PALU

@Mr. Mister The way things work makes it impossible to get lore to show up in a "correct" order on every play though, because technically entries depend on only a few requirements being fulfilled, and those requirements can appear in a wide variety or orders, while the texts are static, and can't take what's already available (and what's not) into consideration beyond the research order dependencies. If you try to ensure a strictly logical order, some paths will get stalled because a particular item didn't happen to show up, resulting in the player sitting with an empty research facility and a stalled development until you finally find that elusive key research item that unlocks research again. There are still research bottlenecks that can cause trouble, such a e.g. consistently failing to get e.g. any Sebillian missions (because the RNG didn't generate them, you failed to shoot them down, or they all had to be downed into the drink [or because you just had to play in in an oddball way to see what happens]). When it comes to preexisting lore entries I've massaged them, but left them mostly intact (removing/replacing/correcting what's definitely incorrect when detected), which means some things may have been a little scrambled when X-Division has adjusted the research conditions. That's an explanation, not an attempt at an excuse. I haven't tried to analyze the dependencies to determine where the current research order means entries ought to be reworked. Alenium is found very early, and you can get it independently of reactors, so if anything, the reactor description should be reworked (and I think both the core of the texts and the research order is essentially from the vanilla game). I've made an attempt to decouple the entries from each other: "Despite only being the size of a household fridge, the power unit recovered from the UFO still produces enough energy to power a city the size of New York. Surprisingly, however, the device proved utterly inert once switched off - not even appearing to radiate heat. The construction of the device is equally peculiar. It consists of a cylindrical outer casing of alien ceramics, the interiour of which is dotted with hundreds of tiny laser emitters. Sitting inside this is a rotating inner casing that is packed with a lattice of Alenium crystal. Preliminary scans suggest that there is an almost incomprehensible amount of energy stored within these Alenium crystals, despite the lattice being no larger than a football. The rest of the power source contains little of interest. All of the materials used in its construction have been encountered in larger quantities elsewhere in the hulls of recovered UFOs and the machinery itself is not overly complex; studying it has yielded nothing worth commenting upon. The only discovery of interest is the sea of identical laser emitters covering the interior of the outer coating, which probably is key to releasing the energy stored in the Alenium. Studying a couple of examples have provided only minor advances in our understanding of laser technology, mostly in the areas of beam focusing and miniaturisation of optical amplifiers. I very much doubt that the aliens are unable to produce far more powerful laser emitters, suggesting that they have deliberately been designed to only emit low intensity beams. Finally, I understand you have received a request (from personnel in a department which will remain nameless) seeking to prevent me from dismantling such devices inside the base in the future. I must object to the repeated usage of the phrase "reckless disregard" and I can assure you I am no more keen to end my life in an enormous fireball than anyone else in this base. I therefore request you tell the staff concerned to stick to what they know (i.e. building things, making unintelligible grunting noises)..." and "Alenium is the fundamental power source behind all alien technology encountered. It is a translucent yellow material that resembles amber in appearance. Detailed analysis of Alenium's molecular structure reveals an incredibly dense atomic arrangement, allowing the material to store energy in quantities previously thought impossible without resorting to fission or fusion. Despite this, the material remains inert and has a half-life of nearly a trillion years. It can be cracked if enough mechanical force is applied, but this will not cause an energy discharge. This can be explained by the exceptionally stable arrangement of atomic chains, which also contain a clue as to how to unlock the energy trapped within: each chain contains regular "weak" bonds that can be broken with precise application of energy. By specifically targeting and breaking these weak bonds with a laser, one can easily generate a controlled energy release of virtually any size. This leads me to believe that Alenium is no more than an incredibly advanced alien battery. The molecular structure is not one that would occur naturally nor contain any inherent energy of its own, but it makes a perfect method of storing the output from a far greater power source. As we have no way of recharging Alenium and will almost certainly be using it to power any new technology we develop, we should make an effort to recover as much as possible from UFOs and alien ground forces."

