Messages

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Open Feedback / Re: Manufacturing Profitability of Mundane Items

« on: July 03, 2024, 01:18:17 am »

Mods very often change the various costs of items that were present in vanilla, engineer expenses, etc., so none of this information can be used with mods.

Hi psavola, yes all good thanks, do understand that - was just looking at it from vanilla perspective; and to identify what items to look at first when using mods to see if they still make 'similar' economic sense...
 

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Open Feedback / Re: Manufacturing Profitability of Mundane Items

« on: July 02, 2024, 12:13:57 pm »

If you look at the table you possibly refer to (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Manufacturing_Profitability#Profit_tables) closely, there are two entries which require minimal research (and not alien tech): medikit and motion scanner. Both provide positive money stream with minimal research, with the motion scanner being better. I've probably seen a table where this has been calculated for all the items, but what's the point - it is well known that in UFO these are the lowest hanging fruit for making money with manufacturing.

Thanks psavola - yes I had seen those so was just curious if there was anything else that you can do virtually from the start that made any sense - in vanilla X-Com isn't the Medi-kit present from the start, so you wouldn't manufacture it anyway (but would the motion scanner)? And obviously I realise its different in OXC / OXCE especially with things like FMP or similar with expanded tech tree and research so takes slightly longer (but not much) to get to motion scanner, for example?

There's also the profitability table in section 5.4 of the old Unofficial Strategy Guide and FAQ.

Thanks Juku121, yeah I found Kasey's SG & FAQ a few days ago and have read a bit of it but hadn't come across that section as yet... I will have a look at it tonight!

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Open Feedback / Re: Firing & Throwing Arc Diagrams

« on: July 02, 2024, 12:04:47 pm »

Yes, you can switch the engine back and forth. (Obviously not with mods with require OXCE, of course.)

That's great - thanks. And yeah I'm only using FMP plus the included XCOMUTIL Stat Strings so had assumed that's clean enough to go across if its safe to do so...
 

As far as I can tell without looking at code, you can indeed fire/throw in a 45º cone. Basically, you have eight facings, and every tile can be divided into one of them. If your current facing is not 'right', you turn.

Throwing is just somewhat harder to tell.

Cheers. Yep will that 'sounds' like what I am seeing - its a 45º cone but that's divided down the middle right, so just 22½º either side of centre line... as opposed to the image above where the coloured arc is a 90º cone, so 45º either side of centre. It really just depends on if they allowed 'overlap' from each of the 8 facings into the adjacent ones either side? But seems to the vision arc (90º) is twice the firing (and probably? throwing) arc (45º)

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Open Feedback / Manufacturing Profitability of Mundane Items

« on: July 02, 2024, 02:15:33 am »

Hi - another quick question - regarding Manufacturing Profitability of ordinary (non-Alien Tech) items. I know OXC & OXCE display the profitability in the manufacturing screen; and there is the original Manufacturing Profitability tables for the vanilla gear on UFOpaedia that was done by MikeTheRed for the developed (i.e. Alien Based) tech. But just curious if anyone ever did similar table for the mundane items, the stuff you can manufacture very early in the game or from the initial research not reliant on Alien Tech or Lasers or similar? I.e. are their things to manufacture for sale that are worth the effort to generate a useful income stream early on with only limited numbers of engineers before your research starts getting up to the higher value stuff like lasers, etc? Would be interesting to see such a comparison (for OXC or Vanilla)?

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Open Feedback / Re: Firing & Throwing Arc Diagrams

« on: July 01, 2024, 11:10:06 pm »

Thanks Juku121 - that sounds good - planning to move to OXCE after I complete my current game in OXC (incidentally can you migrate a game save from OXC to OXCE mid-game?). So will have a look at BOXCE.

With throwing arcs what I mean was similar to LoV/Firing Arcs - i.e. where can you throw without using any TUs to turn/reface - but I presume it's the same as the firing.

Incidentally in the example image you posted I would expect if you tried to fire along the edges of the "V" (vision arc) shown you'd burn 1 TU turning... as that's ~90º total arc and it seems from my play experience you fire anywhere outside ~45º (i.e. 22½º either side of straight ahead) you are required to turn...

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Open Feedback / Firing & Throwing Arc Diagrams

« on: July 01, 2024, 01:56:10 am »

Hi All, just wondering if anyone has done any diagrams for the firing & throwing arcs? I'm assuming its the same for both from what I can tell 'in-frame' - did a bit of searching but drew a blank. Have figured out it's roughly 45º to your front obviously, but would be good to see how the game engine translates that to tiles/squares - especially for when you are facing a diagonal (i.e. corner) versus a file (i.e. facing along a row of tiles).

