Dye grenades, WP shells and shock launcher changing effect type? WTFF!

[Tsathoggua]

Just had some major grief on a terror site (shipping lane mission, gill men, deep ones so far, only seen a few enemies, but had to restart a save from before the mission became available and have it occur again and respond again.

 

Squad loadout includes gas cannon, primary loadout is incendiary, anyone carrying the cannon, got a pair of troopers packing GCs both DEFINITELY (and I checked) loaded with incendiary rounds, each carrying a further five WP clips and a single mag of explosive rounds. These are NOT and have never been loaded into the weapons, but the troops are blanketing anywhere out of sight range by calling up hell fire. Each trooper with GC is carrying a sonic pistol or rifle for their sidearm and stun rod. The rods work as usual. Just had a thermal shock cannon (two troopers again, a few rounds apiece, haven't got many.) as well as dye grenades and incendiary gas cannon rounds start playing up in a weird ass way.

 

Saw a civilian on the upper south deck (LV2) near the LZ standing there like a moron, so tossed a dye grenade up at her feet before I could get someone up there to hit with the stun rod, having just spotted a gill man (turned out to be a tech, totally unarmed, no drill no grenades no nothing whatsoever, just standing there spotting targets with his danglies swinging in the wind so to speak. At least until a thermal shock cannon round took him out of the equation. Would have used a tazer if I'd known he was helpless)

 

Packing a mix of sonic rifle and cannon, lower capability people or stun/weaker gas cannon operators got given pistols rather than rifles or both for their secondary, everyone is carrying dye and sonic grenades. Then abruptly everything went to hell in a handcart. Dye grenades stopped working for a couple of turns, I think I'd thrown three up at that civilians feet before realizing they were going off for no damage

and emitting no smoke coverage. Then...?

 

Saw another civilian standing up at a corridor end, threw a dye grenade and shot a gas cannon round down into the murk of the other corridor. Both went arse over tit in that they went off with a huge BOOM!, as big as a sonic pulser, one GC round missed, hit nearby wall and rather than relatively low damage fire, it took the entire squad, plus the tank on the other side of the wall, I had to restart after stun shots went right the same way., everybody on that floor nearby was killed.

 

Reloaded since before the terror site itself, then went and dealt with it again, no trouble. But something sure as hell got corrupted there.

so I don't call it cheating. A DYE grenade thrown up to another civilian and corridor end for cover went off with the fury of a whole STACK of pulse grenades. Tore the civilian nearby to shreds, and made one hell of a mess, wiped the surrounding scenery out completely.

 

What gives?

[Zombie]

Sounds like a corrupted obdata.dat file (holds weapon stats). Never happened to me before, using any mods?

 

- Zombie

[Tsathoggua]

I really honestly do not know. The edition, if thats the right word, came from a torrent. I can't install things (any things, doesn't matter what they are) via CD, and of course this is WAY too new (this year....bastards who built it for me tried forcing windows 10 on me, asked for blank drives, got their filthy parasitic bench-test in house cant-be-activated-or-reverted W10. Had to go to some extreme lengths to get anything at all working, damn thing was a virus. Had to put the drive in another computer running linux (old man's laptop) and run a low level format before I could even get rid of it. Took weeks to cleanse it fully. Goddamn thing hung on as bad as the very worst rootkits I've ever encountered. Nasty, I really suggest nobody ever use that worthless excuse for an OS. I'd have gladly stuck with XP if my main data drive for my benchtop hadn't died. YEARS of research data, all my ergot fungi work data, years of games and music, right down the crapper. Now I'm stuck with this thing. Its got no CD drive inbuilt, I use (useD) a portable USB CD/DVD drive, but it won't recognize the drivers and I've not been able to fix it.

 

Too busy working on fixing ME to be able to work on this too.

 

So, it came from a torrent. Had to really. The UFO-enemy unknown (first alien war, not the new one, not played those yet) appears corrupted, I can't run it but TFTD works. Would love to get back into the original though, been playing the two since they came out more or less.

 

The problem appears to be resolved. Things are still going to hell in a handbasket, but THAT is due to trying to take out the synomium device in a base. And its ugly as hell. Place is crawling with tentaculats, and some tasoth or aquatoid sniper managed to take out the coelacanth in the first section. Cleaned it right up alright. Now the second...going to find the control center, blow it up and run like hell!

 

Doubtless they are going to be pissed, because they've had their first base up for all of an hour or so, only to be about to have everything blow up in their face. Shouldn't have tried to build within radar range of my own secondary base ehehe:D

[magic9mushroom]

Reminder: they're not WP.

