Re: The X-Com Files - 3.4: Daggers for Hire

[DeltaEpsilon]

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.

[DeltaEpsilon]

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).

[psavola]

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.

Because the gym-max stats are so much weaker than stat caps (+transformations), I partially disagree that they could replace the veterans. I suppose fully Gym-trained agents are acceptable for scouting, breaching and other such roles. maybe they can also throw a grenade or two (though the weak strength really hinders the range). But at least my playstyle  involves using heavily various sniper rifles, whose accuracy and damage depend heavily on FA - and you really need at least about 90 to be able to use them moderately well (snipers have the benefit of armor penetration so they can hurt essentially any enemy, in contrast to many other weapons). For that at least gymrats are useless and no replacement for real veterans.

[DeltaEpsilon]

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.

[Solarius Scorch]

@Chuckebaby: doing whatever I can to explain the relations between transformations and their conditions, but we're working with limited space, sorry. And even if there was more, it would be an even bigger info dump...

Manors have a very small impact on your income (monthly score -3 to -5)

It's daily, not monthly. (Still not a disaster, unless you have like 15 bug manors at once.)

[Juku121]

...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...

A first-time player who cannot figure it out and does not look at the (at most two) Pedia articles that say some sort of pre-existing modification is required before installing a specific cybernetic implant is doing it to themselves. No amount of extra explanation is going to help people who refuse to take a hint in the first place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Commendations are applied last. Flat stat changes first. Bonuses before that.

Akshully... There is no real order. What happens is this: there are basically two caps: the total stat cap and the training cap, which is usually but not always lower (basic agents and reactions, for example). You can no longer get stats from training when you hit the training cap, but combat gains and 'flat' bonuses from transformations work up to the total cap.

And then there are essentialy two types of bonuses to your basic, capped stat value: soldier bonuses, which come from commendations and transformations, and armour bonuses. Neither is really limited, they are independent of each other and the basic, capped stat value, so there is no particular order. The only thing that might lower your theoretical end value is having different commendations/transformations with the same exact bonus. Which I think only happens with the "Master of..." and "Bane of..." commendations right now. Having the exact same level of mastery in two or more weapons gives you the bonus for only one of them. However, different levels of bonuses still stack.

So you essentially have three values that are added together, and it doesn't matter in which order. The only thing you can sorta game and that isn't 100% deterministic is getting your very last combat stat gain that goes over the cap. This is not reduced to the cap after the fact, and since it can range from 1 to 6, your agents can end up at 0-5 points beyond their nominal maximal stat value. Transformations that provide a 'fill-up' stop exactly at the cap, so are a bit less efficient than combat training.

You can see your total bonus stats in the '+' menu when looking an agent's info screen back at the base, and pressing a trigger button.

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.

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.

On the flipside, 'flat' transformation boosts are not subject to diminishing gains, so are a quick way to 'top up' an agent.

...this requires me to actually send them out to missions like manors or something...

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.

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. :'(

...the agent will need to get wounded or panic a couple of times in missions to be able to progress.

Or use pepper spray on relatively harmless or unconscious enemies. Protip: you can stack snoozing baddies on top of each other for massive gains from AoE weapons. Surfboards have even better gains, but are more risky and you can't use sleeping enemies.

Low initial reactions are also really hard to train, so they make a good filtering candidate.

Pepper spray works for reactions, too. And reactions is a stat that doesn't have a lower training cap.

Just let them run out of sanity.

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.

Naturally this involves rushing Gun Kata...

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.

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

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.

The greatest manors have 10 % chance to upgrade to hybrid embassies after 6 months.

Not only, depends on who owns the manor. Hybrid embassies are the most common, yes.

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...

Selling some random stuff that accumulates can earn not totally irrelevant amounts of money, too. Alien communicators, dead zombie parasites, some corpses, secret files, etc.

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).

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.

15 bug manors at once

Bug manors? Are the antmen finally invading now?

[theophilos]

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

[DeltaEpsilon]

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.

[DeltaEpsilon]

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.

[Solarius Scorch]

Bug manors? Are the antmen finally invading now?

[Juku121]

@ Solarius Bugarius.

