How to kill a sectopod without plasma, laser or high explosive charges

[Riftwalker170]

So ive been playing this mod for a good bit now and I have finally gotten a good campaign going with 4 bases and a lot money. Everything was going well until the battleships attacked, specifically they attacked my US base (which i called Area 51, its a must). After using the brilliant tactics of corner camping and save scumming i was able to reduce the enemy force to a single sectopod but that is where the trouble began because this base was not prepared for them as i didnt buy a lot of HighEx. I tried everything i had, small rockets, large rockets, RPG AT rockets, tritanium grenades, alien laser rifles and nothing worked.

So does anyone know what i can do?

[X-Man]

Among standart weapons you can use Barrett Sniper Rifle. It ignores 30% of armor and and has good bonus to damage in the right hands (give it to the soldier with highest accuracy). Also you should choose the right position: shoot to sectopod's lateral or back part for the most effectiveness. It's legs are the most vulnerable. BO snpr are also could be used, but it will take more time to crush its armor.
Be patient and safe, and you'll destroy it. 

[Riftwalker170]

Among standart weapons you can use Barrett Sniper Rifle. It ignores 30% of armor and and has good bonus to damage in the right hands (give it to the soldier with highest accuracy). Also you should choose the right position: shoot to sectopod's lateral or back part for the most effectiveness. It's legs are the most vulnerable. BO snpr are also could be used, but it will take more time to crush its armor.
Be patient and safe, and you'll destroy it. 

What about the Tactical sniper rifle (the heavy one which can fire HE) its kinetic round has a 65% armor effectiveness, which if i understand the system correctly, will go through 35% of the enemy armor.

[X-Man]

What about the Tactical sniper rifle (the heavy one which can fire HE) its kinetic round has a 65% armor effectiveness, which if i understand the system correctly, will go through 35% of the enemy armor.

Oh, I forgot about it Yes, it is useful too. But use only kinetic ammo, not HE. Sectopod has 60% resistance to concussive damage.

[Mathel]

I suggest shooting it with a minigun before the Sniper Rifle. If I remember correctly, miniguns strip armor, making any subsequent hits more damaging.

[Arcalane]

I suggest shooting it with a minigun before the Sniper Rifle. If I remember correctly, miniguns strip armor, making any subsequent hits more damaging.

AFAIK you need damaging hits in order to degrade armour so the minigun is a bad choice here because of its relatively low per-hit damage.


Classically Sectopods have always been very weak to lasers (and at least somewhat resistant to most everything else), so your best bet is probably to laser it in the side/rear as much as possible. Or really just hammer it from any direction but the front.

[ohartenstein23]

AFAIK you need damaging hits in order to degrade armour so the minigun is a bad choice here because of its relatively low per-hit damage.

Minigun and a few other weapons do armor damage before calculating whether or not you penetrated the armor, making them useful for slowly wearing the sectopod down.

You'd need powerful enough lasers to overcome the armor, not likely if all you have are alien laser rifles. An often overlooked option is fire - flamethrowers ignore armor values and therefore are only reduced by damage modifiers. Also, 2×2 units take fire damage for each tile of them that was hit, so up to 4× damage. The vanilla terror units took 100% incendiary damage and could reliably be downed in 2-3 AC-I auto shots. Try using something to take down the shields then torching them. Very few things in the mod are immune to fire.

[TheCurse]

several hits minigun should do fine. however light minigun won't do anything...
heavy/scatter laser would make it a lot easier.
that fire thing is interesting...

[Arcalane]

Minigun and a few other weapons do armor damage before calculating whether or not you penetrated the armor, making them useful for slowly wearing the sectopod down.

It's a 5% pre-mult. I wouldn't hope for too much there!

You'd need powerful enough lasers to overcome the armor, not likely if all you have are alien laser rifles. An often overlooked option is fire - flamethrowers ignore armor values and therefore are only reduced by damage modifiers. Also, 2×2 units take fire damage for each tile of them that was hit, so up to 4× damage. The vanilla terror units took 100% incendiary damage and could reliably be downed in 2-3 AC-I auto shots. Try using something to take down the shields then torching them. Very few things in the mod are immune to fire.

Keep in mind, vanilla (and XCF) sectopods take 50% extra damage from lasers. That puts the alien laser rifle up to 67.5 damage. With a very high damage roll that'll just about overcome the side armour and do a modest amount of damage through the rear armour.

XCF Sectopod is 145 front, 130 side, 100 rear, and 90 under with 40% Explosive, 150% Laser, 80% Plasma as notable resists (exp/plasma) and weaknesses (laser).

Aside from that I think you're right; the best bet here is probably either flamethrowers or incendiary ammunition for cannons and rocket launchers. Using flamers will be dicey (their maximum ranges are very, very poor) but I'm not seeing many other choices. The only HEX weapon I'd consider is HEAT RPG rounds which have a 30% pre-armour bonus, but even those will be defanged by that heavy plate.

[TheCurse]

if available, minigun might not be most efficient, but imo most effective way.
10 bullets @ 30 dmg. 3x per turn per soldier. (considered most hit, so short range...)
pretty sure after 3 or so soldiers, each doing 3x10x30 dmg its gotta be down.
only encountered the MiB versions yet, they did not seem that tough when confronted with a bullet storm.
(yes i might be biased  )

[Docent]

I don’t know how in XCF, but in Vannila there is one secret - incendiary weapons. It always works. Even ordinary incendiary grenades. Burn it. Incendiary rockets, as well as incendiary ammunition for heavy and auto cannons. Miniguns, including laser ones, are useless.

[TheCurse]

how sure are you a laser minigun is useless against sectopods...?

[Arcalane]

how sure are you a laser minigun is useless against sectopods...?

At a glance it has a base power of 50, multiplied by 1.5 is 75. This gives it a damage range of 0-150, not counting however the pre-armour damage bonus works. As such you'll need an above-average damage roll to damage it from the rear, a fairly high damage roll to damage it from the sides, and a near-maximum damage roll to damage it head-on.

Not useless, but flank hits are your friend again.

[TheCurse]

that pre-armor dmg bonus might be worth looking into.
considering how easy it was to kill a sectopod with regular miniguns (30 dmg, reduced by sectopod armor), laser should just rip that thing apart...
don't remember the actual count of salvos, but it took like 2 turns with 2-3 people.
just considering the raw numbers and armor, killing a sectopod with miniguns should be about impossible...
(armor ablation might come to mind)

[Mathel]

Red = edit

The armor pre-damage multiplier allows a weapon to eventually kill anything that does not no-sell the damage type. It may take lots of ammo, but it will die.
I know for sure it damages armor when no HP damage is taken. (Tested unwillingly by plasma against me.)

I do not know if this is correct, but my hypotesis that the Impacting Damage (Before being reduced by armor plate) is multiplied by APD and applied to impacted plate.
That way, if a minigun does 30 averaga dmg, Sectopod has (guessing here) 50% kinetic and a minigun has 5% APD, a shot from minigun will do 0 to 1.5 armor damage per hit. In 10 hits, that would be 0 to 15 damage, 7.5 average. But once it starts damaging HP the armor damage will rise.

A laser minigun, with it's 50 average dmg and Sectopod having 150% Laser, assuming it also has 5% APD, should be even more deadly.
150*5%=7.5 .
Every shot doing 0 to 7.5 armor damage per shot, averaging at 3.75.