Better? "Commander, I am sure you heard about the little commotion by the hidden, main surface entrance to our base the other day. Let me try to fill you in on what happened: A Caesan, dressed in the red shirt of a non-combatant, approached our gate guards with his hands in the air. He spoke to them! He actually spoke to them! Thankfully, one of the guards on duty was a soldier who has battled the Ceasans before, so when the Alien came up to the guards and and tried to talk to them, that guard thought it very odd behavior so he “subdued” the specimen for further study. By subdue I mean clubbed him on the head until he stopped moving. I am thankful that the big oaf who secured our specimen didn't hurt him too much... After I had had a long talk with him in our isolation chamber I found out some very interesting things from him. For the sake of brevity I will just give you a synopsis of our conversations. I started the interrogation off with asking him how he had found out where our base was. He stated that he was on one of the small UFOs that they used to track down the area where our interceptors were coming out of. He convinced the pilot to set the UFO down in the area so he could collect some samples and he then detonated the UFO's Alenium power source, killing everything else on the UFO. After a few days and some fumbling about he finally found the area where our base entrance was located (he was wearing a crude breathing mask that protected him from the usual oxygen toxicity aliens otherwise succumb to). Apparently, the aliens are not as cohesive as we once thought they were. He claimed that he was with the Caesan rebels who were fighting against their masters. He also stated he was the last known rebel that hasn't been captured by the loyalists, as they raided their main headquarters on their home planet. He joined the loyalist invasion army heading to Earth and planned to get in contact with us to help us against the loyalist invasion. I wanted to see if he could get us access to some of their equipment so we could do some more testing on them. Unfortunately, after much discussion, I found out he has the equivalent rank of a scientist and is part of their alien support team, very similar to the role we have in X-Division, Commander. Although that is not a bad thing, this means he doesn't have a lot of authority to request any kind of munition or equipment drops. He however told me that he is one of their linguists and has a brain implant that can translate his psychic “speech” transmission into actual verbal voice of any language he wants. It is a very complicated implant that runs off of the Alenium in his blood stream and it can't be removed without killing him. He told me he can speak to any of the species of the alien invaders, including the Reapers, although that species lack the intelligence to do much of anything but be trained for violence (much like our soldiers here at the base). When I showed him a deceased specimen of a Xenomorph, he started trembling and told me that this must be the new bio weapon the loyalists have made, as he has never seen anything like it. I think we can trust him, Commander. Based on their attack patterns, I highly doubt the aliens need to stoop to such nefarious ways of wiping us out as to send us an undercover agent. He could give us a significant edge against the aliens and his abilities will help us immensely. Plus, we don't have a lot of options open to us and I think we should take any and all advantages we can get. Obviously, trust is a commodity in short supply these days, so despite trusting Paul, that's the human name he's adopted, we keep him in shielded facilities at all times to block any potential communications."

While I believe the text is correct technically, I agree it's hard to understand, so I'll rework it. The box movement wasn't changed that long ago, as I've seen them move, but it's true I haven't seen that in quite some time (and I've never seen roboreaper boxes move, if they've ever had that capability).

The new Xenomorph images are suitably scary. Aircraft transition bug. I tried to deconstruct the hangar the craft should be stored in, but the game didn't let me do it. However, the issue resolved itself spontaneously two or three alien waves later. I suspect the aircraft just teleported into the hangar after a ground mission (the one I think it was dislodged after happened to originate from the same base the aircraft should be at, but I have no idea if there's a correlation), as I've seen it hovering in place quite a few times, but didn't see it move. If the aircraft gets stuck while on a mission it's easy to dislodge it by selecting it and give it a new order (such as to attack the alien craft it was supposed to attack in the first place, or to return to base). It can be noted that the issue resolved itself before I upgraded to the latest version of the latest version, so upgrading does not factor into it.

