26 replies to this topic

[Alienated]

Sunflash, on 9th April 2011, 3:35pm, said:

If you have a farmstead design that requires you to walk a few kilometres from your house to your barn, you need to go visit an actual farmstead.

I didn't say the simulation in the battlescape is excellent.

Sunflash, on 9th April 2011, 3:35pm, said:

Just because YOU can't work as a sniper-scout team with a friend in secanrio paintball, doesn't it's cheating...

Something a sniper can't see he can't aim as well. If you play this: your shooter stand at a door in a room, the scout is outside and looking in the other room through a window and spots an alien just right the other side of the door. The shooter does an auto-shot, first shot destroys the door, the second and third hits the alien. Now this is a shooter/scout tactics because if 2nd and 3rd shot misses or can't send the alien to the floor, the alien can return fire.

No need to explain this further, you should have realised by your own that you've been cheating all along, I suppose by the way you insist that you have not ever tried to play X-COM as it was designed to be played. The reactions-time units thing (that the target can return fire) is the main theme of this turn based game. I didn't say "don't promote cheating on the wikipages," I said "don't call a cheat tactics on the wikipages." I bet everybody who can't beat the game the other way will insist to take the scout-sniper cheat for a superior tactics.

By the way, has anybody updated the wikipages by my remarks or is it planning to do that?

[Alienated]

To the wish list:

§ The combatants currently don't use TU for turns when walking. Also, they lose TU of a step if they sight an enemy. This shouldn't be this way. The new way: the combatants use 4 or 6 TU only when they walk in the direction they have been facing. If you make them walk in other directions, they use 5 or 7 TU. However, they don't turn in the new direction. I know there isn't animation for sideward or backward walks. It can be solved by turning the figure automatically in the original direction without TU cost and sighting check. All of this can simulate running, sidle, and retreat.

§ Now I realise that we could make the stun-rod able to manipulate faint combatants just like the medi-kit does. The medi-kit use checks for what the user is facing and what is underneath of the user. This way the user could stun the faint enemy to death if the underneath use of the stun-rod did normal (or electric) damage to the target instead of further stunning. This could be applied to thermic lances and thermal tazers too, or even fire-arms too somehow. The fire-arm should target the lowest level of armor of the target underneath. It happens that more than one stunned combatants are underneath. This can be ordered just like the medi-kit use does. The fire-arm use should use melee accuracy (100%) and experience should be gained accordingly.

§ I have already recommended the base defence facility to auto-fire if an UFO flies just above your base and the destroyed (retaliation) or downed (other) UFO should give you score. I forgot to mention this: you can (should be able to) ambush an UFO crew if they land exactly the position of your base (an X-COM base in a city). This happens in infiltration and terror missions. The requirement is the same as in the base defense set-up: you must have soldiers and equipment at the base, and additionally you have a certain limitation of the number of soldiers (you can't hide a regiment, so be it a dozen) and you must have at least a captain among them. The equipment phase is the same as in the base defense: you have access to every weapon in the general stores and the crafts, however, what you don't equip doesn't appear on the battlescape. Also you lose everybody (missing in action) and everything if you abort such a battle. The advantage of this is that you don't need a craft to do this and you can scatter and place your soldiers in the houses of the city, I mean the program puts them here and there just like civilians. Also, it could be nice to talk to civilians ("Get off of that tile or I shoot!"). If you ambush a landed UFO, then your soldiers are scattered on the battlefield and the aliens are in the UFO. This may be applied to terror ships too, for example you may ambush them outside of the city if your radars detected the UFO. If you successfully ambush every UFO in the country, you don't lose her funding. For example you can place a base in Novosibirsk and surely ambush every major UFO in the area (Siberia). This may give some strategy to players who just don't want to go to Cydonia. You dismantle and build bases all along your campaign as the aliens change their plan. They start to infiltrate North Africa, so you dismantle three bases and build three ones at Cairo, Casablanca, and Lagos. If you successfully repel the aliens for five (ten on superhuman) years, then the big brain on Mars shall explode in anger and the ugly aliens will eat plasma beam in depression as they've been just intellectual parasites anyway. I love it when there are alternative victories.


