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Messages - DeltaEpsilon

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1
The X-Com Files / Re: Crops and MIBs
« on: December 21, 2023, 10:25:17 pm »
Quote
- Can they be defeated? I put 2 to sleep with electric stick but they are too many.
Yes they can.

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- Reinforces stop?
Yes they do, they only arrive in two waves.

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Edit to the edit: I've sometimes done that. But by the time you can do so easily, a few BO guns and amnesiacs in black suits aren't quite the prize they'd be earlier on. Maybe if you lack MiBs to research.
The big benefit of taking them on is to acquire laser and mass driver weapons early.

2
Brutal AI / Re: [SOURCEMOD] Brutal-OXCE 7.6.3
« on: September 16, 2023, 03:20:38 pm »
This is unreasonably precise IMO.
Additionally, it only seems to react to the door that's very close. The door that's just a few tiles away in the same direction that I open does not cause the turret to react at all.

I don't really think there is an easy way as a player to determine which door was open during hidden movement. I certainly cannot tell even with stereo sound nor does it seem to at all be consistent. Maybe spotting enemies during hidden movement moves the camera or something, but I've never managed to correctly determine which door was opened during AI turn. I suspect there is a way, but it doesn't seem like it's easily determinable in game.

3
Brutal AI / Re: [SOURCEMOD] Brutal-OXCE 7.6.3
« on: September 16, 2023, 08:04:53 am »
Okay, I'm now positive the AI cheats in a major way in vision mode 3.

Video showing it off provided. The save file and options.cfg used are attached.
Version screen:


Video:
https://streamable.com/dc1c41

In case my accent is too thick, the transcript:
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The dog is over here, and the turret is over here.
It's been standing here for several turns now.
And it will continue to be standing there for as long as the dog doesn't open this door.
The dog can go here and open this door for instance... nothing will happen.
But if the dog goes here, opens this door, the turret will move.
As such, somehow the roboturret knows where, uhh, the door is open there. [brain fart, meant to say the turret knows the door was open there]

4
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky
« on: September 05, 2023, 01:53:56 pm »
but waiting until gym max IMO takes longer than it's worth

It certainly does. I did the calculations, for FA the last two points takes 3 months on average, so it might be best to just abort training once you reach that point.


where left is starting FA and right is mean amount of days to reach trained state.

With the costs involved,

if I want to target FA, filtering at 59 is the best option to receive the agent as quickly as possible at the least cost.

Strength, however, is another stat to consider, but thankfully it is trivially bio-enhanceable to a reasonable degree.

Depends on whether you have spares and whether the rookies actually use that 90 accuracy for anything meaningful. I take any advantage I can get for my regular troopers, inefficiency across the entire agent pool be damned. It's the tip of the spear that needs to be sharp.
I guess that comes down to playstyle. I specialize my units very little and want to have baseline of agents that can fulfill any role and can be drop-in replaced. Cancer-type gameplay, LOL. Having high accuracy across the board is important because you
use weapons that have a damage bonus, not to mention actually producing more DPT by hitting more.

Seems kinda tedious to me, even compared to macing sleeping enemies. But I've never tried training rookies en mass that way, so what do I know.
It IS tedious, which is why I don't do it, instead just filtering at hire stage, but you could do it if you wanted.

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So while the numbers are bigger, you also take considerably longer to achieve those numbers.
That's sort of the reasoning behind high reserve capacity: you need that buffer to have enough agents to replace lost units over the time a fresh rookie completes its training.
Depending on how many agents you lose per 6-8 months of training, this is the reserve size you want to have. 200 is ridiculous unless you lose 30 agents a month.

Er, I've seen people claim the opposite, that the map can be either very easy or kinda hard, and my own experience supports that. You can have essentially no cover and several enemies staring at you on turn one, or massive outlying buildings between you and the manor proper.
It's not super consistent, though you can reroll the map if you don't like which hand you were dealt, but losing a couple rookies during training is not the end of the world as long as the rest survive and get better. You don't even need to train them for particularly long once gym starts doing its magic since you only need like 1-2 good XP rolls. Armor helps the rest survive. Wounds are irrelevant since you're mass training anyway.
Do keep in mind that the point is not to destroy the manor or even come close to it, the point is to get 11 action points pretty much and abort he mission.

