Challenge

[Catwalk]

New rule:

No more soldiers may enter alien ships after x turns, simulating that the ship has taken off. Soldiers already inside the ship may keep fighting, other soldiers may keep sweeping for aliens outside. If no soldiers have entered the ship, the remaining soldiers must return to your ship and abort mission.

 

x depends on ship size, as follows:

Very small = 10

Small = 12

Medium = 14

Large = 16

Very large = 18

If the ship crashed rather than landed, add 50% to the above values.

 

Also updated the full ruleset in the original post.

[Catwalk]

Updated rules again, still having a blast playing with this:

 

11) Using alternate research from XcomUtil. You must initiate all research projects as soon as they become available, forcing you to research everything at the same time.

14) REWORDED (You must clear your time units when using Gas Cannon and Hydro Jet Cannon, no reaction shots allowed.) These no longer have Snap modes, easier solution.

15) Heavily modified weapon stats. Main points:

a. Improved damage of starting weapons (28 for Dart Gun, 42 for Jat Harpoon, 60 for AP Gas Cannon)

b. Improved Snap accuracy across the board

c. Reduced Aimed accuracy across the board

d. Aimed TU cost always twice of Snap TU cost, for easier overview of balance

e. Heavier weapons overall, especially Gauss (8-16-24) and Sonic (10-20-30)

f. Much heavier Explosives, weighing 12 and doing 160 damage

g. Clip sizes reduced across the board, especially Gauss (8-6-4) and Sonic (5-4-3)

16) Time limitations on sub missions as follows:

a. A sub will take off after x turns.

b. x is equal to 6 + 2x ship size (very small is 1, small is 2, etc).

c. Crashed subs take 50% longer to take off due to repairs.

d. When a sub has taken off, no more soldiers may enter the sub. If you have no soldiers inside the sub or lose all soldiers inside the sub, you must return to ship and abort mission.

17) Must sack half of all newly hired engineers and scientists.

18) With 1 laboratory/workship, only 50% of your scientists/engineers may be used. With 2 laboratories, 75% may be used. With 3 laboratories or 2 workshops, all may be used.

19) Cost and quality of new recruits changes as follows:

a. Keep track of how many soldiers you've recruited in a text file

b. The first 10 soldiers are at default cost and quality

c. For the next 10 soldiers, you may only keep every second (meaning hiring 20 and sacking 10)

d. For the next 10 soldiers after that, you may only keep every third (meaning hiring 30 and sacking 20)

e. etc

20) When buying basic equipment (except craft weapons), you must buy 11 units and sell 10 of them. This increases prices by a factor of 3.5.

21) A weapon may only be fired once per round, if you are wielding two weapons you may fire twice. Snap TU costs reduced across the board to compensate. HJ Cannon is exempt from this limitation for Auto fire.

22) Chemical flares have been given a weight of 0, making it impossible to throw them (so you can only drop them on the ground). PH gas rounds and torpedoes have been boosted to compensate.

23) +50% health for all aliens (also means extra XP).

 

Is anybody interested in giving me a crash course on hex editing?

[Catwalk]

I'm updating this mod. It will still follow the principles mentioned and it roughly follows the outline, but many details will be tweaked.

[Alienated]

I wouldn't reduce aliens' reactions. This is almost the last hope the A.I. has.

 

May I recommend you to shoot aliens only when your shooter sees his target and the target is able to return fire? I have already recommended this to other players because I noticed it isn't a common way of playing X-COM.

 

If you do these two, then I guess you don't need any more mods.

 

Anyway, I'm happy to see you still playing. I thought for a moment you abandoned the game and all.

[Catwalk]

I agree reducing reactions helps the player, but keep in mind that scout'n'snipe tactics are extremely limited in usefulness with the mod. You need to either have immense firepower at your disposal (also takes a few more hits on average to down an alien) with great accuracy (most weapons are crap for aimed shots, and those which are good tend to have other limitations such as high TU usage or really low ammo), or take your chance on snap shots within vision range. So while it's easier to do reaction shots, you also need to do them a lot more often. And even at halved reactions, you're taking a risk that you wouldn't otherwise need to do if you fire from the safety of long distance.

 

The suggestion you're making is already part of it, in that you may only use snap shots on aliens you can see. And snap shots are vastly better than aimed shots. I do think aimed shots should remain an option that's useful at times. With less ammo and time restrictions, it may well end up costing you a lot more to waste a bunch of safe shots on aliens, but that's a tradeoff for the player to make and sometimes it can pay off.

 

My time is pretty limited, and I'm scattered across a bunch of different games (Master of Magic, Master of Orion, Civilization II, Starcraft, Desktop Dungeons as well as TFTD), so I'll probably be slow and disorganized as always. If you're interested in helping me complete this mod, I'd be most grateful for assistance.

