User talk:NKF

NKF:Talk

Welcome to NKF Talk. NKF once asked the question "What is NKF Talk?" - he didn't have a clue, so he decided to make it up as he went along. NKF Talk is now NKF's personal but ultimately temporary soapbox for ... well anything NKF jolly well wants, but it will be for X-COM-related articles in this wiki, that's for sure.

NKF is referring to himself in the third person for no apparent reason - although is rumoured to be absolutely bonkers, which explains a lot.

P.S: NKF is not NFK. NFK is some weirdo that keeps stealing NKF's thunder. Also NKF doesn't have any hidden psychological meaning, and are merely initials.

The NKF-Centric TO-DO-List of Doom

• The first of the articles I'd like to see started is an "X-Com Apocalypse Starter's Guide", as I've been concentrating far too much on UFO and TFTD, might as well get started on the third game. I've written a lot about the subject on several different Apocalypse forums - it's high time to gather everything into one place. Where to begin? Time will answer that question. Hopefully not too much time.

• An article on radars to explain everything you need to know about them.
• Try to understand Wiki page transclusion to allow easy use of templates and all that.

Them Articles

Or rather, short paragraphs that will eventually lead to a larger article that may very well get a page of its own.

X-Com UFO Radar Info

Radars Hint For TFTD, substitute words where ever appopriate. For example, Radar with Sonar, Hyperwave Decoder with Transmission Resolver, etc. They have different names, but are essentially the same thing. Radars - and Terror From The Deep's radar parallel, sonar - can be installed in any of your bases for the purpose of detecting and then tracking enemy ships. Each base comes with three different radar abilities. Short, Long and Hyperwave detection. As would be expected, you can access these with the short and large radar systems, and the hyperwave decoder, respectively. Short and Long range detection function exactly in the same manner and Hyperwave detection provides the additional benefit of decoding UFO mission data. Radar Abilities Each radar can only add its abilities to the base once. Refer to the following table to see how the radars can build on each other. Table 1: Radar Ability Combinations Radar Module / Scan Type Short Long Hyperwave Small Radar 10 0 0 Large Radar 20 20 0 Hyperwave 0 0 100 Radar Combinations Sm + Sm 10 0 0 Sm + Lg 30 20 0 Sm + Hyp 10 0 100 Lg + Lg 20 20 0 Lg + Hyp 20 20 100 Hyp + Hyp 0 0 100 Sm + Lg + Hyp 30 20 100 This table was constructed by making multiple saves for each radar combination and then referring directly to the save game file for the radar values. Compare how different the values in the table are to text in the Ufopaedia. It can probably be assumed that the 10, 20, 30 and 100 values are in percentages. Therefore it we could say that 10 short range scanning will provide a 10% scan for every sweep of the radar. Once the UFO has been spotted, it'll be forever painted on your radar except when it drops out of tracking range. Radar Stats on the Base Information Screen When referring to your base details, you will see two bars representing the long and short range radars. The short range bar increases for every small radar system, and the long range bar increases for every Large Radar system and Hyperwave decoder. Although you are presented with this information, it is highly inaccurate and should never be relied on. The listing only counts how many radars are currently assigned to the base as opposed to the base's actual ability to locate enemy ships. Refer to the Phantom Radar section further along for more insight on how radars work. Brief Radar Range Comparison If we use the town of Novosibirsk as our point of reference, the tracking radius for the Small Radar can go roughly as far as Moscow. The large radar goes all the way to Berlin, and the Hyperwave Decoder can go as far as London and perhaps slightly beyond. Multiple Radars? Though it's natural to believe that installing multiple radars of the same type at a base will make your radarsmore powerful, they certainly do not. Refer to table 1 above. Notice how when two radars of the same type are combined that they do not provide any additional benefit over a single radar. This means that only one of each type of radar is able to stack its scanning abilities on top of another. In addition to the detection ability, multiple radars of the same type do NOT extend a base's detection radius or its tracking radius. Therefore, multiple radars of the same type do not work. The only multi-radar combination worth pursuing is the small and large radar combo. Once you get the hyperwave decoder, the small and large radar combo are immediately outclassed. Still, there's no harm in having a 30% and 20% contingency even if you've got 100% detection and the money to hang on to build the older modules. The only practical reason for including multiple radars of the same type would be for base layout purposes. The small radar, for example, has a clear corridor, making it a good place for combat with weapons that have a wide radius of effect. Questions on this: 1 Do you happen to know if the Radar Stacking bug also applies to TFTD Sonars? The BASE.DAT structure is different, and does not encode the detection strengths of the base there, so maybe they fixed it? 2 Now that the Radar Stacking bug is fixable (via Seb76's loader, or more crudely via my Python script), a new question arises - does it make any practical difference? Or do UFOs spend long enough inside detection range, that a 10% or 20% chance will always detect them? So at best multiple radars will give you a detection some fraction of an hour earlier, but not really increase total UFOs detected? Spike 03:43, 2 October 2008 (CDT) 1. Yes - they've moved stuff around and I think they increased the size of some entries from from words to dwords. Same thing happened with soldier.dat: They moved variables around and replaced a few 8-bit variables with 16-bit variables. So yes, TFTD base.dat still tracks short long and trans. resolver stats. 2. From personal experience, not really. The basic radars will pick up any enemy ship flying in their detection radii eventually. So yes, if you do want to make stacking radars useful, perhaps letting them pick up enemy ships faster would be the way to go. The HWD/T. Resolver just slams down a perfect 100 for detection ability, so it picks up enemy ships the instant they enter detection range. By the way, all my notes here are quite old and a lot of discussion on the radar mechanics has occurred since then. -NKF 03:59, 2 October 2008 (CDT) Actually, it would make a difference. While the regular radars are fine for detecting anything that's meandering around in the area near your base, anything that's just passing through will likely not be detected on your radars(something that can be very painful in 1-Mission X-COM.) So any UFOs just passing through your detection on their way to a mission won't be detected. Of course, on the counterpoint, since they're on a distance mission, they'll be moving pretty fast and you probably won't have the craft to be able to intercept them. Arrow Quivershaft 08:51, 2 October 2008 (CDT) To elaborate on AQ's response, all radars run their detection check every 30 minutes. In between those checks (on the hour and half-hour), nothing is detected. So every half hour the Hyperwave is perfect, but it's just as bad as the other radars on any other time slot. I would assume that if you have multiple normal radars of the same type (with a fix to allow them to work together) constructed, they would all separately run their checks on the half hour which would increase the chances of detecting a UFO within range. Having 10 small radars wouldn't guarantee 100% detection though, as each one still only has 10%. It's just that you have more radars which run their 10% check instead of one. Hope this makes sense. --Zombie 09:45, 2 October 2008 (CDT) Phantom Radar What is a Phantom Radar? A base with a phantom radar, as I've coined it, is a base that is able to continue detecting ships without actually physically owning the radar. This is achieved by removing your existing radars. The game will retain the base's radar ability until another radar, of any type, is built. Basically, you're retaining the ghost of your previous radar, or radars. The modules themselves do not retain the physically ability to detect ships. It's The base itself has the ability, however the game only assigns (and recalculates, if there are existing radars) the strength of the scanning ability at the moment a new radar module is built. If you want to test this yourself, start a new game and remove the default radar and let time run. Phantom Radar: Life Span The life span of the phantom radar lasts until the next base facility is built at that base. Phantom Radar: Advantages The advantage of removing the facility will be that you can downsize your base just that bit more, making it much easier to defend. Although this can be a disadvantage if your entire strategy hinges around the lower level layout of the module. Plus, the empty dirt module will start costing you money. The phantom radar is extremely useful if you choose to upgrade your radar from an older type to a new type by simply removing the old radar and building the new radar in its place. This avoids the Paying for Dirt bug. This only works as long as the next module to be built is the radar. Otherwise the base will be flying blind in the interim. Phantom Radar: Questions Is this cheating? Depends on how you look at it. You did pay for the scanning abilities in the first place - and the cost of a hyperwave module is not cheap! On the other hand, you no longer have to pay for the maintenance of the module (except for that 80k/month for Paying For Dirt unless you immediately built over it, in which case its lifespan is fairly short anyway). That's about as far as the cheating goes. I'd say it's cheating if you're having money trouble. If you're raking in more cash than you ever need to spend, it doesn't matter if you physically own the module or otherwise. Do I really have to do this? No, but it's good to know. And it stops you from being startled if your base continues to pick up enemy ships after removing the radars. Actually, it's the whole purpose of this article. You're a bit full of yourself sometimes, aren't you? Sad, but true. I do indeed like some types of cheese. Wait, what were we talking about?

