UFOpaedia - User contributions [en]

Talk:Experience Training

2009-05-30T01:38:59Z

JonathanLB:

It's implied here that you don't gain experience for shooting aliens under your control. That's just incorrect. I always shoot aliens who are under my control. In fact that's the only way I give new soldiers firing accuracy training, to shoot already-controlled aliens. It works great! So not sure where that misinformation came from...

-JonathanLB

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I didn't know how to meaningfully merge the top-to-bottom training guide I wrote with the stub page that this article started out as, so I moved the original page to the discussion page here. I hope other editors of the UFOPaedia do not take offense.

I have copied the extensive Kill Modeling section to [[Kill Modelling|its own page]].

--[[User:Ethereal Cereal|Ethereal Cereal]] 20:21, 16 May 2006 (PDT)

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Thanks EC, I think you've done a great job. We can kill all the text you copied (below)... making a Kill Model page was a good idea; it was a little esoteric to fill up an Experience Training page. But I was more interested in the model results than fleshing out a Training page, laugh... it's good you finally fixed things up.

Also thanks for the credit up at the top. It's not particularly necessary since if folks dig, they'll eventually come across the fact I did the quantitative work. I changed the word "information" to "numbers" because many others before me (NKF, Z, etc.) had made many good qualitative observations on experience; what I supplied that nobody else had, is exactly how it worked numerically. Anyway, you can keep or drop that credit at the top of the page. Thanks!

This whole Discussion can be deleted after you read it, if you like. Thanks again for all your work!

---[[User:MikeTheRed|MikeTheRed]] 17:08, 17 May 2006 (PDT)
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Sure thing. And thanks for your work as well. With this discussion page, I'm satisfied that your credit will be easy to find, so I will indeed remove it from the article page.

I've deleted the original article from this page. I took the measure of copying it because the new article is a replacement, not just a rewrite -- I wanted to get your okay before I wiped the old page completely out.

--[[User:Ethereal Cereal|Ethereal Cereal]] 00:03, 18 May 2006 (PDT)

== An alternate Bravery training method proposal ==

I was participating in a thread not too long ago where I somehow ended up explaining how bravery is improved, and this suggestion on how to safely improve bravery was put forward.

Use psi to round up all the aliens on the map, disarm them (as per standard procedure) then start killing them while they are still under X-Com control to drop overall morale under 50%. Repeat this a few times until everyone's had a good scare.

If this works, I can see that it'll be good way to increase bravery of even the toughest of soldiers.

There might be a few cons associated with this as well, but it theroetically sounds much safer than braving aliens with psi (thus revealing the soldier's Achille's heel) or killing lots of fellow soldiers just to get a measly bravery increase.

Then again, there is a counter argument where if you are capable of easily rounding up the aliens with psi, increasing bravery at that point is rather meaningless. Still, I suppose it would still be worth knowing for those wanting to max out their team's stats before launching the final mission.

I thought it was a brilliant suggestion at the time, however I can't run any tests of my own at the moment to verify if it actually works. Would anyone be able to check this for me? Thanks.

- [[User:NKF|NKF]] 22:47, 28 February 2008 (PST)

:Can't run tests myself at the moment, but aliens killed while under Mind Control DO cause morale loss. HOWEVER, it is not as dramatic as you'd expect...I think the only unit that loses morale is the unit that does the killing. (Don't kill MCed aliens with tanks, they WILL take a hit on Morale!) However, the amount of morale lost is always an odd value. I THINK what happens is that the game subtracts the Morale from all soldiers for having a friendly killed, then ADDS BACK into the Morale for having an alien killed, and the net effect is that my troops(which tend to stay at 100 Morale) don't show a visible effect; especially since I generally have at least a Captain on my team(Usually at least a Colonel or the Commander), which means that I lose less morale from the 'loss' and gain more from the kill. However, the unit that actually does the killing takes the extra penalty for a friendly fire kill (-20) and thus the effect of Morale loss can generally be seen on that unit only. So my take is that it's interesting, but only of marginal use. And officers will make it fairly difficult to pull off. [[User:Arrow Quivershaft|Arrow Quivershaft]] 23:26, 28 February 2008 (PST)

====Fire and Gaining Experience====
''Has anyone tested how fire affects experience? Keeping in mind [[Incendiary]] rockets (90IN) and Auto cannon rounds (48IN) Specifically I want to know if:''
* Does Incendiary direct dmg increase [[experience]] if the alien does NOT catch fire?
* Does Incendiary spash dmg increase [[experience]] if the alien does NOT catch fire?
* Does an alien who caught fire give [[experience]] to the solider the round after?
* Does an alien '''in a fire''' (but not '''on''' fire) give [[experience]] to the soldier the round after if he takes damage?
* Does an alien '''in a fire''' (but not '''on''' fire) give [[experience]] to the soldier the round after if he DOES NOT take damage?
* Does a 4 square alien count as 4 hits if fire is on all 4 squares?
* How does this all interact with the [[Known_Bugs#Funky_Fire|fire hurts all bug]]?

