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Agents not appearing in battle


Stun Grenade

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The game needs to reserve some agent slots for mind controlled units - even if you don't intend to use psionics.

 

Also, in base defense, these slots are reserved for controlling the guns. (and we think the more empty slots - the more guns that can operate at any given time)

 

It's not a bug. It's just a limit set by the game.

 

- NKF

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Let me go find out!

 

*puts on hard hat*

*You hear whipping noises and the sound of many feet*

*comes back*

 

Hmm, odd. I was able to bring a full squad of 36 soldiers into an assault on a city building and an alien building. (36 soldiers is incredibly unmanageable, by the way). In this case, I'd assume the game only limits the number of soldiers (+techs) in base defense. I used a Bio-trans packed with as many seat modules I could get.

 

Anyway, to answer your question DG1: It still shows the normal control chance, but the attempt fails anyway. I was doing multiple 76% attacks - and given the odds, it should have worked at least once after several tries.

 

- NKF

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  • 1 year later...

36 is the obvious limit to the size of the squad in a mission, but there's another hidden limit that is dropping the amount of agent you can have. It took me a while to figure why I couldn't bring 36 guys as well.

 

The long awaited answer: :(

 

EQUIPMENT!!!

 

There's a limit of the total number of items you can bring in a mission. For that matter, it seems the limit is for the total number of items in mission, period (I'll explain this later). The game will stop allowing agents to go into missions if the next agent brings in equipment that will exceed the item limit.

 

It seems the limit of the number of items you can bring is the same as the limit of the number of items in mission, hostile and friendly. Which means that the more equipment you bring, the less the aliens get to bring :shock:. I don't have any hard numbers to back it up, but on a bunch of Mothership recovery missions, I was very close to the item limit. Most of the skeletoids and anthropods I faced were not carrying any equipment at all. It does make the missions much easier, as the only threats are overspawns (guess they're still dangerous), poppers, and the 2 or 3 skeletoids/anthropods that were able to bring in equipment. I may actually try to test this theory out more rigorously and let you know.

 

Edit: The max equipment amount is 498 including armour. I will test the alien equipment effect next.

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Sounds reasonable. Apocalypse has to have a limit. It doesn't dynamically allocate space for everything. The numbers in Apocalypse are just a lot larger than UFO's obviously small limits. The programmers never expected that there would be some of us nutters that would want to push these limits. :(

 

Can you give an example equipment kit for all the soldiers to bring in to achieve that? As in, using all 36 soldiers and simply wearing a suit of armour and fill all the gaps with grenades and clips? (with a shield and a gun in the hands)

 

- NKF

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It really is quite easy to max out to 498 with 36 soldiers. Consider 36 * 14 = 504, a full suit of armour is 5 pieces, so each soldier can carry 9 items. If you have a gun in one hand, cloak field in another, a shield, a medkit, a clip of ammo, this already takes you up to 5. Bring in some explosives, stun gun, mind blender and you'll be running out of room.

 

Hmm, I'm not sure if the ammo that's already loaded in the gun also counts as an item. In that case the item total is 534. I'll probably test it out with rechargeable weapons and see.

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Just want to say that I have confirmed that the amount of equipment your squad brings does affect the amount of equipment the aliens bring.

 

So if you want to go into missions and not want to have to face aliens with shields, cloak, dimension missiles, entropy missiles, vortex mines, etc. Just bring enough equipment to get close to the limit and you'll have a very easy time.

 

Of course, if you want new alien artifacts you'll need to leave some room for the aliens to bring them.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 1 month later...
512 is a nice, rounded, computer approved number.

 

But UFO doesn't use such numbers for it's limits, so I doubt it matters.

 

oO

 

512 might be nice, but isnt practicle, cause you also have to count the 0. So this would make the actual limit 511 :cool: Or the limit might be an actual 255, because they might include negatives. (For what ever reason)

 

The same reason, why 16^16 is 265, but FF is 255. Ah, the numbers! :mad:

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FF = 15*16 + 15 = 255

 

(Keeping in mind that F = 15).

 

And 16^16 is... um... a really big number, not 265.

 

The first index in the array would be 0, the last index 511 - making 512 indexes in total.

 

Truth be told, the amount of indexes should be based purely on memory constraints, not on powers of 2 alone. But people like to round, so it could be 500, could be 512... Easiest way to find out is to find the record size and divide the relevant data file by that amount.

 

In UFO the limit is 80.

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*scratches head*

 

Maybe LPC finally made me go made?!

 

But well yeah, you are right (my apologize). I always like to confuse the base of a system with exponential functions. :mad:

 

Anyway just to prove, that i am working on not doing stupid errors that often:

11110 year war ended 11001110000.

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