Ranks and Promotions

[Greg]

Oh... and I always find that there is no need for medi kits on later levels... If you get hit you're usually scr*wed anyways ...

[NKF]

Oh I don't know. I've had plenty of hardened veterans in power suits, who were bleeding all over the place, saved by an eager recruit with a medikit. Usually with a few rounds left to spare.

 

A month in the infirmary is nothing much to worry about. Besides, you can let some new recruits step in for a while. Who knows? Perhaps new heroes will emerge.

 

Never leave home without one, I say. Unless you're going on a solo mission.

 

- NKF

[Cazbol]

I always take 5 medikits for my 10 man teams. A lot of excellent troops have been saved that way, often with single digit hit points and multiple fatal wounds.

 

Those who don't use them should at least try them out. As a bonus, it adds a realistic feel to have medics running around reviving the wounded and patching them up. I think the medikits are an extremely clever feature in the game. Never seen anything like it in other games.

 

Cazbol

[Solfius]

i never got the hang of them, i couldn't remember what to use 4 what injury etc, i may try from now on

[Zombie]

Right, so I did a little bit of research into promotions recently. We all know the ratios: 1 commander no matter what, 1/23 soldiers = Colonel, 1/11 soldiers = Captain, 1/5 soldiers = Sergeant with the remainder either rookies or squaddies. What I looked at was the special case where you start out with a base fully loaded with 250 freshmeat rookies. This scenario would fill the soldier.dat file to capacity and allow you to find the total number of each rank possible. Basically, the ratios are correct with a little tweaking to include the "INT" function to drop the fractions.

 

Commander = 1

Colonel = INT(1 / 23 * 250) = 10 total Colonels

Captain = INT(1 / 11 * 250) = 22 total Captains

Sergeant = INT(1 / 5 * 250) = 50 total Sergeants

 

At least, this is what I came up with. I equipped an Avenger with 26 rookies with Psi and then sent them on a mission. Those soldiers which engaged an enemy and were promoted at the end of the mission were removed from the craft and a new batch of soldiers was added to replace the officers so that the Avenger only had rookies. What was interesting was that soldiers performing one Psionic Mind Control got promoted the same way as if the soldier killed an alien. Had I realized this early on in the testing, I would have used Psi as the primary method to get promoted instead of killing as your whole squad could get experience in one mission. Bugger!

 

After a good many missions, no matter what my soldiers did in combat there were no promotions issued. Time to check the soldier listing. Yup, all the ratios check out. However, what was interesting was that the OSG (Official Strategy Guide) mentioned that a rookie can get promoted to a squaddie by simply engaging an enemy. Technically this is both true and false. With a small soldier compliment, you probably will see rookies being promoted to squaddies on a regular basis. However, when you start to get around 100+ soldiers, this falls apart. When I looked in my soldier screen there were only 11 squaddies out of 250 total soldiers. This converts to a ratio of 1 in 22 soldiers will eventually have a squaddie rank. And even when more rookies engaged an enemy and returned home safely, they didn't get promoted to squaddie either. So this is probably a cap of some sort where only 93 soldiers will ever reach an officer rank. The remainder of 157 rookies can only hope an officer gets sacked, goes MIA, (or *gasp*) gets killed before they get promoted. That sucks, but it's life. Live with it rookies!

 

- Zombie

[Kret]

It could be a bug. The game is detecting there's no more officer "slots" available and thus doesn't bother to perform a promotion check for rookies to become squadies.

[Bomb Bloke]

Promotions are dished out according to who has performed the most action type thingies, and that doesn't just mean killing stuff - To my memory, even throwing stuff is enough.

 

I think it's also the case that units who weren't even on the drop ship can get promoted when combat ends. Whoever's most qualified gets the rank.

 

Might be worth using the Wiki Promotions page as a sketchpad while you research. I also seem to remember Mike doing a LOT of work on actions vs skill increases, so it might also be worth comparing notes with him.

[Zombie]

Thanks for the information, guys. Gotta run some more trials and check with MTR to see what he came up with.