 

Dye Grenades suck. Also, there is a limit of how many squares can be on fire and smoking; too much smoke and fire will hit the cap and prevent any further smoke or fire from being created.

 

Two-part missions have a re-equip screen and IIRC it's possible that it switched out the incendiaries for HE at that time (ammo loaded into a gun can fail to be registered as "carried", so it disappears, and then the game automatically reloads it with the first sort of ammo available, which is HE since you don't have any AP rounds). The Dye Grenade IDK; my suspicion is that the aliens just happened to throw a sonic pulser on the same turn.

[NKF]

The first problem certainly sounds like the smoke/fire limit was hit. That's normal and can happen if you've been throwing a lot of dye grenades or there have been a lot of explosions such as from Sonic Pulsers that have kicked up some dust clouds.

 

The other problem is harder to work out, but I have seen some odd things happen with weapons suddenly behaving erratically and dealing more damage than they should. For example just for a brief moment a Hydrojet cannon ends up punching through an otherwise indestructible wall, or a shot suddenly exploding very violently as if a DPL torpedo had struck. Then not seeing any of this happening again later or on a reload. Quite likely a glitch that occurred during run-time. As long as it does not persist then there shouldn't be much to worry about.

 

- NKF

[Tsathoggua]

I don't think so, there was SOMETHING going on with the dye grenades, because they weren't emitting any screen, just making a small bang as they went off.

 

And they must have meant WP by phosphor, for true phosphors emit light only, not heat, at all. But anyhow, works for smoking the bugs out which is what matters, crispy bug cooked in the shell:D Its the closest suspect, perhaps it could be made to burn under water with an oxidizer/fuel mixture in a shell, but at any rate, I haven't exactly tried that myself, it goes in water for storage so it doesn't catch fire, so I don't exactly plan on *trying* to ignite the stuff. Once was bad enough...

 

Don't think I'd hit the cap, for I'd only just started the mission. ALTHOUGH...those oil drums that one type of shipping mission has SW of the transport, used those to avoid using dye grenades up until needed to provide cover. Might as well take tactical advantage of the terrain. Used a couple more fuel drums to pop a deep one.

Then all hell broke loose, they stopped working for about 3-4 turns, then they started going of with one hell of an explosion whenever I tried to use them. tossed one dye grenade at a gill man for it was all that I had the TU to use, and it didn't blanket the area with cover, it blew the gill man straight to hell. This was DEFINITELY the dye grenades, not thrown pulsers coming from beyond visual range at civilians for that wouldn't have resulted in a kill scored by a dye grenade thrown over open ground. Might as well have been a pulse grenade or DPL for all that gillman withstood the massive blast that resulted. This cannot have been, or the incendiary issues, an issue with crossing over into the bottom deck, because the troops had just landed, came out the dropship, one fired a stun launcher round at the gillman tech on the upper deck spotting (completely unarmed, no drill no grenades, green ball sack swinging in the wind. Waste of a round but couldn't have known at the time.) and the first entry door on the bottom floor, the one that has a wide set of stairs leading to the upper deck had a deep one waiting inside, and that was taken out quickly with conventional weapons fire. Using the oil drums for cover, both to duck behind and to blow to hell to cover an advance.

 

Yes dye grenade blow compared to the original smoke grenades, but they are useful for screening off the egress from the LZ, covering advances, sneaking up on bugs to stun them and especially to protect civilians by tossing them at their feet before running to stun them

 

The odd thing about the gas cannon is that USUALLY the loadout is incendiary, but just sometimes will carry HE shells if running low on IC rounds. HJC loadout is IC in the breech, IC reloads, and again, occasionally HE rounds, but since the weapons that can deploy IC ammo are limited, and the torpedo launcher only can hold a few rounds and its big, bulky and single shot, I tend to leave that behind, and only really use the HE rounds if things start getting messy, vs aquatoids though they work well, an autoshot in the general direction of an 'toid carrying a DPL and as such a maximum priority target generally results in a killshot, possibly several kills, its an unwelcome surprise to find aquanauts wounded after letting off a burst of HJC fire at close range and finding that IC shells started exploding likew HE and producing no fire, it was definitely IC in the breech of the cannons, because both troopers carrying HJC were affected, IC turned to HE. One HE clip a piece to five of phossy shells each, sonic cannon and blaster rifle as sidearm one each of my two heavy weapons specialists, girl with the Gas cannon nothing else but IC rounds, stunner, sonic or gauss pistol (heavy loadout for the HJC carriers I know but they can take it, they have been the same two using the cannons from day 1 the one w the GC is a bit less strong but damn accurate with grenades too)

[sp1ke]

Just out of interest, dye grenades - when they are not mutating into HE rounds - do they actually work for you? I never used them because I read the spoilers that say they don't actually block alien spotting. Best case, they reduce site range a few tiles for one turn. Hate to spoil your fun, because deploying covering smoke/dye is definitely fun - but is it having any effect?

