Author Topic: Re: The X-Com Files - 3.4: Daggers for Hire  (Read 2419200 times)

Offline Akamashi

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4965 on: January 06, 2023, 08:04:12 pm »
8 bases, since that's the limit. I never said they're undermanned, three are full strike bases with the latest tech and high-tier troopers, and all the rest have some sort of garrison.

How do you have global radar, interception and timely strike team transport with only four bases? Especially before the invasion starts.
I've never gotten a cult to attack me. Probably because I kill manors about as quickly as they spawn. I don't think there are any other sources of cult retaliation?

Anyway, cult base assaults are an entirely different ball game from alien base attacks.
What's that? Dagonites?
How is he doing against you? :P

))))))
Difficulties of machine translation. Yes, my experience indicates that 4 bases is an ascetic acceptable option. 3 bases just above the equator in Europe, China and North America, and one factory base in Antarctica. This should be more than enough. Uncovered areas are enough to check with a dark star once a month.

On the difficulty of the Iron man manor, these are very difficult missions. Before the appearance of the blue ttb, I could not cope with the lotus manor and the red dawn manor.

Mutants = mutons. I didn't notice the autocorrect.

Offline Akamashi

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4966 on: January 06, 2023, 08:11:12 pm »
Same, didn't get attacked by a cult once (or anyone up to year 4, really). I think it's about intercepting their strike crafts. If you have some air game, they won't ever get to you. Can't intercept battleship at full speed, sadly.
Doesn't sound like an "easy" defense.

But overall, yeah, 4-6 experienced guys is plenty against most invaders.
Or most post-invasion encounters, really.

Maybe next time I'll try playing 3-man teams or something. Commend stacking really allows you to create monstrosities.

When you play on the complexity of iron man, you are ready for terrible dramas and any consequences. When a huge crowd of a wide variety of mutants attacks your base, and only 6 fighters from the defenders, half of whom cannot hold a minigun in their hands, then any victory already seems to be an excellent result. And if all 6 fighters survive, then yes. I think the battle was easy. Even if the block of the base in which I arranged the meat grinder was wiped off the face of the earth, and the entire branch of the base behind this block was destroyed. It's not a big deal. The main thing is that it is still possible to carry out departures from this center and base. The rest is nothing. We will rebuild.

Offline Juku121

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4967 on: January 06, 2023, 08:38:10 pm »
Yeah, but surviving and being able to continue and rebuild is really not what comes to mind when someone says 'easy'. :)

Yes, my experience indicates that 4 bases is an ascetic acceptable option. 3 bases just above the equator in Europe, China and North America, and one factory base in Antarctica. This should be more than enough. Uncovered areas are enough to check with a dark star once a month.
That still leaves well over half of the globe without radar coverage, and without the ability to get to landed UFOs before they take off unless you get lucky or some advanced craft. Even the Kitsune will need some luck unless you spot the aliens early and manage to not run out of fuel or into HKs while following them.

I guess it's workable in that it you can make progress, but it's not really doing your job of defending the Earth properly.
« Last Edit: January 06, 2023, 08:40:13 pm by Juku121 »

Offline Stone Lake

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4968 on: January 06, 2023, 09:11:03 pm »
On the difficulty of the Iron man manor, these are very difficult missions. Before the appearance of the blue ttb, I could not cope with the lotus manor and the red dawn manor.
You can steamroll lotus manors with bio-exo suits and 10+ man teams on ironman superhuman. The suits have plenty of cutting resists to screw up ninjas.
Red dawn and dagon can be taken with regular armor, with maybe 1-2 accidental casualties from gillmen/jarhead one-shots.
Now Exalt does feels the most problematic without heavy suits due to numerous grenadiers. But you can rush into buildings and camp inside them just fine.
The most I hate about manors is that they usually can't be quickly dealt with and linger for at least 20 turns. Especially upgraded ones, with their reinforcements.

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When you play on the complexity of iron man, you are ready for terrible dramas and any consequences.
There's drama but not much consequences really. Post-invasion there's just infinite money so you can rebuild bases from scratch each month. Pre-invasion it's just ludicrously easy to repel attackers.

