Never the less by the mid of '99 we're only researching with 80 scientists. Couldn't afford more until now. Money is really a hard limiting factor! But I like it! Feels pretty competitive. But yeah, no Raven / Thunderstorm in sight.
350 scientists?! In the early game? Are you serious?! :o One of the prior games was abandoned due to too heavy research: Nothing left to research and way too expensive salaries! We ran out of soldiers / equipement. So we decided to do a bit less research and have more soldiers training. Imho our balance right now is quite good (even if there could be a bit more research, yeah!).
By the way: we got many alien technologies right now that can't be researched - whats their dependency? E.g. sonar pistols, plasma weapons etc..
How you ramp up the research is a delicate balance. As a rule of thumb you should be able to cover the monthly salaries with your current council funding. Building facilities, purchasing equipment and enrolling workers may be something you will need to use other finances as well (except in the very early game, where - except for a few lucky streaks - council funding is net positive).
1999 is already midgame. By the end of 1998 you should have probably about 5-7 bases, with at least a science lab in each (25 researchers), possibly other labs (5-10 more researchers). So let's say this is totalling about 120-180. Sometime in the early 1999, you will hopefully have enough tritanium to start building improved labs, to get deeper research opportunities and further researchers.
I'm on veteran, november 98, kept my score above 2k every month looking at my graphs. It hasn't been perfect, I think there's been about 4 incidents of countries not happy total due to stuff. Funding is 9 million. I suspect superhuman wouldn't have increased funding?
I'd say earning 15-20M a month in the beginning of 1999 should not be all that difficult.
Agents are not all that expensive, and you should not need hundreds of them. If they get killed in every mission, you are doing something wrong.Agreed! Every agent death feels like a honest-to-god mistake. If only I could stop making hundreds of them ;D
Also, I wonder how much of points is from just research? Usually most $$ mission come up later (tasty aliens), so you get more money to get extra scientists. Extra scientists get you extra points. Voila, points-funding feedback loop.
Maybe XCOM files works differently, but as I understood 2k points is all you need to make countries happy for the highest increase tier of 5%~20%. This'd mean that funding goes up a lot later on because it's compounding. Not because your score gets so much better. If you get 12.5% each month for 12 months, that quadruples your income. (1.125^12 = 4.1)
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Country_Funding_(EU)#Monthly_Funding_Change
I'm not certain, either, since I don't have nor plan to have a Github account and thus can't search code very well...
But as I understand it, every month every country evaluates your performance and falls into one of these four categories: happy, satisfied, dissatisfied, pact. Your overall score generally correlates with that category, but not always (alien infiltration, lots of alien missions there, no X-Com presence, the works). Once they're happy, they'll just randomly roll on that 5-20% wheel.
Although I saw general Council happyness threshold being at 500, not 2000 'rating', which seems to be more or less score. @Sneak Dog, where does your 2000 value come from?
There are also custom score values ('monthlyRatings'), but as far as I can tell, these are just feel-good (or bad :P ) words for the Council to pat you on the back with.
OXC wikiWhat's an OpenXcom Wiki? Ufopedia has very little to do with OXC(E) as such, and the ruleset reference doesn't go into anu of this.
But the funding increase overall, like I said, is effectively proportional to the score, sans corner cases.This is not really true in either the strict sense (proportional = constant ratio) nor the weak one ('strongly related').
Kinda wondering which is worse, to ignore a mission or to get wrecked there.Ignoring the mission, since alien score is vastly worse for the country than generic negative score.
And once you clear the 'good > bad + 30' threshold (300 score as a minimum, probably 500 to be safe), you're likely to get an increase from most of them, barring local score spikes.No, because total alien activity is a thing.
Sure, but that presupposes X-Com score is relatively close to alien score, in which case your overall score will suck.I wouldn't call 1-2k a "suck" score, but suit yourself.
First of all I really need to say how much I love this mod! Such an awesome work - so much fun - so much appreciation! A friend and I are ... at least trying to ... play it on superhuman ironman. Sure, it is super hard - but that's what it's supposed to be. We do like competitions ;) Played all of the old stuff again and again on highest difficulty without allowing ourselfes to save / reload. We started this mod some times again until we said: OK, now we've got it - and brought it quite far I guess. We're just allowing ourselfes to check new mission types for the "idea" (just take 2-3 turns, copy back, than we go "live").
But at our current state it feels like we're maybe too late in the tech-tree (what I can't believe) or the game concept just ... is a bit lagging.
