After some time, certain missions essentially become training missions where you can just let your troops blast away at the enemy and gain stats. Zombies after you get good shotguns and more than two guys in a car, and also many of the melee-only cryptids, for example. Manors and the like a certainly not training missions.
They essentially are after Promo 3 and even to some extent before, though it wildly varies which are the better option. I was using Black Lotus manors because they have the shittiest weapons overall (so least wounds), but assassins are a real problem and need special care. Church of Dagon is significantly more dangerous due to Gillmen and incendiary grenades. EXALT has wound-galore weapons, tons of nades and grenade launchers, so dangerous, but not outright Gillmen-tier deadly. Red Dawn is mid, but dynamite is a problem as are armored cars.
But overall manors are generally best for training simply because the map is predictable and is made in such a way that you can set up a line of soldiers to reaction fire at stuff with impunity. It's just a matter of bailing early. Past Promo 3, Gas Nades and Tactical Grenade Launcher becomes extremely powerful for manor maps specifically because it's an open map with many enemies, so perfect for bombardment.
Manors are great because they do not run out and are available at all times.
As long as you don't care about the potential 5-point extra gain from combat, yes. Do note that getting the full 5 points does require you to do some moderately intensive training in the field, and it only applies to 'primary' stats like firing/throwing/melee/psi.
See, the question was about applying transforms before finishing gym training. If we ignore required stats for transforms, consider the following:
I can gun kata a soldier with 50 FA and get 65 FA [+10, +5]. Now, the gym training of this soldier will no longer increase FA.
If I wait until gym increases this soldier's FA to 65, I can gun kata this soldier and get 80 FA. The overall result is better.
That was the question: whether this really happens. If I gun kata a guy that had 50 FA, will the gym still increase their FA to 65 as if there was no gun kata or not.
Pepper spray works for reactions, too. And reactions is a stat that doesn't have a lower training cap.
It doesn't have a cap in general because reactions cannot be gym-trained.
Isn't sanity kinda slow to recover and lack of sanity a pain to deal with during actual missions? I definitely remember it being that way before.
It is slow, but we're doing it on rookies that don't engage in regular missions until they're done. Low sanity is even better for that matter since you need to wait fewer turns for panic checks to start occuring, thus bravery training.
You _do_ need some way to prevent them from exiting the transport though. An outrunner would work, but enemies are an issue of their own.
I assume Psiclones are more plentiful now? I used to hoard them, since there are several things you need them for (Gun Kata x number of soldiers and Skulljacks, mainly) and Solarius was stingier with the rewards a while ago.
They're not plentiful in the slightest, but you do accumulate them. There is no longer a good reason to sell them.
Veterans can also get TNI, probably other enhancements as well, and have commendations coming out of their ears, so they're usually still quite a bit better than that. But 90 is indeed passable enough for everyone who's not a sniper.
TNI doesn't do any flat changes, so it's wasteful to use it on somebody below the stat cap, but if you wanted, you could do it.
Also TNI is wasteful because you probably will only get it past Promo 3 by which point Combat Pilot Training already will allow you to reach 90 stat cap on rookies after bravery and reaction training or filtering is done.
They're largely irrelevant as long as you manage to regularly prune the manors, and are generally doing well with score. But if it starts to spiral out of control, it can get pretty bad, as you say. I think there have been people with 20+ before.
Manors are tricky the first time to deal with. They become largely irrelevant later though, but by then, if you haven't gone for them, you probably have a ton of them around.
But, as psavola said, this degree of gym training is really nor very efficient. It's better to combine it with field training by sending rookies out on milk runs. Unless you have massive amounts of newbies in training, and just pull replacements from them, as I've seen some people do. Training 200 agents by hand is a real pain. :'(
Well, the pool is not
that massive, but it's still 30 or so rookies to babysit. Mass training is a chore because even though armor allows you to mostly ignore cultists in manors or whatever, it's still not the kind of mission you want to let Brutal AI autopilot or something to do.