5
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky
« on: September 05, 2023, 12:20:42 pm »
Ok I just found a manor #6, so I am unknowing where #2 and #5 is 😂

 Does the medium convoys moving around create manors ? It says it's doing cult infiltration

I didjt bother buying the attack helicopter but perhaps I should for shooting those

And ok, thanks for advice , this alien stuff will fund a lot
The easiest way to determine where manors are is to check "Alien activity" graph. Manors increase the line there by a small value every day. Once you determine the region, you just need to send out a car to the country and have it patrol every city as manors can only spawn within cities.

6
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky
« on: September 05, 2023, 12:19:08 pm »
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.

7
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky
« on: September 05, 2023, 09:43:13 am »
Oh, I don't use them freshly gymmed, I apply transforms AFTER the training. Naturally this involves rushing Gun Kata, A fully trained Gun Kata-ed soldier thus ends up with 80 FA. 80 FA is still not good enough for sniper rifles, but I was using SVD this whole game all the way to 1999 to great effect and SVD with 80 FA is strong enough for the majority of pre-1999. Accurate rifles also work, though I don't like their inconsistency damage-wise.

With TNI, we're getting 90 FA, the regular stat cap.

8
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky
« on: September 05, 2023, 09:31:44 am »
You might want to read through the tips and tricks thread, which includes a huge number of small advice as well as some strategic tips: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8199.0.html

Manors have a very small impact on your income (monthly score -3 to -5) so that's irrelevant. The worst thing is when they upgrade to tier-3 and have MIGs that could be faster than your craft and shoot them down. Manors generate minor cult missions in the region, but that's mostly irrelevant as well. The manors upgrade on certain schedule. After 5 months, the manor has 30 % of chance to upgrade to a greater manor and after 10 months it's 100 %. The same upgrade chances from greater to the greatest manor. The greatest manors have 10 % chance to upgrade to hybrid embassies after 6 months. Later in the game, the manors might also spawn directly as tier2 or tier3

It's definitely not irrelevant. The -3 and -5 are applied daily, so manors actually incur -90 for tier 1, -120 for tier 2, -150 for tier 3 monthly each.
This accumulates quickly if you have many of them, which is the case eventually. My last run died to essentially manor overrun, I had 11 by October 1998. They also produce many cult infiltration missions, which are just annoying to respond to because they are produced very often and yet have considerable ignore penalty as well (-150).



9
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky
« on: September 05, 2023, 09:17:53 am »
The training if the agent doesn't go out on missions takes a rather long time and the stats are still miserable. While having a backup of 10-20 rookies in training is probably a good idea, I wouldn't suggest doing it on a much grander scale.

Having played a couple of ironman campaigns (vet+SH) up to a certain point, I would rather suggest considering focusing on a playstyle where you don't lose soldiers or only lose them rarely (losses are of couse inevitable in the beginning, because the agents are so weak and the body armors non-existant), so don't need a reserve of 30-40+ weak rookies in the first place. I've personally been well satisfied with 30-40 agents in the primary base plus some (and dogs) in others. There are a LOT of easy-ish missions, where you fill at least 50% of your craft with recruits in training (or dogs to be trained). Using reverse stat strings mod you can easily get a grip on which agents can still improve (except for commendations) and only send those on most missions.

From what I have seen, the most important stat you may want to look at (until you are able to screen for PST) is bravery. You require 30 for combat pilot training and 50 for TNI, and if you start with e.g. 10, the agent will need to get wounded or panic a couple of times in missions to be able to progress. If you want to maximise the survivability of rookies, I suppose you want stats where you can get bio-enhancement as early as possible. Melee accuracy also takes very long time to get trained so that you can go to martial arts training, which likely also in practice requires field missions. Less than 30 PST also locks you out of martial arts training.

The average to fully train is about 6 months which is fine. I don't have a ton of reserve, but I do have a decent amount (20-30 soldiers) of soldiers that can replace fallen veterans and have a similar level of performance.
Screening for bravery is a 50/50. It might make sense, but bravery is actually really trivial to train now due to mission auras. Just let them run out of sanity.
PST is fine. Low initial reactions are also really hard to train, so they make a good filtering candidate.