 

By the way TFTDExtender has a fix to up the power of dye grenades so they work like EU smoke grenades.

[Tsathoggua]

they do seem to be of some use. More than a single turn but the coverage is crappy, in terms of range. I HAVE found them of use however, particularly in terror missions for protecting civilians, at least as long as they do not stupidly go and seek out the nearest source of a sonic cannon round in the gonads [or, as they are then to be known, 'stopnads'].They seem at least a bit less prone to suicidal stupidity if they are unable to see the enemy though, but I may be mistaken there, I have no way to objectively confirm this, subjective experience is all I've got to go on. At least however during terror missions they are useful, right at the feet of the civilian, to screen them from immediately being butchered until I can get a squaddie or two up in close to stun them and get them out of the way until revival w/ med kits is possible before extirpating the last hostile present at the site. And also for covering the LZ, and sneaking up on the enemy if the plan is to creep up and jump them with a tazer.

 

Bagged a gill man earlier of above soldier rank that way. The small explosion radius does at least mean that they can be let off close up without triggering react fire. I find ducking down to a crouch seems to help, the enemy seem less able to shoot at the troops if they are down low in the haze. rather than standing up. They do at least seem to help. And I always cover the immediate egress from the triton, after getting the tank out of the door.

 

And to blanket the immediate area in and around the LZ,until the teams can get into cover, seems to reduce my casualty rate.

[NKF]

The code of the smoke propagation was changed between UFO and TFTD so that instead of immediately filling a circular area with a full strength screen that thinned and spread slowly over time, TFTD starts off with a small full-strength dust cloud that expands outwards at a reasonably fast rate over several turns.

 

The problem here is that the ability for smoke to obscure vision is at its strongest when the screen is thick, but is less effective when the screen is thin. A single tile of smoke at full strength can obscure you far better than a thin cloud spread over 9 tiles for example. The way TFTD does it, by the time the dust cloud is big enough it will likely have thinned a bit, allowing enemies to see further into the cloud.

 

That's not to say you can't make good use of it, as you most certainly can. A quicker way to kick up a large dust cloud is to use an explosive like a DPL torpedo or a Sonic Pulser.

 

- NKF

[Tsathoggua]

Wouldn't waste DPL rounds just to kick up a shitstorm.

And besides for what I want the smokescreen usually the dye grenades are preferable. Afterall. letting off a DPL or pulser will attract attention can only be used below water (either torpedo launcher or DPL, makes a big mess or REALLY big mess respectively

 

And the most use for them is terror sites and bases (theirs not mine) and especially for shipping lane missions. I like to deploy some smoke to blanket the LZ and allow the strike teams egress immediately outside the exit hatch of the transport, thats probably the worst part of A terror site where one is most likely to suffer casualties. Having a tank at least allows one to use it as a meatless meat shield so to speak to block incoming bolts of sonic fire as its not unlikely that even the coelacanth will be able to take a couple of direct hits on its front armor plating from anything up to the size of a sonic cannnon or even a couple of bursts of bio-drone fire. I've often seen a squad coelacanth (have had to replace it three perhaps four times That is to say by replacing three times original dies, buy new one dead new, dead on third and using it still. Or perhaps fourth but I can't remember for sure.A coelacanth is far easier to replace than an aquanaut than a highly trained and expert marksman sniper capable of hitting and dropping a target with every shot they can fire at least with aimed or snap-fire much of the time.from so far off they cannot even SEE the target and closer in, every round fired in burst mode from a gauss pistol or further away with a rifle, and who can easily tote around something heavy like a hydrojet cannon or torpedo launcher and still carry a gas cannon to flush out aliens or send them running away using phossy shells if something particularly dangerous, or melee capable bugs start charging.

 

Not just for the sake of accuracy itself, But also strength, for the aquanauts in question have been training hard, until their strength has reached some crazy levels, carrying a gas cannon or hydrojet for a sidearm case in point. If their main weapon is a torpedo launcher or one of the other two heavy support weapons (the GC and hydrojet)- which most other troops would only carry as a dedicated weapon, without medkit, with just a couple of dye grenades and sonic pulsers, as well as a lightweight sidearm like the gauss pistol or sonic pistol.

