekeepers. Shit was fun when they got assaulted by 5 fucking codices.

I like good tactical rpgs. If I start playing some one and stop and think that I'd rather be playing another more complex and interesting TRPG then I tend to lose interest fast. X-Com DOS seems to be complex enough its just the archaic control scheme that slows everything down and the ugly sprite-work that puts me off. I'm sure people with nostalgia goggles love the sprites but it just kills the vibe for me being someone who never played it back in the day.

My first TRPG was Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya on Game Gear.

I didn't even know Xenonauts 1 finished development.

I'll check that out. Is that the best Source port?
openxcom.com/mods

I forgot about the psi class until I was about 3/4s of the way through the game. The one soldier I turned into a psi operative spent the rest of the game in the psi chamber training since I wanted him to be max level. Then I got bored and just did the final mission without them.

You missed out, mate. It's pretty slick. One of the abilities is a near-guaranteed mind control. Another is more random, but you can damage quite severely along with it, and either mind control, stun, or panic the guy.

Reminder that these are sold for $20 total and $5-10 apiece.
Resistance Warriors Pack:
The pre-order bonus that lets you "Customize your squad of resistance fighters with bonus outfits, headgear, and custom facial war paint. Instantly unlock a survivor of the old war as a recruit in your barracks."
>but their date-of-birth wasn't changed from regular soldiers, not just letting but ensuring that every """"""veteran""""""" was five to ten years old when EW happened
Preorder DLC/10
Anarchy's Children:
It's a customization pack that "introduces more than 100 new exotic customizations for the entire arsenal of armors available to your XCOM soldiers." It's $5.
They managed to make Slingshot seem like a good DLC/10
Alien Hunters:
This DLC purports to "transform the soldiers of XCOM into an elite alien hunting squad with impressive new weapons and armor to face off against new alien Rulers that will pursue your squad across an entire campaign. Additional cosmetic upgrades to soldiers and the Avenger are included, as well as a new epic mission where Central Officer Bradford leads a squad with the guidance of an old friend."
Firaxis what the fuck are you smoking/10
Shen's Last Gift:
This DLC was Firaxis' ace in the hole. They were bringing back fucking MECs! How could they possibly fuck them up?
How did you even fuck up MECs, Firaxis?

Hands down best port in my opinion. Apocalypse port when?

Yes, use the nightlies. They have better mod support.

Yes, use the nightlies. They have better mod support.

Sounds like that would break the game, but a lot of the aliens have pretty bullshit abilities as well, all I know about Psi is that firaxis seemed to forget about the one that keeps an alien in stasis but you can't hit them since they came out with the cyro grenade that was basically a much better version of it.

Nigga, GUERILLA warfare.

Sectors can be recaptured.
Go in at night, kill a few guys, retreat. Bleed them try.
Or you can mine and set up proper defenses. Build milita before capturing the final part (the counterattack triggers once you fully take drassen. You need to have 33% of the town to train milita)

Technically, you can keep 2 Drassen sectors, and take other towns, prepare and leave the last Drassen sector for later.

PROTIP: punch bloodcats to death. You need (roughly) 2 mercss for every bloodcat to get it winded; after that, a single merch punching will keep it that way.

Good starting team: MD, Bull, Grizzly, Barry, Steroid.
Later add Wolf, Fox and Shadow.
Buns is also a great starter.

1) They love old X-Com and have said no chance. They are keeping the classic gameplay, with tweaks and bells and whistles..

2) It's not a direct sequel, but an alternate reality

The eternal early access game is Project Zomboid if anything.

It did. It broke the game something stupidly. But it also made the game absolutely hilarious because of it.

I liked xenonaughts but I felt they suffered from a few things.
>World air dominance is hard as fuck. Even on normal but I feel its supposed to be like that way

Good things about it

Some things I want to see

You want one better? Punch doors and cars since A: you can do it in realtime and B: doors and cars don't fight back

For what purpose? They're worth their weight in gold for the comedy skits alone.

Well shit, being able to play at 1920x1080 is a huge improvement already. Thanks goys!

Mr. Gojntarski is always part of my team.

Igor and Q are OK, but they are part of my B or C team, for merc morale reasons.

Never ever? The last sign of life from the dev of OpenApoc was half a year ago.

I really enjoyed the air war in Xenonauts. You constantly had to upgrade your air force, build smaller "air bases" and keep your finances/alien materials in check to keep up. The ability to manually play out the air combat was a nice addition as well. They were pretty generous with letting you recover and repair airplanes and there is actually an setting you can tweak that disables that feature which is too much even for me

About the samey maps, they are apparently changing their approach to level design in Xenonauts 2 to have for example a 20x20 area that is randomized, instead of the way they did it in Xenonauts 1 where they manually placed buildings and objects that were semi random (a building would always be in the same position for example but its interior changed slightly).