Also having just 6 guys on the defensive doesn't exactly spell "ready" for me. I usually have at least like 10 dogs and 10 rookies, train them, then rotate into the main base to replace casualties. Soldiers and dogs are dirt cheap compared to scientists anyway.

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That still leaves well over half of the globe without radar coverage, and without the ability to get to landed UFOs before they take off unless you get lucky or some advanced craft.
If 6 bases give almost full coverage of the globe, how come 4 + dark star leave "over a half" without radar coverage? Something doesn't add!

I agree with Akamashi, 4 or even less bases should be plenty. After you get enough alien engineers, you skip almost every uninteresting encounter anyway.
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but it's not really doing your job of defending the Earth properly.
Before I finished my latest campaign I was doing my job so unproperly, there were somewhat 25 alien bases on the globe and about 10 countries left the council. And they still paid me some millions to "fight" the aliens :D

Offline Juku121

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4969 on: January 06, 2023, 09:50:50 pm »
You can steamroll lotus manors with bio-exo suits and 10+ man teams on ironman superhuman. The suits have plenty of cutting resists to screw up ninjas.
But Ninjas and their friends also have guns, while Bio-Exo has no kinetic resistance. Not to mention balls of flaming plasma and, uh, fire. I doubt it's as game-changing as heavy tac suits vs regular cultist firearms. All it does is defend from sudden knives in the face.

If 6 bases give almost full coverage of the globe, how come 4 + dark star leave "over a half" without radar coverage?
I have eight, and there are sizeable parts of three oceans not covered, plus some bits of the Arctic. How you manage to get everything with six, I don't know. I do use slightly different radar ranges, but 2500 vs 2577 for big radars shouldn't make a difference. And if you halve that, that's half of 'mostly covered' gone, even if there was some overlap.

Six bases covers six out of seven continents, but UFOs can spawn pretty much anywhere, and you need your warning as early as possible unless you want to let some UFOs slip through or get shot down. Which you apparently do?

I agree with Akamashi, 4 or even less bases should be plenty. After you get enough alien engineers, you skip almost every uninteresting encounter anyway.
You do, I don't. The Greys don't get to molest Earth bovines on my watch! :D

You also can't manufacture anything in bulk with so few bases, especially with three of them being strike bases. And I want every team to have at least four of everything. :-[

Before I finished my latest campaign I was doing my job so unproperly, there were somewhat 25 alien bases on the globe and about 10 countries left the council. And they still paid me some millions to "fight" the aliens
Well, I would be ashamed if my campaign came to that. YMMV.
« Last Edit: January 06, 2023, 10:01:11 pm by Juku121 »

Offline Stone Lake

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4970 on: January 06, 2023, 10:44:08 pm »
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But Ninjas and their friends also have guns, while Bio-Exo has no kinetic resistance. Not to mention balls of flaming plasma and, uh, fire. I doubt it's as game-changing as heavy tac suits vs regular cultist firearms. All it does is defend from sudden knives in the face.

Well, I cleared 4 or 5 lotus manors in bio-exos without a single casualty.
Bio-exos protect against your own gas, which you should use against ninjas. Or any human enemies, really. But it works just fine with rifles and smoke.

Kinetics: Lotus have no hard-hitting snipers like red dawn, so kinetics aren't one-shots. If using smoke, you mostly don't even get hit. And if you do, just rotate troops.
Fire: Same as above. Also, bio-exo has incendiary resist.
Plasma: Usually one-shots, but is somewhat inaccurate and requires Witch to be in 13 tiles range. She's usually dead before she gets there.
Knives: Easily the most dangerous stuff from the bunch. Assassins are almost invisible, can't always be detected even with aggressive scouting, throw multiple accurate, very damaging knives from up close or go for melee which is fatal.

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Six bases covers six out of seven continents, but UFOs can spawn pretty much anywhere, and you need your warning as early as possible unless you want to let some UFOs slip through or get shot down.
If I imagine globe as a cube with 6 faces, 6 big radar bases in centers of those faces should give like 95% coverage.

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Which you apparently do?
You have to ignore some flyby strikers or battleships anyway. Why would I care about a single slipping scout or something?

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You also can't manufacture anything in bulk with so few bases, especially with three of them being strike bases. And I want every team to have at least four of everything.
Well that's just someone's OCD speaking.

