Re: The X-Com Files - 3.5: Whispers In The Dark

[theophilos]

I am stuck on "reptoid assassination squad". I'm in a building with lots of civilians, but it's turn 29, no signs of any enemies,  no civilians are being killed or anything yet, I've explored all I could, except 3 tower rooms which are inaccessible. (Going to try to break the wall to get in , but only small arms were aloud)

Could it be the enemies spawned in a place where they are stuck?

[psavola]

I am stuck on "reptoid assassination squad". I'm in a building with lots of civilians, but it's turn 29, no signs of any enemies,  no civilians are being killed or anything yet, I've explored all I could, except 3 tower rooms which are inaccessible. (Going to try to break the wall to get in , but only small arms were aloud)

Could it be the enemies spawned in a place where they are stuck?

You'll need to post a save to confirm or deny. Probably not, though. The place is a maze with all the floors (there are also a lot of downstairs) and having scanners/dogs is useful. This is especially useful when you don't get any visual or audio clues (opening/closing of doors etc) on civilian or enemy movement. To prevent false positives and to protect the civilians, it is advisable to stun the civilians you came across.

I doubt you actually meant "no civilians are being killed.. yet". You probably meant "anymore", because usually a large number of them get killed very soon. It would indeed be very strange if this wouldn't have happened to you at all.

[krautbernd]

I doubt you actually meant "no civilians are being killed.. yet". You probably meant "anymore", because usually a large number of them get killed very soon. It would indeed be very strange if this wouldn't have happened to you at all.

I wouldn't necessarily say "usually". Both the civs and the aliens tend to spread out, and normal difficulty levels there's what, three or four reptiods on a giant map with many small rooms. I have had missions where the reptiods didn't manage to kill a single of their targets and at least one where the civs killed the last remaining reptoid. I wouldn't call something like this "unusual", given the setup.

@theophilos

Yes, please upload the save in questions, let's have a look at this.

[Chuckebaby]

I am stuck on "reptoid assassination squad". I'm in a building with lots of civilians, but it's turn 29, no signs of any enemies,  no civilians are being killed or anything yet, I've explored all I could, except 3 tower rooms which are inaccessible. (Going to try to break the wall to get in , but only small arms were aloud)

Could it be the enemies spawned in a place where they are stuck?

If it is similar to the Exalt HQ building (yes I had a reptoid assault mission there once), go to the first floor. You'll see some rooms which are not accessible. They have white panels on them instead of doors.
Fire a few shots of ammo at them or use a grenade. They are usually hiding in there. It's a stairwell.

There might be access from the basement too, i can't remember. I only say this because I had a similar issue a while ago.

[Chuckebaby]

That's what I can't figure out, how to get them Kyberi :-)

Alright so I figured this out.
Soldiers need to first install the TNI plate before any Kyberi (Cyber sight, Cyber heart, etc.) can be done.

I'm gonna be honest here, the documentation/popped research could probably be a bit more user friendly.

I'm sure most people can figure this out after stumbling on it but i must have missed it, where it mentioned TNI must be taken place in order to take advantage of the Kybri functions.

Maybe place a disclaimer on the Kyberi research "TNI must be done for Kyberi enhancements".

[Juku121]

Erm, you need the TNI (and not TNI plate, whatever that is) to become a Kyberos in the first place. No cybernetics if you're not a cyborg seems intuitive enough?

Edit: Even if both the tech blurbs and the transformation descruiptions didn't mention that in the first place. Which they do.

Edit2: If you mean there should be a clearly stated TNI requirement for the agent-to-Kyberos transformation itself, yeah, that seems sensible.

[Vakrug]

Maybe place a disclaimer on the Kyberi research "TNI must be done for Kyberi enhancements".

This is just a minor inconvenience. If you have some guys with TNI already installed (and you probably are), then it is easy to guess the requirements.
And now compare this with "Blood Boosting". Description just says: "WARNING: BLOCKS SOME OTHER TRAININGS." Yeah, go figure it out! And transformations cannot be undone!

[DeltaEpsilon]

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.

[theophilos]

You'll need to post a save to confirm or deny. Probably not, though. The place is a maze with all the floors (there are also a lot of downstairs) and having scanners/dogs is useful. This is especially useful when you don't get any visual or audio clues (opening/closing of doors etc) on civilian or enemy movement. To prevent false positives and to protect the civilians, it is advisable to stun the civilians you came across.

I doubt you actually meant "no civilians are being killed.. yet". You probably meant "anymore", because usually a large number of them get killed very soon. It would indeed be very strange if this wouldn't have happened to you at all.

I wouldn't necessarily say "usually". Both the civs and the aliens tend to spread out, and normal difficulty levels there's what, three or four reptiods on a giant map with many small rooms. I have had missions where the reptiods didn't manage to kill a single of their targets and at least one where the civs killed the last remaining reptoid. I wouldn't call something like this "unusual", given the setup.

@theophilos

Yes, please upload the save in questions, let's have a look at this.

