I've been a bit busy lately... great stuff here, though!
Thanks for the update on the logger, BB. I took a look at it... looks great. Fwiw, I've already been directly sucking data out of Unitref and Soldier into Access. This was crucial to my
experience work. Speaking of which, your ReadMe said suggestions are welcomed... you might want to put Unitref experience counters in there. These are important for telling how many hits actually landed (even if no damage resulted), etc. For the Psi counters, users need to know that failed psi attempts add 1, but successful ones add 3, to the counter. You can always back-calculate number of successes and failures since you'll know how many attempts you made.
Anyway, just a suggestion. And you don't need to do it for me. But others may like it. In addition to the experience work, they showed me that e.g. occasionally you get an extra
reaction count, and that prox grenades credit hits to the person that set the prox mine off,
not the person that threw the grenade.
NKF and others - a very minor point re: rooting aliens - be careful of rooting them on an elevator. Elevators don't require energy to move up and down. You'll never guess how I got reminded of this point.
Zombie (or anyone), I am modelling the number of hits needed to kill critters and would like to make sure I understand things correctly. Mind if I ask some questions here?
1) You will recall there were some apparent simple errors in the OSG (aka Aztec's spreadsheet) vs. what was found in Geoscape.exe (and Xcomutil.cfg). Would you be able to check the items in "Bytes that are always different"
here to confirm that OSG is wrong and Geo is right? Or, like you said, should I simply go with Geo, eh?
2) Likewise, for the second bullet under "Systematic Differences" there - was OSG also incorrect across the board for Celatid and Chryssalid, Firing Accuracy and Armor? (OSG got the 2x increase backward?) Again - go with Geo?
3) OSG has zombies, but Geo does not. If you have confirmed any one level's stats for zombies, the rest can be extrapolated.
4) I see you folks have been talking about
Damage Modifiers some. Are they all up to date on the wiki?
5) In your damage analysis
here, you talk about "order of computations". It seems to me though that the bottom line for being accurate is not the order per se (min before max before average), but the observation that Integer rounding occurs separately for the modifier. Would this be a correct conclusion?
6) Along these lines, I'm not sure why you broke out the range from the average. Can't the average be stated as simply (Min+Max)/2? This accurately produces the average of 9 to 29 inclusive, 19.0. (Why do you say 19.
5? Did your test results indeed have this average?)
Thanks greatly for your help if you (or anyone) can address the above... before I go crunching tons of numbers.
Fortunately for my modelling, target Health does not change across difficulty levels, and armor only changes once. I know I'll model vs. HE, but not sure what else to model... maybe a select few weapons, like standard pistol, laser pistol, heavy plasma.
The weak ones were specifically chosen because they're the reason I'm doing this - to see which approaches to damage let you hit a target the most before killing it. In particular, standard pistol vs. edge of standard grenade blast.
But now that it's set up, I can throw in whatever else folks would like to see. Any other particularly popular weapons? Maybe laser rifles?
I probably haven't made it clear - I've set up a model that does trials of, shooting a target with a particular weapon. It includes armor and health being shot away (or not) with each hit. So it needs to handle min and max damage and modifiers correctly. It also includes a choice to always hit one side of armor (e.g. front), or to always target the highest armor side, out of whatever is left (a.k.a. continuously turning the alien for each shot, to kill as slowly as possible and maximize experience). Then I see how many hits are needed to kill. Run it a million times, and take the average.
MTR