 

From the tests which I ran, only those soldiers which actually went on a mission ever got promoted. For instance, if you have rookies back at the base who never went on a mission, they would never get promoted by sitting around warming the bench. If of couse, the soldier at your base is already an officer, then soldiers arriving from a successful mission will probably end up "promoting" the officer to a higher class. You can't get "something for nothing" in this case.

 

- Zombie

[Zombie]

Well, I just ran a bunch of trials with one rookie doing various "tasks" on the battlescape to see if it affected promotion status. This is what I came up with:

 

Action					   Promoted
Shot Alien (hit)				Yes
Shot Alien (miss)			   No
Reaction Shot (hit or miss)	 Yes
Hit with I-Ammo				 No
Death of alien via "on fire"	No
HE GZ hit					   Yes
HE GZ+1 hit					 Yes
HE GZ+2 hit					 Yes
HE GZ+3 hit					 Yes
Throwing items				  No
Smoke Greneade exploding		No
Proxy exploding (and killing)   NO!?!
Motion Scanner use			  No
Mind Probe use				  No
Electro-flare use			   No
Panic attack (via psi-amp)	  Yes
Mind Control (via pai-amp)	  Yes
Stun Rod (KO)				   Yes
Medi-Kit use (any function)	 No
Small Launcher stun			 Yes

Grenades function in exactly the same manner as a "hit" with HE ammo. Stupid, but the Proximity Grenade doesn't give experience to the soldier who either tossed it or dropped it on an alien so therefore no promotions are issued. (Still need to investigate this further with the bug surrounding thrown grenades). Haven't checked the case where a soldier stuns an alien but doesn't knock it unconscious. A lone soldier can't walk away from it safely as it precipitates reaction fire from the alien, so I'll need to bring a couple soldiers to distract the alien.

 

Incendiary is strange. It doesn't give a promotion with a single hit and it doesn't promote if the alien dies from being on fire from an incendiary hit. Didn't check the case where multiple I hits kill the alien. It's strange how reaction firing an Incendiary round promotes the soldier while just shooting at it does not.

 

Obviously, there are things which I didn't test yet (from above) and also some stuff from the wiki (a panicking soldier is promoted). That's seed work for another day.

 

- Zombie

[NKF]

You'll probably have noticed that all of the actions that will cause a promotion are actions that will add a point or three to the soldier's experience counter. The actions that don't increase the experience counters don't cause a promotion. In that case I would say that a successful melee attack would count towards promotions.

 

The only oddball out at this point is the throwing skill, which doesn't get much love. Then again it would've been abused like anything if it did.

 

What about the bug where you can harm any alien standing in flames by just setting off incendiary explosions?

 

As for the proximity mine, since it gives experience in reverse, you could just get one of your own units to set it off to get the experience point, but that would be a bit ridiculous.

 

- NKF

[Bomb Bloke]

Incendary weapons don't count as a hit regardless of who they damage/kill. Reaction shots are counted seperately so they are an exception as far as promotions go. The game does not record who ignited a given unit either (which makes sense, given that fires can spread on their own and certainly aren't "owned" by units). Shooting units with a 0 damage weapon still counts as a hit.

 

The electro flare can't be "used". It lets off light, but it'll do this no matter how it ends up on the ground. Throwing one is the same as throwing anything.

 

When a grenade is detonated, a flag is checked to see who last threw the thing. At the start of the mission this flag will be 0, so if a grenade goes boom and no one threw it, the first unit in the table gets credit (even if it's a tank, I assume). Dropping a grenade is not the same as throwing it and so does not change the flag.

 

Prox mines do update the "thrower" flag correctly, they just don't give them credit when they go off.

 

Doesn't matter whether you KO a unit with the stun rod or not.

 

Resisting the urge to panic gives promotions, panicking does not. This has nothing to do with psi attacks, it's simply the case that if a unit has low morale but does not panic they'll get credit.

 

See bytes 76-85 in UnitRef.Dat. These list the values recorded to show what units can get credit for. If you bring up the unit status page via my map editor you can mess with those stats there.

 

I updated the wiki Ranks page with this info and redirected the Promotions page there. There's still some questions to my mind regarding who will get a promotion when (are some actions worth more then others?), but I reckon it covers most of this stuff.