[Alienated]

I can't help much. My only idea was that comment.

 

Yesterday I put aside EU for a while and took TFTD. I have an old saved game but I began a new one without fewer cheats. For example I have never built two alien containments because the game doesn't check the limit (ten captives per facility).

 

The rules for my new game: I may not start researching alien artefacts until I have gathered everything. This means earth technology for a long time. The earth technology isn't too bad, I finished a campaign with that already. What challenge I didn't take is the sole rely on the funding nations. Now put this and earth technology together to get a hard game because earth technology is quite expensive. You have to have at least eight Barracudas to intercept the two Dreadnoughts of an infiltration mission for example. Eight Barracudas cost a lot. If you can't separate the alien subs, then you have to deal with the Fleet Supply Cruiser, the Battleship, and the Cruiser also. That's four Barracudas in addition. If you don't reload (I am a notorious reloader because I like to play on the possiblities), you need the double amount of this at least. With a pair of sonic oscillator on a Leviathan, they fall like rotten fruits.

 

The cheapest thing can be the Gauss Cannon. After I research it, I don't need Ajax torpedoes (and I get some store space back). And the Gauss Cannon can destoy the Survey Ships. It took a lot of reloads to destroy the first Survey Ship with a pair of Gas Cannons and an Ajax Launcher and Gas Cannon combination. Three errors could and did happen: (1) the Gas Cannon downed the sub; (2) the Ajax just downed the sub; (3) the first Ajax missed the target (I wanted it to cost only one Ajax torpedo). (You can destroy a Small Scout by a Stingray missile in EU.) The next time I will do it by D.U.P. head and Ajax (it takes only one D.U.P. head torpedo). In my EU campaign, I only have Avalanche launchers and selled the rest because money doesn't matter there, and every Small Scout destruction costs two rockets.

 

I manage my account on paper. I record every selling that should be excluded from my cash to get the real money. I must spend only the real money. Otherwise I had three bases already. The second base may come only in March, until then I will be lucky enough to get the alien activity of February near my base again. My base is in the Mediterranean, more accurately near Fiume. The standard sonar can hear and see that area completely and a little of the North Sea whereas its detection rate is poor. You have to reload some times to get a glimpse on an alien sub at all. I noticed the Small Radar Systems in EU was better than that. And I must add you have a larger surface of Earth to observe because Earth has more water than dry land.

 

And finally: I declared the Bad Rookies Rule or rather Bad Seamen Rule again. This rule means all my new aquanauts have the worst values for TU (50), Stamina(40), Health(25), Bravery(10), Reactions(30), FA(40), TA(50), MA(20), Strength(20) whereas all are M.C. resistant (100). It takes several careful missions to have a squad of an actually operating men. In my EU campaign, my bad rookies looked like good rookies around June or July. Now some of them have 80-81 TU but there are several men who still have Reactions under 50 and FA under 55. My best few men have around 75 Reactions and around 70 FA and it is already December. So I foresee that this TFTD campaign can be similar or even worse because I will Vibro-Blading (or Thermal Tazing) a lot and it is much harder to set traps for aliens for Reactions improvements in TFTD because it is almost always dark and the terrain is difficult. The farmlands of EU provided many good places to set up a trap and I had good cover in night missions and it was possible to win without electroflares. This time I had to do my first mission in the dark without chemical flares though I did it daytime. It seems that touched down alien subs sit in deep water instead of shallow, you have to shoot them down in shallow waters to get missions in light terrains. I waited all along in the Triton opening the door and shooting at aliens who occasionally passed by. It took 114 turns and 6 reloads to win that mission. Now I count the reloads too. That 6 reloads mean that I could have lost two men in that mission. The Cruiser was much easier because (1) I had chemical flares; (2) only one alien patrolled outside of the sub. That took 3 reloads. However, I could have lost more men because they threw grenades like rain. One grenade fortunately landed on the roof of the Cruiser, haha, the fools kept trying. Fortunately the A.I. is extremely stupid, otherwise I couldn't even kill an alien ever.

 

So I recommend you to do a campaign by a mixture of rules. For example you use standard weapons without lobster men (you can manage alien activity by reloads). When you use sonic weapons or even gauss, the Aquatoid and Gill Man missions may be too easy whereas a gill man takes two or three shot of Jet Harpoon and their underwater terrorists (Hallucinoid and Xarquid) are decent opponent for Gas Cannon and Hidro Jet cannon. Grenades also make the game too easy, so you may as well ban them too. Even a bad rookie with 50 TA is a formidable killer with grenades.

 

I usually don't use HE ammo, and I can't see any benefit for phosphorous ammo so I wouldn't use that anyway. I believe that gauss weapons against Tasoth is a decently balanced game, and doing them away by Gas Cannons is a challenge. You don't need any equipment mod for a good gaming.