Remarks for the wikipages:

§ Also the aliens may use snap-shot only for opportunity fire. Have you ever seen an alien shoot twice in the floor after it shot your soldier dead at the first opportunity crack? I haven't ever in the PSX version. The editor's soldier probably had reactions around 30 and an alien (aliens usually are fine with reactions) shot him trice as if it had been an auto-shot. This happened to me either in my "youth", and I wanted to know how on earth I could've told my soldiers to use auto-shot for opportunity shot. No way.

§ Also the aliens use aimed shots. Maybe I didn't read the opposite on the wikipage, I indeed read it on forums from NKF. However, I don't have 100 per cent sure method to determine my fact. I concluded from the number of opportunity shots and the reactions values of combatants. It is possible that the alien took a heavy plasma clip from its left leg, put it back, took it again, put it pack, or unloaded-loaded its weapon before it snapped & shot saying: "Just watch how I can beat you even this way, weakling earthlings!", so I merely vote for my being right. Aliens use shots according to distance. If your soldier is around twenty tiles away and well covered, then the aliens do aim their shots. And miss often. Even they.

§ Aliens can't see better in the dark than X-COM operatives. If you mind-control them, then you can see they can't see farther than an earthling can. I know this is bungled as well as other things in the game. Should I put it in the wish list or the bug list that the alien side too should have difficulties in the dark? The electroflare could be a strategically-tactically benefical utility in night missions but now it is almost essential therefore the player chooses daylight UFO assault. Night missions should have been intended for surprise combats and hide & seek combats. And if you had highlighted the aliens positions by electroflare light, then you could have had advantage against aliens. By the way, can aliens see civilians in the dark (farther than nine tiles)? If they can't, then doing a terror site at night isn't so bad an idea.

§ Not a specialty of the wikipages but I believe it's worth mentioning: the bad usage of the words then and than. I know that people in the United Kingdom and the United States of America use then instead of than among other grammar errors but being Made in UK or Made in USA isn't an excuse for committing such things. Then and when make a pair. Also common mistakes are there, they're, and their; your, you, and you're; its and it's mixed up, fortunately not on the wikipages, yet. However, I remember some things like soldiers equipment written on the wikipages intended to mean soldiers' equipment or a soldier's equipment maybe. And there is sg = sg exists whereas there exists sg = syntax error. Do not fully rely on a computer spell checker. What the spell checker can identify as an error any average reader can identify. Errors the spell checker can't identify confuse and mislead readers.

[Alienated]

I have some remarks again.

§ I have already mentioned the data bug in TFTD that there are places between South Atlantic and Antarctic taken for North Atlantic. I observed lately that alien subs in missions at the North Sea usually have a waypoint in the buggy area causing them to shuttle south and north on the globe. (Sometimes alien subs even take a seat there.) This causes two significant problems: (1) greater alien activity scores at irrelevant areas as Antarctic, South Atlantic, and Africa; (2) loss of sight of alien subs. In the beginning with Standard Sonar you have a hard time to detect alien subs, and this error makes you have to detect alien subs twice.

I found one more buggy place between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, also taken for North Atlantic. I have not yet observed issues in alien sub movement regarding this place. The only drawback of this is that the settling of a base costs more than it should as North Atlantic is one of the most costly areas. I wonder how floating base attack missions may handle an X-COM base in the buggy places. Does somebody care to confirm this data bug on the PC versions at last?

§ I read on a wikipage "Most experienced Able Seaman is promoted to Ensign if opening present." I discovered that this is not exactly the case. I got promoted a man (7th) with 25 summary improvement points versus a man (9th) with 29. The invisible melee accuracy can't be the reason because none of them has used Thermal Tazer. Can you tell a parameter that isn't counted for promotions? Are some parameters counted twofold?

Here are the "competitors" for the rank:

  7  8  9 10  ordinal number
   E  A  A  A  rank
   4  5  2  2  missions
   2  2  2  2  kills
   2  3  2  5  TU improvement
   9  4  7  7  Stamina i.
   7  4  8  4  Health i.
   0  0  0  0  Bravery i.
   0  0  1  0  Reactions i.
   3  2  1  2  Firing Acc. i.
   3  3  1  0  Throwing Acc. i.
   1  9  9  6  Strength i.
  25 25 29 24  Total i.