10
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky
« on: September 05, 2023, 08:25:44 am »
Commendations are applied last. Flat stat changes first. Bonuses before that. You can no longer train after you've achived the training cap (including flat stats changes) but not commendations. I'm uncertain about bonus stat changes but I have been assured here that they work like flat changes in that it's not important in which order you apply for example transformations.

Instead of training caps, it's more interesting to consider stat caps. For regular agents, firing accuracy is maxed at 90. When you have 89, you're still able to get an increase at a missions even though your effective, commendations-included, stat is over 90. Also, if you want to micromanage, you might want to get the stat maxed naturally in a mission before getting a transformation that gives you a bonus, because in battlescape you might get a stat change that goes above 90.

The reason why I'm asking is because my long-term strategy generally revolves around getting many soldiers, gym training them until they hit training caps minus 1-2 (as the last two points usually take an obscene amount of time), then applying transforms in such a way so as to get stat changes to increase the stat until stat cap and only then consider bonus.

Technically it'd be more efficient to mass train trained rookies until their stat is enough that after applying all flat stat changes I reach stat cap, but this requires me to actually send them out to missions like manors or something, which generally comes with risk of death as they're not good enough yet to shrug off hits as I couldn't be bothered to play training regimes correctly, I just get them in a line and let them reaction shot, then abort. It's dangerous because dynamite and such, however, risking mass deaths, but that's the least micromanage-y approach.

Only fully kitted up soldiers are then let into doing missions.

It should be noted that after doing some calculations, I discovered that, for instance, with Firing Accuracy, it is as expensive to just acquire soldiers en masse and then filter them at 59 firing accuracy as it is to train them for several months, salary and cost of living included. This only works for one stat, however, and breaks down for filtering by several stats. For 59 Firing Accuracy threshold, the soldier cost will hover around $200k, but it is much quicker to get a soldier like that than to train them.

The problem is that it's not entirely clear if I can apply transforms to eligible rookies immediately with no net loss of stat gains produced by them or not.

11
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files online Wiki
« on: September 05, 2023, 05:41:05 am »
Are there any plans to make the source code public?

12
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky
« on: September 05, 2023, 02:48:48 am »
What's the interaction between gym training (and psi-training for that matter), transformations and commendations?

For instance, agents by themselves gym-train up to 65 FA. Is this FA limit the limit on inherent soldier FA, the value before any commendation or transform effect is applied?

Certain commendations can increase FA: if I were to have a soldier at 64 FA, get them a commendation that increases their FA by 1, thus getting to 65 FA, will the missing 1 FA to cap still be trained?
Same issue with transformations, but two-fold there: it appears there is some inherent difference between bonus changes and stat changes. If I have a soldier at 60 FA, give them Gun Kata, their stat changes by 10 and then +5 extra is added on top, for the purposes of gym training does the soldier still have 60 FA, 70 FA (only stat change included) or 75 FA (all of them included)?

I assume there really is such a difference between effective and inherent stats because in Agent screen, if you sort by stats, the value displayed on the right can mismatch the actual FA displayed in this soldier's info screen.

13
Brutal AI / Re: [SOURCEMOD] Brutal-OXCE 7.6.1
« on: September 03, 2023, 08:48:55 pm »
Same issue here, though I get 66% regardless of weapon or anything. Also X-Com Files.

14
Brutal AI / Re: [SOURCEMOD] Brutal-OXCE 7.5.1
« on: August 30, 2023, 01:47:38 pm »
There is a practical problem with Brutal AI that makes it go from hard to just play annoying: finding the last aliens sucks because unlike normal game they can stay in cover and not move, leading to motion scanners becoming useless, so for complex maps, you can easily look spending a hundred turns checking literally every nook and cranny if Bug Hunt mode does not activate. That is _really_ frustrating, especially if the enemy is not even dangerous to your soldiers.

Maybe there should a special case for this situation? Always have at least one unit acting as a scout?

15
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.0: Beyond Human
« on: August 28, 2023, 06:49:24 am »
How do I get to the manor at all? I seem to get intercepted some way, although I am new to air combat in xcom in general. I sent an empty helicopter to it just to see what would happen

Do the extra troops spawn at a side of map or do they just spawn, right next to you? I do have good troops to send at least

It's an alien base. You need to discover it. Find where the enemy craft spawns in and check if there is a city close to it. Send a car or something to the city and just patrol there for a couple seconds, you'll find the manor.

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