 

Hell I am almost surprised one of them doesn't just take a sonic oscillator into battle, or if ever they SEE a triscene, get themselves a pair of craft PWT launchers and go lay waste to the next alien facility needing to be taken out not bug by bug but just blow the whole damn thing up in two shots, one for the base underground and then wipe out the seafloor base:D

 

Got a few that are regularly issued both a torpedo launcher w/large torpedoes plus a single phosphorus torpedo or gas cannon/HJC and a sonic cannon in the other hand, and who still are accurate enough with them to be useful. Training up an agent to be that good a shot when carrying a sonic cannon or rifle in the other hand takes a lot time and effort, not easily replaceable

[sp1ke]

I agree that troop transport de-bus is the main place where you want cover, particularly on shipping lane missions, but still, I'm not convinced Dye is effective.

 

I have once or twice set up campaigns with all the weapons and gear tweaked so they 'work' properly but usually it just ends up reducing the challenge factor as much as it reduces the irritation value. So there's no gain. Particularly as you can't really brag about those games or even share the experience much with other people, as other people won't have had that same experience of non-standard settings. So it's kind of a lonely exercise in pedantry to set such games up. (Hmm, that's probably the only reason I've ever actually done it, I am big on pedantry).

 

Having a tank at least allows one to use it as a meatless meat shield so to speak

Er, isn't that called "a shield"? ;-)

[Tsathoggua]

Well if your beefng tons of offensive hardware up to the extent all you need carry is one trooper with a dart pistol and a teddy-bear with a lump of lead pipe wrapped

round one end, or a tank loaded with rubber bullets to take on t'leth and win (reductio ad absurdum), but tweaking one piece of kit so that it works properly that was

unfairly crippled, to make it more realistic (the dye grenades) then I'd not call that unfair.

 

Its pretty much realistic for a smoke or dye grenade to be able to disperse its contents over a wider area than a single tile. There are flare type smokes used by the modern militaries that slowly emit their contents. But those are generally used for marking out e.g landing points for telling the egress transport where to land.

 

Its very, very realistic to expect screening smokes for providing cover to be dispersed over a wider area than merely covering the space between the feet of a single

human or alien of similar size and disperse over only a few times that over several turns. Indeed for subsurface use, it would make sense to use a screening agent that

reacts with water, to be dispersed by means of a small explosive charge. Such agents as would fill that purpose do exist. Making a bit of kit thats

of borderline usefulness as functional as it formerly was before it was effectively broken isn't akin to cheating, its just fixing what was broken.

[NKF]

Considering the game was rushed out very quickly after the original, some testing may have been not as thorough as it should have been.

 

I do agree that a DPL just for smoke may be wasteful, and that a dye-grenade is safer for disembarkation, but my point was that the option is there available for you to use. Sonic Pulsers are probably the more readily available means of kicking up a dust cloud considering how prolific they are throughout the game and it works out of water too.

 

Really it's up to the situation. You may find yourself in a spot where you want a sizeable dust cloud right away. That's where the Sonic Pulser or a DPL comes in real handy. If you can control the situation, such as leaving the Triton, then the dye grenade would be safer if you want to take your time before setting forth. Say you wanted to spend a few turns arming all your Sonic Pulsers so that you can quickly toss them out later on , then the wait for the dye grenade to generate a light screen isn't an issue.

 

Incidentally, on training strength: Strength doesn't improve by weighing yourself down. With the exception of throwing stuff, Strength is given a chance to upgrade whenever you successfully perform an action that can raise a trainable skill such as firing accuracy, reactions, etc, So, you can train better if you don't encumber yourself too much.

 

Yeah, real-world logic has no place in this game.

 

- NKF

[Tsathoggua]

Well no shit.

 

Wouldn't be a practical way to cover the LZ using a sonic pulser or DPL. Thats just doing the alien's jobs for them and giving them a free tin of meatpaste to spread on their post-mission sandwiches (just watch out for bones and bits of aqua-plastic and/or metal fragments before you eat.......)

[sp1ke]

No I never beef or buff as such, I just balance. Sometimes that includes minor buffs or beefs for stuff that is otherwise useless. For example, I buff craft cannon and Ajax/Stingrays because otherwise they are useless and never get used. It's never about making the game easier, that's pointless, it's about making the equipment sets and options more balanced or maybe a better sense of ""realism"" (in quadruple quotes!) or taking out things that are irritating, not because they make the game hard, but because they are kind of stupid.

