Jungle warfare, night

[Tsathoggua]

Anyone got any specific favourite tactics and/or clever tricks for fighting in dense jungle.

 

Other that is, than be trigger happy with the incendiaries, let the tanks scout the way after first blasting away any cover with blaster launcher shells, and peppering the place with AC-IC rounds? need to keep in mind we weren't prepared for this, only have a six man fireteam inserted close to a medium-large UFO, a harvester I think.

 

Its pitch dark, and the vegetation is very dense. Flattened plenty of it, and set off a good few blazes in the bargain with the blaster launchers.

 

Then sent tanks scouting, will arm one guy with an autocannon and incendiary rounds, and a psi-amp, the other with a heavy plasma and psi amp, the a third packing a heavy weapon for hard target interdiction. Most probably blaster launcher, some spare shells for it, plasma rifle for sidearm, and psi amp plus a bunch of flares, alien grenades and smoke bombs, and a spare round or two plus a medkit.

 

Getting inclined to send a fourth man if I can, if there are enough flying suits to go round packing another medkit, spare stun rods for the rest of the fireteam, not sure what to arm the fourth with, other than further supplies of pre-primed alien grenades (will be flying, so any dropped will not present the same hazard, that of killing the entire team if the grenadier dies and drops his load right amongst the squad.

 

Two remaining men will hang back and light the way with flares, one at least packing a blaster launcher, stun rod and psi-amp in backpack plus a spare motion scanner, spare incendiary and a mag or two of AC-HE, plasma rifle, medkit and as many spare launcher rounds as practical. Second ground trooper, both will have to be in personal armor, as the flying suits are being manufactured currently, the ones available have been issued to the on-duty members of the psi-corps and then only to the very most talented psykers, the rest of the men will get them as and when they are available, first priority is to the members of alpha squad that are hopefuls for induction into

the psi-corps. The last two of the six on this mission will be sneaking up under smoke cover, tossing grenades to blast away the vegetation and play the combined roles of sniper and supporting the cannon and laser tanks with heavy plasma and where useful, grenade fire. But primarily crouched down in a patch of undamaged vegetation, so as to pop up when the tanks spot a target, and take them down with aimed fire from heavy plasmas.

 

Think I should give one of them a rocket launcher as well? got plenty large and better yet, incendiary rockets. 20+ a piece available on the skyranger. They are all pretty damn strong troopers. Although the sniper team aren't as strong as the lead members of alpha team, and especially as the commander, the blaster launcher-brawler guy got promoted to commander after his last mission. Presumably for assisting in psionics training, by hanging back near the UFO door, and once a disarmed muton ran for it after repeated panic attacks unleashed by the junior members of and hopefuls for induction into the psionics division, the commander just puts a stop to them running for it by taking a swing with that, by now almost certainly infamous blaster launcher of his, taking the runner down by means of that equally infamous golf-swing of his Or if not enough TU to swing ol'skullcracker then chances are high can take the enemy over completely and march them back to the middle of the psi-training arena, and after that, once its the last (preferably last but one) enemy around, then they get used by all of the non-tank units as hand to hand (or rather, heavy weapons-to-hand close combat training) Shooting the enemy full to the gills of medkit stimulants, so as to keep the by now utterly terrorized, near scared to death by the constant barrage of multiple psyker assaults conscious longer and revive them once they fall, so as to be able to better use them for melee training. Cruel, of course, but effective. Somehow, I think that given that the aliens use instantaneous psionic communications, alpha squad, and especially its 4 most efficient psykers and the, although not the most powerful psi user in the team, probably the nastiest, most brutal bastard in ANY of the squads, will have gained a pretty terrifying reputation amongst any of the aliens that is of a species which possesses a brain, and is not of a robotic type.

 

BTW, what is the limit per mission that a unit can benefit from bringing psi attacks to bear? and whats the limit for melee attacks?

 

Alpha squad being the ones in the thick of things so to speak, they are the ones who huff, puff and blast the fucking doors off their hinges, toss in the smokes and alien grenades then storm targets, heavy plasmas and autocannons blazing, close (as possible) combat with blaster launchers, and getting up close to take targets down with stun prods. The small launchers used by the aliens are currently being researched. Should make things easier.

 

Anyone got any neat tips for jungle warfare, and specifically, night time assaults

[Zombie]

Normally, I have one guy standing on the equipment pile and for the first round he fires off a Incendiary Rocket at the base of the ramp. If necessary, he'll pick up and reload the launcher and fire that off somewhere. After the vegetation has burnt around the LZ, the ground should pretty much be scorched earth by this point. So deploy more troops with AC-I and light the place up. Keep an eye on quantity of fire though, I'd plop a smoke grenade on the ramp first to keep everyone concealed. HE grenades are otherwise quite useless as you will have trouble throwing them where you need them, but Blasters or Large rockets are great at clearing out large swaths of vegetation where aliens might be hiding. Toss Electro-flares around the perimeter after your HE fun is over and you should be good to go.

 

Make sure to dump smokers before advancing and firing off more incendiary rounds though, as smoke and fire don't mix. The trick is to keep the fires small enough so that the smoke/fire limit isn't filled. Since you have Blasters, the best strategy is just to clear out the vegetation with well placed bombs (or large rockets), then toss the flares out and advance. Fire takes a while to eliminate foliage and potential obstacles so when you need a clear LZ STAT, HE can do that quickly. Lighting the place up is a lot of fun though, so I do try to mix it up a little between HE and I.

