The X-Com Files: Play the early history of the agency

My worry was there is something they haven’t told us about yet that is going to need my money, so I’d been a bit conservative, but I guess I should open up another base. Asia has been busier, but I think western hemisphere is probably the best bet like @Nightgaunt did, and then both can send teams to Asia if needed for now. We’ve upgraded to renting vans now. I agree on the interface. They sure can seem to fire a lot of rounds from a glock in 1 turn though. :)

Surely there’s a mod or something by now to help! I can’t imagine people have been playing, banging on, and modding X-com all these years and no one’s solved the LOS issues, yet they’ve managed all these other wonderful QoL improvements.

Because I’d hate to ragequit over something so obvious. Especially now that I’ve read up on how reaction fire works. I had no idea it was an interactive system rather than just a “saving throw”! Leave it to Gollop to go the extra mile.

I think what we need is Ray to give his love to x-com like he did MOO. :)

And as I feared, line of sight has no easy resolution. Which is fair enough, I get it. It’s a tough problem in any simulation, and it will be decades before Gollop makes Phoenix Point, where the player’s actual line of sight replaces hit chances.

But I didn’t realize how wacky things can get with X-com’s LOS rules. Did y’all know that because a sectoid is so short, it can shoot a soldier through a farm’s wooden fence while the soldier’s return fire is blocked by the same fence? Oof.

Okay, I’m about to start my fifth or sixth attempt at this mod. My previous game ended when my last two agents were devoured by rats as soon as they stepped out of the car. Willard, noooooo! But at least I’m getting a handle on things!

Which difficulty are you playing on? I’ve been playing on experienced. I lost a van-load (and the van) of agents to something that I don’t recall now :/. I guess I’m trying to repress the memory (oh! I remember it now a reaper). One odd thing I’ve run into, perhaps a bug is if someone is fatally wounded, and we finish off the enemies, it will ask me if I do not want to exit, because someone is still fatally wounded. So I said no, initially because I thought maybe we can get back to the car and that huge medpack and fix them up a bit, but it ends when you hit end turn anyways and they end up showing up as wounded. Perhaps a thing with dropping it down from veteran to experienced as well I guess.

I chose the middle out of the five difficulties, so Veteran, I think? I looked up what difficulty levels do. It’s a pretty wide swathe of effects, and I don’t think you’re supposed to assume the middle setting is the middle difficulty. Oops. But the difficulty level isn’t my issue; the learning curve is what’s getting me.

I believe this is in case you want to use an item to patch up the character before ending the mission. If I’m not mistaken, it’s a weird artifact of these games that you can patch someone up in the field using a medkit, but otherwise, they’re going to have to sit on their butt for several weeks back at the base until they heal. At least I think that was going on when I was getting messages like that.

I’ll try to verify next time I see it, but I initially had the same reaction as you: “Gah, does this mean my dude is gonna die???”

Okay, question time! If I right click on an agent’s weapon, it creates a tiny yellow dot next to the weapon graphic:

What it that? And more importantly, where can I go to figure out basic interface stuff like this???

EDIT: Well, Google is one option. The dot lets you set a preferred weapon for reaction fire. Only useful if the agent is dual-wielding, I presume.

Probably true, especially since everyone always and only ever played the original Xcom on Easy, whether they meant to or not. Didn’t seem so easy at the time, did it? Hey, having a bug that forces only one difficulty level is one way for developers to “tune their game!” :)

Anyway, I am watching this thread with copious amounts of popcorn. Keep going, X-Commers!

Yeah, I was thinking fatally would mean they will be dead if I exit. I guess that means someone has to lug that case around. I’ve been sending the smaller medical bags with the teams as well.

I just fired it up to see if I could figure that out, and I wasn’t seeing it on my weapons, but they just had glocks equipped, so maybe something with the shotgun. Just about had another team wipe, had to run 2 agents back to the van and abort.

Edit: I think I found it @tomchick

Right click on a hand item slot: Toggles this hand as preferred for Reaction Fire until toggled again; the preferred hand is marked with yellow dot. This preference is for hand, thus persists whether armed or not, but normal rules of reactions are obeyed: melee weapons and built-in melee weapons are used if in range, but if the item in the hand is not a melee weapon or gun this unit can use, the preference is ignored and the unit will fire the gun in the other hand instead. Toggling is free, no extra TU cost.

