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[Sime]

I've no idea how people survive to year 2.  I'm usually squad wiped in the second month playing on level 3.  Something to do with peasants only surviving 1.5 missions on average.

[Nirur Torir]

I've no idea how people survive to year 2.  I'm usually squad wiped in the second month playing on level 3.  Something to do with peasants only surviving 1.5 missions on average.

I don't know how new players are supposed to get started these days, since the mod keeps getting harder and more convoluted to keep up with the people who've been playing it for years.
You shouldn't need to rely on peasants for your main team. Rush ?Gals Are Superior? if you need to recruit more hands. If you didn't stumble across the button yet, you can press 'Q' from the Geoscape to get to the research tree screen. You can middle click an item to see the research path, which can help find the research path to buy junk guns that are easier to use than muskets.
At the start, you're supposed to pick your battles carefully. Don't bother with mutant pogroms until you're on your feet, nobody expects you to play the heroes until you research a specific tech. You might be able to nab a better gun or two with a smash and grab on one, but that hurts your score and the starting transport is now a deathtrap with too many windows.

I don't recommend starting with the newest versions. Either I got a particularly bad run, or the new sky ninja mechanics are brutal and anti-fun, even for old hands. I say either download an old version or wait a few months and hope they get nerfed.

[Aoi]

If I'm ever forced to use peasants in an all-purpose mission (as opposed to peasants-only missions), I usually toss them a rifle and let them pick stuff off from a distance. They're not meant to be rank-and-file. One of my oldest peasants is kind of a monster (for a normie) is more than enough to face off against a rookie gal though, so they can be... sort of usable eventually.

Excluding the strategic level nonsense which didn't get too bad until the third year, I didn't find sky ninja stuff too bad in M2, but I was playing a lethal game, as opposed to a try-and-capture-everybody one. About 30 hands (~10 trainees at a given time) was good to cycle a constant flow of soldiers at max-freshness with only a mess hall. I was also being choosy about game progression though, so maybe it kicks up with certain options.

[Rolan7]

Peasants are great!  Only 5k each, and if they survive long enough they have a lot of potential.  I see them as essentially original XCOM soldiers.  Male soldiers (usually) start stronger but it just takes one mission with a SMG and Militia armor to get a peasant up to speed.

I tend to use the Turtle a lot, and the Bonaventura because green codex best codex, so I have room for weak units like peasants.  They can usually carry Kustom Handcannons after their first mission, which are reasonably deadly!  Later on I probably equip them with lasers for the armor-bypass.

I've no idea how people survive to year 2.  I'm usually squad wiped in the second month playing on level 3.  Something to do with peasants only surviving 1.5 missions on average.

I don't know how new players are supposed to get started these days, since the mod keeps getting harder and more convoluted to keep up with the people who've been playing it for years.
You shouldn't need to rely on peasants for your main team. Rush ?Gals Are Superior? if you need to recruit more hands. If you didn't stumble across the button yet, you can press 'Q' from the Geoscape to get to the research tree screen. You can middle click an item to see the research path, which can help find the research path to buy junk guns that are easier to use than muskets.
At the start, you're supposed to pick your battles carefully. Don't bother with mutant pogroms until you're on your feet, nobody expects you to play the heroes until you research a specific tech. You might be able to nab a better gun or two with a smash and grab on one, but that hurts your score and the starting transport is now a deathtrap with too many windows.

I don't recommend starting with the newest versions. Either I got a particularly bad run, or the new sky ninja mechanics are brutal and anti-fun, even for old hands. I say either download an old version or wait a few months and hope they get nerfed.

Yeah.  Even looooong-time regulars on the Discord are talking about this:

Alright, but you do surely realize that it's not in an ideal state right now? We can only see a part of your vision, so presumably you do want to balance it out somehow. I'm telling you, right now opposing enemy bases and hunter killers can be frustrating and imperfect, because they can pop into existence from anywhere, spot your craft first second and attack while your radars only do the same every 30 minutes before researching hyperwave decoders. A chance to lose your base before it can even do anything to defend itself with the only option that might not be able to even help is even worse.