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Well, I would be ashamed if my campaign came to that. YMMV.
We'll see. When there's nothing to be gained from encounter, like new researches or money that you don't ever need, or exp, and the alien menace just keeps growing, why bother?




« Last Edit: January 06, 2023, 10:54:06 pm by Stone Lake »

Offline Juku121

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4971 on: January 07, 2023, 11:23:10 am »
Kinetics: Lotus have no hard-hitting snipers like red dawn, so kinetics aren't one-shots. If using smoke, you mostly don't even get hit.
Well, that's not really a feature of the armour, is it?

Also, Witches with Arasakas say "Hi!". About 70% as bad as SVDs, so can still one-shot you if the RNG doesn't like you that day.

But, yeah, there's nowhere near Red Dawn level of proliferation of hard-hitting kinetics.

Bio-exos protect against your own gas, which you should use against ninjas.
50% isn't quite total protection.


But yeah, you're right. I was mentally comparing Bio-Exo to Heavy Tac Suits, which work roughly as well against sudden knife death (20 vs 12 damage on average), but shut down all the kinetics. They're Promo III material, though, unlike Bio-Exo suits.

If I imagine globe as a cube with 6 faces, 6 big radar bases in centers of those faces should give like 95% coverage.
Nowhere near that, because a) there are oceans in inconvenient places and b) you want your bases to cover landmasses first, since that's where most activity happens.

I just tried to do this '6 faces' rather randomly, and was left with a giant continent-sized hole and at least another 10% in gaps. See for yourself.

You have to ignore some flyby strikers or battleships anyway. Why would I care about a single slipping scout or something?
No, I want all the landings, because that's where I can actually try to compete. As you say, intercepting everything isn't really possible until lategame. And that requires early warning, since radars are not infallible and landing windows are something like 2x4 hours, tops.

Well that's just someone's OCD speaking.
;D

When there's nothing to be gained from encounter, like new researches or money that you don't ever need, or exp, and the alien menace just keeps growing, why bother?
I'm permanently over my budget due to all that manufacturing. Every plasma gun for the Black Grey Market counts!

And these aliens game here to mess with us, I'm getting each and every one of them I can. I play this mod to shoot aliens in the face, not to win with least effort expended.
« Last Edit: January 07, 2023, 11:27:24 am by Juku121 »

Offline Akamashi

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4972 on: January 07, 2023, 12:21:26 pm »
You can steamroll lotus manors with bio-exo suits and 10+ man teams on ironman superhuman. The suits have plenty of cutting resists to screw up ninjas.
Red dawn and dagon can be taken with regular armor, with maybe 1-2 accidental casualties from gillmen/jarhead one-shots.
Now Exalt does feels the most problematic without heavy suits due to numerous grenadiers. But you can rush into buildings and camp inside them just fine.
The most I hate about manors is that they usually can't be quickly dealt with and linger for at least 20 turns. Especially upgraded ones, with their reinforcements.
There's drama but not much consequences really. Post-invasion there's just infinite money so you can rebuild bases from scratch each month. Pre-invasion it's just ludicrously easy to repel attackers.

Also having just 6 guys on the defensive doesn't exactly spell "ready" for me. I usually have at least like 10 dogs and 10 rookies, train them, then rotate into the main base to replace casualties. Soldiers and dogs are dirt cheap compared to scientists anyway.
If 6 bases give almost full coverage of the globe, how come 4 + dark star leave "over a half" without radar coverage? Something doesn't add!

I agree with Akamashi, 4 or even less bases should be plenty. After you get enough alien engineers, you skip almost every uninteresting encounter anyway.Before I finished my latest campaign I was doing my job so unproperly, there were somewhat 25 alien bases on the globe and about 10 countries left the council. And they still paid me some millions to "fight" the aliens :D

About the bio suite, it's not even clear if it's a joke or serious. My experience of storming manors between 2 and 3 promos... Only the tactics of running into the house and playing open-close the door work. But the doors should also be guarded by dogs on the initiative, and all fighters should have miniguns and first aid kits. If there is no house next to the respawn, we immediately retreat. By cults. This tactic works easily against Dagon and Exalt. There are no problems with them at all. Lotus - there are always a lot of breakthroughs and injuries. Without blue TTBs, it is unjustified to go to the lotus. It is easier to close the lotus cult before many manars have appeared, because their headquarters is the easiest of all. Also about the final mission of the red dawn.

