Author Topic: A thread for little questions  (Read 1034298 times)

Offline khade

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #90 on: April 02, 2017, 07:05:14 am »
It is sort of possible to see the weather, center on the area or use t to check on the available targets, and you get access to another button that just says "uhh" tells you the probable weather among other things.

Offline legionof1

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #91 on: April 02, 2017, 07:12:49 am »
Snip
 I was talking about the Silver Towers map. Just don't research them before you unlock MAG rockets and can level the entire building.
Snip

It not that hard considering its star gods, but the craft layout is impossible to full explore without flight and has a ton of opportunity to waltz into point blank reaction fire. Considering that reaction fire is ghost beams it can be expensive to clear. Think 4-5 floor building with no stairs just holes.


Yay net score loss(potentially losing the game level) for the privilege of economically crippling to operate lasers. Considering a player could unknowingly stumble into have to deal with it in the first 3 months of play. Hell probably 2 months if the stars align. Maybe you finagle an advantage out of it by have that type of firepower early but your gambling the campaign on it.

Offline Dioxine

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #92 on: April 02, 2017, 09:16:40 am »
I don't see how Contact: Eurosyndicate can be researched within first 3 or even 5 months. It requires a lot of RNG hits, as well as 3 techs, of which 2 have several varied prerequisites.

Offline legionof1

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #93 on: April 02, 2017, 09:56:09 am »
Considering nearly all the prerequisites are on the get one free lists of early captives(academy students, human civilians, etc) it's not improbable. I managed to get all the regional contacts in 5 months last go with low spawn numbers of difficulty 2. Play diff 4 i could see it happen. A common occurrence no, but an uncomfortable possibility considering it's potential score impact. I'd feel much better if it was gated behind school graduation. As it is now you might face the problem with not but a pachyderm and sticks. Also something to consider is the dual impact of pogroms/eliminations.

I'll grant i may be playing devil's advocate but if i found it an unpleasant surprise with end game tech, someone pre school graduation just may get sucker punched out of the game without any real clue why. Most of the additional mission researches yield stuff you can at least evac from if it goes pear shaped. This is the only mission in this format of Death or Glory aside from the final run.

« Last Edit: April 02, 2017, 10:00:32 am by legionof1 »

Offline Dioxine

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #94 on: April 02, 2017, 03:15:43 pm »
Fair enough. I think the Contact article doesn't give enough warning; I'll fix that at least.

Offline EricPhail

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #95 on: April 05, 2017, 01:45:46 am »
Can anyone knowledgeable look at my save and tell me whether:
a. Something's broken
b. The RNG is just being unhelpful in the extreme (reticulans, star gods...)
c. Things are fine (if so any advice for the next while)

oh also, why is this save file getting rather close to the attachment limit size?

Offline Noir_CZ

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #96 on: April 06, 2017, 04:08:36 pm »
I have a stupid little question. I don't think I read it anywhere but I need to ask... what do the different kinds of damage do? Here is what I gathered so far

Piercing - normal type damage, good for going through armor? At least some weapons with piercing have a note about being better against armor (-xx% armor)
Slash - normal type damage, generally bad against armor
Concusive - normal damage, (could be called blunt or impact damage to my understanding), usually secondarya effect of shock damage (eg stun) in description notes
Daze - stun damage
Choking - stun damage? , then again poison gas grenade is said to kill and no stun mentioned
Chem - ??????? - variable from stun to armor damaging? (chem on poison dagger deals damage faster, chem on blowdart deals stun)
Plasma - ?????? - sometimes plasma damage is stun (cattle prod, tazogun?), sometimes it is just damage (i-gun)
laser - just damage type like burn

Can someone please clarify? Or point me in the right direction if I missed it somewhere?

Offline ivandogovich

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #97 on: April 06, 2017, 05:00:18 pm »
@ Noir_CZ

Piercing - Standard Armor Piercing from vanilla.  Basic ballistic rounds you would find in conventional weapons. Rifles have a slight bit of armor negation with this, and because this is a common early form of damage, many higher tier enemies have in built resistances to it (I'm looking at you, Mercs).
Slash - Melee, also known as Cutting.  Almost always on melee or thrown weapons: Axes, Swords, Throwing Knives etc.  Usually very solid damage in its Melee form, and often scales up in thrown form with throwing skill (more skilled archers get more damage, etc).  Usually a solid early damage type as most enemies don't have extra resistances to it.  (This is actually one type Mercs are more responsive to).
Concusive - High Explosive from Vanilla.  Great for terrain damage. Often useful as bombs that use it hit the under armor of the targetted unit.  Does carry some secondary stun effects, but in practice is more likely to kill targets if it overcomes their armor than stun them.  Higher tier enemies are often resistant to this, but as with anything, apply it enough, and you may still get effects.
Daze - Stun damage. Knocks enemies unconcious.  With OpenXcom Extended, the waters become a bit more muddied here, as weapons can have a primary damage type and secondary damage effects. For example, the Handle is primary Daze/Stun with secondary lethal effects.  This means that as damage scales up with your strong gals, you may sometimes kill a target you were trying to stun with a handle.  Also, some targets are immune to Daze/Stun damage.  Another mechanic in OXCE allows other weapons that are designed for incapacitating enemies.  These are often listed as "Plasma" damage in the Bootypedia, but they have extremely minor lethal damage and 4x stun damage.  These are often later in the game.
Choking - Smoke from Vanilla.  Please note that almost all units that don't have environmental filters (masked helmets, etc) take 4X damage from smoke as compared to vanilla.  You can see this in your own gal's base stats.  Does stun damage over time.  Now, throw in OXCE mixes on assorted weapons as mentioned above in Daze, and you can get Smoke type weapons that also do significant Lethal damage (to health) or pain (often to Morale) or even to energy and time units.  Most early Choking stuff is just smoke though.
Chem - Same as Acid from vanilla (ie Celatid spit).  In XPirateZ almost always degrades armor, usually adds pain (Morale damage) and has good Terrain Destruction effects.
Plasma - Plasma from vanilla. " sometimes plasma damage is stun (cattle prod, tazogun?)" - See explanation in Daze above.  Most enemies will respond to doses of plasma as very few are resistant to it.  However, access to good plasma weapons for the player can be fairly limited for sometime.
Laser - Laser from Vanilla.  This always has some armor penetration properties so it can be useful against armored enemies.  Again, not easy to get a hold of early on.

