sp1ke

Like it! That sounds like a good mix of strategic challenge and tactical challenge. And yes, thematic.

Great summary! I don't remember having too much trouble getting Triscene attacks and if I remember they were more common in the city terror attacks. We're talking about the 4-square dinosaur animal things right - it's been a while?. They were always could for HC-IN and AC-IN practice (despite the IN bug). Calcinites were a right pain in the baseplate. I found them hard to spot and hard to distinguish from similar aliens. Most common on island and port missions, yes. Many times my tech tree would be held back many months because I'd failed to snag one at the opportune moment. Apart from missing them altogether, the two main gotchas I were getting a live one when you needed a corpse (or vice versa?) and blowing up the (priceless!) corpse with careless use of explosives. My teams tended to go for a policy of "contain the terror, save the planet, shame about the civilians" on terror missions and go in blazing away with HC-HE, AC-HE and grenades. Two of the rarest beasts are Hallucinoids and Xarquids. Mostly found on the outside deep sea level of alien base raids iirc. When I was researching the articles for those creatures I had a couple of "natural" save files which were like gold dust. You can't really do definitive research using synthetic save files that you've edited to include the subject creatures. As you clearly do appreciate! It's great that people are still working to improve this wiki.

What myths did your code dig clear up? (There's plenty!)

I suppose it's possible the tables are exactly the same as EU, just translated to the equivalent monster types? But no sorry I don't know.

From memory the in game Ufopedia pulls its values from the game data file. I believe the cases when its wrong are the few cases when the game engine fails to pull the value from the data files but instead uses a hard coded value?

It's been a few years since I looked at these but from memory they're unchanged from EU. Just part of the quick re-skin of EU with very little actually changing under the hood. If you check the Talk pages of the relevant Ufopedia articles there's a slight chance there might be a data dump. Also see if I did a Firepower chart for TFTD USOs. I was drafting one but I don't know if it was ever finished enough to publish it. If I did, that would have the RoF in it. I remember there being a lot of uncertainty about how to interpret the game file data for USO RoF.

If I remember correctly you need to find and take out their base(s) to stop the assaults on your base. Otherwise they will continue non-stop

A lot of flaky stuff is happening in your games lately and I suspect your save files or even game files may have become corrupt.

Which slot is the Sonic Pistol in btw? Normally (bipedal) aliens have all their inventory in the first slot, leading to the risk of game crashes when trying to manipulate their inventory.

Also it is impossible to do a live capture of a 4 square terrorist even if you stun it and even if you physically drag it inside the Triton. And also any aliens still under MC at the end of the tactical mission will have weird effects: showing as MIA is the least of it.

OK iirc, in an unmodified game: It is normal to be able to access inventory of an MCd alien It is normal not to be able to access any built in weapons of an MCd alien So the only new thing you may have found that's odd is that the Xarquid is carrying a pistol. My guess on that is that the pickup code is running (though I think that requires a patch to enable?) and the Xarquid picked up the sonic pistol from an alien or human casualty or morale failure. Not so much to use it as to deny it to you. However if you found every MCd Xarquid was carrying a single sonic pistol I would suspect some kind of hacky coding. Definitely the Xarquid is not properly implemented (coded) as its supposed to have multiple attacks including a Freeze attack (non lethal?). Re the MC of multiple squares of a large terrorist, each square is numbered and I believe you have to take them over in numerical order for best effect? All of this information is in the (online, not in-game) UFOPaedia somewhere, so you could check in there.

Another, less-cheaty option is to "milk" the Colonies for score. Kill most of the aliens and then abort without destroying the colony. Rinse and repeat as often as you can. Then before the month is over do a final mission and take out all the Colonies. The undefeated Colonies are what is killing your Score and driving the governments into the hands of the aliens. So you need to destroy all the ones that you know about. You also need to patrol aggressively to find the other Colonies that probably exist that you haven't detected yet. And I guess if you are restoring saves (which is also cheating, of course) go back as far as you can. Because the "earlier" you detect, assault and destroy the Colonies, the less Score you will lose. You are responding to Terror sites right? If not then you will also lose loads of Score.

If you really want to cheat and really find the Colony Assault missions boring, you could install xcomutil and use the "win" option to kill all the aliens in the tactical mission. (OK, I admit it, I've done that too when the tactical game gets boring and repetitive.) To be fair when you do that cheat you really should blow up some of your own guys to simulate whatever casualties you probably would have taken, and then on your next USO mission just throw all the loot out of the boat and abort. (OK, I admit it, I've never been quite that conscientious when cheating).

