Quick question on Bravery

[mikmac]

How important is bravery would you say? Do you guys fire agents with 10 or 20 bravery?

Thx again for an excellent mod!

[krakp]

This is how it worked in the original XC.

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Bravery

Not sure if Bravery was modded in any way in XCF.

[psavola]

Bravery as such is not all that important. It's more important as a gatekeeper for special trainings and progressing your agents.

Combat pilot training requires 40 bravery (and gives +10) and Install TNI requires 50 (and gives +10), Sectoid Legacy requires 60. You need to have these to get Helix Knight or Psion.

So the transformation/training process - especially for the agents you hire later on - gets much smoother if you get at least 40 or close to it in the stats lottery.

Of course, you can get improvements from panicking, getting wounded and for example by using pepper spray. Bravery can also be trained by putting cowards on a craft and making dogfight the enemies. A low-tier manor and its hunter-killers 3-4 times a month with a LITTLE BIRD is ideal for this.

To make the trainings and transformations smoother, later in the game I might be more inclined to sack the agents with very low bravery. In particular when you get hybrid training and want to unlock their maximum PSI fast, I almost always sack the ones with 10-20 bravery. Having 40+ initial bravery would be ideal. But in the beginning of the game I'm not picky at all (so many agents will die or get wounded in any case).

[HinterDemGlas]

I didn't pay that much attention to Bravery in my current game, but I guess I lost some people to panicking after being hit by incendiaries.

Of course, you can get improvements from panicking, getting wounded and for example by using pepper spray.

Also, importantly, healing items except sprays. I think it's a 9% chance for improvement per wound healed. When I have an experienced agent with a guts deficit I make them a medic.

There are some relatively easy ways to grind the system, like abusing Psiclones or depleting your agents' sanity on purpose, but those are kinda boring.

Bravery and current morale also count towards PSI-Defense, so you do want to max out Bravery for your elite soldiers eventually.

[mikmac]

Thx for the replies!

[Empiro]

Bravery is much easier to increase in this mod compared to the base game. Early game, money is tight enough I don't reject anyone. Later on, I'll likely reject based on PSI strength than anything else.

Commendations give boosts that aren't counted against the cap (you can have more than 100 bravery this way), but they do count for requirements for trainings and enhancements.

Besides using interceptions (Bases/Embassies are great for this), Healing is a great way in combat. Just make the low-bravery agent the preferred medic, and it'll go up on its own.

One other way is using the garrote and surfboard weapons. Neither weapon is great, and you only can get surfboards on the surfs up mission.

It's really good to maximize your bravery because the Kukri is an amazing weapon due to its bravery scaling. At 140 bravery, you have +59 damage from bravery alone.

[betatester]

I use to heal even enemies to increase bravery, like said above make low bravery soldiers medics
Dog barking increase its bravery too
And every agent have a pepper spray on him for bravery XP, any panicked enemy with no weapon left is a target for pepper spay and bravery training
My best tactic, stun the guy heal him and stun it back with pepper spray

[hederino]

Pepper spraying trains bravery even on unconscious enemies. Healing bleeding enemies lying around and then pepper spraying them often does the trick.
Another thing about bravery is that it also plays a role in your units' psi defence. And levels above 100, achievable with commendation bonuses, have a chance of mitigating sanity loss, the higher the better.

[Chuckebaby]

One thing I used to hate about the old vanilla game, early game some soldier's with low bravery would be going berserk. It did make the game extremely interesting but it was frustrating when you had one in the craft next to 5 other soldier's.

[psavola]

It usually takes a while until you get pepper spray. Until you do (and even for some time afterwards), essentially during 1998, you can put two low bravery agents to pilot the LITTLE BIRD and have it attack tier 1 and tier 2 manors. (More advanced craft are needed if you have tier 3.)

Fly to the manor range and destroy the spawned hunter-killers. The manors recharge in roughly 7 days (10000 minutes), so you can do this 3-4 times a month per base. This will relatively quickly raise firing accuracy, reactions and bravery. It is advisable to have have reasonably good other stats (i.e. focus on training bravery, the others can easily be trained otherwise as well) so that you destroy the enemy crafts before they can damage you too much. With decent pilots, you can usually take down at least two tier-1 manors with one go if they are close by before having to go back to repair.

[Stone Lake]

You also can use multiple little birds to train multiple pilots - everybody in the winning dogfight gets the exp as long as the craft has hit the UFO once, IIRC. That may require some setup though.