I noticed that aquanauts (and soldiers) gain experience peculiarly according to their ordinary number. For example my 1st aquanaut in my current game just won't improve TU and Strength whereas his reactions and FA are the best among the men: 38 and 56 (everyone starts at 30 and 40 by the Bad Rookies difficulty setting). I also noticed such tendencies in EU, I had a guy with maxed Reactions (around 100) with still 67(!) TU and a guy with around 40 Reactions and 20 FA improvement and max TU (80) with still 4(!) Health improvement.

I also read on the same page "Promotions for rank above rookie are given out globally. That is, after any mission by any individual base, all soldiers from all bases become eligible for promotion... IF, and only if, someone obtained any combat experience." I must add to the condition (IF, and only if) that a killed officer may also trigger a set of promotion without any experience gain.

§ I read "Mutual surprise. If X-COM and alien units spot each other simultaneously, the aliens will not fire first," and "Aliens also benefit from mutual surprise. However, an X-COM unit being tracked by aliens' "intelligence" is already visible, thus cannot trigger the not-visible to visible transition that allows mutual surprise." Then it seems the aliens always know where your soldiers are! Properly speaking, such as mutual surprise doesn't exist in the game. It is just a bug. When you sight an enemy unit by entering its range or line of sight, the program doesn't start the opportunity shot calculation subroutine but starts the "Put the Alien's Image on Screen" subroutine and forgets the other subroutine. This never happens to the alien side because your soldiers are always on screen in enemy turns. Dear wikipage editors, you put this on the wrong section. It should be put in the Known Bugs and Battlescape Exploits sections. You can place a soldier facing a door, he opens fire at the alien opening the door if he has enough Reactions and TU left. However, such a trap works better if you place the man by the door to open fire at the alien opening the door AND going through it because aliens' side armor is usually thinner.

I also noticed an odd thing. You wrote: "Will never trigger reaction shots: Turning in place," and this is correct, however, sometimes it seems as if aliens' turning in place also triggered reaction fire because I see some of my soldiers shoot when the alien, after having come through a door, turns towards my soldiers. I guess the alien wanted to walk back because it didn't have enough TU to shoot but as it started to turn back in the direction of the door (essential for animation) it sighted my soldiers so it spent the TU for walk (4 TU) not for the turn to the L/R (2 TU) and the program took the move for a walk and started reaction fire. It should have been a mutual surprise case but as my soldiers were on screen already, the alien brought reaction shots. Mutual surprise doesn't exist in the two X-COM games; a variety of bugs, that is what exists. I read "TFTD, Terror From The Deep, X-Com, XCOM, et. al. originally developed by some very fine people. Originally distributed by Microprose. Now? Who knows." Calling the developers very fine people is an open insult to decent game developers regarding game development. I can believe those are very fine at cooking, car driving, or playing the guitar but NOT game development. The two X-COM games are very fine games because the genre itself and the theme itself are very interesting but their coders and designers bungled them almost everywhere the games can be bungled. They just luckily touched a thing essentially bringing success. It happens. This is called virtue. They are virtuous, I agree.

§ It is not a bug but it proves that the geoscape wasn't programmed to be foolproof. If you avoid combat and just make the X-COM craft follow the UFO (alien sub), then you can still click on the craft's dot to command otherwise after that, for example move to a waypoint. The craft moves toward the waypoint and you can click on the craft's combat screen icon to fight or leave the target. Then the craft will return to base and the waypoint stays on the globe unerased until next new game. Such a haunting waypoint can be a real dirt on the geoscape. So don't be a fool by doing unexpected things in X-COM, especially in X-COM.

[kyrub]

Alienated, on 2nd May 2011, 12:04pm, said:

§ I read "Mutual surprise. If X-COM and alien units spot each other simultaneously, the aliens will not fire first," and "Aliens also benefit from mutual surprise. However, an X-COM unit being tracked by aliens' "intelligence" is already visible, thus cannot trigger the not-visible to visible transition that allows mutual surprise." Then it seems the aliens always know where your soldiers are! Properly speaking, such as mutual surprise doesn't exist in the game. It is just a bug.
... Dear wikipage editors, you put this on the wrong section. It should be put in the Known Bugs and Battlescape Exploits sections.

