Messages

1

The X-Com Files / Re: aircraft questions

« on: December 20, 2019, 06:05:20 am »

IIRC the Craft Laser Cannon is a BEAM class weapon (as opposed to a CANNON), which means it can only be used on the Darkstar, Lightning, Firestorm, and Avenger. It's in an odd spot because unless you manage to rush lightning/firestorm you won't really have anything to mount it on for quite a while.

Craft weapon classes should be detailed on the weapon ufopaedia page, and weapon mounts available should be detailed on the craft's ufopaedia page.

Plasmas should be BEAM class as well.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Stuck and unsure what to do next...

« on: November 23, 2019, 05:30:29 am »

Ah, I see. So, Dart Rifles for everyone, I guess.

My go-to for a long time has been dart pistols in the quickdraw holster. It's worked surprisingly well.

Flashbangs can also help with this as they do some stun damage and reduce the target's available TU/etc. on their next turn.

With Dagon, I assume I need to capture the guys in robes that look like original Ethereals? What about the other cults?

With Lotus, I got Witches and regular members. I think I'm missing a Ninja. Is that the one I need?

Red Dawn is just a bunch of dudes in camo and tanktops. Nobody stands out. And I have no idea who to capture for Exalt either...

Simple rule of thumb; if you haven't seen something before, try to capture it. This is a lot easier with cults and similar groups because their units have unique appearances; with full-blown aliens you'll have to guess ranks based off the weapons they're carrying.

As a plus, live enemies give more points than dead ones, and even if you've exhausted interrogation options they can be sold to the Council for extras cash.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 1.0.1: Judgement Day

« on: November 18, 2019, 07:52:17 pm »

hm. then it seems i had a lot more labs at some point. o_O
damn thats gotta take ages.
thought once you researched it all psi skills are revealed. might have remembered wrong.

Psi strength is revealed. Psi skill always starts at 0 and must be improved by using a psi lab/gym and psi weapons/items.

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The X-Com Files / Re: How to equip/bring a Laser Tank in to a mission?

« on: November 15, 2019, 06:43:28 pm »

HWPs are equipped on Basic AI Units like soldier Armour.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Martial Arts training (v. 1.0)

« on: November 14, 2019, 06:58:42 pm »

Not sure how XP gain works, so I can't say for sure if that's intended. Though, it should be possible to do MA training once your soldiers have Combat Pilot Training and a Tactical Neural Implant though as they each add +5 melee.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Some suggestions

« on: November 14, 2019, 08:34:44 am »

It is generally true, but there are various additional considerations related to vacuum and 0-g which makes firing normal guns complicated. Besides, it's simply a design feature - not an ass pull by any means, but a simplification (like firing standard guns underwater is also impossible in XCF).

Sorry, but this is completely out of touch with physical reality. Bullets don't become magical in space.

So are handheld laser and plasma weapons depending on who you ask, because of things like the plasma projectile wanting to decohere and the energy consumption. Yet we accept them because they're common scifi and gameplay staples, and elements that already exist in the game.

Sure, one of the considerations for micrograv/vacuum combat is recoil, so you're probably going to use a lower-velocity round (so lower base damage) or one that can accelerate in-flight (hence gyrojet). It's probably going to be a relatively large and heavy round as well, which would limit capacity (but the UAC guns are largely already low-capacity, so that's covered). All in all, not great at punching through conventional body armour but fine for use in space against targets that are probably going to be quite lightly armoured.

The UAC Pistol embodies most of these already. It uses a high-power round, has fairly average capacity, and a hidden armour effectiveness modifier. The SMG is relatively low capacity for an SMG as well. The Rifle is more of an outlier since its 3shot function means the magsize is effectively 36 (a bit above average) and it has fairly normal damage for ballistics.

I really ought to explain my internal train of thought more sometimes.

Iunno, I'm mostly just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I realize some of it is going to be a little "out there" or more game-vs-reality, but that's just a side-effect of differing design styles and mindsets. The only other stuff I can think of basically requires whole new engine features or extension of existing ones, and this isn't the place to ask for that.

7

The X-Com Files / Re: How to kill a sectopod without plasma, laser or high explosive charges

« on: November 14, 2019, 06:57:44 am »

Red = edit

The armor pre-damage multiplier allows a weapon to eventually kill anything that does not no-sell the damage type. It may take lots of ammo, but it will die.
I know for sure it damages armor when no HP damage is taken. (Tested unwillingly by plasma against me.)

I do not know if this is correct, but my hypotesis that the Impacting Damage (Before being reduced by armor plate) is multiplied by APD and applied to impacted plate.
That way, if a minigun does 30 averaga dmg, Sectopod has (guessing here) 50% kinetic and a minigun has 5% APD, a shot from minigun will do 0 to 1.5 armor damage per hit. In 10 hits, that would be 0 to 15 damage, 7.5 average. But once it starts damaging HP the armor damage will rise.

A laser minigun, with it's 50 average dmg and Sectopod having 150% Laser, assuming it also has 5% APD, should be even more deadly.
150*5%=7.5 .
Every shot doing 0 to 7.5 armor damage per shot, averaging at 3.75.

Sectopod's Kinetic/Ballistic mod is a flat 100% IIRC. And yes, both of them have a +5% pre-armour bonus. The highest I've seen is the HEAT rounds for the RPG-7, which are a fat +30% - but that's Concussive/Explosive which Sectopods are fairly resistant to.

This page appears to be a semi-complete breakdown of how the damage works.

I'm pretty sure. Because I take into account not only armor, damage multipliers, etc. I do not forget that the Sectopod will not stand with its back turned to you and wait until you put three bursts from 10 meters into it.

That doesn't make the weapon useless, you just need to actually plan around using the weapon. Which is what you should be doing anyway in the circumstances of fighting a sectopod with early-game weapons.