 

One rule can also be interesting: the Rookie Only Rule. As soon as a Seaman becomes Able Seaman (or Ensign), you must sack him. This means no experience game. No matter he is either killed or survive, aquanauts always cost money and they are what they are originally. It's a shame you can't switch off experience gaining in the option menu, I would have taken that challenge already whereas I don't like it because I don't like to operate with always new figures.

[Catwalk]

Well, there's a lot of balancing and menial labour to be done still And I could really use the help, so let me know if you change your mind.

 

In Master of Orion, I like trying out a different variant each game. TFTD somehow feels different to me, I prefer just fine tuning the game balance and then play with that.

 

One of the things I don't like about TFTD is that the only real way to get Reactions is to set up training situations. It is highly unprofitable to gain Reactions through actual use of reactions in a real situation. I'm mainly interested in closing a whole bunch of exploits and removing certain disheartening elements of the game (such as the near impossibility of defending against DPL, Tentaculats being a bit too mean and reaction fire being just overall unfair and generally useless to the human player).

 

Actually winning TFTD is such a big chore (and should be a bit harder with this mod), that I think this mod will keep me entertained for a long time to come if I manage to finish it.

[Alienated]

One of the things I don't like about TFTD is that the only real way to get Reactions is to set up training situations. It is highly unprofitable to gain Reactions through actual use of reactions in a real situation.

I agree if this is a comparison to Enemy Unknown. The TFTD aliens tend to use grenades a lot and they have a lot of grenades. They sure can miss with firearms but it is very hard to miss with a grenade. But as soon as you get the magnetic ion armor, you can settle traps for them, I mean you can fire at them from the air (water) whereas they are helpless with the grenades and they still throw them, the stupid devils. The problem is that they get DPL weaponry by the time you get the mag. ion armor. They have blaster launcher only on bases and battleships in EU but they have DPL on mere medium sized subs too. I think the best thing could be modifying the weapon allotment of alien squads. Take the grenades and DPL from them and get a good game. I have great ideas what to do. It's a shame you can't find sonic pistols later in the game for example, and there are a lot of aliens who don't even hold a weapon (Gill Man Technician, Lobster Man Commander, Lobster Man Navigator). Well, the X-COM games can be very annoying and I wouldn't care to play them without save & load.

 

Still there are funny situations, for example when your trap successfully tears the surprised aliens apart and their deathscreams are always funny, I can never get bored of that. I prefer TFTD deathscreams to EU deathscreams. I usually hardly can wait for the next port attack to hear the roar of the deep ones.

 

Yesterday I cleared a crash site of a battleship with gill men and xarquids. I saw the yellow "tanker" houses and thought: "now I will hide in them and be safe of alien grenading". And what happens? Actually the xarquids hid in the houses just waiting for my aquanauts to enter. Fortunately I quickly found out how to shoot them to death. That was the funniest crash site in TFTD I've had so far. By the way I wonder how on earth (under water) the big fat xarquids got in those small cabins. They surely came to life inside.

 

I think almost every game has some annoying part. Fortunately the aliens don't use DPL and sonic pulser as many times as they are able.

 

And I believe the reactions techniques aren't so unprofitable after you have learnt how to set it up well in TFTD too. And of course it takes reloading to see what can happen this way and that way, and slowly you learn the fine details of it and you can do it wihtout any reloads. On base defense missions it works better than in EU because they have no DPL and they actually have to MOVE, not as they won't budge in their dirty submarines. I produced a disturbance sensor but in vain because every time I used it there wasn't anything on it. Oh well, at least I knew they were at full TU somewhere.

[Catwalk]

I think the best thing could be modifying the weapon allotment of alien squads. Take the grenades and DPL from them and get a good game.

...

Well, the X-COM games can be very annoying and I wouldn't care to play them without save & load.

I actually think the potential for being mutilated with grenades and DPL add a lot to the game, even without reloading. An average casualty rate of 3-6 per mission encourages diversity in squad composition, forcing you to think carefully about which men to risk for what mission. You'll always want a handful of crack troopers and then a bunch of riff raff, that way your initial casualties won't be too expensive. And with the rules in my mod, losing too much cannon fodder gets expensive after a while so you won't get too lax about that either.

 

Facing explosive weapons have interesting implications for your tactics. They encourage you to do aggressive scouting and to spread out your men more. This is balanced by the rule requiring (weakened) aimed shots to be used if you want to fire at aliens you can't see, making it difficult to focus enough firepower in a certain area without clustering your men a bit. Makes good formation really important.

 

And I believe the reactions techniques aren't so unprofitable after you have learnt how to set it up well in TFTD too. And of course it takes reloading to see what can happen this way and that way, and slowly you learn the fine details of it and you can do it wihtout any reloads. On base defense missions it works better than in EU because they have no DPL and they actually have to MOVE, not as they won't budge in their dirty submarines.

