zaimoni

Acknowledged. I was testing some savefile-based AI augmentations within UFO Extender when the site started going very sluggish about a week back; when it didn't come back quickly my untrained gut reaction was "hardware failure or critical misconfiguration of CloudFlare". (I just supervised a server migration last month. The unmanaged dedicated server I lease for the domains I host, was starting to have hard drive issues that sabotaged saving cookie-indexed data to the hard drive.) The old server did wink out exactly as fast as this (midnight GMT July 16th).

The UFOs have come for Ufopaedia The DNS is live and pointing at Cloudflare, but the backend server is not where Cloudflare thinks it should be. Do any wiki admins (in particular Gazchap or NKF) have insider knowledge they're willing to share?

My experience with Silent Storm Gold, is that "delete profile" is incomplete. The directory itself goes away, but the missions you have fully completed go inaccessible. With the Allies campaign, if I start a new Allies campaign in the same profile. after completing U.K. Commandant's office, then * it's impossible to get the hint on the first mission. Fortunately I can leave the base anyway. * English Manor/Wilkins is the first mission in South Britain, rather than the usual first mission.

Yes to both. My approach gets me the full ten exploit scientist-days. Your proposed only gets you one exploit scientist-day. That is point-blank wrong. You get 61 net-scientist days, my recommended approach guarantees 70 net scientist-days. True; this is how I know the prior statement is point-blank wrong as a trivial calculation. The trick is to never waste days on the day a project completes.. Yes, this is what I do when using the exploit. No revisions needed; interpretation is accurate enough when not using a hex editor.

Take notes. The listing order of the projects is consistent across all game files, so the easy way to implement in C is an enum. All technology pre-requisites are strictly before the projects they enable, while all alien research topics are after the projects they enable. Pre-existing works (the research-days hours needed are initialized when the research is started, even with 0 scientists). I have seen cases where the starting research is less than minimum with a new project (e.g., Laser pistol after laser weapons), so I assume the research-days hours are initialized before the buggy research-days are applied.

The research-days are applied in strictly increasing order of the project listing; the efficiency exploit is that the reallocation screen happens *before* any research-days in projects listed after the just-completed project are applied. Setting the scientists to 1 on the last day, then applying the 9 scientists to a project later than the one being completed, wastes the 9 scientist-days just like having all 10 scientists applied on the last day to 1-scientist day of research. To avoid wasting them, they have to be diverted the midnight check before the midnight-check that completes, then restored for the last midnight check. Both of these are trivial calculations.

I have tested this extensively (I normally watch the scientist-days when playing in a hex editor). In general, this is completely wrong: if 51 scientist-days is rolled, the countdown is: 51, 41, 31, 21, 11, 1, -9 : six days. To cheat i.e. optimize research hours, one would set the scientists to 1 when 11 was the number of scientist days, then reset to 10, to avoid wasting 9 scientist-days. There is a documented bug, where projects started immediately at midnight, that are later than the completed project that triggered the reassignment, get the research immediately. If the project with 51 scientist days gets its 10 scientists during the post-research midnight allocation, it will complete in five days because the 51 to 41 transition happens immediately. Engineering-hours works the same way in general; I have not tested whether the hyper-efficient bug is present there.

The stock Skyranger (no weapons) will enter re-arming phase on a half-hour mark, but not a full hour mark.

Correct. I don't have this fully reverse-engineered, however.

I haven't tested that carefully; I think it's updated every 30 minutes.

Go into the control panel for the display, and set the screen resolution to as low as it will go. Reset it to where it was, when done.

It did not happen at the end of the turn. The Floater took two hits in one autofire burst before dying, so the FF actually reached the savefile. (I assume being hit triggered the AI recalculate, but since the Floater died that was skipped)

So 255 i.e. -1 would be an intermediate mode. [saving a file with a Floater that had been wounded before it was killed, had 255 in this field.]

It's an AI bug. Furthermore, the AI can reaction-shot down grav lifts fine; it's just intentionally shooting down grav lifts that's impaired.

Seb76 has tracked down the "most promotable" formula (it's on UFOPaedia, and I swiped it for my Python 2.x-based editor suite). It's basically a sum of current stats.

I haven't formally checked, but I think it's the after-mission stats that figure into the relative promotion score the game uses. That is, the stat increases are applied first.

That sounds reasonable. The correct adjustment of XBASES.DAT will replace the next retaliation mission with a base-attack Battleship. I'm a bit fuzzy on whether this replacement also transmogrifies Research and Terror missions.

Well, research order is a learning curve thing (I made that mistake a couple of times myself), although there are several good options. Try sending Interceptors to the regions that are spiking (they can spot close-by UFOs as they're portable radar). If the activity rating is increasing then an interceptor has a chance of finding something. If the region's out of range of an Interceptor, a manned Skyranger still might have a chance if the UFO's one that actually lands. No; whether they want to use psi on terror missions is dependent on several factors.

It is a Very Bad Thing to save a game with an interceptor window open. The resulting savegames eventually crash on open in Geoscape. This does include "had interceptor window open when starting Battlescape". "Eventually", because sometimes the crash-on-open doesn't start immediately.

I haven't seen this on Superhuman (looking at the relevant file in a hex editor). XComUtil has an option for drastically multiplying the needed research days as part of an optional mod, but that isn't difficulty-level sensitive either.

Plasma is convenient, but two interceptors with a pure Avalanche loadout are perfectly safe (with a little manual dexterity -- must start closing right before the third volley is fired, then manually disengage after the hit).

Yes. I usually reserve TUs by calculating them before attempting the move. X-COM reaction fire is always snap shots. I haven't recently allowed a situation where I could personally verify whether alien reaction fire goes bursty at game-distance 3 or lower.

You give up on zero casualties. It becomes a matter of influencing who dies first. It doesn't help that there are no good in-game means for either screening Psi Strength (the most important stat), or sorting the soldier order. Also, Morale isn't that important -- ignoring mind control, once you have a Captain on the mission even Morale 10 will need like 5 X-COM (Rookie/Squaddie) deaths in a row to have any risk of panicking, after which you need two alien kills per X-COM (Rookie/Squaddie) death to prevent panicking. ----- The minimal comprehensive solution for controlling soldier placement in Windows CE XCOM right now seems to be NKF's Neolem for fast ordering, followed by Seb76's UFOExtender for providing precision swapping. Isolated DOS versions will need another source of precision swapping. ClarkWehyr works fine once you have it installed, but the official *.EXE installer dies on W2K and higher. (Have not checked DOSBox 0.72/0.74.). ClarkWehyr also should not be used for base editing. Soldier.py (from my own suite of Python scripts) also provides precision swapping. The actual editors I have deployed currently are: Neolem, Extender, Jenny's, and mine (which also rips a few features from XCOMUtil that I actually use, such as battlescape overview).

DOSBox 0.73 is known-bad. (It has a substantial reduction in the maximum command-line parameter length. No version of XComUtil has been released that can handle these truncated command lines. Per http://www.bladefirelight.com/downloads , there may be other issues.)

~50% at what difficulty level? XCOM1 has been completely analyzed at the assembly level; it's strictly difficulty level there. I suspect at least the constants were changed around.