You should learn more about the game, perhaps? This mechanism was hard-coded in the game, it's not a bug. Alien intelligence means Aliens "remember" or "focus" on a given enemy and his general whereabouts. It is not the same as being on screen, they are unable to shoot at him from distance (like you do). They can psi-target him and they are not "surprised", because they "expect" him being somewhere there. Why is that odd? In the same vein, you could find the X-COM coordination by one player as unfair. How can someone aim at something that he does not see? That's not a bug for you?

Quote

I also noticed an odd thing. You wrote: "Will never trigger reaction shots: Turning in place,"

There should be probably written: "Will never trigger reaction shoots: Looking in another direction". That's all. (Are you a hair-splitter?) And no, it is of course not a case of "mutual surprise", since your soldier saw the alien first, when it came through the door. So he's not surprised.

Quote

I read "TFTD, Terror From The Deep, X-Com, XCOM, et. al. originally developed by some very fine people. Originally distributed by Microprose. Now? Who knows." Calling the developers very fine people is an open insult to decent game developers regarding game development.

  How can you call other people names when they did something so interesting as X-COM? The game has been enjoyable up until today, for 17 years. Nobody else have make a solid sequel, although many tried, with similar conditions as Gollop brothers. Is it "decent" only?  And by the way, what did you achieve professionally? By your standards, is it decent or very fine? I'd like to know, really.

[chiasaur11]

I'm still amazed at the obviously kilometers thing. I mean, you can walk from one side of the battlefield to the other in a reasonable time period, but it's so huge you can't shoot from one end to the other due to the curviture of the Earth? Man, X-Com wind sprints must be hell.

Also, did some reading up on guided missiles when considering the bebop (as I will continue to refer to Blaster Bombs  until it catches on or I die. Shut up and give me my mad dream.)

Apparently, first generation Soviet wire guided missiles could go faster than 200 mph once they got up to speed, and that was slow enough to require revisions. Aliens having a bomb that has to walk over slower than a sprinter seems a bit...

incompetent of them considering what current guided missiles can do. Just thinking.

[Alienated]

kyrub, on 2nd May 2011, 1:21pm, said:

How can someone aim at something that he does not see? That's not a bug for you?

That's already been discussed.

kyrub, on 2nd May 2011, 1:21pm, said:

There should be probably written: "Will never trigger reaction shoots: Looking in another direction". That's all. (Are you a hair-splitter?)

I didn't split that. I said that statement is correct.

kyrub, on 2nd May 2011, 1:21pm, said:

:bleh:  How can you call other people names when they did something so interesting as X-COM? The game has been enjoyable up until today, for 17 years. Nobody else have make a solid sequel, although many tried, with similar conditions as Gollop brothers. Is it "decent" only?

You should read that again  whom I called decent and whom I called virtuous.

kyrub, on 2nd May 2011, 1:21pm, said:

And by the way, what did you achieve professionally? By your standards, is it decent or very fine? I'd like to know, really.

For example I tend to find shameful bugs comitted by professional programmers.

[Alienated]

Now I post alien sub data for the PlayStation version of Terror from the Deep. I guess alien subs behave the same way in the other versions, and I know the UFOs in Enemy Unknown behave the similar way, I also have data for Enemy Unknown but not the full yet.

