Messages

1

The X-Com Files / Re: Synthmuscles availability

« on: January 06, 2024, 05:21:34 pm »

Even disregarding synthsuits, assault suits are a very nice way to bridge the gap from cyber armour to power suit. Power suits requiring an advanced laboratory is non-trivial. Assault suits are also just pretty good, being a melee armour with actual armour. Though looting power armours from MiB and gillman hero does mitigate this.

2

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky

« on: December 24, 2023, 01:25:30 pm »

There's a whole bunch of different storylines. They're mostly unrelated, and will all just be happening. Sometimes the randomness can produce funny results, like how the Red Dawn barely appeared for you. They'll appear yet. There's probably also a bunch of Red Dawn cult houses for you to raid and kidnap a high ranking member from to progress the storyline. Main thing to do is making sure you're capturing and researching new dudes and researching progression researches. Which it sounds like you have been doing.

I don't think any of the storylines can be aborted, but sometimes you can skip a mission. If you've made a deal with the lizardpeople, then I don't think the antman missions will come. But they're also no longer needed for anything. So you're good.

[Spoiler]

3

The X-Com Files / Re: Firearms vs. heavy armor

« on: December 04, 2023, 07:02:54 pm »

Do people use heavy X weapons over sniper X weapons? For what purposes?

They've comparable damage, the heavies have bad accuracy and range for a better fire rate, but the snipers have both a far superior damage range (50%~200% vs. 0%~200%) and ignore 25% of armour.

Weirdly enough, snipers just seem better for taking down big targets. Though I've been liking the blackops assault cannon a lot, the gauss/plasma cannons seem worse and the turbolaser portable cannon is there to try and one-shot sectopods.
I did a bunch of math vs. sectopods before, assuming 100 firing accuracy:

Spoiler:

98 armour, 0~116 damage for the blackops assault cannon with tritanium ammo.
98 armour, 26~106 damage for the blackops auto-sniper with tritanium ammo.
Honestly this one ain't gonna be pretty either way.

130 armour, 0~300 damage for the heavy gauss
98 armour, 72~290 damage for the gauss sniper. Or 26 armour vs. 0~218 damage for easier calculations.
A heavy gauss shot deals damage to a sectopods 130 side armour 43% of the time and kills 25% of the time.
A gauss sniper shot with 100 firing accuracy deals damage 88% of the time and kills 44% of the time.

Turbolaser has the funny portable cannon though. Add to that that sectopods hate lasers. Lets see here.
130 armour, 0~315 damage for the turbolaser portable cannon.
98 armour, 56~225 damage for the turbolaser sniper. Or 42 armour vs. 0~169 damage for easier calculations.
The turbolaser cannon deals damage 59% of the time and kills 28% of the time.
The turbolaser sniper deals damage 75% of the time and kills 18% of the time.

While I'm at it, lets check plasma weapons. Mind the 20% damage resistance.
130 armour, 0~184 damage for the heavy plasma with a 0~100+0~100% damage roll.
98 armour, 40~160 damage for the plasma sniper. Or 58 armour vs. 0~120 damage for easier calculations.
The heavy plasma deals damage 18% of the time and kills 0% of the time.
The plasma sniper deals damage 52% of the time and kills 0% of the time.
Sectopods -,-

So if we go for mib shock troopers on 95 side armour:
71 armour, 0~116 damage for the blackops assault cannon with tritanium ammo.
71 armour, 26~106 damage for the blackops auto-sniper with tritanium ammo. Or 45 armour vs. 0~80 damage for easier calculations.

The blackops assault cannon deals damage 39% of the time and gets an average of 8.7 damage.
The blackops auto-sniper deals damage 44% of the time and gets an average of 7.7 damage.
This doesn't include armour degradation because I'm lazy. If you get 120 firing accuracy the sniper goes up to 10 average damage per shot. That'd be roughly 5 shots to kill a MiB shock trooper, which would be two auto-fires hitting 5 out of 6 shots for 90% time units.

Seems to me that the sniper ate the heavy's niche and is both a long-range high-value target eliminator as well as an anti-armour weapon. But I might've just been using heavies wrong.

4

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky

« on: December 01, 2023, 08:07:36 pm »

Coming soon in The Xcom files newest update: "Stop, drop and roll feature" 

This literally happened to me last week. Forgot the extinguisher. Guy was on fire for a few turns. Health loss not bad but was in sickbay for a while.

Give kneeling a 5% chance to stop being on fire?

5

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky

« on: November 20, 2023, 08:39:27 pm »

Never a fan of the heavy gauss. Poor accuracy and the 0~200% damage roll means half the time when it does hit it deals no damage vs. the sectopod. A pair of gauss snipers should do it.

6

The X-Com Files / Re: Ok so ... How is superhuman to be played?

« on: November 17, 2023, 09:44:48 pm »

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 ) words for the Council to pat you on the back with.

Yeah, this seems about right? It'd make sense given how simple a lot of these small mechanics in XCOM are. Apparently the 2k rating came from a post on a forum of just some random person on the internet. My bad.
Regardless, five bases with scientists or even seven by the end of 1998 seems ambitious. Though having such a couple of months later is suddenly reasonable, hah.

7

The X-Com Files / Re: Ok so ... How is superhuman to be played?

« on: November 17, 2023, 06:26:34 pm »

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

8

The X-Com Files / Re: Ok so ... How is superhuman to be played?

« on: November 17, 2023, 05:18:23 pm »

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?

5 bases with 125 researchers costs 6 million in upkeep. That leaves you with 3 million in upkeep for agents, some engineers, vehicles and whatnot. Agents may well take half of that. Not to mention how each science laboratory costs roughly 2 million. (7 bases of this would cost 8.5 million upkeep by the way.)
Seems really tight, especially getting the 5 million per science base seems tough. That sounds like some manipulation of which missions can spawn is going on. Because I haven't gotten aliens pop up yet beyond the military shooting them down, so no selling those sweet alien weapons yet which is when the income really kicks off.

[Spoiler]

9

The X-Com Files / Infernalism psi defence

« on: November 12, 2023, 04:27:03 pm »

So looking at the wiki, infernalism supposedly boosts psi resistance per its description. But looking at the gamefiles 'armors_XCOMFILES.rul' I see:

Spoiler:

    psiDefence: &StandardDynamicPsiDefence
      psiStrength: 1.0
      psiSkill: 0.4
      moraleCurrent: 0.33
      bravery: 0.2

...

    psiDefence: &InfernalDynamicPsiDefence
      psiStrength: 1.0
      psiSkill: 0.5
      moraleCurrent: 0.33
      bravery: 0.2

This implies that infernals get 0.1 of their psi skill as a bonus. But they also lose 30 bravery. Given 50 psi skill, isn't this a net negative? +5 from psi skill -6 from the bravery loss? Not to mention the max morale loss from having less bravery?

Most likely I'm missing something though, and I'd love to be enlightened. Would mean I don't have to differentiate between my soldiers based on psi strength as much in the midgame.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky

« on: November 12, 2023, 03:09:21 pm »

First off, great mod.

It's possible to miss the zombie trooper implant entirely by being too live capture happy like this mod has been teaching me to be. The live zombie troopers don't grant the zombie trooper implant pre-requisite, only the corpses do.

Edit: I should probably mention why. As far as I know they're only fielded in a magma lab mission that, once completed, doesn't show up again.