''Depending on how this works out, it may mean that the best way to skill up your squad is with an [[Auto-Cannon]] using [[Incendiary]] rounds.''--[[User:Brunpal|Brunpal]] 09:53, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Unfortunately no to all the above. From the damage tests that were done extensively by our regulars that did most of the work on the damage/experience pages, incendiary damage does not increase your experience counters at all. - [[User:NKF|NKF]] 13:49, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Even a direct hit that kills the target? That seems odd. If that's the case then it should be noted on the various XP pages that it's totally impossible to gain XP with [[incendiary]] rounds loaded. It's a pretty big exception.--[[User:Brunpal|Brunpal]] 15:54, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Given the amount of damage inflicted by a hit from an incendiary round, a kill is unlikely. Nevertheless, IIRC, Firing Accuracy is incremented on an actual hit of the enemy. [[User:Arrow Quivershaft|Arrow Quivershaft]] 16:02, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Actually, after skimming through the pages on training experience, I can't see mention of whether incendiary increments 'hit' experience or otherwise, so I'm left a bit unsure at this point. What I vaguely remember is that incendiary (standing in flames, on fire, etc) won't increment the kill counter - but then again the kill counter is just that, a counter. It has no control over your stat increases. Oh well, nothing a few practical experiments won't fix. -[[User:NKF|NKF]] 16:23, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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From a logical standpoint, it should, given that every other time your soldiers successfully shoot an alien, regardless of whether they do any damage, they get firing accuracy experience incremented. But tests are the way to go, yes. [[User:Arrow Quivershaft|Arrow Quivershaft]] 18:25, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Shooting an alien with IN does not increase the "successful hit" counter. This could be considered an oversight by the programmers (an IN shot is handled differently to that of a standard bullet, and they skipped the bit which dealt with the counter).

I'm uncertain as to whether shooting an alien with IN - and killing it specifically with that shot, as opposed to the alien dieing in the flames a turn later - will raise the kill counter.

- [[User:Bomb Bloke|Bomb Bloke]] 18:43, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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I'm not too concerned if the kill counter goes up or not, just if the hit counts towards xp. I used the example of a direct hit that results in a kill because a kill is the easiest way to check that damage was done, (vs a hit that did zero damage). It's also the most conservative test; if ''that'' doesn't count for xp, then it stands to reason that no other form of IN damage counts for xp.

There is also some discussion at [[Talk:Incendiary]] about this issue.

Sucks if IN doesn't count at all. I had visions of getting personal armor, then throwing 4 aliens into the back of my ship and firing one at point blank auto shot for a full set of xp actions. I'm looking for a way to train in early game. Generally I don't do much with xp training with psi. Soon as I have psi ''capable'' squad (vs godlike) I head to mars and end the game.--[[User:Brunpal|Brunpal]] 21:03, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Experience works like this: Whenever you perform certain actions, certain counters are incremented. At the end of combat, the vitalstatistics relevant to those counters may then be incremented.

When you fire a weapon, if you hit a unit with it the "hit" counter goes up. As IN does not increase this counter (or any of the other counters, except maybe kills which doesn't increase skills anyway), it won't cause you to gain in any stats.

Hence why you can't use the kill counter as a way of checking to see if a soldier will gain "experience". You HAVE to check the action counters themselves. The game doesn't always do things in a predictable/logical manner, so when doing research it doesn't pay to assume.

So in case I wasn't clear before, shots made with IN do not count towards any form of "experience".

- [[User:Bomb Bloke|Bomb Bloke]] 21:35, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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The results are already out there, but I had run a practical exercise anyway. I fired up TFTD and started a brand new game. Bought only Phosphor rounds and made sure I had 8 gas cannons. At the start of the first mission, I saved and edited unitref.dat to give the first soldier all-round 255 armour - effectively making him invulnerable to enemy attack. Perfect for testing - although I had to restart my test as I corrupted my results with one reaction shot (my test was to see if any promotions were given, then to check if any stats have increased). I have got to say that TFTD has REALLY nerfed incendiary effects for underwater maps. Fire burns for about one or two turns before fizzing out. Had to repeat this whole test all over again on a land map to get better results.