And about 4 bases and covering the globe with radars. Firstly, I don't see much point in covering the water with radars. And secondly, it doesn't work the way you think. Even if you cover only 50% of the sushi with radars, you will detect 95% of the plates. And flying out on each one is also a rather deviant tactic. Personally, I drown 95% of the plates in the sea.

Battleships and other saucers with turrets can still be stormed only with delta radiation research and heavy weapons. There is only to put up with it, there is nothing you can do about it. I lost three countries like that (guess which ones?)) In this game, I got all this only after 4 years of playing. If I were starting over, I would have gotten it all in the first six months after the invasion.

If you play with save loads, then all this ceases to be a problem. You can take battleships with your bare hands as trainees without losses.

Offline Stone Lake

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4973 on: January 07, 2023, 01:46:21 pm »
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Well, that's not really a feature of the armour, is it?
Yes, but that means kinetics shouldn't be an issue.

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Also, Witches with Arasakas say "Hi!". About 70% as bad as SVDs, so can still one-shot you if the RNG doesn't like you that day.
They literally can't if you have 70+ health, and practically won't if you have 65+ health. Which you should.
Now, how about those knives with ~56 power? Max damage to heavy tac's side can be 65, about the same as arasaka, but knives are thrown in a succession. And then there's katana with 95 power...

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50% isn't quite total protection.
But it's not 50%, it's 0%, so total protection. Gas damage type is choke.

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I just tried to do this '6 faces' rather randomly, and was left with a giant continent-sized hole and at least another 10% in gaps. See for yourself.
I see there's much overlap between radars, so you can cover that giant hole. And then there's maybe 10%, maybe 5% in gaps, it's hard to tell exactly. They're further decreased when you build hyperwave decoder. Also detection chance is just 20%, so you can as well just build extra radars.
Then again, sure, you can roll with 7 bases, they aren't harder to defend and don't cost too much, they just are not necessary.

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And that requires early warning, since radars are not infallible and landing windows are something like 2x4 hours, tops.
I think the main problem with these windows are that UFOs land at night, not that you can't detect them.

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And these aliens game here to mess with us, I'm getting each and every one of them I can. I play this mod to shoot aliens in the face, not to win with least effort expended.
Well I certainly don't envy the arduous path ahead of you. My patience ran out on about first year post-invasion. But that's also was my second complete playthrough of XCF. If you really want to take down and assault every UFO up until landing on mars as you say, that's probably a year or two of IRL effort. Good luck!

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About the bio suite, it's not even clear if it's a joke or serious.
I'm serious, they're one of the easiest. You probably just had bad luck with them.

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Battleships and other saucers with turrets can still be stormed only with delta radiation research and heavy weapons. There is only to put up with it, there is nothing you can do about it. I lost three countries like that (guess which ones?)) In this game, I got all this only after 4 years of playing. If I were starting over, I would have gotten it all in the first six months after the invasion.
You lose countries no matter what you do, and no matter how many ships you take down or assault. It's just RNG script. It's been like this since vanilla.
So you don't even need to assault battleships in particular, I did it just once for fun and that's it. Same with terror ships. There's just not much to be gained from them.
« Last Edit: January 07, 2023, 01:58:35 pm by Stone Lake »

