questions about stats... and many more

[Bartleby]

hello,
i love to see this game getting better and better - great job. hope there will be a time when the grafic will be better. maybe do a deal with them. they can sell it on steam because its needed to install the game and u can use better grafics . how long is an gameidea by law protected?
in the last years i stopped playing betas because of time but now i want to play it on linux.

some questions:
1. is it a good training for the soldier if u use all timeunits every turn? wasnt it that way in tftd? [no]
2. how much morale do they need to be quite brave? maybe 30+ [40+]
3. is it useful to move with overwight because of training? [no, see https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Experience]
4. do alienartifacts not use space in the base? [yes, but if u end a mission and bring back its there is some kind of extraspace]
5. is basedefence useful - when u have aggressiv aliens and want a lab-base.
6. can u still earn money by producing? or other questin: are there mentionable changes between xcom and openxcom? [yes]
7. works the hire/fire-bug at the end of the month? hope not, but just wondering
    [no, any personnel "in transit" requires you to pay their salary, so you can't avoid paying them that way.]
8. how much reaction do a soldier need to be useful? [40+]
9. do soldiers with bad stats have a higher chance to get good psi-stats? [no]
10. are multiple radars useful? [yes, until Hyperwave Decoder]
11. er.... are there big labs in the 1. game or just in tftd? damn.. played tftd 100 times but long time ago. [no]

well. would be nice if u could answer some questions. because of not much time and the wish to hire the best soldiers, i would like to know more about stats and possible changes. havent found much by search, sry, the answers must be somewhere?

EDIT:
12. do aliens get more damage if u have researched them? readed tomething like that in an very old post [no, but would be great *g*]
13. do u get more money if u researched something? [no]
14. do u need dead bodies? or is it just an item to sell and the 1 research? [no, not needed, just for one research]
15. is a flight in the plane without fight any useful for a soldiers training? [no]

16. IMPORTANT: can it be that range doesnt effect chance to hit? just played 2 missions
 (what effects chance to hit?)
[...at a longer range, it could have drifted far enough over to completely miss the target.]
17. does smoke of a missle affect chance to hit or view of sight? [just view of sight]

18. is it possible to play on a widescreen in fullscreen and with black borders on both sides (to have right dimensions, round globe...)? its annoying to play in a window and each time u want to move on the battlescreen u need to be careful that u dont leave the window. what scale/filter is best?

[nice guide: https://www.xcomufo.com/usg.html]

[Align]

1) Makes no difference.
2) Bravery only defends against psionic panic attacks, in that you lose (110 - Bravery) morale on a successful psi-panic attack. That's it. I wouldn't worry about Bravery, really... accuracy and maybe strength are more important.
3) Makes no difference.
4) They do.
5) Kinda, but a 100% safe defense is expensive, and aliens will just keep sending UFOs until they manage to land I think? Might've been a bug that got fixed in OpenXCOM. Mind Shield is probably a better bet.
6) Yes you can, in fact it's easier than ever as you can have manufactured stuff get automatically sold. Production costs and sell values etc are identical.
7) Um, I think you can indeed fire everyone then hire them again immediately afterwards to avoid paying their salaries, but this would actually cost more. Engineer salary: 25 000, Engineer hire fee: 50 000. Also any personnel "in transit" requires you to pay their salary, so you can't transfer all your engineers and scientists between bases and avoid paying them that way.
8) Chance to react is proportional to your TUs (as well as Reactions, of course), so if you just sit still and have full TUs at the end of a turn you'll reaction fire pretty much guaranteed. I wouldn't worry about it.
9) No, it's random.
10) Yes! Until you have a Hyperwave Decoder, then you only need one of that.
11) Uh, well, XCOM labs allow 50 scientists to work at once, if that's what you meant?

12) No.
13) Nope.
14) Nah.
15) A soldier has to do a "primary action" (basically, cause damage to something) to get any stat improvements.

16) There's an option to make range and various things affect accuracy, but it's turned off by default.
17) Smoke blocks line of sight fairly well, kind of like how in night missions you can't see enemies until they're really close. Pretty great when you want to move through an area without getting alien reaction fire all over yourself, like when exiting the Skyranger. Without the option mentioned above turned on, it doesn't affect accuracy.

18) I don't think you can use black borders ("letterboxing"), but haven't tried it...

[Bartleby]

thank you very much. edited first post a bit to have better overview .

the questions with the stats is still interesting:
i think it is that way:
- u get exp if u shoot, more if u hit something (wall), even more if u hit an enemy and most if u kill an enemy.
- i am also quite sure that u get exp (better stats) when u throw something and if u kill an enemy with that, u get even more exp (better stats).
- how is it with the other stats (skills)?

11. in tftd u were able to research a big lab with double size.

8. reaction.... is important i think. the question is: if u walk and see an enemy, who shoots first .

2. bravery defends vs psi???

[Align]

If you don't mind SPOILERS, https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Experience explains stats pretty well. But it's for vanilla XCOM, and I'm not sure how much of it applies to OpenXCOM.