Ok I just found a manor #6, so I am unknowing where #2 and #5 is

Have an interceptable craft (so no cars or vans, and either fast or something you don't mind losing) hit each city you see. For baby manors that have launched recently, you can also use cars and patrol each city, but that takes much longer. Both are slow and tedious, but if you want to get at the manors, that's the in-game method.

Personally, I don't have the patience for this, and just make a waypoint and then just copy over a manor's coordinates in the save.

Does the medium convoys moving around create manors ?

No, manors just spout on their own. They're not taking over, merely infiltrating the society, sort of, by spreading their cult's influence.

They essentially are after Promo 3 and even to some extent before, though it wildly varies which are the better option.

A mission that can be used for training is not a training mission. If it meaningfully risks your agents, it's a gamble, not training.

Granted, the repeatable nature of manors does skew this perspective quite a bit.

As you say yourself, pretty much every cult has something that's at least a bit dangerous, and what kind of map and cover you get when assaulting a manor can vary. Never mind high-tier manors that have more and more dangerous cultists in addition to the reinforcements.

I mean, if you just go in and fire a few mortar rounds, throw some 'nades, shoot everyone close by, then leave, it kinda works. It's also gamey and you're stuck doing training all over while the rest of the game mostly just stands still. The worse sort of grind, really.

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.

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.

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.

Since the +5 is 'bonus', the above is not quite true. You can still train until 65+5, not 60+5.

And, yes, boosting after training is certainly one way to do it, but waiting until gym max IMO takes longer than it's worth. Better to transform at 60 FA and get to 70, then rely on field experience or another transformation to make up for the 5 'lost' points.

So while the numbers are bigger, you also take considerably longer to achieve those numbers.

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.

It will increase them to 65, but not as if there was no Gun Kata, since Gun Kata 'takes away' 10 of the remaining 15 possible trainable points.

It doesn't have a cap in general because reactions cannot be gym-trained.

Yeah, my bad, forgot that.

It is slow, but we're doing it on rookies that don't engage in regular missions until they're done.

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.

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.

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.

Manors are tricky the first time to deal with. They become largely irrelevant later though...

That's assuming you ever get to the 'later' stage and the manors don't just kill your baby air game in the crib and eat all your score.

[DeltaEpsilon]

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.

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.

[psavola]

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.

Speaking of Gun Kata vs Skulljack. What is actually Skulljack useful for? It seemed rather useless (LOS panic or MC), though I suppose you could use it to train PSK and rookies' secondary stats. Based on Juku's comments, I also skipped Gun Kata and have sold out all the Psiclones. I suppose I'll have to start doing Gun Katas from now on, given that the boost of 10/15 FA, 5 RE seems like a good tradeoff for 10 sanity.

Wrt earlier discussion, I suppose I could see some benefit of going to manors repeatedly for training purposes, to just shoot the visible enemies on turn 1, then abort immediately. Then there would be no risk of grenades, you'll just have to watch out for grenade launchers. This would be a very similar technique as some used for TFTD: go for the alien base, see if there is a visible alien, everyone PSI-amps it, then you exit on turn 1. Repeat ad infinitum, and fairly soon you have fully maxed out secondary stats and as a bonus some PSK.

[Juku121]

Skulljacks are melee-range, not just LoS. They do come a lot earlier than Psi-Amps, and don't require psi-training to use. If you get a good psi-strength agent or few, then a mind puppet is always useful. Since they're hard to control outside close range, I use them as breachers going through doors or around corners to take the first shots, or just leave them around as bullet magnets so my agents aren't. This is more useful in cramped urban and indoor missions and nearly useless in open ground, though.

Gun Kata only gives 5 FA at the cost of 10 sanity in the long run, which is the other reason I never used them. Because there were never enough for rookies, and they were not that useful for veterans. The +10 and +5 reactions 'only' speed up training.

[Chuckebaby]

A first-time player who cannot figure it out and does not look at the (at most two) Pedia articles that say some sort of pre-existing modification is required before installing a specific cybernetic implant is doing it to themselves. No amount of extra explanation is going to help people who refuse to take a hint in the first place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think if this "With subdermal plating and artificial cortex extensions" is supposed to mean.."Installing Tactical Neural Implant"

Just wish the documentation was a bit more clear for newer users so they wouldn't have to go through the long way as I did.