ACM (UFO Aftershock)

[Solarius Scorch]

About reticulan staff. I was considering an ability to manufacture ret batteries and missiles, but i found no proper way to logically explain why laputians are able to manufacture these.

 

I wouldn't concern myself with that. Reticulan bats being a scarce and much desired item is fun, and part of the game's charm. Plus, it teaches you not to waste ammo.

 

Actually, I was wondering if Reticulan weapons shouldn't actually be harder to use. The reason being, I realised that the Reticulan weapons have no visible targeting systems, not even boresight; so I asked myself, how do Reticulans operate it, especially since it's so damn accurate? I figured it must have some kind of psionic targeter; but obviously you'd need to be psionic to use it. So I thought of a devious idea: introduce psionic targetting systems. Every Reticulan weapon has them installed, but if a human wants to use it, this targeter has to be uninstalled... which decreases overall accuracy of the weapon roughly by half. That would of course mean that only Psionics could use Reticulan weaponry to its full potential, because the targeter would require Psionic level 1. Probably overcomplicated to actually be employed, and maybe not that good from the gameplay point of view, but I figured that the idea was interesting enough to share.

 

On a completely unrelated note: is it just me, or you can't install .50 accelerator on cyborg machinegun and cyborg sniper rifle? I have produced them, but these weapons don't even have the "Compose" button. (Not that I complain, they're uber-powerful anyway.)

[Cal.50]

whoa, whoa, hold on. isn't Labuta a reticulan space craft? i don't remember the whole story, but the old Laputa was found buried on the Earth in UFO:AM. it was used by humans to escape form raging biomass. the rest of the story u may watch in UFO:AS intro - the old Laputa was destroyed and the new one was found on the Earth's orbit.

 

if there's a reticulan lab with reticulan library, it could have a small reticulan factory too. it's a military vessel after all.

[exewon]

whoa, whoa, hold on. isn't Labuta a reticulan space craft? i don't remember the whole story, but the old Laputa was found buried on the Earth in UFO:AM. it was used by humans to escape form raging biomass. the rest of the story u may watch in UFO:AS intro - the old Laputa was destroyed and the new one was found on the Earth's orbit.

 

if there's a reticulan lab with reticulan library, it could have a small reticulan factory too. it's a military vessel after all.

 

didn't the story used the end where the humans accepted the offer of the reticulan's to be shipped to a spaceship of reticulan design so they could use earth for growing the biomass?

If my thing is right it wouldn't make sense to give people that you drove away from their home blueprints for advanced weapons so they can attack you on even ground.

 

By the way does anybody have some tips for playing the missions. I keep getting my ass kicked when I am outnumbered.

 

P.S I don't know if it is possible but could you bring back the original capture type missions from UFO:AM? I found it a lot more realistic if you had to carry the captured alien/mutant back to the zone.

 

EDIT: By the way with the 2 first pistols you get excluding the desert eagle you have a typo in the glossary. It says you can produce it in the advanced weapons factory But you can produce them in the basic one.

[Solarius Scorch]

didn't the story used the end where the humans accepted the offer of the reticulan's to be shipped to a spaceship of reticulan design so they could use earth for growing the biomass?

If my thing is right it wouldn't make sense to give people that you drove away from their home blueprints for advanced weapons so they can attack you on even ground.

 

Fair enough. On the other hand, the living on board of alien spaceship alone should give people enough clues to duplicate some of their technology.

 

By the way does anybody have some tips for playing the missions. I keep getting my ass kicked when I am outnumbered.

 

Hmm... Hide in a room with just one small entrance and wait for them to come. One by one.

 

P.S I don't know if it is possible but could you bring back the original capture type missions from UFO:AM? I found it a lot more realistic if you had to carry the captured alien/mutant back to the zone.

 

Definitely would be nice (where are those happy days of XCom where you could fit everything in your backpack?), but I'm afraid it would be extremely difficult to pull off.