I agree that specifically setting up scenarios for training reactions is profitable. That's what I want to avoid, though. I think the player should be encouraged to make use of reactions in a natural setting simply to win the battle. Right now there's very little incentive to relying in any way on reactions, you lose out on it most of the time. It only really works with high reaction soldiers, and those are likely to be the ones you don't want to risk anyway.

[Alienated]

They encourage you to do aggressive scouting and to spread out your men more.

Aggressive scouting? In most cases the terrain is dark. And the blast radius of the DPL is so great that it covers 1/5 or 1/6 part of the whole place. And how do you enter the alien sub if you scatter your men so much?

 

Now you consider risking men and not risking men... You don't have to risk anybody. You don't have to do crash sites and landing sites at all. If I played the game so "seriously" that I risk and risk not, then I would not care to touch downed alien subs because it is not worth the risk. Or I would bomb apart the whole place by DPL bombs before I came out of the Triton. I did so in EU once or twice and I realised quickly that that was no game.

 

I agree that specifically setting up scenarios for training reactions is profitable. That's what I want to avoid, though. I think the player should be encouraged to make use of reactions in a natural setting simply to win the battle.

No training. To win the battle. The Reactions traps work well, but it is of course worse than the so called "scout & sniper tactics". I take that for a cheat. Just how long do you want to play shooting gallery in X-COM games?

[Catwalk]

Aggressive scouting? In most cases the terrain is dark. And the blast radius of the DPL is so great that it covers 1/5 or 1/6 part of the whole place. And how do you enter the alien sub if you scatter your men so much?

I agree that the damage should be lowered a bit, so you stand a fighting chance against it rather than it being insta-death. By aggressive scouting, I mean giving more incentives to finding the aliens rapidly rather than playing it safe. If the battlescape is dark, you'll need to scout even more aggressively and light the place up well.

Now you consider risking men and not risking men... You don't have to risk anybody. You don't have to do crash sites and landing sites at all. If I played the game so "seriously" that I risk and risk not, then I would not care to touch downed alien subs because it is not worth the risk. Or I would bomb apart the whole place by DPL bombs before I came out of the Triton. I did so in EU once or twice and I realised quickly that that was no game.

I agree that it should always be worth the risk to investigate subs. If that isn't the case, victory points and cash values can be messed about with.

 

Re: Reactions.

No training. To win the battle. The Reactions traps work well, but it is of course worse than the so called "scout & sniper tactics". I take that for a cheat. Just how long do you want to play shooting gallery in X-COM games?

I agree that scout'n'snipe is probably the biggest exploit, and I think my proposed rules deal with it quite well. Sniping is still an option, but often not a good one.

 

As for reaction traps, I think it's way too risky unless you're using soldiers with 50+ reactions for it. And those are the soldiers you probably don't want to lose, unless they're rookies who happen to have high reactions. I'd much rather charge the sub competently so the aliens don't get the chance to shoot at me. I recall once I set up a reaction trap outside a room with 4 soldiers. A single aquatoid went outside, dropped a sonic pulser and got shot. And I lost 4 men. I was sad.

[Alienated]

A single aquatoid went outside, dropped a sonic pulser and got shot. And I lost 4 men.

Now this kamikaze action of aliens is what makes me nervous. If the throwing range could be relative to the sighting-shooting range, this might not be a problem. The throwing range should be reduced to no more than ten tiles. But the aliens tend to throw grenades one or two tiles away, just as they also shoot the DPL from so far. When it is a lobster man, I can understand. But this is the normal thing. What I hate the most is when they attempt to throw where there is no way to throw, and blow themselves up. In that case you can't do anything about it.

 

But, as I said before, I can manage every misson without stupid grenade cases by save & load because the aliens don't use grenades as many time they could.

 

The only important thing is: play X-COM as you like it to play. If you don't like to ambush the aliens, then don't ambush them. An ambush is the worst if the aliens meet up at the door, one or two comes through it but the rest throw a grenade or shooting at your snipers from tricky angles. Then the best solution is open the door and tak-tak-tak from adjacent tile not to miss. I hate the scout-sniper method because it takes a lot of clicks on weapon, use menu, target, and carrying the cursor far away to the target. The lobster men made me hate it. It got laborous. When you auto-shot at an alien on adjacent tile, it goes down simply as pie. Now not the lobster man, I mean you auto-shot a muton by heavy plasma, or a snakeman or floater by laser pistol. And I think neither the tasoth can stand an auto-shot by gauss rifle. I reserve the vibro blade for lobster man. That is why I hate open terrain. They grenade a lot and I can't do the executioners' shot. When I get my soldiers inside an alien sub or UFO, I sigh in relief because I know my time has come! It is very funny when the aliens come home and my men welcome them from right and left at the frontdoor.