A thread for little questions

[Ragshak]

Are there any tips how to deal with Fatbag? They can shoot at me before I can locate them and no matter what armor is put on my gals they one shoot them. I know it it is because of acid damage but how to counter this?

Because of Fatbags and Chryssalids I reaaaaly dont like The Church. Even academician cyberdisk and traders powerarmored soldiers aren't so annying 

[ivandogovich]

Are there any tips how to deal with Fatbag? They can shoot at me before I can locate them and no matter what armor is put on my gals they one shoot them. I know it it is because of acid damage but how to counter this?

Because of Fatbags and Chryssalids I reaaaaly dont like The Church. Even academician cyberdisk and traders powerarmored soldiers aren't so annying 

Celatids are one of the deadliest foes in the game.
Their weapon has 140 (Acid/Chem) power which will always be an issue.  It is arcing, so shooting them from under cover (below a vessel/under trees) may help.  They have good snap accuracy so reaction fire can always be a challenge.
They have decent health (68) so they may be able to tank a few shots.
Celatids have Sense=20 (Can see through walls, etc).

Do what you can to stay 20 tiles away from them.  And Shoot them from under cover.

[Starving Poet]

I found that the last celatid on the map always required a sacrifice of one girl before I could kill them. 

As Ivan said, their weapon is arcing - so keeping something over your head will limit their ability to hit you.   They *used* to have 30 SENSE and 3 snap shots per turn, so they've been toned down quite a bit! 

[legionof1]

Also something you can do is bunch up the gals before your likely to engage one. If the celatid "spots" too many gals at once it will end up wasting most of its TU on the advance/retreat dance even if the great majority are out of line of fire.

High Sense enemy units are very susceptible to the "panic dance" because they see through walls and the AI only considers raw number of enemies spotted. So group up and bum rush the thing is my solution most of the time if i cant down it at 25+ tiles. 20+ tiles of open lines of fire is pretty rare so

Also of note is it takes 20% additional cutting damage so bows are very effective.

And it's not actually that accurate, despite its high weapon 75%, its skill is only 80. So .75 on weapon x 80 skill=60.  Good for a terror but not that accurate in absolute terms. Particularly as a non aoe arcing fire.

                                         

[Ragshak]

What is the role of Mint? I see i Can produce lower chips from high ones but... in the end selling Chemicals gives more money (tested on 1k->200$ chips).

[Scorrpio]

Lower tier minting is definitely very blah.   The true heavy hitter is making obsidian chips from ore and them making gold chips from those.  Probably absolute best return in late game, beating even tanks by a large margin.  Too bad ore is not readily available.  Be sure to stash any ore you happen across.

[ohartenstein23]

Too bad ore is not readily available.

Sounds like somebody hasn't tried the Prospector as a dropship.

[ivandogovich]

Doing the rough math (not accounting for runt salaries or workshop overhead), each Ore is worth about $170,000 if processed through Obsidian to Gold Chips.  This makes each Prospector flight pay about $680,000 (while an Excavator take down can yield over $8.1 million).

[Scorrpio]

Sounds like somebody hasn't tried the Prospector as a dropship.

Somebody is still waiting to get a bloody implosion bomb launcher part to drop...

[legionof1]

Bomb launcher can cheerily go fuck itself. Random RNG to get Pacification run, extra difficult combat cause 1/3 to 1/2 the air game is locked behind the fucker, and then less then 50/50 per individual bomber craft.   

[Ethereal_Medic]

Found my Impl.-Bomblauncher inside a Star Gods Bomber... (my 4. Bomber-raid in total over different factions)
(Considering this the 2nd hardest crackdown-version once the one Sectopod finally decided to die and leave his squishy friends to get bumrushed where Mercs are too healthy and acc. to be dealt with most of the time)

The technologies I can research (in November 2603) are 20 months too late to be useful (especially prospector is totally useless now)
If you have trouble downing bombers, try your tankiest aircraft infront and 2-3 baracudas with as much firepower hooked onto the 4xlw slots and/or one bomber with 3x hammerite.

The bomber has poor acc. and can't oneshot any of those vessels. Using a small shield on the baracudas can net 1-2 additional hits if the bomber refuses to go down.
Just one thing that is realy annoying is the chance to get the one and only bomblauncher part from the crashsite.

It would be less RNjesus if this crash had at least 2 bomblauncher spawn-points. It's even more common to get the 1x plasma-spitter-parts over nothing.
I could consider myself lucky to have 4 baracudas with 3x lascannon + 1x light shield to pulverize any threat the airgame could throw at me besides silver-towers and battle-ships.

One question: Is it possible to get an instant crackdown (assault transporter) from a random faction besides having no sentry/fighter with crackdown-order at the very start of a month (detected Nov. 2603 02:00 - aimed onto asia)? Sure those SG are no match against 40 elite hands and 3 howertanks but having less than 5hours to react to a serious crackdown-attack from thin air seems quite rare and random to me. It's confusing since every crackdown before needed the following order: Sentry / Fighter / Large Vessel / Crackdown-vessel.
Thoughts?

[Starving Poet]

One question: Is it possible to get an instant crackdown (assault transporter) from a random faction besides having no sentry/fighter with crackdown-order at the very start of a month (detected Nov. 2603 02:00 - aimed onto asia)? Sure those SG are no match against 40 elite hands and 3 howertanks but having less than 5hours to react to a serious crackdown-attack from thin air seems quite rare and random to me. It's confusing since every crackdown before needed the following order: Sentry / Fighter / Large Vessel / Crackdown-vessel.
Thoughts?

Yes, I was able to replicate this by having the ratmen patrol find a base mid-month, but not have the time to perform the crackdown before the end of month mission roll.  The next crackdown by whatever faction will know where the base is and immediately launch a base attack.  I'm sure this will work for other crackdown options as well.

[Ethereal_Medic]

Guess tough luck been spotted by the church and getting assaulted by the Star Gods
Makes sense since every mission in November 2603 was 100% Star Gods and the usually milking runs.

[desert]

As I like to take things slow (into my 4th year, fielding only Codex ships and Hunter-Killer, waiting on Mint and Summoning Circle construction, Printer and Refinery research), I have to admit my Geoscape activity is much the same as it was 2 years ago, not counting special missions, with very incremental equipment upgrades across factions (alongside old stuff). I've seen Star Gods only once. Is there some threshold at which activity will categorically change to weight Star Gods heavily?

Also, why is it that rebel mutants can't be taken hostage if they are unconscious at mission end? I've only seen them once so far, in a Euro mission, but I'll assume this applies to all encounters with them. I debugged to revive a few with medkits (for the faction research), otherwise the only hostage would have been the General.

[juff]

If i'm not wrong stargods increase in frequency when their topic is researched. No idea on why rebels can't be captured.