I guess we'll see if anything comes of it.
I miss when the game mostly followed the player's pace.  Now... I don't know, I'm pretty sure Dioxine is literally saying to send escorts with every transport in year 2.  Which is so awful I can't even believe he's saying it.

It's pretty easy to edit the rules for myself, but the game has gotten sadly newbie-unfriendly. 

[E. Albright]

I don't know how new players are supposed to get started these days, since the mod keeps getting harder and more convoluted to keep up with the people who've been playing it for years.

Overtuning seems to be a prominent, dangerous pitfall for indy devs who have a core userbase they interact with constantly, and no need to make the game marketable to a wide audience. Crawl fell into it pretty hard, and XPiratez is also very guilty. DoomRL did a pretty decent job of threading that needle by gating away their worst changes in specific challenge modes, and I suppose the "no codex" option here is a step in that direction... but overall, Dioxine is just ramping up the basegame difficulty every time, and it looks like it's pure overtuning. I really like the game, but it's getting to be a bit of problem and makes it reeeeeeeeeeally hard to be "good" and not just savescum constantly.

(I'm also suddenly feeling grateful for being such a slow player and still being using the March release...)

[Dostoevsky]

It's pretty easy to edit the rules for myself, but the game has gotten sadly newbie-unfriendly.

Any suggestions? I can do some very light tinkering with basic stats/values, but beyond that I'm out of my depth.

[Rolan7]

In the past I've edited the Bughunt conditions to be more lenient, but that actually seems to be less of a problem in recent versions.  Or more likely, I'm still in early-ish game and mostly avoiding underground missions and bandit towns. 

Fakedit:  Wow I just got ninja'd hard, ha.  Stop killing Lokk'nars, Robsoie!

Some of the city tilesets are way too elaborate, the worst part about X-piratez is looking for three enemies split among dozen three-story apartment buildings.

Yeah those three-story apartment buildings are definitely the worst.  Personally I fiddled with the bug-hunt settings a bit, just to make sure it *always* triggers on turn 15 instead of being weirdly conditional.  Mostly for special missions where Dioxine makes a "riddle" of hiding an enemy or two in unreachable places, but it can help on normal missions as well.

bughuntMinTurn: 15
bughuntMaxEnemies: 20
bughuntRank: -1 # commanders are VIPs
bughuntLowMorale: 100
bughuntTimeUnitsLeft: 0

(Edit the user\mods\Piratez\Ruleset\Piratez.rul file)

Just a note : those lines are now located in  ...\user\mods\Piratez\Ruleset\Piratez_Globals.rul
[snip]

A minor issue that other people have run into is not being able to research Zombies due to capturing Fatmen alive, not dead.  An edge case, but still silly.  Find this:

- name: STR_ZOMBIE
    cost: 15
    points: 150
    dependencies:
      - STR_ZOMBIE_GRUBAS_TERRORIST
      - STR_ZOMBIE_STERILE_TERRORIST
      - STR_ZOMBIE_STERILE_CORPSE
      - STR_ZOMBIE_GRUBAS_CORPSE

And simply delete the corpses from the requirements.

Building-destroying missiles are the worst kind of random.  They're less likely to hit certain valuable buildings, sure, but they'll still do it - and they're almost impossible to intercept.  You can build a bunch of defenses, and probably should build some, but those randomly miss.  So: open Piratez_factions.rul and search for missilePower, and delete those two lines.
I haven't actually tested this, I've only edited my savegames when I got sick of multiple unstoppable missile strikes.  Removing the base-destroying quality had a pretty fun side effect in those cases, I expect the same is true with this.  It's both positive and negative, and I think it's a lot more appropriate.