First of all we're facing many UFOs we don't have ANY chance to intercept with our helis and one Arrow. We just wait for them to land, start the mission and almost every time immediatelly take of, since our poor weapons too have NO chance against thoes ... one eyed dudes (don't get their name right now). It feels a bit desperate ... but yeah, aliens are attacking the earth! We will get better weapons, it might be desperate in the beginning ... so ... cool for me. Just not having any chance to intercept them is a bit hard (meaning too hard ::) )
Second problem are the Hybrid bases. Protected by UFOs we first need to trigger and flee. Still OK for me. But my main point of criticism is the base mission than. We are starting in the middle of many strongly armed soldiers. There is no chance AT ALL to even leave the starting point. Everywhere way too many opponents right next to us with full TU just waiting for a reaction shot. And even attacking them the next turn is suicide. We need our TUs for reaction shot. So the best is to just stay on the walls in the lading room, skipping turn by turn hoping every opponent gets killed by reaction not being able to shoot our soldiers. It actually works most of the time. But that really doesn't feel like gaming any more. Am I mistaken here? Are we maybe doing something completely wrong? If we were starting a bit offside we could capture rooms and have a nice fight with the Hybrids. But right now it just feels like a messy game design (so sorry for saying that! :-X). And I really don't see any chance in leaving the room. Like ... totally no chance :'(
Regarding intercepting. You don't need to do any intercepting before 1999. By that time you should have at least researched RAVEN and THUNDERSTORM, even if you haven't wanted to use the alloys to build one. If you don't, you're way behind the curve. It sounds like you're research is lagging badly. Remember, you'll need to have multiple bases with science labs, intel, and bio labs (35 researchers each) within a year or so, and improved labs on multiple bases before 1999. So, your goal should be at least 150-200 scientists within 18 or 24 months.
350 scientists?! In the early game? Are you serious?!Don't listen to stupid advice. I am already close to the final of the game, I have recently become 75+90+10+10 scientists. And even so, I use 90% of their resources to study all kinds of shit. And so by 1999 I had 35+25+10 scientists. And then the whole game 35+25+10+10 . And I didn't feel any discomfort. This is a lot to explore the key techs and engineers of the aliens. Even if you have 9999999 scientists, it will make little sense, because they will have to study poop 95% of their time. And there will be no stopper for progress, since in addition to science, you also need to conquer resources and train fighters. This is usually the anchor, not the science.
However, to me, the playstyle is in many cases very courageous and/or risky and I'd advise more caution.Thank you. I try to make a point of being stupidly courageous, when I can afford it. Rookies are just 30$k per unit, after all.
To minimize risks, also apply this tactic to the very first cult apprehension events, especially if you play SH and thus there are 4 enemies rather than 2 as in VET.Sadly, doesn't seem to work very well in apprehensions, at least for me. You often spawn surrounded by lights. And that's besides the times you stare directly at a shotgun.
I'm a bit bored with veteran, so there's proper IM/SH run in the workings now (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE9um8-d4SFITbv_YNSNcAy6Ca5abQD2J).
The chances of one-shotting a shotgun mook turn 1 with your small shotty - are meh, pump shotty - mid (lower dmg, but better accuracy), shotty shotty - fairly decent. I really like researching non-std & shotty first. Single kevlar can be got from researching or processing captured madman (granted RNG blesses you and you get the mission).
A nice tip from SL on the stream: avoid researching 'abducted farmer' for as long as you can. They give good score (28 base value = 56 when captured non-researched) and give about 170 points per mission (with SH) if you haven't researched them.Personally, I use 'giveScoreAlsoForResearchedArtifacts: true' to avoid such perverse incentives. And while X-Com might have researched them, the loot is still priceless alien artifacts to the average Council member.
I suppose you don't get extra points for killing unresearched enemy units.Nope.
In vanilla games, all the alien artifacts (including weapons) have the same property, giving double(?) points if you haven't researched them yet, so some people intentionally avoid researching those that they don't need or need yet. In XCF I think this applies to alien components, but I was unable find scores for alien weapons.'recoveryPoints' for items/corpses. You don't get double score, you either get the listed score or nothing.
Speaking of farmers, in stream part 6 (at 45 mins) I noticed for the first time equipping the squad with only killing weapons and pre-primed grenades when going for a crop circles mission, I suppose in anticipation of MIBs. MIBs start appearing in crop circles in month 6, although it's still much more likely not to encounter them. I hadn't paid much attention to this before, but it seems cattle mutilation missions never have nasty surprires, while crop circles may also have zombies and mibs, so I guess your preparation tactic might be different.Yes, no surprises on Cattle. As for MiBs, they have specific theme that plays in the briefing (space rangers theme), so you can equip accordingly.