 

And yes I have tossed sonic pulsers out of the boat to clear an LZ. Kind of "double action" clearing of the LZ. :-)

[Tsathoggua]

With the dye grenades, I usually move the point men out immediately behind the tank, letting the tank suck up any on-target reaction fire, and let the dye grenades go off right at the point men's feet. Its where the most immediate result is centered and the densest smoke..

 

Got to agree for the most part about the craft gas cannon. It is sort of useful for taking down small scout type USOs that are large enough to have a crew and power source and allow for more of a chance to retain the valuable resources that went into the USO. Rather than say, a pair of DUP head torpedoes blasting it to smithereens with a simultaneous hit.

[sp1ke]

Got to agree for the most part about the craft gas cannon. It is sort of useful for taking down small scout type USOs that are large enough to have a crew and power source and allow for more of a chance to retain the valuable resources that went into the USO

Yes. In theory. But have you ever actually tried this? It doesn't rarely work in practice. You so rarely get into firing range that you are better off just engaging with dual DUPs, obliterating the thing, getting some score and moving on.

[Tsathoggua]

I have, but its been years since I did. So I cannot remember the results, but have heard that it works when a craft is actually shot down.

 

How does the craft gauss cannon fare? I so rarely ever have the research done because I rarely ever bother with the heavy gauss cannon. IMO the range of the craft gas cannon should have been longer, and the option for manufacturing alternative ammunition, likewise for the coelacanth. Wish there was an option to outfit hovertanks with gauss an gas cannon (with HE and IC rounds) too, a hovertank mounting a beefed up tank gauss cannon from the coelacanth would be another neat option....

 

gah...no rest for the wicked, or for the X-com commander it seems.

 

One of those intermediate advanced interceptor/transports would be perfect, given the single weapon mount for a dedicated light assault fighter, mounting a craft gauss. Or even a manta outfitted with twin gauss cannons for taking down cruisers and the like since the manta is nippy as hell and can close in rapidly. And its capable of taking out a battleship if you get lucky, mounting twin sonic oscillators. Although its always been a bloody close call, with the interceptor downing the USO but having to crawl back to base for LONG repairs, sometimes been down to a single shot either way and the manta winning the coin toss as to who gets to shoot back first.

[sp1ke]

After tedious and repetitive research, the best weapon for hunting small scouts (VS USOs/UFOs) is the Ajax torp (Stingray missile in UFO).

In theory the cannon (almost any cannon) is the best because the small per-hit damage gives the best guarantee of downing the USO/UFO before you destroy it. BUT, the chances of remaining within firing range long enough to do this in TFTD are so poor that you will actually succeed more times with Ajax than you will with Gas/Cannon. Even though Ajax/Stingray will destroy the USO about half the time, this 50% success rate ends up being far superior to the Gas/Cannon despite the Gas/Cannon's theoretical rate of 100%. The problem is that the Gas/Cannon's 100% rate of "not destroying" has to be factored against an almost equally high % rate of "never downing" the USO/UFO.

 

Even with what turns out to be the optimum loadout, Ajaxj/Stingray, it's basically not worth it trying to soft-crash the VS targets. It requires that in every operational area you maintain one entire aircraft that's only job is to shoot down VS. The reason for this is that the rearm reload cycle is so long and rigid. By the time you re-arm a sub/aircraft to correctly engage a VS target, the target is typically long gone.

 

One thing I was thinking of playing with in my current game is to keep 2 Ajax launchers and 3 rounds in reserve for this. With only 3 rounds to load instead of 12 it would arm up a lot faster and might be feasible to use as a "reaction" interceptor for VS targets. It might also be possible to manipulate the "first shot misses" bug to use a DUP+Ajax combo and make the DUP shot miss, hoping to drop the VS with the Ajax. But it's is SUCH a big effort it's really not worth it and I don't know why I keep trying to figure out how to make it work.

 

You see the problem is compounded by all kinds of factors: the abnormally slow load/reload rate of Ajax compared to all other weapons; the fact that you can restrict an attack to your longest-range weapon ("Cautious") but you can't restrict an attack to *ONLY* your shortest range weapon. The fact that you can't remove an interceptor weapon, you have to switch it for a different type of weapon. The fact that if two weapons are mounted, the game loads all of the left weapon before it begins to load the right weapon. The various rearming and refuelling cycles that do literally nothing. The very long transit times of cannon ammo. The inadequate starting stocks of cannon ammo. Basically you get the feeling that the playtesters all played the game like we do - just use dual DUPs and don't worry about any other starting weapons.

