Jasonred

Great! Then, may I suggest 3 more tests, involving modification? Repeat experiment, with tank having bravery of 120, then 130, then ummm, on a soldier with 120 bravery. And compare numbers. And in 3 tests, we will find out: a) If that's the precise formula, min morale= bravery-99 b) If it works for non-tanks. Oh, and maybe tank with 90 brave and 100 brave if you feel energetic. Unconscious tank??? HOW??? What weapon adds stun damage to a tank? THAT is the key. Once we find that out, we can reproduce this condition indefiniitely, since we all know how to reduce a tank's health to that stun level... Sectoids trying to mind control a tank? mmm... I don't see how that would occur, since sectoids can magically sense which of your team is the weakest psi-link, and target that person... your TANK had the worst psi defence in the squad? You must have had a squad of mutants! Or an all tank squad? Ah. Another test for zombie then. See if a modified tank with 2 psi strength and skill can be mind controlled. Or, heck, just 2 psi strength will do...

hmmm.... I'm uncertain how the flags work regarding unconsciousness. It just didn't deflag him since he was unconscious? Or more likely, the game created "unconscious soldier, alien afiliation". I know there's some weird stuff concerning how knocking units unconscious doesn't actually knock a unit unconscious so much as it removes the old unit and creates an object defined as an unconscious being... Your psi-weakling idea, sadly, will work... just not for very long. Why? Reaction fire. dum dum dum dum. Well... they will actually last if you stick them in really heavy armor, but I don't think it will end well, since your own troops will then just waste all their own AP blasting their ex-comrades, making them easy meat for the Sectoid rounding the corner with his Heavy Plasma... Worse case scenario: your mind controlled troops' dancing around in their faces irritates your Blaster Bomb toting Commander so much he (reaction) shoots them... at point blank. You could try blockading those decoys though. Have 2 tanks or 4 strong psi but also decoy troops. Plus 2-4 weaklings. Then hem the weaklings into a corner and make their guards face the other way. Now they can't move thus drawing no fire plus no wandering around the map. Quite resource intensive, just for some decoys, though!

I know a direct hit Heavy Rocket will kill even Super-Cyberdisks. So, maybe HE-packs should too? I remember very few weapons harming a Super Sectopod though...

Plasma Cannons (Lineage Plasma Cannons?) are the only way to get early air superiority. DO NOT bother with pea shooters; the alien ships will have massive armor that a lot of weapons have trouble penetrating. I have seen the motherships' shields get torn off by Megapol Hovercar machineguns, (shields get no damage reduction), but the actual ship hull itself is mostly impervious to enitre flotillas of normal craft. (the building defense forces). You also want to research alien weapons ASAP. Alien ship weapons. I am unsure of the exact flow of research tree. Hoverbikes, armed with Plasma Cannons, are actually quite powerful! Dance like butterfly, sting like bee. If I'm not mistaken, 2 top modded hoverbikes have more firepower than an unmodified Hawk. Stun grapples don't work through shields. Grenades do. So do toxiguns. And so does fire. And you don't get the shields if you destroy them, you have to circumvent them with said stuff. If you have psi capable troops, try to get the alien to drop his stuff. Also... if I'm not mistaken, factions upgrade personal armaments throughout the week, based on score and stuff. So COS can technically get access to top technology on Wednesday, days before the ALIENS get their hands on new supplies on Monday... heh. Especially funny if you've managed to capture and research the tech by that weekend... Aliens: Hah, with these newfangled Devastators and iinvisibility devices, X-com will never know what him them! X-com troops teleport in and drop piles vortex mines, then teleport out. Aliens: ... Remind me to drop a Overspawn on that COS temple... BOOM! And, if, like me, your main problem was the air superiority, and your ground forces were still the stronger, ignore any advice on lowering your score. Especially since, by the sounds of it, you are in financial straights.