 

EDIT: By the way with the 2 first pistols you get excluding the desert eagle you have a typo in the glossary. It says you can produce it in the advanced weapons factory But you can produce them in the basic one.

 

At this point there are hundreds of typos all over the mod, so I guess pointing them out one by one here is pretty much pointless. As far as I can tell, Okim is aware of this, and will be fixing the descriptions in future releases.

[Cal.50]

didn't the story used the end where the humans accepted the offer of the reticulan's to be shipped to a spaceship of reticulan design so they could use earth for growing the biomass?

If my thing is right it wouldn't make sense to give people that you drove away from their home blueprints for advanced weapons so they can attack you on even ground.

it could be. i don't think that game gives any sufficient explanation of what really happened. i didn't bothered myself to look for an answer elsewhere.

 

at the early researches it said that both ships are quite similar, but the 'new Laputa' is more advanced then the 'old Laputa'. would u call a passenger liner and a battle cruiser with the same name? it should be same class or same model ship which is more likely. as far as i remember the new Laputa has cannons and stuff (we tried to shoot down the Wargot mothership in vain, didn't we?). so it is a military vessel.

btw i'm not sure if even three dozens of Laputas could have enough capacity for entire Earth's population, not to mention that we had only one.

 

therefore i incline to theory of lost war.

[Okim]

On a completely unrelated note: is it just me, or you can't install .50 accelerator on cyborg machinegun and cyborg sniper rifle? I have produced them, but these weapons don't even have the "Compose" button. (Not that I complain, they're uber-powerful anyway.)

 

Those two weapons must be reaquired/reproduced in order for compose button to appear. Just get all of your BH2 and barretts and 'lose' them in a mission (retreat from it while throwing away all these items). Nex time you produce or capture one of those it will have compose button. The game 'stores' all aquired items in samew file for faster access, so in your case it currently remembers a configuration without slots.

[Solarius Scorch]

Those two weapons must be reaquired/reproduced in order for compose button to appear. Just get all of your BH2 and barretts and 'lose' them in a mission (retreat from it while throwing away all these items). Nex time you produce or capture one of those it will have compose button. The game 'stores' all aquired items in samew file for faster access, so in your case it currently remembers a configuration without slots.

 

Ah, I see. I understand that if you start a new game with ACM 1.3, it will be available from the start?

[Okim]

Ah, I see. I understand that if you start a new game with ACM 1.3, it will be available from the start?

 

 

Yes, they will have all slots they intend to have when you start a new game. I wont advice you to do that - a new update is on its way with some major fixes.

[supercrimson]

Okim, great mod, very addictive, one problem. Every time it looks like Im gonna win a fight against the cultists, the game crashes..

 

Currently, I have to defend a base, on one of those crashed spaceships, I go to the top floor in the spaceship, set up an ambush an lure the cultists in. After several ill conceived attempts I finally managed to kill nearly all of them, then to my horror the game crashed. I then repeated the mission over and over again, trying different things and it still crashes. I also save at the beginning of the mission, half way through (I made 9 different saves through out the mission) and as the loading bar gets to 95% of one of those saves the game crashes again. Very infuriating puts it lightly.

 

So to recap, I start the tactical mission afresh, nearly finish it and it crashes. If Im in the mission, I save, then leave to have a smoke/eat then load that tactical mission, it crashes. And if I save at the beginning, middle and near the end of the tactical mission, play for half an hour more, it crashes and I attempt to load one of those saves, it crashes at 95% when loading that save (where it says 'creating units').

 

I installed the game, patched it to 1.2 then installed your mod. My computer is a hardcore beast, Im running windows 7 64. 4 gigs of ram, 1 gig gpu, plenty of hd space, and windows 7 automatically defrags my hd on a periodic basis. How do I solve this infuriating crashfesh conundrum?? Cheers!