 

So although I remain unsure whether dual Ajax or single Ajax is optimal, I have given up solving the tactical problem, because the operational problem of maintaining one interceptor per area in "VS hunter" mode just isn't justified either by the cash cost (craft plus pen plus stores etc), nor by the opportunity cost of lost intercepts against bigger, more valuable prey. So I just use the VS ships for target practice and forget about it. And by the way if you did want to mount 1 Ajax, if you ever want to change the loadout on that ship you would need to have something like a spare cannon and no cannon ammo stocks to simulate an 'empty' right mount point.

 

It's a shame, like everything else in the game that doesn't get used just because it wasn't properly playtested and wasn't properly balanced.

 

One thought I am having as I play my current TFTD game is whether dual DUPs is actually overpowered in the early game for anything except the really big tough ships. For the standard Medium ships it might be better to mount say DUP+Ajax, in other words, stay with the starting configuration. The idea would be that the USOs would be less badly damaged and have more loot on board (as well as more hostiles). I haven't tried it though.

[sp1ke]

A nice idea, if anyone is thinking of doing a mod, even without changing any of the craft weapon stats or rearm/reequip times, would be to have a "Rules of Engagement" option (ya know, like the real world) where you could send up an intercept mission but say "use cannon only" or "use Ajax only". If that's getting your interceptor killed out there then you have to disengage and abort back to base before you can give new rules of engagement.

[sp1ke]

Actually I take all this back and yet again I am reminded of the dangers of generalising from XCOM EU to TFTD

In EU the Small Scout can outrun the Interceptor but in TFTD the Survey Ship can't outrun the Barracuda (though can out-dive it).

Therefore it should be absolutely fine and easy to reliably soft-crash VS size Survey Ships using either a single or dual Gas Cannon

[NKF]

Folks, just a quick reminder that the purpose of adjusting your weapons to shoot down alien submarines is simply to get them down. The severity of damage done to them is irrelevant for determining what you can recover from the crash site. Instead that is determined at the time the map is generated when your ship lands.

 

That means if even if you miraculously shoot down a Very Small with a Pulse Wave Torpedo, you might still find it relatively intact on the ground. Similarly with a larger ship taken down with a single Craft Gas Cannon could st ill get all of its Ion Beam Accelerators blown to bits and wipe out much of the interior.

 

- NKF

[Tsathoggua]

Hahaha damn what a thought. But the odds of those scout craft continuing their existence after a PWT hit, is slim to jack shit.

 

Personally I wouldn't waste the ammo. Graft gauss cannon are a good loadout, for a rapid interceptor like the manta, is perfect for interdiction of those nasty little targets. More dangerous than they might appear for their size due to the kind of missions they are usually on.

[sp1ke]

Thanks NKF, I was wondering that myself, but I was too tired to go and check UFOPaedia.

Still there's probably some loose correlation between doing minimal necessary damage to a craft, and a lower risk of inadvertently destroying it.

 

Intercepting Small Scouts early in the game in EU is hard, but important because you can capture about $400K worth of loot, which makes a big difference at that stage. Hence, the questions about how best to do that are all concerned with starting tech.

 

In TFTD, turns out it's not hard to catch a Survey Ship and also not particularly important to do so.

[Tsathoggua]

In EU, the craft laser cannon worked pretty well for engaging light targets as long as they could be caught and gotten within engagement distance and effective range.

Too bad about having to manufacture craft gauss cannon rounds in TFTD.

 

(question...forget if its the tank, the heavy gauss or the craft gauss, but isn't there some sort of hidden alternate round type for one such gauss weapon? how does one get at t?)

 

 

And while the damage done is determined at mission start/load time is it 100% thusly calculated? Perhaps the damage differential is less obvious with torpedo weapons vs torpedoes, or cannon v cannon but how about cannon vs torpedoes, cannon or torpedo v sonic, and anything v PWT missiles.

 

When the weapons become available I'll have to test it. As it just seems common sense (ahem...thisis TFTD I guess..) that shooting down a cruiser or harvester with gas or gauss cannon and torpedoes, or twinlinked DU armor-piercing torpedoes would inflict proportionally far less destruction than would hitting that same fr.ex. cruiser woth the stonking great force waiting to unleash hell in the guise of an interceptor mounting twin pulse wave torpedoes.