Not mentioned:
Burn - Incendiary damage from vanilla.  If a target is hit Fire will almost always damage the target.  If the target is set on fire from being hit or starting its turn on a tile on fire, it will continue to take damage from the flames.  Some units are immune, while others are very vulnerable (Academy Drones).  Often targets under armor so this too helps with the damage it applies.
Special - This is listed and is a rare damage type applied via Voodoo(Psi) weapons.  Has varied effects ie, stun, morale, tu, energy, armor damage, in addition to possible lethal damage.
Cold -  A weather affect of environmental conditions, causes energy drain on player units not wearing little or nothing. (Bikinis are bad in the Arctic)
Heat - Another weather affect: Caused stun on units that might overheat in Jungles or Desert.
Acid Rain - Damages armor, and morale.  May cause stun?

Offline juff

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #98 on: April 06, 2017, 05:39:42 pm »
I don't think it's a dumb question. There are a lot of mechanics and I had to take a bunch of notes to keep track of them. All of this is from bootypedia articles, so be sure to read them all. Anyway, here's some other information

Weapons have 2 ways of dealing with Armor
Armor effectiveness means ignores or adds some percentage of armor
eg. Fuso sword has armor +40%, so if the target has 50 armor it reduces damage by 70. Spear has armor -20% so the same target would reduce damage by 40.
Armor damage means that some percentage of the damage dealt will be done to armour first, removing it for all subsequent attacks.
eg. Hammer has armor damage 10%. If the hammer hits for 60 damage, it also removes up to 6 armor from the target. I believe armor damage happens before the target takes damage.

Piercing - all piercing weapons that have a base of 60+ damage deal armor damage
Laser - Has armor -33.3% by default
Plasma - Has armor damage by default.

Extra Damage (Lethal) - Does that percentage of damage as lethal damage. Eg. Fistycuffs (extra lethal damage 35%) hits for 20 stun, it also does 7 hp damage.
Extra Pain - Does damage to Morale. Pain resistance and immunity don't actually reduce pain damage, but instead increase the amount of stun recovered each turn.
Reactions Disrupt - Reduces current TU of unit, so reduces chance of reaction fire
Shock (System Shock)- Weapons do some amount of stun damage as well. The default is 0-50% of the damage dealt. A weapon with Shock x3 would do 0-150% stun damage. eg. If hammer hits for 60 damage, it does 0-90 stun as well
Cold embrace of death - If a unit has 3x more stun damage than current health, it loses 1 hp a turn. If it has 6x more damage, it loses 2 hp a turn.

Offline Starving Poet

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #99 on: April 06, 2017, 06:30:54 pm »
I've been playing for 100 hours and I still get all these mixed up in my head - it's nice to see everything all on one article.

If I'm not mistaken, all chem attacks damage armor to some extent as well

And I'm pretty sure that vanilla rules still apply: Armor damage = int(HP damage / 10) +1

Offline legionof1

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #100 on: April 06, 2017, 07:47:59 pm »
Also something to consider when selecting a damage type is that resistance is applied before armor(and +/- armor%). This means that some weapons behave quite differently then first glance would seem to tell.

A great many melee weapons with reduced armor penetration have the raw power to not be drastically affected by the few net extra armor.  Only a tiny fraction of all foes have better then 50 armor with the great majority being low 40s or less. +30% on 40 armor is only 12 extra armor against weapons that generally swing for 80+. Resistance is more effective against such high base weapons then the great majority of armor.

Shotguns are the reverse, horrid against any significant armor but much less hindered by high resist.


Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #101 on: April 06, 2017, 09:08:14 pm »
This should go straight to the Ufopaedia page. :)

Offline sinisteragent

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #102 on: April 07, 2017, 12:11:59 am »
Also important to not that (with a few possible exceptions?) being set on fire has a drastic effect on morale, making it extremely useful for some strategies. It doesn't tend to do huge immediate damage, but between the damage over several turns, plus the likelihood of causing panic, plus having an enemy illuminating their own surroundings, plus the likelihood that a unit on fire will also be in smoke (so receiving stun damage too), fire damage can be much more powerful than low numbers suggest.

Offline wolfreal

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #103 on: April 07, 2017, 05:44:05 am »
What do you think is the next bill paying strategy after chateau?. I´m in august right now, building my second base to intercept civilian traffic (Something I know is finite), and somewhat managing to pay all the accounts by now, but I think Chateau is not so reliable (Not every time you get rodeos, or apples in those rodeos). Selling small ship engines is kind of working from now, but if you can share some strategies in this point, it is going to be great.

Offline LuigiWhatif

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #104 on: April 07, 2017, 07:23:47 am »
Can you make chemicals yet?  They're pretty good until you get a mint running.