Hello here is update:

Yes it was like the exalt building,

Explored everything , took over hour with the darkness. Top floor had one large accessible room tower, and three smaller inaccessible room towers that went down to bottom level. the only way to get in was to blast hole into wall. There was 2 enemies in north tower and 2 in Southern most tower. No civilians killed minus 1 who ran through the hole lol , this was aboit turn 30 I finished exploring to find out no doors into these towers

Sadly I dont have the save anymore , if it would have been useful to fix problem. I will just tell myself,  that the reptile assassins were hiding in the walls and were found out before they could hatch their plans!

[Chuckebaby]

Erm, you need the TNI (and not TNI plate, whatever that is) to become a Kyberos in the first place. No cybernetics if you're not a cyborg seems intuitive enough?

Edit: Even if both the tech blurbs and the transformation descruptions didn't mention that in the first place. Which they do.

Edit2: If you mean there should be a clearly stated TNI requirement for the agent-to-Kyberos transformation itself, yeah, that seems sensible.

I think for us here that have played this game (and beat it it) a few times over, we can grasp the basic concepts and wing it as we go (figure it out). But to someone playing this thing first time around, they aint going to put this together.

And if your answer is tech blurbs mention this. There are boat loads of tech tree info on transformations. Can't expect to remember all of them unless, as I said before.. You've played the game a few times over like most of us here have.

[theophilos]

How badly does manors effect overall income? There seems to be 4 manors total (march 1998)

One of them I killed quickly 1997 but I was late In connecting dots that cars=manors , do only discovered rest until now. #2 of 4 I don't know location. #4 killed last month. #3 located but outside of osprey range so.  Thinking to send 8 man team.. exalt.. 😢

No flying jets coming out of them yet

I assumed manors would make income go down in a country so when I saw nothing go downward I assumed safe, but now I'm wondering if I've been so low on money, because of these manors flattening countries income?

Also is it ok to sell alien weapons ? I have some but afraid if selling there might be nechanic of cults receiving them lol

Any other money making tips, im stuck at 2 bases rn. 2 ospreys, 40 scientists, 25 engineers,  kinda stuck at under million $ to float freely l, would like to afford 3rd base and get ready for aliens

Have dagon hq defeated but need to research statue still, have black lotus avatar ready to be interrogated, red dawn coordinator being interrogated, I can research alien alloy engineering but unsure if worth atm

Not sure what kind research I should be prioritizing to shoot down aliens , also unsure which tech allows me to view my troops psi strength

[psavola]

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.

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.

[psavola]

How badly does manors effect overall income? There seems to be 4 manors total (march 1998)

One of them I killed quickly 1997 but I was late In connecting dots that cars=manors , do only discovered rest until now. #2 of 4 I don't know location. #4 killed last month. #3 located but outside of osprey range so.  Thinking to send 8 man team.. exalt.. 😢

No flying jets coming out of them yet

I assumed manors would make income go down in a country so when I saw nothing go downward I assumed safe, but now I'm wondering if I've been so low on money, because of these manors flattening countries income?

Also is it ok to sell alien weapons ? I have some but afraid if selling there might be nechanic of cults receiving them lol

Any other money making tips, im stuck at 2 bases rn. 2 ospreys, 40 scientists, 25 engineers,  kinda stuck at under million $ to float freely l, would like to afford 3rd base and get ready for aliens

Have dagon hq defeated but need to research statue still, have black lotus avatar ready to be interrogated, red dawn coordinator being interrogated, I can research alien alloy engineering but unsure if worth atm

Not sure what kind research I should be prioritizing to shoot down aliens , also unsure which tech allows me to view my troops psi strength

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.

Obviously it's the easiest to deal with manors when they are tier1 (no reinforcements), but IMHO tier2 is also fine if you know the tactics. You'll just have to learn the locations of manors and avoid tier3 until you trigger the MIGs, run away and after that assault it (once the hunter-killers have been triggered, there's a very long cooldown for them to go for you again).

It's fine to sell all alien plasmas until the beginning or mid-1999. You can use the money, and you get plenty more of them before you can research them. Alien lasers you can learn to use much earlier so I'd try to hold on to at least some of those (and all the clips).

Researching 'metapsychology' is the one where you get to evaluate the PSI strength of your agents. Browsing the research tree with 'Q' and http://xcf.trigramreactor.net are your friends. You should obtain some idea of what's useful to research. There's so much junk around that otherwise you get swamped (you have already been I think). Playing 'blind' a recipe for disaster and a restart sooner or later.

You still have plenty of time before the invasion starts, and in any case it will be a rather slow beginning. You don't necessarily even need to shoot down anything at first. You don't need to be too much concerned about that at this point. You should rather focus on expanding your research potential (science and other labs in the bases) and obtain global coverage. Your number of scientist shows that you don't have full research even at your two bases yet.

At this point of the game, most of your funding comes from the council and its gradual upgrades keep you afloat. The second main source of income are the money briefcases and money bags you might get when dealing with cult safehouses, outposts, forward bases, etc. Whether you get lucky and get manor funds is up to RNG.

[DeltaEpsilon]

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.

[psavola]

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.