Okay, not only do aliens gain a preference for Weapons over Psi based on probability of successful attack, but they also decide whether to launch panic attacks or mind control based on your psi stat. Since, aliens not only gain the ability to access every single stat your soldiers have, but they have working knowledge of every formula in the game implanted in their overmind... Using Psi on the most psi vulnerable soldier in your team, AND deciding whether to use panic or MC based on his defences is... mmm... and yes, all this despite never having even seen him. grr! Anyhow, yeah, I suspect you should use X-com to Psi attack aliens for future tests. Much less painful than the other way around! Cheers!

Hey. These figures mean that Zombie's formulas that he gave are WRONG. Your figure show that a soldier with 100 psi strength and 0 psi skill DOES seem to have some pretty good defence against mind control, doesn't he? Besides that... I am also guessing that the game uses the same formula for X-com mind-controlling aliens as aliens mind-controlling X-com? (could easily be wrong, but I think it's a reasonable guess). So, I've noticed that it makes quite a big difference when trying to control aliens with weak psi strength compared to high psi strength, regardless of their psi skill. In fact, very few aliens in the game have psi skill higher than 0. So, you would probably notice if all other aliens were all equally easy to Mind control/panic. They're not. Look... here's the easiest way to do the test. Psi control the aliens, don't have the aliens psi-control X-com. It's a lot less finicky than the other way around. uf. Second, first round of tests should ALL involve aliens with Psi Skill of 0, ie normal aliens. When extrapolating graphs and such, it's ALWAYS very nice and helpful to know the intersect values of X and Y. Zombie's formula's most serious flaw is that: (PAD) = (PStr * Pskl/5) for all intents and purposes = (Pstr/5*Pskl) or (Pstr*Pskl)/5 or whatever. In other words, that formula would mean that Pstr and Spkl are equally important, and just divide the result by 5. Why didn't anybody else comment on these formulas, and say "I think these are wrong". Guys, yes, Zombie and NKF are the most hardworking guys in terms of formulas and experiments, plus Zombies a moderator, but they're *not always right*. unitref[056] ... never changes? so... sorta like "initial psi skill" huh. hmmm. Any idea what this figure is used for? hm. Though if it never changes... I doubt that the game uses the "initial" value instead of the "current value". So I guess this figure is effectively non-important.

Psi-Amp? Strategy? ... In what way do the two words mix? ... I'm speaking from experience, too many games where I sack everyone without 80+ psi strength, and give a Psi-Amp to everyone with 90+. brrr... I like the "Xenophobic" challenge some people came up with. Earth based technology only. Researching alien artifacts is ok, but no using or manufacturing them. The "pacifist" challenge also intrigues me. Stun only! wah. Hmmm... I suppose Psi-Amps in this case might turn the campaign into something... quite interesting. For a while anyhow. hmmm....

... Gah! For a minute, I thought I could do something with the "pre-rollover funding" and "post rollover funding", but, even with that, you'd have 2 million gain... Hmmm.... AH! I have an idea! you... made a mistake somewhere! ... no? Rechecked figures, they're all correct? It's not a wild goose chase? mmm.... okay, what did you cheat in involving staff? Let's figure out if you didn't add some mystical plane dwelling scientists and engineers who are drawing paychecks from their alternate dimensions... And it's not 2 million lost... it's 4 million lost. Possibly 5.3 million. (since you should have GAINED 2-3.3 million)

collpase on top of you? How? Since when is there even a "ceiling" for COS temples? The best you can do AFAIK is, yes, cause the side wall to collapse, and the ground floor to collapse into the basement. That's about it. Oh, Hydrofarms, those are pansy easy to collapse. The time consuming things are like knocking over entire corporate buildings... cause certain walls and tiles, even Devastators take 3-8 shots to "roll" a powerful enough shot.

If all else fails, just send them on that mission anyhow! ... I can't remember, but maybe the first bit of research isn't "sleeping chamber" but "alien building" or something.

.... offhand, my guess would be... salaries? Or did you include those in maintainence?