I found that on this page.

some x-com files wiki thing: OpenXComExtended Mod Data Viewer
ufopedia open xcom page: OpenXcom - UFOpaedia

Darkness is deadly, especially when you don’t have someone looking every direction damn zombies. I’m waiting for the zombies to unleash some chrysalid type mechanic RIP Capt. whateveryournamewas. You tenure was short, but active.

lol!

I can just imagine two agents (The Blues Brothers, naturally) driving 4,000 miles to be met with… dark.

I wonder what the return trip was like.

Getting out and kneeling. Classy.

You guys are making me want to try this mod.

The permissions being a pain with the Program Files directories in Windows led me to installing games in a directory inside my user directory.

Ha, and for years I wondered how much I cheated myself out of the true tactical experience by only ever having chosen Easy. That’s balm for an ancient wound.

So, I’m not entirely clear from the description about new mission types and flying on airlines and so on, but this is still about combat, right? You get your Mulder and Scully to mission locations, and they use their guns to fight aliens?

I did know, because I argued with @justaguy2 about it in the Phoenix Point thread. It’s like some people weren’t even paying attention to our pointless bickering!

Yes. You get a broader set of incidents (at least to start), like cult investigations and crop circle reports. A lot of them have only one or two opponents in them. They heavily imply you want to stun the enemies so you can interrogate them back at your base. I don’t want to say too much more, because I think seeing the variety of new things is a lot of the appeal of the mod. It’s really a new research tree (a seemingly huge one), which you open up as you find new things on missions, and which occasionally gives you new story tidbits or new capabilities.

You do have more than two agents (frankly, I think it would have been kind of neat to just start with two), and can get more. But you start with a “car” for a vehicle, and it only holds two agents.

Ah, i’ve done one and a half run throughs of this mod. Hope you guys have a good time with it, and I can answer general OXC/Xfiles/Xpiratez questions.

It is quite extensive and long but rewarding.

So, i’ll start off by saying there’s a night vision display in the OXCE options that can be manually or auto-toggled that lights up the terrain so you can see it (so long as it’s in your LOS) but also subtly shades your dark vision range. You will eventually get armors and units that will be better with night vision, and indeed ones that will give you the ability to see through some smoke.

If you go in the ‘soldiers’ screen in your first base, there will be a drop down in the lower left corner. Look for ‘martial training’ and turn it on for your starting agents. There is a significant amount of improvement to be had in agents from a month or so of training and I highly recommend you be training as many people as possible.

Oh my god! I can’t believe you interrupted Tom while he was in the middle of being about to agree with me about Phoenix Point 😂

So after several restarts, I went ahead and dropped the difficulty to the first level for a “figuring the game out” playthrough. And I’m glad I did, because I’m finally wrapping my head around the flow of this mod. And I’m starting to unlock cool stuff.

Basically, X-Com Files is about doing two-man missions until you unlock the later gameplay systems. At your own pace, of course, since these are tucked behind research. So while you unfurl the game, your officers go on mostly modest two-person missions. I’d say 80% of these are showing up to arrest a single perp. Well, “arrest” in the sense of forcibly stop, which sometimes results in bringing a prisoner back, and sometimes results in bringing a corpse back.

But there’s this recurring pattern of rolling onto the map, getting out of the car to check the lay of the land, getting the equipment you need (should I bother with cuffs? do I want to carry a medkit around? will I need the flashlight?), and then doing your single focused task. Sometimes the guy is just standing there when the mission starts and it’s over after one turn. Other times you have to hunt him down. Still other times, there’s a pitched shoot out.

Sometimes you have to hunt a monster in the wild. These tend to be mutated wildlife, and they’re not too challenging if you’re careful not to trip over your quarry. A long-range weapon really helps. As does waiting for daylight before starting the mission.

And then sometimes you pull into a canyon, get out of the car, and find you’re surrounded by a horde of zombies (nine zombies is a horde when you’ve only got two agents with a shotgun, an assault rifle with limited ammo, and Glocks):

It might be time to get back in the car. The problem is that we’re right outside of El Paso, which means the United States will be disappointed if we leave zombies running around in Texas, and the last nation you want to disappoint in X-com is the United States with its deep pockets.