Too often (at least it seems so) I misjudge something as being just in my arc with limited TU left and go to fire or throw and burn 1 TU with unplanned turning and get the dreaded "not enough time units left..." message.
 
TIA

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Open Feedback / Re: How does Equipment Weight affect XCOm Soldiers (and Q on Terror Attacks)?

« on: June 30, 2024, 01:16:17 am »

Thanks for the comprehensive response Irismono - much appreciated!

As far as weight goes:

Openxcom by itself doesn't change any of the weight rules, they're the same as vanilla. OXC in general doesn't change vanilla rules except when neccesary, and certain things, like removing the 80 item limit for craft, are optional. There's an option in the settings (pretty sure it's in base OXC, but might be OXCE) to put make certain stats visible in the inventory, including weight.
 
Yeah I assumed something like that - back in the day I never figured it out (and I didn't come across any of the original fan communities in the 90's) so I used to just work by trial and error - which coudl be very inconvenient and have to swap gear between soldiers during the early part of the battle!!

And I've found the setting in the config for what you mentioned now its been pointed out - I had missed that originally as had only looked at the visible stuff in the GUI, etc. So much appreciated!
 

As for encumbrance:

Encumbrance = Strength / Carried Weight*

If Encumbrance >= 1 then

   Available TUs = Base TUs

Else

   Available TUs = INT(Encumbrance x Base TUs)

As far as I know, no OXC/OXCE mod messes with this. Overloading your units gives them a penalty based on how much they're overloaded, and it's multiplicative, meaning it'll be worse for low strength soldiers and more bearable for high strength ones. A 20 Strength rookie, for example, carrying 25 weight worth of equipment will have a 0.8 encumbrance multiplier, while a 70 strength superhuman carrying 75 weight will have a 0.9333 etc. multiplier. This means that the rookie will lose a full 20% of his TUs, while the Superhuman will have a much less punishing loss of roughly 7%
 
Thanks - that makes perfect sense now and explains why I was struggling to find a consistent methodology for how weight of weapons & equipment were affecting TU, etc. That makes everythign so clear now and with the optional data displayed above (on inventory screen) will make life much easier!
 

This is separate from direct stat modifiers, which (to my knowledge) can only come from armor and (OXCE exclusive) transformations. Armor will modify the base stat in the above formula. Thus, if you have a unit with 65 base TU, and an armor that removes 5, his new base TU is 60, and that new number will be used in the formula if he carries more than his strength limit.

Some mods also have armors that effectively reduce strength by taking up weight points themselves. Eg. my soldiers are currently using an armor that weighs 6, so even if that unit has an empty inventory, he still has 6 weight taken up. This is usually a way to balance armors. Those 6 weight points prevent my soldiers from carrying say, two extra grenades, or a magazine for their cannon, but the armor is highly protective and that's arguably worth more than the firepower.

Yes, absolutely - I guess the armour or similar is a double whammy as you get that arbitrary cost in mobility (the -5 to TU, react, stamina) but then you still have the effect of it's weight as well on your encumbrance... especially early game with just the armoured jacket added by OXC or Mod until you research the original body armour and then battle & flying suits... But as you say survivability more important than carrying more ammo or a bigger gun in most cases...

Regarding weapons and TUs:
You are correct in assuming that the % refers to the base TUs before encumbrance. Returning to that rookie from earlier, if he's carrying a weapon that requires 85% TUs for an aimed shot and he's overladen such that he only starts with 80% of his TUs, the only way he would be able to shoot is if someone gave him extra TUs (don't think there's anything like that in Vanilla, but some mods have such items), or if he dropped whatever was overloading him and waited til next turn.

Also remember that armor modifiers apply before the battlescape, while encumbrance applies on the battlescape. So regardless of how many TUs an armor takes away, the % will be based off the base TUs which were determined before the battle started. You could have a suit of armor that reduced a soldier's TUs down to 4, and the 75% attack would then cost 3 TUs, regardless of the soldier's stats before armor. Thus, no matter how many TUs a unit has, they will always be able to make the same number of attacks with a given weapon. TU growth is mostly useful for movement.

Thanks - that's great to understand too. Will make allocating out armour and weapons & equipment a lot more logical...

Not sure on terror AI, but I do know that some mods have more dangerous AI routines.

Juku121: What irismono said.