I don't think it occurs to most people that such a thing is even possible. Cause you have to... let me try and remember.... ah, I forget exactly, but you take the biggest engine, the lightest ship (in other words, you use the beginning ship instead of your Super Avenger thingy), strip off the good armor and stuff, and stick on those Engine killer beam thingys. Added bonus is the ridiculous amount of salvage you get, since you ONLY ever damage the engines.

Eh? What version are you using? For some reason, when I try that, I find that strange things can support the building... like a pane of glass can keep half a building standing, stuff like that. COS only has temples, which AFAIK are impossible to collapse. Only to do major damage to.

Haha. The worst explosion I've seen was caused by me guarding the exit of an alien ship. Forgot which one. Anyhow, plenty of Anthropds and Skeletoids lugging premium gear. Vortexs and boomeroids and devastators. Huge pile of munitions builty up in that area. Then... a Anthropod started to throw a boomeroid. But was shot before he could complete the throw, and dropped it where he stood. BOOOOOOM. ... I reloaded cause of the huge financial loss there, though. Aargh! All that nifty tech! Multi-worms are only trouble on TB... cause the newborns get FULL AP, and thus plenty of reaction type attacks and moves. On RT, Auto-cannon Explosive rounds toast them easily.

The Megaprimus Project is under research during Interceptor, so logically, Apoc is a bit after Interceptor. The whole POINT of the outposts, AFAIK, is that they're supposed to mine Elerium. Those outposts are sort of cowboy towns, with civilization centred around Elerium mines. Solmine is owns the mining rights for these outposts, or something. Anyhow, they're the company which takes the excess Elerium from your space mining outposts and sells it back on Earth. In Apocalypse, since when was there an Elerium shortage? I seem to remember being able to buy tons of the stuff off the open market, not exactly cheap, but not exactly a "rare and elusive" item. Plasma weapons are just fine to use on ships before you get Alien tech. And, as I said on another topic board, when you modify your ship to fly BACKWARDS faster than any alien ship can fly forwards, and you have the longest range weapon in the game, there's nothing to stop you sniping everything into oblivion... That's the easy way to kill phantasms. Other than that, those Phantasms eventually run out of cloaking power and decloak for a while.

It's not how many large rockets you can BUY. It's how many one soldier can carry. ...Erm, wait, I forgot, this ain't X-com 1 or 2, you can carry significantly more... Still... I mean it's not one of those weapons you can use like the devastator, carry 2 on each person and autofire demolish the entire landscape thing. At least, not for more than 1-2 missions... ... Enhance explosive piles? Erm... I dunno about this one. Personally, I found that camping at certain points tends to lead to more than large enough piles of stuff... I've never found a pressing need to make an even LARGER explosion...

Oh, poppers can be BAD. In enclosed spaces, they're horrible! Since you don't have disrupters yet, you might have to pull out stun grapples for those poppers... most other things will just blow them up. Which is bad, if you're at close range! BAD!!! Fight cultists in Turn based. The temple layout is simple, so you don't suffer much from the "alien hiding in the corner" syndrome. Those homing things are Marsec Missile Launchers. YES, Megapol Armor is hardy stuff. ... but it's not gonna do well against those whopping large rockets. BTW, you can buy and use those too, you know. No research needed, so if you just pick it up off the dead cultist... heh heh heh. And you can NEVER ignore those large rockets. NEVER. If it wasn't for ammo shortages and other even better weapons, I'd put those things as one of the most devastating weapons in the game. I'd say how to deal with them, but that utilizes real time and some artifacts you don't have yet. (spoilers)

Doesn't sound like he did to me... NKF, your test sounds the MOST scientific to me. Run a trial and base theory on results. Now, my only gripe is: if you're at the point in the game where you're not using lasers/plasma, perhaps your soldiers are not exactly the greatest shots in the world, especially with a heavy/auto cannon. When I was talking about my "most efficient" thingy, I was including the misses. Over a reasonable distance, with early soldiers, the HE ammo gave me far far better results. Later on, eh, why use anything other than Laser Rifles, Heavy Plasma, Blaster Bombs and Psi? As for Jellyfishgreen's question, so, it's confirmed? They're not weak against fire, they're extra strong against it? Another thing. Don't explosive hit under armor? Instead of front back etc? For direct hits anyhow.

