A thread for little questions

[bouchacha]

How does rank work for weapons that scale with it when used by enemies? I'm constantly surprised by the pesky officer's pistol. Base damage of 15 piercing but +5 for every rank above Swabbie. Humanist soldiers are killing my gals clad in Guardian armor and that seems very wrong. Is it working as intended or or some weird code scaling enemy rank too high?

--- posts merged. Please don't do that ---

In vanilla XCOM, it was a good idea to sack any soldier that had less than X psi strength because they quickly turn into a mind control liability. Is this still good practice to follow with low voodoo power?

[Ethereal_Medic]

@ boucha

You can still use voodoo-weaklings as standard crew with the more worthy soldiers.
Just keep in mind to not bring them to missions with star gods (ethereals) or missions against the academy (high ranking psyonics sporting witches and more).

If they die, you've less to pay monthly so one win that way.

Humanists:
I just checked your problem in quick battle debug and it is true:
A humanist soldier's rank is too high. Equipped with a officier's pistol the damage roll is 0-70 (15 base + 20 bonus *1d200).
A humanist leader only has a damage roll of 0-40! (15 base + 5 bonus *1d200).

I doubt those bullet's can pierce through a guardian armor (it has 20% piercing protection so it's impossible to even pierce through the rear armor on a maximum roll).
If you're wearing a 'defender' armor it's alot more likely to get damaged by a 0-70 roll since the defender armor has only 10% piercing block)

[ohartenstein23]

The issue with rank is that alien ranks are numbered the opposite way from your soldiers - your swabbies are rank '0', gals are rank '1', and so on, but alien commanders are rank '0' on down to soldiers, who are rank '5'.

Before you ask if this can be changed by reversing enemy ranks, the answer is no, spawn points for enemies are done by rank and would take reworking every map to fix. Just watch out for officer's pistols.

[Ethereal_Medic]

If it causes more trouble than intended the rank* modifier needs to be changed.
Rather nerf the pistol if needed.

[FiendishDrWu]

I wonder if the pistol's damage could be coded:

(5 - alien rank) * 5  + 15

[Meridian]

of course it can, but then it would be OP in the hands of your rookies

[FiendishDrWu]

Sure, but is it being somewhat overpowered in the hands of rookies that much of a threat, given that they're statistically likely to be your least capable soldiers anyway?  Doing all the damage in the world won't help a rookie gal who can't shoot straight!

[sanyaskillpro]

But then the item wouldn't make any sense, an officers pistol that is bad for actual officers.

[FiendishDrWu]

Well, it's fine for enemy officers.   Just not yours.  But then, they built it for their benefit, not yours, so for all we know, maybe that was an intentional design choice on their part.   

I mean, we know that the Star Gods intentionally manufacture their equipment to be hard for others to use; what's to say the Humanists don't have some junior-grade version of that?

[BBHood217]

I say give the humanist soldiers a different pistol.  This rank thing wasn't a problem before because no enemy had officer pistols until that mission was added.

if they go down stunned, their corpse is invisible, but they have decent stun regen and can popup back up fairly easily.

There isn't even any point in stunning ghost gals since you can't recover them anyway.

[Dioxine]

I say give the humanist soldiers a different pistol.

No.

[mamix]

I finally managed to face a provost thus taking her alive. Immediately researched this first in order to progress further on the Dr. X's hideout quest. After finishing the research, game gives the option to sell the captive instead of using her to blackmail Dr. X into coming out of hiding.
Two questions :
1) If you sell the captive, does that mean you skip on the Dr. X quest entirely?
2) After finishing "Blackmail Dr. X" research the only information given is "to be continued". Is this under development or is there something else needed to be researched in order to progress on that quest further?

[legionof1]

the Dr.X line is as yet unfinished.

[bouchacha]

What are your go-to strategies for dealing with base assaults? Especially with mercenaries?

[Ethereal_Medic]

Space Rangers laser shotguns
Plasma Blunderbuss
Poison daggers
Excess flamethrower usage
suicide barrel bombers on turn 1-2
panzerfaust + any other explosive use (shot, not thrown = can't throw at all inside the base because of the ceiling
accept losses (gauss to the face, pulverized by a shock trooper, sniped by a HWP gauss howertank)

Goal is to win the battle, every gal, peasant, slave, HWP, AUX is replacable