"Workshops allow a base to construct aircraft, vehicles and battlefield equipment, as well as to disassemble items to gain parts. Each Workshop will house up to 20 engineers, who require both living space and workshop space to be available before they can be recruited. Unlike Laboratories, Workshops are NOT networked - engineers in different bases cannot collaborate on projects.

Engineers suffers diminishing returns when at work: the first engineer on a project works at 100% efficiency, the second at 99% efficiency, the third at 98% efficiency (and so forth). Finally, as workshops are expensive and have unusually high maintenance costs, consider your finances carefully before constructing one." and "Laboratories allow a base to conduct research. Each Laboratory will house up to 20 scientists, who require both living space and laboratory space to be available before they can be recruited. Research is networked across different bases, so multiple scientists working on the same project from different bases are just as effective as if they were housed in the same facility.

Research performed in a laboratory suffers diminishing returns: the first scientist on a project works at 100% efficiency, the second at 99% efficiency, the third at 98% efficiency (and so forth). Finally, as laboratories are expensive and have unusually high maintenance costs, consider your finances carefully before constructing one."

If there's no loss of productivity as you add engineers (and scientists) to projects then the info that states this is the case is incorrect (I believe that's vanilla functionality). The info claims the first one works at 100% efficiency, the second one at 99%, then 98, etc. I've seen that the maximum number of scientists you can assign to a project is 99 (with the loss of efficiency logic the 100:th would have an efficiency of 0% ...). The current state of the file contains only small differences from the previous version I think, but it makes sense to use the latest one when producing an update. xenopedia.xml

@Mr. Mister I believe there are several viable tactical choices. I went with building 6 bases immediately and then gradually fitted them fully with a full team of solders, but yes, you need to look carefully at your expenses and estimated income or you'll end up in the red (I've had all production halted at least once). Initially the reach of the aircraft is barely up to the radar range, so many bases (with aircraft) help down as many enemies as possible, which helps your future income. When it comes to research I started with a single facility (the starting one), built a second one about two months later, and then expanded to facilities in two additional bases (rather slowly, as they're expensive). Eventually (late phase 2) I set up a base dedicated to research and tore down all the other ones, which freed up quite a lot of space, as I could then remove one barracks as well (allowing me to build two additional hangars in each of my "real" bases). My workshop strategy is distributed, with one per base, with each workshop processing what its team brings back and producing what they need (with some limited shipping of building material to resources that are short of them). It's extremely expensive to ship craft cores and alien weapons for processing (bodies are a lot cheaper), which means local processing saves money. Also, there's the loss of productivity as you add workers to tasks, so having 4 engineers in each base each producing one weapon X is faster than having a central base producing 6 weapons with 24 engineers (although the central facility will push out the first weapons faster, but the individual teams will push our their weapon after about 5½ central production ones, which means total production is higher when distributed). Having 6 teams is probably not optimal, as they tend to get a bit too little experience, and the more teams you have, the more equipment you need to produce (as well as tie up a hangar for a drop ship). I suspect 3 teams make better use of the resources and provide the troops with enough experience to keep up. You'll still need barracks and a store if you want to be able to ship in troops and equipment when the aliens attack a support base, though (I believe they tried to attack my "Brains" research base, even though no flights had taken off from it during an invasion wave and no troops were stationed there, but I managed to bring it down before I was certain that was the target base). Engaging a fighter with a foxtrot seems rather pointless, as bombers tend to be rather useless against fighters (there's even a loading tip covering this). I'd send a full wing of 3 interceptors against fighters and reserve bombers for craft that can't take evasive actions (even though there are missiles that might work against fighters). The estimated percentages are somewhat odd, occasionally allowing you to bring down a craft automatically that you can't bring down by dealing the maximum possible damage. In the same vein, you can get your craft quite shot up, even when you can easily take down the craft without any damage at all if the fight is performed manually.