I took you for umm, peoples of evil for a moment there. Maybe I was wrong, maybe not.

Isn't that also on SegaCD? I think I played that one. I've also beaten SF1 and 2. Still need to get on 3. They're pretty simple though.

Oh hey, this thread reminded me that someone in the Ace Combat threads asked for my shitty geoscape mod again. Since I never posted it anywhere, I'll post it here again.

mega.nz/#!MUoTEAID!UlCBtDSvCVyzDHESRmePWDM0f3gy0J98Nh_DElxu2EA

This replaces the world.dat for the original X-com, and I've tested it in openXcom. It doesn't redefine country borders or city names, so it looks like extra shit instead of just kinda shit. No motivation to fix that either, since I'd have to do it by hand and keep checking the worlddat editor for coordinates and even less motivated to make a tool to help with it.

The worst and most glaring flaw by fucking FAR was the god awful fucking timer on over half your damn missions. I don't know what wackjob retard executive thought implementing that would be a good idea, but that was a horrendous decision. There was a damn good reason that immediately following the game's release, the most popular mod by a long shot was one that utterly removed turn limits (and another one that had mission timers only start when you were actually spotted, which made stealth super useful and added a surprisingly pleasant new angle to the game).

On 95% of all the missions with timers, you had two fucking choices: finish the mission successfully and take losses (2+ squadmates at least) or attempt to cut your losses by keeping everyone alive but dealing with the mission consequences. I would NEVER want to fucking play through a campaign on ironman with mission timers, I would blow a blood vessel from sheer rage by the second timed mission.

Timers make zero sense from an XCOM design perspective anyway. Sure you can justify it being there due to plot reasons, but XCOM is about making tactical choices in the field, attempting to accomplish a certain goal as best you can while minimizing your losses. Timers totally fuck that shit over, it's the game forcing its way into your face to scream at you "do this shit sloppy and pay a bad price, or don't, and pay a slightly less shitty price." It directly encourages awful gameplay and forces you to take super risky moves no sane person would do, making the entire result of succeeding a timed mission with no deaths almost 100% a result of luck.

I could write ten pages on why that shit was an atrocious decision beyond all fucking recognition but you get the point.

No problem nigga.
Grizzly is loved by almost everyone and gets along with almost everyone (except Dr. Q), so he is the backbone of my A-Team. Steroid hates ruskies, so Ivan and Igor go into another team.
Shadow is also liked by everyone and he is too cool to not take.

There is a table somehwere that tells you whom a merc likes, or hates and whom they can grow to like or hate.

Timed mission have their place, but they were badly implemented and there were too many.

I remember this game back in the day, I never really played it that much but gameplay wise in combat it reminded me of xcom a lot.

+3D more than skin deep, models actually used instead of die-rolls for things like hitscan resolution and physics-based projectile bounce.
+Well made and fun core game, tense FoV/LoS mechanics, labyrinthine maps, decent graphics.
-Game feature-incomplete, campaign incomplete.
-Engine characteristics mean terrain destruction will probably never be possible.
~Rebalance in 2.5 totally fucked up reaction fire. Seriously, it's unplayable now, play an older version until somebody patches it or the devs pull their heads out of their asses.

Don't include me in that "we". I didn't buy a single nucom game.

[HAND RUBBING INTENSIFIES]

Consider the fact all people playing + modding it have shit taste.

...

Thanks.

A good implementation I think would be Invisible Inc. In Invisible Inc every turn increments an alarm counter, as well as being spotted or killing a guard. Every 5 increments a new threat is introduced, from more cameras, to stronger firewalls, to guards getting different patrols or armor, or more guards being introduced, or one of your agent's locations being marked for guards.
I think such an approach would work nicely for X2, since it would add this nice risk-reward element to missions taking longer, than outright pulling the plug and telling the player to go fuck themselves.

I'm 100% sure that already happened.

even if it's a early mockup, those piece of interface ripped straight out from nuCom worry me.

That sounds like shit.

I don't want magically stronger guards or cameras magicaly popping into existence.

Alarms make sense.
Turn counters on specific missions (like, "stop that bomb!" or "board that train/ship before it leaves") make sense - and yes, those should be a failure if you don't make it in time.
But otherwise, no.

It's basically that, alarm levels. The higher the alarm level, the stronger the counter measures are.
I like your solution though. Pretty much the way it was in EU, is it not?

Don't forget that he's also one of the few heavy weaponfags in vanilla.
Personally I can't even imagine playing without Maddog, Fidel, Reaper, Scope or Nails. Scully, Devlin, Trevor, Red, Q, Ivan, Steroid, Konrad and Stephan come close second. Just too bad that Thor is such a cuck. WIS 97 iirc, like fuck me.