Don't want it to suddenly flip around and gun down your lasergunners? Use other soldiers to eat up its reaction TUs first. Bait it into a favourable ambush situation where your gunners have max TU available for the job themselves. Characters don't get to decide whether or not to take a reaction shot if they have TUs remaining; they either pass the test and react or they don't. Exploit that.

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The X-Com Files / Re: How to kill a sectopod without plasma, laser or high explosive charges

« on: November 13, 2019, 04:45:01 pm »

how sure are you a laser minigun is useless against sectopods...?

At a glance it has a base power of 50, multiplied by 1.5 is 75. This gives it a damage range of 0-150, not counting however the pre-armour damage bonus works. As such you'll need an above-average damage roll to damage it from the rear, a fairly high damage roll to damage it from the sides, and a near-maximum damage roll to damage it head-on.

Not useless, but flank hits are your friend again.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Bugs, crashes, typos & bad taste

« on: November 13, 2019, 02:25:54 pm »

For some reason the HWP's aren't going on any of the vehicles like Osprey or Dragonfly I checked other vehicles and stuff but nothing seems to allow them to be added. Included my save incase it's needed.

You have a Basic AI Unit, but you need to assign the Tank/Cannon or Tank/Minigun to it via the Armour menu. Then you'll need 4 free spaces as previously mentioned.

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The X-Com Files / Re: Some suggestions

« on: November 13, 2019, 02:15:06 pm »

Ad. 2) UAC Rifle. I realize that most UAC weapons are a bit too good for their role. It's because the UAC arc doesn't exist yet, but the weapons are already the game. Once I do something serious with UAC, I'll make these weapons a bit harder to get (excluding Cult of Apocalypse missions).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the point of all the UAC weapons is that they're optimized for microgravity/vacuum use, yes? A brief readaround suggests to me that conventional ballistics would work fine for combat in such conditions as well.

My suggestion instead would probably be to do something funky with damage types, armour, and resistances, e.g. a UAC rifle does "GYROJET" damage that is very low normally, but all the space-based enemies have a weakness to GYROJET damage that makes it competitive or superior to regular KINETIC/etc. weapons.

11

Open Feedback / Re: Research Collaboration?

« on: November 11, 2019, 04:51:22 am »

I could've sworn I've seen this question asked before...

Problem is my search term/pattern didn't find that thread - like I said, it was difficult to find a straight answer even though the answer is very simple, because the ways to express the question are more complex. I probably would never have found your thread because my searching focused on "research collaboration" or "research sharing". "Multiple bases research" might have found it, but I expected that to instead lead me down a rabbithole about specializing research bases and suchlike.

You essentially need to feed the question wholesale into a search engine and hope it understands. But the problem is, if you use any modern search engine, it's going to return results for Firaxis' 2012 XCOM and XCOM2, not classic XCOM or OXCE.

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Open Feedback / Re: Research Collaboration?

« on: November 10, 2019, 05:43:17 pm »

That's what I figured. I tried digging through the UFOPaedia site and a forum search but it was strangely difficult to find a straight yes/no answer and I wanted to be certain.

13

Open Feedback / Research Collaboration?

« on: November 10, 2019, 05:15:05 pm »

I'm having an oddly hard time finding a straight answer to a simple question, so fuck it, here's a thread;

In short, is it worthwhile or effective to have multiple bases working on the same research project simultaneously?

e.g.

• Base A has 50 Scientists working on Laser Weapons
• Base B also has 50 Scientists working on Laser Weapons

Are they actually sharing/comparing notes, or am I better off telling one set of scientists to go work on something else?

14

The X-Com Files / Re: How to kill a sectopod without plasma, laser or high explosive charges

« on: November 10, 2019, 04:35:44 pm »

Minigun and a few other weapons do armor damage before calculating whether or not you penetrated the armor, making them useful for slowly wearing the sectopod down.

It's a 5% pre-mult. I wouldn't hope for too much there!

You'd need powerful enough lasers to overcome the armor, not likely if all you have are alien laser rifles. An often overlooked option is fire - flamethrowers ignore armor values and therefore are only reduced by damage modifiers. Also, 2×2 units take fire damage for each tile of them that was hit, so up to 4× damage. The vanilla terror units took 100% incendiary damage and could reliably be downed in 2-3 AC-I auto shots. Try using something to take down the shields then torching them. Very few things in the mod are immune to fire.

Keep in mind, vanilla (and XCF) sectopods take 50% extra damage from lasers. That puts the alien laser rifle up to 67.5 damage. With a very high damage roll that'll just about overcome the side armour and do a modest amount of damage through the rear armour.

XCF Sectopod is 145 front, 130 side, 100 rear, and 90 under with 40% Explosive, 150% Laser, 80% Plasma as notable resists (exp/plasma) and weaknesses (laser).

Aside from that I think you're right; the best bet here is probably either flamethrowers or incendiary ammunition for cannons and rocket launchers. Using flamers will be dicey (their maximum ranges are very, very poor) but I'm not seeing many other choices. The only HEX weapon I'd consider is HEAT RPG rounds which have a 30% pre-armour bonus, but even those will be defanged by that heavy plate.

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The X-Com Files / Re: How to kill a sectopod without plasma, laser or high explosive charges

« on: November 10, 2019, 03:19:36 pm »

I suggest shooting it with a minigun before the Sniper Rifle. If I remember correctly, miniguns strip armor, making any subsequent hits more damaging.

AFAIK you need damaging hits in order to degrade armour so the minigun is a bad choice here because of its relatively low per-hit damage.


Classically Sectopods have always been very weak to lasers (and at least somewhat resistant to most everything else), so your best bet is probably to laser it in the side/rear as much as possible. Or really just hammer it from any direction but the front.