S = Survey Ship (very small)
E = Escort (small)
C = Cruiser (small)
H = Heavy Cruiser (medium)
R = Hunter (medium)
B = Battleship (large)
F = Fleet Supply Cruiser (large)
D = Dreadnought (very large)

The number after the capital letter in the missions table indicates the type of behaviour; the table of these types lists the speed and depth between waypoints.

v = very deep
d = deep
n = normal
s = shallow
t = touched down

T = Surface Attacks ("terror")
P = Probe Missions ("research")
R = Resource Raid ("abduction")
D = Interdiction ("harvest")
E = Colony Expansion ("base")
I = Infiltration
B = Floating Base Attack ("retaliation")
S = Colony Supply Missions ("base supply")

 T E5 C5 B1 B3
 P S2 E4 C6 C6
 R S2 E5 C4 R1 R2,R2
 D S2 S3 E4 C3 C4 H1 H1,D3
 E S4 E6 C7,F3,F3,D4+AC
 I S2 E3 E2 C2 C2,B2,F1,D2,D2+AC
 B S1 E1 E1 C1 C1 C1 D1 D1/D5
 S F2
 
 S1 2000v 1200s  400s  600s  400s  840s 1120s 2000v
 S2 2000v 1480d  560s  940s 2000n
 S3 2000v 1140d  520n 1000s	0t 2000s
 S4 2000v 1520n  400n  880s	0t  400s  640n 1300s	0t 2000s
 E1 2800v 1680s  560s  840s  560s 1176s 1568s 2800v
 E2 2800v 1400d  700n  448s 2800s
 E3 2800v 2128n  560n 1232s  560s  896n 1820s 2800s
 E4 2800v 1596d  728n 1400s	0t 2800s
 E5 2800v 2128n  560n 1232s	0t  560s  896n 1820s	0t 2800s
 E6 2800v 1400n  560n  420s	0t  560s  812n 1176s	0t 2520s
 C1 2600v 1560s  520s  780s  520s 1092s 1456s 2600v
 C2 2600v 1560d  780n  520s 2600s
 C3 2600v 1924d  728s 1222s 2600n
 C4 2600v  780d  650n  520s	0t 2600s
 C5 2600v 1976n  520n 1144s	0t  520s  832n 1690s	0t 2600s
 C6 2600v 1742n 1352n 1040s	0t  780s  520n  780s	0t 2600s
 C7 2600v 1300n  520n  390s	0t  520s  754n 1092s	0t 2340s
 H1 3800v 2546n 1976n 1520s	0t 1140s  760n 1140s	0t 3800s
 R1 4500v 1350d 1125n  900s	0t 4500s
 R2 4500v 3015n 2340n 1800s	0t 1350s  900n 1350s	0t 4500s
 B1 4200v 3108d 1176s 1974s 4200n
 B2 4200v 2520d 1260n  840s 4200s
 B3 4200v 2520d 1260n  840s TerrS
 F1 3400v 2040d 1020n  680s 3400s
 F2 2720v	0t 3400s
 F3 3400v 1700n  680n  510s	0t  680s  986n 1428s	0t 3060s
 D1 4800v 2880s  960s 1440s  960s 2016s 2688s 4800v
 D2 4800v 2880d 1440n  960s 4800s
 D3 4800v 2736d 1248n 2400s	0t 4800s
 D4 4800v 2400d 1200n  768s	0t 4800s
 D5 4800v 4800s BaseA

A few notes.

§ The interdiction and resource raid missions are officially mixed up. By the UFOpaedia, Heavy Cruisers do resource raids alongside with a Dreadnought just as they harvest in Enemy Unknown and Hunters do interdiction as they abduct people elsewhere. Now which sub contains an examination room or cargo space, I pass.

§ Survey ship and Escort are mixed up in the battlescape, Battleship and Fleet Supply Cruiser are mixed up in the geoscape by the looks. These are not news.

§ I am confused myself because some alien subs showed up in the deep instead of very deep by my early notes. This may be due to my mistaken notes or the game uses slightly different data at certain parts of the campaign.

Now what's the use of this table? For example a perfectionist can see how many alien subs he hasn't intercepted or even detected. Without the Transmission Resolver you still can tell how much activity you should expect in an area: if you are reported "size: very small, depth: normal, speed: 1520", then you may as well start building hangars because several heavy weight alien subs are going to show up with an alien colony; if you are reported: "size: very small, depth: shallow, speed: 1200", then you may as well start strengthening your base defences because the aliens are seeking your base; if you are reported: "size: large, depth: very deep, speed: 2720", then it means an alien colony is already present on the globe and scoring victory points to the alien side, and actually an alien sub is heading right there.