Last but most important - what to do about all these ninja interceptors?  I don't know yet.  What I do know is that, in a pinch, you can go into your save game and search for the ID of the "shipping".  201, for example.  Then you simply change its latitude and longitude to be somewhere else.  Voila, auspicious wormhole.

[Dostoevsky]

Thanks. And yeah, I've been using the bughunt modification already (I remember those 'puzzle' missions from my last campaign).

[Iduno]

I've no idea how people survive to year 2.  I'm usually squad wiped in the second month playing on level 3.  Something to do with peasants only surviving 1.5 missions on average.

I don't know how new players are supposed to get started these days, since the mod keeps getting harder and more convoluted to keep up with the people who've been playing it for years.
You shouldn't need to rely on peasants for your main team. Rush ?Gals Are Superior? if you need to recruit more hands. If you didn't stumble across the button yet, you can press 'Q' from the Geoscape to get to the research tree screen. You can middle click an item to see the research path, which can help find the research path to buy junk guns that are easier to use than muskets.
At the start, you're supposed to pick your battles carefully. Don't bother with mutant pogroms until you're on your feet, nobody expects you to play the heroes until you research a specific tech. You might be able to nab a better gun or two with a smash and grab on one, but that hurts your score and the starting transport is now a deathtrap with too many windows.

I don't recommend starting with the newest versions. Either I got a particularly bad run, or the new sky ninja mechanics are brutal and anti-fun, even for old hands. I say either download an old version or wait a few months and hope they get nerfed.

The #1 thing that would make the game better is taking Dioxine's computer away. Almost literally anyone else would create a game that's more fun.

I don't know how new players are supposed to get started these days, since the mod keeps getting harder and more convoluted to keep up with the people who've been playing it for years.

Overtuning seems to be a prominent, dangerous pitfall for indy devs who have a core userbase they interact with constantly, and no need to make the game marketable to a wide audience. Crawl fell into it pretty hard, and XPiratez is also very guilty. DoomRL did a pretty decent job of threading that needle by gating away their worst changes in specific challenge modes, and I suppose the "no codex" option here is a step in that direction... but overall, Dioxine is just ramping up the basegame difficulty every time, and it looks like it's pure overtuning. I really like the game, but it's getting to be a bit of problem and makes it reeeeeeeeeeally hard to be "good" and not just savescum constantly.

(I'm also suddenly feeling grateful for being such a slow player and still being using the March release...)

Last I checked the Discord, it's just messing with players as a joke. The game isn't being made for them, it's to entertain the dev.

[Egan_BW]

Last I checked the Discord, it's just messing with players as a joke. The game isn't being made for them, it's to entertain the dev.

perhaps the same could be said of all religions games

[E. Albright]

So it's literally like the jokey (well, probably jokey) spoofs of Crawl dev logs:

Code: [Select]

Removed fun
Removed problematic fun
Fun found, removed
I mean, that does sound about right. Every update feels like either just enough cool stuff to make people want to try it despite awful miserable changes that accompany it, a less-expansive update that makes things slightly easier, or an update with just enough cool stuff to make people want to try it plus changes that more than make up for any easing up a preceding update might have done...

[Rolan7]

On the one hand, aren't we the Losing Is Fun crew?

On the other hand yeah this is just shitty.

There's fun difficulty, and then there's 6 ninja interceptors randomly ganking my transport.
With absolutely no notice.
And it's well-armed, but it dies anyway because there are SIX OF THEM.

[Rolan7]

Like - if you want to reward people for taking an L, maybe don't put hard time-gates in your game such that they hard lose if they don't progress fast enough! 

[Robsoie]

Any idea of what's the XPiratez version with the less "unfun" ?

[Dostoevsky]

M1 was the first version to add all the ninja bases, hunter-killers, etc. I believe. Bunker-buster strikes are somewhat older...

Ultimately what I did was just make brainers much cheaper. You're still quite limited by overall capacity, and there's more than enough to research to fill their time especially early on. The improved research and slightly easier finances helps me go 'fast enough' to not fall behind the new power curve requirements (I think).