What about how the original games used to handle it? There's a difficulty level that mainly impacts the enemy numbers and how early the more powerful ayys will come out to play; while the monthly score further makes the game easier/harder based on your performance.

Daily reminder that Firaxis killed off the best X-COM clone out there.

moddb.com/games/ufo-the-two-sides
ufotts.ninex.info/

UFO: The Two Sides was an X-COM clone/remake that would let you play as either X-COM or as the aliens. Aliens would build secret bases, dispatch ships for subversion, research, and infiltration, and try to take over countries while AI-controlled X-COM would try to stop them. Playing as X-COM was the same as vanilla. Most significantly, though, you could play multiplayer on the geoscape over a long campaign, one person playing X-COM and one playing the ayyys, both doing the exact things that they would do in their respective singleplayer mode, but able to see each others ships, control ship battles, invade each others bases, etc. When ground battles were initiated, the two players would fight on the battlescape normally.

Firaxis DMCA'd the project well before the release of the nuCOM games.

Never forget.

I know it happened to Stellaris.

All I want is to be hunting for mythical creatures in the woods with a bunch of green boys and grizzled veterans before I realize I've bitten off way more than I can chew and I need to get the fuck out of dodge.

Oh, so that's why they stopped updating. Fucking hell.

Mordheim is pretty close with the added ability to play as some of the creatures.

Teams of cannibal ratmen, vampires, and mutants. Though you could always play pure and use witch hunters or battle nuns.

It looks very interesting and I've been meaning to check it out, but it looks closer to Valkyira Chronicles than X-Com.
Shit, it's just a medieval game anyway, so it wouldn't be so terrible if they just aped Nu-Com's mechanics, expanded on them for melee combat and threw in stuff like building destruction and horribly OP enemies coming after you in the woods at night.

You don't actually aim in Mordheim.
Also the RNG may put you off.

Not until the community edition added them no.

This user understands it. Reaction fire was nerfed into the ground and I stopped bothering with updating around about then.

RNG in x-com and similar titles is to be expected.

Demons are a thing that appear in higher difficulties.

So I found this totally not Xenomorphs and Hydralisks alien mod for Xenonauts that was made by some ruski. It was never updated to work with the newer versions of the game and one of the total overhaul mod teams used it to create some weird version of chryssalids involving the eggs (when reapers already had that role). I was thinking of updating it but giving it a unique role, maybe having them spread gas that hurts you when dying, so you have to make sure they are far away when taking them out. The queen (on the right) already has a projectile that shoots some sort of gas but the others are melee units. I'm thinking they should be mainly featured on terror missions.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

If I was like you, I'd never update past 2.2. Railguns were so fun back then.
But their insistence on nerfing good things only makes me try something new or look for ways to optimise what I'm already doing. The unfinished campaign was a bummer tho. But I understand the reason.

Mordheim is pretty fun. Just don't get too attached to your dudes. Falling in combat isn't automatic death, but more likely than not they aren't walking away from it without permanent injuries. Missing eyes, lost limbs, some form of insanity or another. Once they rank up, it's a bit easier to keep them whole, but the beginning especially makes you RNG's bitch.

The problem with current reaction fire isn't that it's harder, but that it's bass ackward. Actions that should start quickly (machinegun burst, long flamethrower blast) are treated the same as actions that take a long time to begin (lining up aimed shots and snipers), meaning that use of heavy full-auto weapons to provide covering fire doesn't work, and spray'n'pray out of an assault rifle when rounding a corner will be beaten several times over by pistol quickdraws, both of which are completely unrealistic. Everything other than pistols, grenades, and melee are completely useless in any offensive or defensive role other than finishing up known ambush targets that have all their AP drained by decoys.

What I miss most was the beastly grenade launcher, capable of reaction fire and magdumps.

...

web.archive.org/web/20160706183127/http://www.please use archive.is/articles/2016-05-24-paradox-pulls-discriminatory-stellaris-mod-that-made-all-humans-white
Can you get a shorter link somehow Jesus Christ that's long.

Sorry, I messed up: archive.is/DUeoA

Are they still using my old, shitty railgun model?
Have they finally put my "new" (old) laser rifles in?
I stopped following the game.

I happen to fondly remember ARs with plasma bullets from whichever version that I've played last. And I think that was 2.5.
What you're describing does sound pretty bad.

Grenade launchers and the like (anytihng with ballistic trajectory) would be nice if there were ways to at least guess alien positions behind fully obscuring obstacles. Like hearing, motion trackers and such.

No idea. Check the pics - these were in the last time I've played except the minigun.

Also, why did they have to remove Kerrblade?