Nonono... you've got the building destruction thing backwards. What you do is, you fly your X-com craft near the buildings. So the aliens take them out. Firstly, the aliens have better firepower anyhow, so they're better at knocking over buildings. Second, it's diplomatic heaven! The corps involved will get angry with the aliens and when you attack the aliens, those corps will love you! Plus, hopefully their defence fleet will come out and plaster the alien ships. AFAIK, city damage is city damage. Doesn't matter who did it. (so always fly craft at lowest altitude) One bad point is that weird diplomatic ties can be formed. Especially if trick the aliens into blowing up Diablo's slums... can you imagine the government becoming friends with the aliens and wanting you to stop attacking the aliens? This game is different from other X-coms in that you start off with access to medkits and psionics, if I'm not mistaken. Use them. Also, DON'T FORGET TO BUY ARMOR FOR NEW TROOPS!!! I never found myself needing to, but if you're desperate enough to lower your own score, you might want to try "friendly raids" aka stun raids. Several dozen rocket launchers and ammo should be enough to let you murderize those aliens. Also, the early access to flying technology turns those Autocannons with Explosive Ammo into monstrosities. Overall, I'd say that you DO get quite a it of good technology early on. What you need to win is TACTICS and using what you got, not more powerful guns... the only exception to this is air battles, where tactics barely come into play. So, I'm rather surprised, out of all the techs to cheat in, blehm chose devastators and disrupters. Though... if you're not doing air battles anyhow, maybe that's not too bad. mmm... I'd forget NKF's advice on ignoring the alien ships. Too many people ave faced "missing" a certain type of ship in their research tree. This might be due to not downing everything they see. One game, I so overdid the raiding that COS started protecting themselves with Devastators and Personal Shields. ... That was admittedly rather rough. I was desperately fighting them with machineguns and lawpistols when it occured to me to come back to the temple with psionics and make them drop their stuff. MUCH better!

Ahem. Doesn't 80% Fire mean they ONLY take 80% damage from fire? Ie, fire does LESS to them? What, you thought 90% means they only have 90% defence against stun? ... I don't think that's how this game works. As for the whole, "Which is MOST EFFICIENT on Chrysallids" question: Eh, When I fire my autocannon-HE rounds in burst, it usually kills Chrysallids. When I send a burst of AP, at the same range, the results are far inferior. Talking about pure vulnerabilities though, since I was the one who copied the ingame Ufopedia and wrote the weak to explosives thing, it'd be nice for someone to say what the ingame data actually says. Any hackers want to do it?

Wait for it. There is NOTHING like watching a dozen or so agents with double devastators, staring at a COS doorway from the other end of the room, and a cultist pops his head through in RT. It's actually funnier when your team is inaccurate... Colateral damage anyone? What I did to overcome ammo shortages: Raid the COS in TB. With one machine gun in each hand, and Auto-Fire. EAT POINT BLANK SHOTS, COS!!! ... the fact that it only costs 1 TU per shot is just... hmm! The IMPORTANT advantage in raiding COS is: you can launch for another mission immediately. Note that your agents are automatically rearmed, BUT not IMMEDIATELY. You can actually send them out on another mission after captured goods have arrived in base, but before being rearmed. Note that you had better manually rearm them then, or there's a chance you'll go into battle with only 2-3 bullets per gun... not good! Another thing about COS. They're wimpy. So you can raid them using the dregs of equipment that you have. Buy the weapons you wouldn't normally use, and kill COS with them. Great!