[Solarius Scorch]

I've had similar issues with Wargot attack on Laputa: it kept on crashing, and loading a save made in the middle of the battle didn't work. What's more, once I started the mission again by going back to an earlier save and finished it successfully, I couldn't get to the research screen at all - it was crashing the game every time.

 

What I did was starting a new game and hoping it wouldn't happen again. It didn't.

 

PS. My .50 weapon add-ons work now, many thanks. Can't wait for 1.4!

[supercrimson]

So the trick is to start a new game? O_o If I were you and had gotten to the wargot stage, only to have to start over, I would have uninstalled the mod there and then. Ive had a lot of experience with fallout 3 mods like fook and mmm and the last thing I want to do is to 'start over again' to try and get that mythical 'stable game' only to find at some later stage in the game the bug pops up again and I have to 'start over again'.

 

Sry if I sound a bit cynical...

[Okim]

That`s ok. This damn crash-bug is an ancient cancer of ACM. I can`t figure out why this one happens. I thought that this crash was connected to ACMs re-equipped cultists, but if you say that is also happens with wargots (whom i never touched) - than i have no more ideas.

 

For me a simple loading autosave before the combat solves the problem.

 

Can you try to list all the cultists with different equipment (and armors) that you have encountered in that mission before the game crashed?

[ERISS]

I installed the game, patched it to 1.2 then installed your mod.

ACM runs with the 1.3 AS fanpatch. I don't think it will solve, but at least it will be better to install it before ACM.

[supercrimson]

Im not raging any more so I may be more assistance to you in regards to bug squashing. The very first time it crashed, I was swapping out some loot on the ground with stuff in one of my guys backpacks. I cant remember If it was a laser rifle or assualt rifle I was swapping out for a pole which I use to finish off the unconscious , aniways as soon as I dropped it in his inventory, the game crashed.

 

When I ctrl alt delete to desktop, the was a message there saying something about a fatal error and something about the inventory which I can only assume means theres conflicts with your items. Every time after that I had the crashing which is illustrated in my previous thread but without that fatal-error- inventory message waiting for me at desktop.

 

Every time the crash happened there was a dead or unconscious robot, tons of assorted cultists with a plethora of weaponry lying around. There were also dead cultists-cyborgs with there insane gear lying around. Things I noticed were machineguns, assault rifles, miniguns, smgs, pistols, rocket launchers and assorted sniper rifles. If theres also a crash with the wargots, maby tweaks are to blame for that? Possibly 2 different bugs. Tweaks bug and gear bug?

[Solarius Scorch]

Im not raging any more so I may be more assistance to you in regards to bug squashing. The very first time it crashed, I was swapping out some loot on the ground with stuff in one of my guys backpacks. I cant remember If it was a laser rifle or assualt rifle I was swapping out for a pole which I use to finish off the unconscious , aniways as soon as I dropped it in his inventory, the game crashed.

 

When I ctrl alt delete to desktop, the was a message there saying something about a fatal error and something about the inventory which I can only assume means theres conflicts with your items. Every time after that I had the crashing which is illustrated in my previous thread but without that fatal-error- inventory message waiting for me at desktop.

 

This isn't an ACM issue, I remember it soooo well from the vanilla game. Granted, it's more frequent with ACM, but I guess this is due to the increased number of units/items in a mission.

 

Tip: increasing your virtual memory seems to help a little.

[otreblA_SNAKE_[ITA]]

@supercrimson: do not make a lot of samegames (do just two or three more savegames): I had the same issue when I made 8\9 savegames

 

What is the 1.3 fanpatch?

[supercrimson]

This isn't an ACM issue, I remember it soooo well from the vanilla game. Granted, it's more frequent with ACM, but I guess this is due to the increased number of units/items in a mission.

 

Tip: increasing your virtual memory seems to help a little.