Offline Akamashi

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4974 on: January 07, 2023, 02:14:52 pm »
Yes, but that means kinetics shouldn't be an issue.
They literally can't if you have 70+ health, and practically won't if you have 65+ health. Which you should.
Now, how about those knives with ~56 power? Max damage to heavy tac's side can be 65, about the same as arasaka, but knives are thrown in a succession. And then there's katana with 95 power...
But it's not 50%, it's 0%, so total protection. Gas damage type is choke.
I see there's much overlap between radars, so you can cover that giant hole. And then there's maybe 10%, maybe 5% in gaps, it's hard to tell exactly. They're further decreased when you build hyperwave decoder. Also detection chance is just 20%, so you can as well just build extra radars.
Then again, sure, you can roll with 7 bases, they aren't harder to defend and don't cost too much, they just are not necessary.
I think the main problem with these windows are that UFOs land at night, not that you can't detect them.
Well I certainly don't envy the arduous path ahead of you. My patience ran out on about first year post-invasion. But that's also was my second complete playthrough of XCF. If you really want to take down and assault every UFO up until landing on mars as you say, that's probably a year or two of IRL effort. Good luck!
I'm serious, they're one of the easiest. You probably just had bad luck with them.
You lose countries no matter what you do, and no matter how many ships you take down or assault. It's just RNG script. It's been like this since vanilla.
So you don't even need to assault battleships in particular, I did it just once for fun and that's it. Same with terror ships. There's just not much to be gained from them.
I disagree. The alien colonies in the files appear after the landing of a certain type of battleship. And only after that the country signs the pact. Since my tormentors have knocked down 100% of all the plates, no more alien colonies have appeared.

Offline Juku121

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4975 on: January 07, 2023, 02:46:09 pm »
Yes, but that means kinetics shouldn't be an issue.
Yeah, but that's a function of BL team composition and smokes, not any armour you may or may not wear.

They literally can't if you have 70+ health, and practically won't if you have 65+ health. Which you should.
That's true, but a solid veteran with 20 health left isn't much better than having been one-shot. He's probably bleeding out, too.

Now, how about those knives with ~56 power? Max damage to heavy tac can be 65, about the same as arasaka, but knives are thrown in a succession. And then there's katana with 95 power...
More like ~58. Knives have 130% armour effectiveness. Average is ~14, vs ~8 for the Arasaka. Bio-Exo has those at ~7 for knives and 28 for Arasakas, a much bigger difference.

Melee is always a crapshoot until very high armour values. Katanas will frequently kill you no matter what armour you're wearing. And Katana for an Assassin is 91 effective power, how did you get 95? That means an average of ~23 vs Bio-Exo and ~40 vs Tac Suits. ~22 if they hit you in the face. Not a gigantic difference, really.

But it's not 50%, it's 0%, so total protection. Gas damage type is choke.
Indeed. My bad. :-[



I do think you're right and Bio-Exo is actually better for BL missions than the Heavy Tac Suit, but the differences don't seem to be very big. Except for the choke resistance. That is indeed a gamechanger.

I see there's much overlap between radars, so you can cover that giant hole. And then there's maybe 10%, maybe 5% in gaps, it's hard to tell exactly. They're further decreased when you build hyperwave decoder. Also detection chance is just 20%, so you can as well just build extra radars.
The only base that has significant overlap and can be moved to mitigate this is in North America. And since I can't put it into the Pacific, there'll still be some overlap. Maybe 50% of the original. And in a pretty inconvenient location, trying to cover both of the Americas at once.

And no matter how you slice it, the non-covered area is not 5% or even 10% of the globe, i.e. 95% coverage with 6 bases.

Basically, I don't try to tile the Earth. I try to cover the continents where most of the action is, for both radar use and shortened aircraft range. Yes, maybe the 5% or 10% or whatever stragglers don't bother you. It does bother me as the commander supposedly in charge of defending the Earth against alien incursions. :)

Building extra radars means using base slots I have other uses for. One radar get both advance warning and covers any potential sneakiness going on outside radar range.

Then again, sure, you can roll with 7 bases, they aren't harder to defend and don't cost too much, they just are not necessary.
So you're saying my super-secret Elerium storage and 'two hundred aliens in containent tanks' Antarctic base is not necessary, then? Nor the mass laser rifle manufacturing facility? What kind of slapdash secret alien-fighting organisation are you running there? :P

So you don't even need to assault battleships in particular, I did it just once for fun and that's it. Same with terror ships. There's just not much to be gained from them.
100-200 Elerium, turret corpses, lots of Alloys and other swag? Alien Commanders? (I really wish they didn't come down to your bases to be captured like sheep. :( )

Only the tactics of running into the house and playing open-close the door work.
That's cheese I got more than enough of when I played Urban Chaos (JA2 mod).

Firstly, I don't see much point in covering the water with radars. And secondly, it doesn't work the way you think. Even if you cover only 50% of the sushi with radars, you will detect 95% of the plates. And flying out on each one is also a rather deviant tactic. Personally, I drown 95% of the plates in the sea.
AFAIK, crashed UFOs don't give the aliens any score, so crashing the saucers into the sea is just aesthetics.

