When one of my soldiers get frozen, the freeze damage fades away at the rate of 1 point per turn. I would assume this is true for aliens as well, whether they are unconscious or not. Ufopaedia.org says exactly that, after all. However, recently I encountered this situation:

I was exploring some large USO full of aquatoids. In one of the rooms there were four of them, and one of them tried to reaction shot me with the thermal shok launcher. He missed, but all four of them fell frozen. Strangely enough, I didn't get any freeze damage, despite being closest to the blast (I was wearing aqua plastics armor).

Now, I didn't want live aliens to clog up my alien containment space and I didn't have any grenades, so I decided to wait. That was roughly turn 15. Thermal shok bomb is supposed to do 120 pts of freeze damage, so assuming the aquatoids have at least 20 health, they should wake up around turn 115. I patiently waited until turn 230, but nothing happened. When I reloaded the turn 200 and decided to leave them alone, one of them woke up in the turn 203. Nobody else followed him, though.

So, does anyone have a similar experience? Does the freeze damage really go away 1 pt/sec? Is the freeze recovery random?

Ah, wait. The Thermal Shok Bomb does 120 points of stun on average. The max is double that or 240 points. All Aquatoids have a health of 35 except for soldiers which have 30. So you would be looking at a wake-up timeframe of about 205-210 rounds max. 203 is right in that range. And since Aquatoids are 100% susceptible to stun they should follow normal aquanauts. Now, this is assuming unaltered health for the aliens. If their health is lower due to you shooting at them, the max time could go to 239 rounds.

As far as I know, all single-space aliens recover from stun at a normal rate of 1pt/turn. (At least this is true in EU. I believe I checked this out in TFTD too and it was the same). Double wide aliens recover at the rate of 4pts/turn (1pt/section/turn) but they never wake up. Perhaps wait a little bit longer to see if the aliens wake up. If they don't, email me your saved game and I'll take a look at the numbers.

- Zombie

Heck, I should have kept the save, I no longer have it. But thanks anyway.

I guess I was just unlucky (or perhaps too lucky to deliver full 200% ), it seems I gave up just before they would wake up. But the strange thing is that I had a save in 200th turn, waited until 230th, but nothing happened. I reloaded back to 200th, tried to leave, but in several turns (like I said, around 203th) one of them woke up. Could it matter that I moved and returned, therefore "refreshed" the aquanaut's view of the aliens?

Yeah, that could be an answer too. Sometimes units are invisible when they wake up unless you look in their direction. But they normally re-appear when it is the aliens turn again. Lemme check this scenario out a bit.

- Zombie

Good of a place as any for this so here it goes. I was comparing the stats of the Stun Rod and the Thermal Tazer the other day with the values found in the Official Strategy Guides. Mr Ellis claims a 15 TU cost for using the Stun Rod, but that is obviously wrong as the game files lists it at 30%. Fine. When I looked in the OSG for TFTD, the Thermal Tazer is listed at 80% TU! What the....? That can't be right as my soldiers never have too many problems with not enough TU when using the Tazer. After checking OBDATA.DAT it lists the charge as 40% TU. Big difference, but it matches my experience.

The nice thing about the Tazer is that it dishes out 80 points of stun on average compared to 65 for the Stun Rod in EU. That extra 15 points of stun really helps to knock aliens out fast. I'm really impressed with the Tazer now and frequently use it as a primary weapon if I come across Lobstermen early on. (Lobbiemen take 110% damage from stun as well and stun is basically the only damage type which does normal or above damage with starting equipment). Of course, I don't like those extra stunned Lobstermen Soldiers clogging up my Alien Containment so I end up blowing them up on the battlescape with explosives. Still, at least I'm not wasting clips upon clips of Gauss ammo trying to kill one of these beasts.

Anyway, while digging in TFTD's data files I noticed OBDATA.DAT[040]. Not sure if this is intended to be a stun related stat, as there are some differences when compared to EU's list of objects. Most objects are 100 as usual but there are a few changes:


It would make sense that this field is melee related (possibly unused accuracy) as the HTH weapons are greater than 100. But I can't figure out why the Magna Pack has a value of 80 while the Sonic Pulser is 110. Those are grenades and are not intended to be melee weapons. Odd stuff.

- Zombie