 

I had a feeling it was something about the game having memory issues.. The same happened with fallout 3 where mmm was adding a huge amount of units, along with fook adding a huge amount of items. I guse the way these 2 games handle memory is a bit finicky. I was gonna try combatmod but I sense I could come across the same issues there aswell. Hmmm indeed.

 

(edit) In regards to memory problems, I remember reading somewhere that this game has memory leak issues and that playing for only an hour and a half then saving, quitting and reloading - and repeating those steps through out your game can solve the crashing. Anyone heard about this?

 

@snake

At first I only made one or two saves, and still had the same issues. So I thought It could be some specific occurrence in the tactical game causing the corruption and if I made a tonne of save games I could use the process of elimination to uncover the cause of the corruption. I like this game and really want to solve this issue, or at least alleviate it to some degree so its not a game-killer.

 

And deff interested in this 1.3 patch.

[exewon]

now that I have machineguns and rifles the game became a lot easyer I can't wait to reach the cultist so It gets a bit harder.

 

But that aside I can't research laser weapons because I need to research the battery first. But I can't research it because I need to research plasme theory first But I can't because I need to find a plasma weapon. Is this a change in the mod. and if it is which faction has a high chance to use a plasma weapon?

[supercrimson]

now that I have machineguns and rifles the game became a lot easyer I can't wait to reach the cultist so It gets a bit harder.

 

But that aside I can't research laser weapons because I need to research the battery first. But I can't research it because I need to research plasme theory first But I can't because I need to find a plasma weapon. Is this a change in the mod. and if it is which faction has a high chance to use a plasma weapon?

 

If I remembered correctly its the wargots that use plasma weaponry. As to your other question Okim will have to answer that.

[Solarius Scorch]

If I remembered correctly its the wargots that use plasma weaponry.

 

And Reticulan plasma cannon. It's a wonderful toy.

[Okim]

But that aside I can't research laser weapons because I need to research the battery first. But I can't research it because I need to research plasme theory first But I can't because I need to find a plasma weapon. Is this a change in the mod. and if it is which faction has a high chance to use a plasma weapon?

 

You are confusing smth. The battery tech is required for laser improvements tech. Basic lasers are available from start. You just need a proper lab to research it.

 

 

About ACM and 1.3 patch.

 

I strongly recommend everybody to upgrade their UFO AS game to 1.3 before using ACM, however ACM is still compatible with 1.2 and should not cause any problems.

 

The first time i`ve experienced a saved-game crash was a year ago - the very first my attempts to tickle with various inventories. At first time i tried to narrow the problem by replacing each new inventory with default ones. I found nothing, so i decided that there is smth else in ACM or vanilla game that produces that crash.

 

After some research i found that a simple defrag before launching the game helps alot. Crashes after this service are less frequent, but still present.

 

Now i once again suspect inventories as the main reason of these crashes. There is another idea, however - ACM has increased numbers of enemies and this may be causing some kind of memory overflaw or smth like that.

[otreblA_SNAKE_[ITA]]

What if I'd patch my game AFTER installing ACM? Would I find new crashes or other similar things?

 

thank you for the info

[Solarius Scorch]

What if I'd patch my game AFTER installing ACM? Would I find new crashes or other similar things?

 

thank you for the info

 

I've just tested that, installed patch 1.3 and re-copied ACM files, just in case. All works fine.

[otreblA_SNAKE_[ITA]]

So I haven't to restart my game or something else?

[Solarius Scorch]

So I haven't to restart my game or something else?

 

No.

 

On a completely different subject, I dream of being able to use proper power armours... like the Wargot ones! You put a Human soldier inside, arm it with two Brownings (or quad rocket launcher + gauss minigun, for example), and off you go! The Wargot model is fine, it would only need some recolouring and making that stupid front window opaque to hide the Wargot pilot. Would probably be too hard to code (if possible at all), but man, it would be awesome.

 

Of course it would cause problems with transport, as it wouldn't fit into the landing capsule... Which means you'd need to use Orbital Combat Drop! Hell yeah!