Full coverage is not about detecting them at all, it's about finding them early enough that a early mid-game craft has a good chance to get to all possible landing sites. Full radar coverage helps with cutting down on time to first detection. Finding them when they've already landed, or on the return leg to outer space isn't half as useful.

The alien colonies in the files appear after the landing of a certain type of battleship. And only after that the country signs the pact. Since my tormentors have knocked down 100% of all the plates, no more alien colonies have appeared.
No, they appear when the country gets infiltrated, which happens when the final Battleship enters the atmosphere. Whether it lands or is shot down matters not (without using 'interruptPercentage', which the mod does not). This has been discussed to death already. What you're seeing is random luck of not getting any infiltration missions since your last one.

If you play with save loads, then all this ceases to be a problem. You can take battleships with your bare hands as trainees without losses.
All right, challenge uploaded. Feel free to save and reload to your heart's content to win the attached mission with zero losses. Post your results - preferably intermediate saves, like one per 5-10 aliens - when you're done.
« Last Edit: January 07, 2023, 02:51:21 pm by Juku121 »

Offline Stone Lake

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4976 on: January 07, 2023, 03:59:04 pm »
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Yeah, but that's a function of BL team composition and smokes, not any armour you may or may not wear.
Well that's on you, I didn't write that it was.

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That's true, but a solid veteran with 20 health left isn't much better than having been one-shot. He's probably bleeding out, too.
Ah yeah, brave x-com commander here prefers to lose his veterans left and right instead of just being wounded and rotated out of battle. Good call!

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More like ~58. Knives have 130% armour effectiveness. Average is ~14, vs ~8 for the Arasaka. Bio-Exo has those at ~7 for knives and 28 for Arasakas, a much bigger difference.
75^2/100 = 56.25. Well if you feel than Arasakas are more of a threat than assasins, then suit yourself.
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Melee is always a crapshoot until very high armour values. Katanas will frequently kill you no matter what armour you're wearing. And Katana for an Assassin is 91 effective power, how did you get 95? That means an average of ~23 vs Bio-Exo and ~40 vs Tac Suits. ~22 if they hit you in the face. Not a gigantic difference, really.
That's literally the point not to make it a crapshoot. Maximum damage with a 95 power katana against bio-exo is 67, but it's 119 against the side of a tac. Higher the damage roll, the more favor falls to bio-exos.
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how did you get 95?
I got into new battle at superhuman and mind probed the assassin. Numbers from wiki vary by difficulty and can't completely be trusted. He still had 75 throw tho, as I think it's not affected.
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And no matter how you slice it, the non-covered area is not 5% or even 10% of the globe, i.e. 95% coverage with 6 bases.
1/6 of a cube is 16%. If overlap is fixed, can't say there's enough gaps to fill a whole 1/6. So yeah, 95% coverage.
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Building extra radars means using base slots I have other uses for. One radar get both advance warning and covers any potential sneakiness going on outside radar range.
But you will half the amount of time UFO flies in relevant zones, undetected. All that for a single tile per base! To me, "halving" sounds way more important that whatever is between 16% and 5%.

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So you're saying my super-secret Elerium storage and 'two hundred aliens in containent tanks' Antarctic base is not necessary, then? Nor the mass laser rifle manufacturing facility? What kind of slapdash secret alien-fighting organisation are you running there?
No, you can run all in one. Except containment, that goes to research.

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100-200 Elerium, turret corpses, lots of Alloys and other swag? Alien Commanders?
You can get most of that unnecessary crap from other, easier encounters. I got commander before I got any leader, from a lab ship. Doing it once, for fun should be good though.
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All right, challenge uploaded. Feel free to save and reload to your heart's content to win the attached mission with zero losses. Post your results - preferably intermediate saves, like one per 5-10 aliens - when you're done.
Give me some dogs and I'll try. I wonder if they can bite high enough to get the turrets, though.
Even if not, in principle doable with baiting alien fire, but sanity will be a problem. I can almost imagine it - rookies win by doing nothing.
« Last Edit: January 07, 2023, 04:22:40 pm by Stone Lake »

Offline Juku121

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4977 on: January 07, 2023, 04:55:16 pm »
Ah yeah, brave x-com commander here prefers to lose his veterans left and right instead of just being wounded and rotated out of battle.
That may not always be an option (spent your meds on a friend already, etc), or not fast enough vs bleeding. And from a local Battlescape POV, an agent rotated back and with stat drain is very much one that isn't in the fight any more.