I've tried to look at the antimatter researches, and they seem to be correct (I haven't looked for typing errors, but I've split the line so the 3 cases lie under each other, which should highlight any differences, but I would probably have missed errors generated through cut&paste of the first condition). It can be noted that the alien rebel requirement seems to be completely redundant, as this happens automatically without player action as far as I know, which means this requirement will always be fulfilled at the time the other conditions are met. It can be noted that the alien fusion reactor appears in both of the two latest researches, so it's a 3:rd phase tech used for a phase 4 research requirement, but I don't think there's a phase 4 equivalent, and the other conditions are probably sufficiently restrictive. Thus, the requirement probably doesn't add much, but it isn't harmful either.

Getting every data hack for a phase is a fairly steep requirement, but probably not unreasonable. I've had some trouble with that in the RNG department, though, as the Carrier was very scarce in Phase 3, with an andron one early on and then 2 months of complete absence. I did eventually get a Sebillian one after over 3 months, and finally a Caesan one in the second to last wave (I think: I estimate the next wave to be phase 4). I believe I did get a couple of non Caesan ones in between those two. In the same vein, I still have to get a Sebillian base building mission: most of them have been androns, and the rest Caesan. I believe I've got all data hacks now, but I still lack the Fusion AP tech, which I think would be rather useful to deal with the nastier, hard to crack phase 4 foes (I get by with Plasma AP in phase 3). In terms of balancing, I certainly wouldn't mind if it was possible to get craft that end up circling over a target to do so over land rather than a patch of ocean, as I had quite some trouble in the beginning of phase 3 with craft that were impossible to shoot down over land because of this (every bomber for the first several waves, for instance, and most of the cruisers. I had a rather significant lack of the heavy craft systems for quite a while because mostly only the small ones were possible to down over land). This is a completely different issue, though.

I NEED nice aircraft to be able to take down two terror dreadnoughts in the same wave, and I haven't even been able to try to see if I can do anything about the triple landing ship group;) Aircraft weapon entries: Most entries just use descriptions such as wide and narrow for firing arcs, but a number of them use the same 180 that's stated in the panel of weapon stats. On top of that, I haven't been completely sure a weapon mounted on the "left" side would cover the "right" one, and vise versa. I don't think it's good to give a different firing arc number in the text compared to what's found in the panel, but if it is indeed correct for all cases that 180 means 360, then I can revise entries for such weapons to indicate full coverage. Balance: It's very expensive to send cores and alien weapons from one base to another for processing, while it's comparatively cheap to send the weapon wielders (both the dead and live ones). I think it would be good to lower the costs for the expensive items to allow players to chose their production strategy. Soldier weapons, on the other hand, ought to be still be costly to ship around to make it an offset cost to ship troops and equipment around rather than using multiple teams (which require the manufacture of multiple sets of equipment).

geoscape bug: aircraft stuck in the air and won't move. Usually this bug can be worked around by selecting the craft and give it a new order (and it doesn't run out of fuel even if stuck for days [like the first time, when I found the fighters from the very first invasion wave hadn't landed when the next wave arrived]), but the stuck aircraft in the save was ordered to relocate from "Australasia" to "South Africa", and you can't select relocating craft to give them new orders. I did originally relocate 3 craft, and only one of them got stuck. It can be noted that I have saved and reloaded on the geoscape while the craft were in transit, but I haven't performed a single ground combat mission. I cannot say if I had reloaded when the craft got stuck, though, but I definitely have done so after it got stuck to work around a different bug: relocated aircraft can sometimes take off from the base they were relocated from, rather than their new base (and return to the old base, only to teleport to the hangar of the base they were supposed to be at), and I've found that saving and reloading after landing and before taking off gets the craft to start from the correct base. 3.zip

Updated xenopedia.xml to handle the swing back to Shock (easier in this direction, as the word "slow" is used a lot less than "shock"). I've also modified the Buzzard and Sentinel armor descriptions to handle shield incompatibility and weapon use cost increases, respectively. Dark shield bypassing weapons updated. xenopedia.xml

It will work.