Okay, and here are some interesting? points and theories. 1. The alien ships DO have a stockpile of E115. Or rather, HAD a stockpile of it. They used it all up getting from Mars to Earth in the first place. The 50 units per Power Source is all that's LEFT. 2. Eh, X-com scientists are good, but they're not THAT good... Our ships are only able to utilize a fraction of the efficiency that the Alien ships have. Compare the mass of an Avenger vs a Battleship, and the number of power sources, and their top speeds and acceleration. ... MAN! Inferior! 3. On the other hand, it could just be that our crafts concentrate on Shielding and weapons, whereas alien craft concentrate on fuel efficiency. Since an Avenger can go 1v1 with Battleship. Hmm. And our Plasma Cannons seem GREAT! Better than original tech! 4. The aliens actually destroy all Elerium that they have in their storage as soon as X-com attacks their ships. Like a steam train of old, the Power source is usually constantly being topped up at 50 E115 as it goes around. Heck, their engineers must do SOMETHING right? Also, it explains why their fuel is ALWAYS 50 per power source, regardless of how long or far they've flown. Of all of these, 4 seems the most likely to me. (other than the "plain old game design" explanation...)

Isn't it just one long bite animation? I've never had a Chrysallid actually miss and leave a soldier unzombified after an attack, so that was my assumption. Also, I have never had it attack just once yet succeed on the first attempt. Hence, my conclusion was that it just does one or two LONG attacks.

Hey, if you keep getting supply ships showing up on your Hyperwave Decoder, and you KNOW there's a base there, but you just can't see it on the map, you have two choices: 1. Patrol over it with a Skyranger 2. Hope and wait for X-com intelligence to find the craft during their monthly sweeps. AFAIK, no elerium based craft hold enough fuel, therefore cannot stay in the air, long enough to detect an alien base. Well... it's jolly difficult anyhow. Might be possible if you fine tune the change of hour thing and all that, but it's a boatload easier just to send a skyranger to patrol there. Missiles take ages to reload probably because they tend to use up almost their entire payload during each mission! Whereas Beam/cannons might have 100 or so shots, but they probably use up, mmm, 10? I'm sure the time PER missile is larger than the time per Beam/ cannon round.

WHY is everyone misreading one comment? It's the circle of confusion all over again! Also known as Chinese whisper. (The game where you whisper something softly once in the clockwise persons ear... when the message traverses the circle it has invariably turned into utter babel) The ORIGINAL quote was something to the effect of "heh heh, there's a tile that if you control it guarantees you victory" ... it never said "there's a tile which if you stand on you win automatically". ... I'm pretty sure that those two sentences have different meanings, and were MEANT to mean different things. FUrther, the tentative reply to that quote was "is it orange? " ... so we're not even sure if we're talking about an orange tile in the first place. ... as I said. Too much urge to collect and present data and evidence, too little logical thought and deliberation. On another note, I think that you were blocking the 4 square lift with your tank or something, were you? Maybe that was the problem. The alien was aiming at a certain part of the tank, and hence fired at an angle instead of straight down! ... overall, I have never had an alien fire plasama or throw grenades down. So, you only have to worry about Blaster Bombs. The solution to this is in fact counter intuitive! ... do not shoot the aliens. What will happen is many of them will gather and bunch up around the lift. This will in fact make them into a superb meat shield which will prevent BBs from even getting near the lift, much less fired down it. To you guys then, what is the best strategic position to hold for each alien craft? For me: Medium Scout: guard the doorway! Large scout: again, cover the doorways, and when storming the command room, come from both sides so at least one person will be able to sneak up on the aliens from BEHIND. Supply Ship: My favourite, easiest and most common. Stand on the bottom tile of each of the lifts. It has NEVER failed. Failing being able to reach them, guard the ships exits, and reaction fire them all to death. Terror Ship: for this and battleship, you're likely to be dealing with Ethereals, sectoid commanders, or Chrysallids... so camping might not be the wisest choice... Battleship: Seriously, what's wrong with 4 men standing on the bottom of the elevator? If they're all psi titans. Which they should be! ... though at this point I just use psi and slaughter everyone.