In any case, my findings are that the Kill counter does increase with an IN induced kill to the person that performed the killing blow, but no experience is awarded. An alien dying from fire doesn't increase the kill counter nor is experience awarded (actually, one test did increase the kill counter, but that was the odd one out).

- [[User:NKF|NKF]] 01:24, 2 August 2008 (PDT)

Makes sense... incendiary is such an odd kettle of fish, it doesn't count as a hit in terms of experience, reaction triggers... basically acts very oddly... [[User:Jasonred|Jasonred]] 05:25, 15 March 2009 (EDT)

Talk:Saving

2008-08-05T06:53:31Z

JonathanLB:

I wasn't aware that anyone played any X-Com game without saving and reloading. Why would you do that? I don't think it makes the game fun at all if you can expect your soldiers to die every few missions at the start of the game where your technology sucks hardcore. In fact, at the start of a game I will tolerate only minor injuries. By the early-mid stages of the game, whether the first, second, or third, I tolerate no injuries whatsoever. I use all ten save spots and save every time a significant event happens, which could even be moving a few of my guys before I'm going to move another one into a potentially dangerous, unscouted area. Or it could be after I kill an alien. In Apoc, I won't accept even a deflector shield going down. If a shield fails, time to load to an earlier saved game. Those things take too long to manufacture, so I look at them like health, and if the health reaches 0, time to reload.

I don't spend all kinds of time building up a guy into a super-soldier just so that he can be killed by one bad turn, haha, that seems funny to me. I didn't even realize anyone would play an X-Com game without this technique. It just seems wasteful otherwise.

:: JonathanLB, think of it as an ironman playstyle if you like. There's an entire genre of games (rogue-likes) where save-load is explicitly cheating. Here, it's merely an out-of-game "difficulty switch".

:: To put things mildly, as long as you're playing against the default AI, and actually <b>understand</b> the default AI, the only thing preventing almost never losing supersoldiers is that there's no in-game roster swap utility. It's a fairly common deficiency for savegame editors to address for XCOM1/XCOM2, and I suspect it will be figured out for Apocalypse before long. -- [[User:Zaimoni|Zaimoni]], 13:49 4 August 2008 (CDT)

:: P.S.: on talk pages, leaving a signature is generally good style on (almost) any wiki.

Hey, I apologize I don't even know what a signature is. Do you mean just signing my name or how do I go about doing that? I wasn't trying to be rude. I registered to the Wiki with my real name and all so I'm not trying to hide! haha. I wasn't really understanding your entire post, I mean I can see how if you were wanting to make the game super challenging you would do this, but actually with X-Com 2 that game is so tough anyway even with save-and-load, it's not really necessary I don't think. The start of the game, at least, is brutal, terror missions where you're still using darts. Ouch!

I think I differ from many players because I don't agree that the "fun" from the game is making it challenging and having your guys die, etc. I feel the fun is getting to the point of utter domination where each mission is fairly easy but still entertaining and fun, and so you train your soldiers to be really awesome and have the ultimate fighting squad. At least, for me that has always been the most fun. When I first played X-Com it was one of the earliest games I played for the PC, I was I guess maybe 11 or 12, not sure, and having beaten the game several times back then and yet again now that my friend gave me DosBox, I always enjoy the process of training my soldiers to be amazing combat units. I just restarted X-Com 2 because I never beat that game without cheating, I found it too difficult when it came out. I hope I can do so now with save-and-loads but even then it can be tough. I just lost a soldier in a terror mission without realizing it, I have no idea how, I must not have been paying attention but one died. Oh well, early on, probably didn't have much gained experience it being the third mission and all but still I was surprised. I used to use that Hexedit cheat, where you could hack the soldier profiles and make them have 255 time units (FF), 160 health or something (AA), I don't remember exactly, but I never got far in the game without cheating so now it's time to do it at least what I consider the honest way, albeit still with save-and-loads. So, uhh, signature would be I guess: -JonathanLB 23:52 4 August 2008 (PDT)

Talk:Saving

2008-08-04T13:43:37Z

JonathanLB: New page: I wasn't aware that anyone played any X-Com game without saving and reloading. Why would you do that? I don't think it makes the game fun at all if you can expect your soldiers to die ever...