Bats are even more awesome at chokepoints, like single doors, due to their incredible melee dodge and CQB. But the moment someone can shoot at them unimpeded, they're toast.Uhh...maybe if you have a dozen or so of these, then it would make sense to risk them like this. I guess I'll try placing some rats at chokes, they seem not that far off with dodge. And even doges manage to out-doge in CQC many weirdos most of the time.
Uh, I thought smoke and fire only affect you if you stop?Yes, of course. I do mean that they need stop in smoke.
2) Power suits from captured MiB heavy troopers. Also one from captured Gillman Hero at undersea city.BTW how do you capture heavy troopers? The most painless way?
BTW how do you capture heavy troopers? The most painless way?
BTW how do you capture heavy troopers? The most painless way?
Just got to Jan 99 in SH/IM run. 13.5$m income, 4.5 bases, 143 scientists. Tried somewhat hard, but quite far from perfect run. So psavola's estimate of 200 scientists by mid 99 seems to be on point.
I think you should also be able to get much more than 13.5§m in Jan 99.Probably not by much. I may have had a couple of meh early months, but otherwise I think it was good. So roughly, I may have lost 1-2 months of good funding increases. Worth checking the saves, I guess.
You seem to skip or abort a large number of missions (even 1/3 or 1/2), even those that could be easily doable without much risks but might be somewhat annoying and/or boringI actually think that I'm doing too many missions. Training forty agents is too much, 20 + base guards should be plenty. And if you have nobody to train doing research-less missions feels unnecessary.
Personally, I find e.g. cyberweb lairs very easy and also great for training melee;Depends on gear. Cyber? Go nuts. Otherwise, there are some layouts where robots camp above and refuse to come down, can fry your vested agents like nothing. Also closed terrain shenanigans - you can punch it out with better armors, but not with vests, IIRC. Can be annoying, and there's plenty of tedium going forward.
the farms are also very easy and provide great material for reseach - easier by far than other hybrid missions, because none of the enemy units is a 'sniper'.I have bad flashbacks about dealing with hybrids. The drones can be a bit annoying, unless you're running cyber. Small convoys (new thing?) are easier, no drones. And they have both workers and soldiers. Medium convoys have rocketeers, but they are fairly important captures, I think.
because smoke in XCF causes in principle CHOKE damage (in contrast to vanilla where it would be useless I think).Smoke blast itself deals no choke damage, you're awarded with exp just for hit. Even more so, for each hit in the area? I think the "sneakiest" one is scanner morale loss. It leads to panic check, trains bravery and awards Tu/Hp stat gain. Mostly for critters, though.
If I'd have to pick one thing I still haven't figured out is how you in mission debriering screen can move on to another basesYep, that's custom thing. I intend to share these sometime.
I suppose you shot down the scarab, because the base defense would have been a lengthier thingShot down like 4 or 5 syndicate transports. I guess that was it.
Having all the crew (and/or rotating them in and out) and equipment everywhere is seems like a PITA. But I suppose this cannot really be avoided.Eh, all the micromanaging seems to be less than one medium-sized battle, so no bother. Also, one trick I devised is to save defense loadout as craft loadout, then buy a car and load the load out - the game will offer to buy missing stuff. Manufactured equipment is more troublesome, though - have to load car at manufacturing base and transfer it with all the equipment to target base. True, equipment needs updating over time. But small updates shouldn't feel too annoying.
I think you should also be able to get much more than 13.5§m in Jan 99. You seem to skip or abort a large number of missions (even 1/3 or 1/2), even those that could be easily doable without much risks but might be somewhat annoying and/or boring (for example, cyberweb lairs, heists, hybrid farms, etc.). I
So the "alien research" has been stalling a bit, and there wasn't really pressing need to research more.Well yes, that's the important part - you miss the aliens / alien multitool / welder and the research stalls, with amount of scientists being irrelevant. Or get them, but have no trit to build anything properly (albeit Gertrude gifts you a hefty chunk). Same thing can happen for Promo 2 / lab.
Killed off syndicate in Nov 1998, obtained infernalism in Oct 1998That's some incredible timings. In particular, for Infernalism - I always get it late for some reason. So...+20 TUs / Melee, and without the suit. Is that more or less OP than Synthsuit? ::) And you're step away from Spartanism, which is twice as powerful.
have done underwater city twice and tasoth factory three timesTasoth factory has so many power sources. Easy way to get resources needed for Advanced Lab.
Apparently EMP is also the trivial way to capture live sectopods (the earliest off MIBs), which can be a major boon in the game.There's nothing trivial about outplaying the sectopods, as they can shrug off mines sometimes. But yeah, makes it easier. Also most of the things sectopods do for you can be provided with just tanks, except thermal vision...