Strategically, it's of course better to save the agent. But tactically, it can make your position worse than outright losing one.

75^2/100 = 56.25.
I meant max damage vs Heavy Tac Suits, which you claimed was 65.

Well if you feel than Arasakas are more of a threat than assasins, then suit yourself.
There are other tools against ninjas (dogs, motion scanners, incendiaries). Not much to be done against stray shots, and less hassle changing everyone in and out of another set of armour. Assassins are only scary close up. Though probably enough that I should re-evaluate the Bio-Exo suits when I get to that point of the game again.

That's literally the point not to make it a crapshoot. Maximum damage with a 95 power katana against bio-exo is 67, but it's 119 against the side of a tac.
Do Assassins come at you from the back all the time? And 95*2*0.5 - 16*1.4 ~= 72, not 67?

In any case, what makes melee dangerous is that they can slash you more than once due to flat and low TU costs, so max damage on one swing is not the most important metric. As you said yourself for the throwing knives. Getting into melee is always a crapshoot until you get such high armour values even a max damage hit does negligible damage.

I got into new battle at superhuman and mind probed the assassin.
I debug moded myself to one and checked his damage directly. He does 0-182 on the middle difficulty, so 91 on average.

1/6 of a cube is 16%. If overlap is fixed, can't say there's enough gaps to fill a whole 1/6.
But the globe is not a cube, and surface area calculations are not that simple. For a rough estimation, a Large Radar covers about 1/4 of the diameter circumference of the Earth, so ~(1/2)^2 of a hemisphere. Two hemispheres means you need around 8 of these radar areas for total coverage, provided you could tile the globe with circles. No way to get everything even with 7.

If you feel otherwise, feel free to create a save with 6 bases and 95% coverage. I am saying it's not even theoretically possible.

But you will half the amount of time UFO flies in relevant zones, undetected. All that for a single tile per base! To me, "halving" sounds way more important that whatever is between 16% and 5%.
If I had the slots, I'd do that. Perhaps I should, non-manufacturing bases usually have a few free. And, as mentioned before, detection is only the (smaller) half of why I find total coverage useful. No way to build a 'super-hangar' that doubles transport speeds. :(

No, you can run all in one. Except containment, that goes to research.
r/whoosh has entered the thread. :P

You can get most of that unnecessary crap from other, easier encounters.
Not as fast, which matters when I'm 40 million in the hole that month, with maybe 20 million in bounties to offset that and want to get another manufacturing base up and running. I have about half the funding of a comparable vanilla XCF game, score bounties, near-infinite stores and pack-ratness. :D

Give me some dogs and I'll try. I wonder if they can bite high enough to get the turrets, though.
Here you go.

And no, that's why it's impossible. Same for Terror Ships. Would be interesting to see how far you can get before the tedium becomes overwhelming, though.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2023, 01:59:14 pm by Juku121 »

Offline Akamashi

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4978 on: January 07, 2023, 10:07:27 pm »
This is a pretty stupid argument if you consider it on the complexity of iron man. The bio-exo suit on the manor is just garbage. If you see an assassin, then with a 90% probability you immediately get 3-4 throwing knives. If you miraculously survive, then the agent needs to be treated on the next turn, and often by two different people. Assassins are neutralized either by accidentally shooting a minigun, or they are put into a stupor in the doorway by a dog barking. With subsequent execution. Any other encounter with an assassin with a 95% probability is the death of an agent. It's ridiculous to assume that bio exo will really save you from meeting an assassin. On Iron Man, agents with health above 50 are a huge rarity until the discovery of delta radiation.

Offline Xylon666Darkstar

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Re: The X-Com Files - 2.7: Spectral Entities
« Reply #4979 on: January 08, 2023, 12:03:40 am »
Spoiler:
xcom bio-enhancement
becomes way far available before delta radiation.