Total Randomness

This is a work in progress

Just in case anyone's wondering what I'm doing here, I'm trying to make a template called the UFO Base Kit - or something like that. Seems okay, I guess. If you want to fiddle with it, feel free to do so.

Oddly enough, the Wiki software for this site doesn't allow default values for template parameters - so I have to manually enter 'dirt' for all the dirt sections. Ah well - next software update, I guess.

Possible entries

dirt  
lift
lab
workshop
psi
containment
storage
quarters

hangar1
hangar2
hangar3
hangar4

small_radar
large_radar
hyperwave

(Defense modules)

grav
mind
missile
laser
plasma
fusion

Here's an example.

;How you should NOT build a base: 
{{UBK|=
|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|hyperwave|=
|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|lab|=
|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|quarters|=
|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|workshop|=
|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|dirt|quarters|=
|psi|mind|stores|stores|stores|lift|=}}

Produces:

How you should NOT build a base

And just as a quick comment on this design: Thanks to the Base Disjoint Bug, all of the above modules will be sealed off from each other.

---

Another example of the template in its intended use:

The above are examples of my standard plain vanilla listening/intercept outpost. The module placement is completely random. There is no sense to it at all - except that they are as bare-bones as possible. Due to the small number of entry points, a few well placed rockets is all that's needed to clear a large chunk of aliens before things can get nasty.

---

Main page - distributions

Hi NKF. As you are thinking about the main page, could you add a place to organise "where to get it" / "distributions", and/or a place to talk about Steam? Thank you. Spike 03:20, 2 October 2008 (CDT)

Heh, actually I was implementing something as you posted this. It's not the best and really just a hack of a solution, but it gets a link onto the main page that we can work with. It'll do for the present, but a more prominent location should be decided on eventually (I'm thinking as in an overhaul of the main page and moving the three main game menus into their respective pages). - NKF 03:34, 2 October 2008 (CDT)