Hi (Not) Jake Remember your mission is to save Earth, or at least, save the Governments that are funding you? It's not about making money or developing technology. It's about saving the earth from alien takeover. That is your primary objective and everything else is just a tool in that fight. So yeah take out the colonies. :-)

maybe start another thread in the relevant forum area for your OpenXCom UFO EU AAR?

your question was already answered on 11 June... scroll up... check the Explosions article, everything you want to know (that is known) is there.

As I said, you still benefit from the USO splitting its fire between your attacking interceptor subs, just not as much as you would expect.

Yeah. All the craft weapons are unbalanced and most of them are more or less pointless. DUPs then Sonic Oscillator is the optimal route. Which makes it all a bit boring. In fact even some of the subs are pointless. This aspect of game balance is not a strong point of TFTD, alas. Gauss weapons are electromagnetic 'projectiles', rather than electromagnetically propelled projectiles, but no one has the copyright on what the term 'gauss weapon' "really means". It's basically a fight between Traveller and its source material, and TFTD. Who's to say who is right? Railguns are different, a third thing. distantly related. Frankly, none of these weapons have much of a chance of working underwater. The Gas Cannon and the Jet Harpoon are probably the most realistic. (Sonic, yes, but good luck making it directional and focused. I guess that's why it's Alien technology.) Why do you think Gauss weapons are antimatter weapons? If they used antimatter as the 'kill mechanism' rather than a power source, they would make nukes look like a picnic.

Slightly but not much, and it tends to crash the game. You can mod the armour levels with XComUtil or TFTDExtender, and fix the ammo bugs.

What, you ran out of Gas Cannon rounds, tazers and coveralls? Oh well I'm sure your resupplies will be arriving soon. :-D

Maybe you don't understand what I'm saying Starting craft - produced by corporations, paid for by governments, lent to XCOM with a nominal "rent" that's insanely below commercial rates and only enough to cover fuel, spares, and 'normal' wear and tear - not combat damage, not insurance (which is impossible on military craft anyway), not amortising the cost of replacement ("self-insurance"). In addition, the launchers and missiles are also being given to XCOM, basically for the cost of secure transportation. Launchers and missiles would cost in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. XCOM Produced craft - these are clearly produced, owned and (at least mostly) paid for by XCOM. So they ought to be available for sale. The sale price would be in the hundreds of millions to billion dollar range - think of what Russia would have paid for a B1 or what the US would have paid for a Backfire, or indeed what the US pays for B1s and B2s, and for hunter killer subs. So there are two things, chalk and cheese, both with insane economics but in opposite directions. A unifying explanation is that the CFN first subsidises XCOM craft in the early stages, then does the reverse when XCOM starts to build its own tech. The idea is the CFN does not allow XCOM to profit by manufacturing craft (as distinct from weapons) but perhaps keeps these profits for itself or keeps the craft for itself, while lending them to XCOM for the duration of the alien conflicts.

yes, that's why you get exactly zero dollars when you give them back to the governments you rented them off Actually I have no idea what you're talking about, sorry. Who is saying rented craft can be sold?

Yes taking down a battleship with just DUPs is hard. Even if all the DUPs hit they may well not generate enough damage to down the Battleship. You have to be hair trigger on your attacks and on your disengage. There is also a curious observed phenomenon that USO/UFOs seem to do more damage, faster, when you team up on them with a flight of interceptor craft. Not them I'm recommending engaging big ships with one craft at a time. You still benefit from the UFO/USO splitting its fire amongst multiple XCOM craft, just not as much benefit as would be expected.

These are craft weapon rounds not tank rounds. So they would be only usable on craft weapons. You can change pretty much all of the stats by text editing. You can also trick it into appearing on the UFOPaedia. Hacking the tech tree to make it researchable is possible, but you could have it available from the start. You could change the name, rounds, power, price. It's slightly trickier to change the weapons that will 'take' the ammo but that could be done. There are other unintended side effects and bugs possible when using an 'unused' ammo type rather than modding one of the existing types. The hardest part would be getting some existing weapon to use this unused ammo type. I'm not sure how that is done (or if it's possible actually). It's a shame there isn't an unused torpedo type. It would be 'interesting' to add a nuclear armed torpedo. 500 damage? 1000? maybe 2000 or more (since the damage is random up to that maximum level). 2500? But a standard or worse chance to hit. Very expensive. And probably you would lose Score for using them - but that would be a complex mod and hard to implement.

After XCOM start producing their own craft instead of begging them from governments for a nominal fee, you get the reverse problem, which is that "in real life" XCOM could sell or rent one of these vessels to governments for probably 50 years worth of funding a pop. The sale price of any XCOM built craft should be in the billion dollar range.