Briefly,
Reactions is exercised by getting a reaction shot
Accuracy by landing a hit on an enemy
Psi by just using it on an enemy, more if it succeeds
Bravery by not panicking when under 50 morale

Other stats are only passively raised when these above get exercised.

11. No such lab in OpenXCOM, don't remember one in TFTD either...
8. To decide if a unit gets a reaction shot, the game calculates the "reaction score" of both units, which is Reactions multiplied by percentage of remaining TUs (higher score = you get a shot).
2. If a psi-panic attack succeeds on a unit, they lose morale points. They lose less morale with higher Bravery, but it doesn't hinder the attack from working in the first place.

[AMX]

11. in tftd u were able to research a big lab with double size.

That was in Apocalypse, actually.

[moriarty]

5. is basedefence useful - when u have aggressiv aliens and want a lab-base.

the problem with base defences is that they are all-or-nothing. the aliens will only attack with battleships, so your base defences will need to be able to reliably shoot down those huge saucers. if you manage to hit the battleship but fail to destroy it, you have gained nothing.
(I'm trying to introduce mechanics that change this, but this is vanilla behavior: if you hit it heavily but fail to destroy it, the aliens will attack with full strength)

[Daiky]

If you don't mind SPOILERS, https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Experience explains stats pretty well. But it's for vanilla XCOM, and I'm not sure how much of it applies to OpenXCOM.

I based the openxcom experience functionality on that page, so it should apply to openxcom as well, unless things have changed on that page or in openxcom code meanwhile, but I guess that would be only minor differences.

[pmprog]

Is the "255 primary points give you a negative" still there? as that sounds like a bug.

Also, I always thought the bravery calculations were basically impossible in-game. If they lose that much moral, they usually end up dead. Maybe something like if the solider is the target of enemy fire, but the bullet misses, that gives them a little boost or something

[Align]

For what it's worth a near-miss would make me crap my pants more than it would calm me down.

[pmprog]

I get your point, I was just thinking along the lines of "hey look, they can't hit me, time to go kill them".

[54x]

Is the "255 primary points give you a negative" still there? as that sounds like a bug.

Also, I always thought the bravery calculations were basically impossible in-game. If they lose that much moral, they usually end up dead. Maybe something like if the solider is the target of enemy fire, but the bullet misses, that gives them a little boost or something

No, I don't believe so?

That was just bad handling that they used a low-capacity variable and didn't put in handling for it to max out at 255.

[Warboy1982]

2: it ranges from 10-100. 40-60 is a good starting point.

5: yes, especially with aggressive retaliation.

8: see 2.

16: shot deviation is based on an angle. the further away the target is, the more this deviation affects how accurate the shot ends up being. for example: a 5 degree deviation will still likely hit at close range, because when the projectile reaches the target, it will only have drifted 5 voxels to one side, and will hit the target in the arm rather than the chest. but at a longer range, it could have drifted far enough over to completely miss the target.

17: just visibility.

[Bartleby]

thx guys. thats a lot of information and help .

2: it ranges from 10-100. 40-60 is a good starting point.

i never saw a rookie with more than 60.... (in the first month)

5: yes, especially with aggressive retaliation.

hm.... can u be 100% sure to be safe with very good defense so that u dont need any soldiers to defend the people in a base?
atm i restarted already my game and am wondering if longtime 3 base-target is enought. all 3 fully upgraded and stand-alone.... is it recommended/useful to install something like a workshop- or lab-base?

8: see 2.

other question: how much reaktion does an alien have .

warboy, is widescreensupport planned? or is it possible in linux to make the mouse not move out of the window? (hm... new to linux, i must google that *g*.)
a page in the wiki with a picture of every display filter would be great.

[EDIT] is it right, that u cant hire people at the end of the month without paying them that month? was in the old game different.

[Warboy1982]

a: 60 is the maximum starting value for those stats.

b: no, you can never be 100% safe. even in a base with nothing but defense modules and grav shields. there's RNG involved. as unlikely as it may seem, the possibility exists that every shot will miss.

c: depends on the alien's race, rank and the situation, you can see the stats in the ruleset that define the actual reaction scores per race, but the rank defines the aggressiveness, and the aggressiveness and situation dictate how many time units the unit reserves.
the combination of reaction stat and current time units is the effective reaction score.

as for widescreen support: yes, adding black space for letterboxing/pillarboxing is planned, as for trapping the mouse in the window, the addition of SDL_WM_GrabInput( SDL_GRAB_ON ); somewhere in the game initialization would do exactly this, should be a simple enough option to add.

[Bartleby]

..., as for trapping the mouse in the window, the addition of SDL_WM_GrabInput( SDL_GRAB_ON ); somewhere in the game initialization would do exactly this, should be a simple enough option to add.

hm... sounds perfect. sadly i am a linux-noob. must i edit the usr/bin/openxcom? .... well, could u explain how if u have time and its not too difficult?