 

As for those "limits" you are referring to, I'm not sure what you mean. If you are eluding to how many times can you do an action to guarantee max experience in that stat, then it is 11 actions. Melee in EU is always 100% accurate so there's no point in trying to train this stat. Your Melee Accuracy stat will increase from Stun Rod usage but the improvement in skill does not make it easier to Stun (if this makes any sense).

 

- Zombie

[Tsathoggua]

I'm using openXcom, I should perhaps have said, but from the context of having an agent using a BLASTER Launcher to beat up an enemy I had made the assumption that this was obvious, if not, my bad. And Accuracy with stun rods is hardcoded is it not? so of course it cannot improve the efficacy of the weapons actual discharge, only a function of chance to hit, and since its hardwired to 100%, well, what improvement can there BE on 'always lands the blow.

 

And since the troops can thus use other weapons in melee combat, I take it in this case this is dependent on melee accuracy stat, and doesn't borrow from the stun rods hard-coded 100% stat but rather, is a re-enabled 'hit' command?

 

One thing I'm curious about actually, is, if you know, WHY, after it obviously had been coded for by the game devteam, that it was then disabled? and for that matter left that way in TFTD. As once coded for, then its more work to disable it, albeit not much, assuming it was as simple as commenting out a few lines or subroutine and no tidying up was needed of course. But still would have been less work to leave it once coded than to disable it, and what POINT was there in doing so? I can't see any.

 

As for limits,yes thats right. With psi though, and specifically failed attempts, that would be 33 though, no? given it takes 3 times as many failed attempts tp gain the same amount of experience as one success.

[NKF]

Deadlines or lack of resources have caused many great ideas in games to be only half implemented, retooled or cut out entirely. X-Com Apocalypse is a prime example of this. Melee was probably simplified at the last minute, but some of the underlying mechanics are still there.

 

Psi experience breaks a little from the norm. For most of the trainable skills, the general idea is that a success adds 1 to the successful-attempt tally, and a failure adds nothing. With psi, a failure adds 1, a success adds 3. Therefore, to get the optimal number of attempts to get the full dice roll when determining experience gain, you only need to fail 11 times or succeed 3 times when using any of the Psi-Amp attacks.

 

I don't really know why it's so lenient. I can only make the guess that the programmers may have expected psionic to be a lot harder to use and train.

 

- NKF

[Tsathoggua]

I thought that psi success adds 1 whilst failure adds 1/3rd of a point.

[Zombie]

I thought that psi success adds 1 whilst failure adds 1/3rd of a point.

 

An unsuccessful attack gives you one "action" and a successful attack gives 3 as NKF mentioned. You need 11 actions or more to get into the max bracket of 2-6 psi skill increase points, so that's 4 successful psi attacks (best bet is panic attack as it's more successful than MC). It's not 3 successful attacks as NKF mentioned (3*3=9 which only gets you into the third tier of 1-4 increase), you need that fourth success to get into the 11+ range.

 

And since the troops can thus use other weapons in melee combat, I take it in this case this is dependent on melee accuracy stat, and doesn't borrow from the stun rods hard-coded 100% stat but rather, is a re-enabled 'hit' command?

 

Maybe, maybe not. You are exploiting a bug when stacking items (and a pretty serious one at that, item sprites shouldn't disappear when you click on the "next page" button but they do thus allowing the Stun Rod to be placed on top). But the fact of the matter is that the stacked Stun Rod's new "stun" attack takes 50% base TU and is listed as 100% accurate no matter what the melee accuracy of the soldier is. My assumption is that the game is using the Stun Rod's hard-wired internal 100% accuracy stat for to-hit determinations and uses the stacked item's melee power for the damage quantity and type as the listed accuracy never changes no matter how low your soldier's melee accuracy is. I guess you could make an argument for the accuracy listing being displayed wrong since the bug may be causing other problems (it's a pretty complex bug to begin with... who knows what could be going on behind the scenes), but all evidence points to the standard stun mechanic being used.

 

One thing I'm curious about actually, is, if you know, WHY, after it obviously had been coded for by the game devteam, that it was then disabled? and for that matter left that way in TFTD. As once coded for, then its more work to disable it, albeit not much, assuming it was as simple as commenting out a few lines or subroutine and no tidying up was needed of course. But still would have been less work to leave it once coded than to disable it, and what POINT was there in doing so? I can't see any.

 

Thing is, there aren't any true melee weapons in UFO at all (at least not now, and maybe not in the past either). It's quite possible that some were planned, but never created. And intrinsic melee (clocking an alien over the head with a Heavy Plasma for instance) might have been planned due to the hit command being present in some versions, but maybe it never worked the way the devs wanted it to... or most likely it was cut due to time constraints and being unable to put it through rigorous QA testing. I know that in UFO the QA team wasn't exactly huge (TFTD had nearly 3 times more) so this would make sense. The text for the "HIT" isn't even present in the language files anymore.

 

- Zombie

[Tsathoggua]

TFTD had a larger QA team? what were they? lab mice? Drosophila? *nearly inhales his drink* Three times more but none of them actually turned up for work after the first day maybe?

 

I'm using openXcom mind you, not the original. Is the item stacking bug still present, and if so, how to exploit it?

[Tsathoggua]

My bad, I'd misread the numbers on the UFOpaedia (website)

 

Thats dyscalculia for you. It blows goats.

[Zombie]

I'm using openXcom mind you, not the original. Is the item stacking bug still present, and if so, how to exploit it?

 

I have no idea if the openXcom devs fixed the bug, you can read about it by visiting the Item Stacking Bug page at the X-COM wiki.

 

- Zombie