Regarding terror sites, it was not uncommon even back in the day to get a bunch of Cyberdisks staring at your ramp. It's a mostly a matter of random luck, although a nefarious map maker could affect that. I don't think vanilla/FMP(E) does that, though.

Thanks Irismono & Juku121, yeah I suspected it's just a combination of some especially bad luck on the alien deployment generation along with some newer mod Ai that's designed to make the Aliens a bit smarter and more aggressive when you interrupt their terror session! So all good - it's been a long time so just needing to refresh my memory...
 

...and yeah I do recall sometimes getting really tough ones in the original unmodded game back in the day - as you say Juku121 the multiple Cyberdisks is not uncommon - 4th attempt at this specific assault I had 6 Cyberdisks in LOS and able to fire on the Skyraider's ramp from the start (and at least 1 more moving around beyond them taking our civilians, which appeared after I took out the other 6 out and had run out of rockets). Ending up dusting off with only 2 survivors (from 10) after killing 6 Cyberdisks and 3 Sectoids that were directly surrounding the transport and there were at least 1 and 3 more respectively in LOS still shooting/mind controlling) - 'terrible' result  obviously as lost all the civilians... never got anyone more than about 3 ties away form the Skyraider. Either this is a particularly tough random scenario or I'm extremely rusty...
 

Juku121: The only real difficulty-related thing is that the higher your difficulty, the more enemies are facing your craft on the first turn, ready to rip you a new one with reaction fire.

Yeah - I'm only playing on Experienced (2) this game - as it's my refresher/relearning of the basics and familiarisation with what OXC has added (after this I was planning to switch to OXCE and then start moving up the difficulty settings) - so I'd assume it shouldn't be pumping the numbers up too much?

Anyway - Thank you both.
 

(P.S. been trying to reply for 2 days but forum won't let me - had to strip or the BBcode quotation and stuff out to do so, hence the 'italics' quotes).

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Open Feedback / How does Equipment Weight affect XCOm Soldiers (and Q on Terror Attacks)?

« on: June 28, 2024, 11:09:42 am »

Hi All,

Just recently signed up - always been a big X-Com fan and played it extensively in the 90's through to early 2000's, but haven't played for nearly 20 years until I got a copy on GOG in recent months... And then have only just discovered OpenXCom, OXCE, and all the other great XCOM communities there are around! Can't believe I never knew about them... So I have a couple of questions (I'm playing my first game in forever with standard OXC and just the Final Mod Pack as a familiarisation before I dive into OXCE):

• Weight of Equipment (Weapons & Body Armour) - is there a table somewhere with the details, especially the new stuff from OXC and the more popular mods? Just trying to understand the impact of heavy weapons versus medium and light ones and how they scale (I know some of the data is on UFOpaedia, in individual item pages, but was hoping its all in one place somewhere)?
• Also with weight how does that affect the solder attributes exactly, I'm finding sometimes weird effects I can't quite attribute (and as its been so long since I played I can't recall what I had figured out unassisted back in the 90's)? e.g. it says in game (OXC) a soldier wearing Armoured Vest loses 5 time units (& stamina & reactions) but when combined with a weapon they sometimes lose 20 or so TU it seems? Is there a guide or table around how much TU (and reaction) gets lost by weight? I've been trying different combos of gear with different soldiers and noticing even 2 unarmoured soldiers given the same loadout (shotgun, ammo, and some grenades; similar with grenade launcher) seem to get different effects on them for amount of TU lost, etc... is this weight related or just the item characteristics?
• One other thing on TUs, I assume when it says a weapon uses 75% of TUs for an aimed shot, that's 75% of the original TUs before any effects from equipment and similar? Since you can end up unable to do a shot in certain cases (e.g. your equipment reduced your TU by 30%, to 70% original, but weapon needs 75% for aimed fire)?
• And lastly just wondering if OXC and/or the Final Mod Pack introduces changes around Alien terror Attacks (or has enhanced the Ai to make them respond more aggressively)? Don't know if its just me but they seem much tougher than previous? I'm only playing on Experienced first time through while I get 'back in the groove' but my first terror attack in the game (on 1st Feb 1999) is proving extremely tough - I know these are always fairly hard and lot of guides online say the first one is usually a nightmare, but seems like the aliens are extra difficult by literally surrounding the Skyraider on landing so barely getting out of the transport without a massacre (my memory is they'd normally be scattered randomly all over the battlescape). So far 3 tries and 0/3 - two wipe outs and one Dust Off with a lone survivor!!

 
Appreciate any thoughts or guidance (as I have a bit to catch up on) - and love the work everyone involve has done around this game...