I believe avoiding frustration caused by being hit by arbitrary game restrictions that cannot be foreseen, because they're there only because of balancing or game engine issues should be chalked up on the positive side. I agree that my own frustration shouldn't shine through in those descriptions, though. There shouldn't (ideally) be gotchas in the equipment your team produces [which doesn't mean you should know the property of equipment that hasn't been designed ahead of time], while the enemy creatures, behavior, property, and equipment are things to be discovered by the player and the player's staff. "Note that armour flight is incompatible with the use of a shield, as holding one blocks the function that activates the flight control." can be sort of believed.

The reason I refer to the flight control scheme is that it is specified to use controls in the gloves, so in my mind it means holding a shield prevents you from using the glove manipulation correctly (using a liberal dose of suspension of disbelief about how you can apparently sling your weapon to release the hands, but not the shield). The reason for the note in the first place is that yes, I was dismayed to find you can't carry a shield while using a suit, and the game didn't tell me that this was buried in the game definition files. It's a typical case of something the techs should tell me, not a gotcha to catch you in the field just because the game developers thought it would be too powerful to use a shield together with flight, but they couldn't figure out a way to disable the shields protection while airborne. Claiming that a shield would make you lopsided while an arbitrarily heavy two handed weapon (and stuff in the backpack) doesn't is definitely gamey in my mind. I can, of course remove the fence part to let the player figure out that flying over a fence means flying with a shield.

I think the sentence is technically correct, but that's little consolation if it's too convoluted to be untangled. I've changed it to: "Note that the flight control scheme is incompatible with the use of a shield, so you will not be able to use the suit to "jump" over fences when carrying a shield (a rather natural desire, as you can't climb over fences wielding a shield)." "Spears": Given the name of these weapons, it's only confusing to call the ammo "rods". Instead, I've made a note in the first one that they're actually rods, and use quotes around "spear" everywhere when it refers to the ammo (as opposed to being part of the weapon name).

Yes, I think we can call it a day on that. Loadout: I've never sent them out with half the capacity intentionally, only when the aircraft returning from the first sortie landed, I changed the loadout (while it should be refueling), and it turned out the second weapon slot wasn't in fact loaded when it was due to be sent out, but I needed to bring that craft down. I then sent the craft home once they'd refueled (I'd shuffled crafts around so the bombers were stationed at the closest base). Once there I reverted to the "standard" loadout without waiting for reloading. However, even craft that were at their home bases were affected, and I believe I've seen it on freshly produced aircraft occasionally when changing from the (very obsolete) default to a desired loadout. However, it doesn't seem to be reproducible in any reliable manner. Assuming it's happened, would you be able to get anything useful out of a save where a craft is claimed to no longer be reloading, but with some of the loadout not actually fitted, or would you need to catch it while still loading (i.e. a save while loading, to be provided once it's been detected it didn't work correctly?

Spear cannon: We mean the same thing here. It's not clear if the 95 + 15 is to be applied before or after the extra APs provided by the armor. Torpedo slots: Well, yes, the new aircraft you can build can carry twice the number of torpedoes, assuming you guessed correctly as to whether you will need countermeasures or not, and assuming you've been able to actually build those aircraft as they require resources that won't be available until the phase (and the first sets of cores are "lost" to disassembly protocol development, so you may not actually get anything until the third wave [+ disassembly time], all this assuming you're able to shoot craft down over land: they have an annoying tendency to head out over the ocean and circle, at least the big ones that provide those resources). Loadout changes seem to be buggy, with many cases resulting in nothing being loaded (during my last wave I changed the loadout from mini-mines + countermeasures to 2 mini-mines on a craft, but when it was reported as fully reamed, it only had 50% (proven to be reported correctly when I deployed the mines against a Terror Dreadnought targeting a city), and I had a number of other cases after the wave where I tried to revert the loadout back to countermeasures + mini-mines and the craft were "fully reamed" at 50% several days later with "intercept" not showing them to be rearming. Replacing both slots, go back to the geospace, and then replace them again with the desired loadout worked for all of them, however. Changing loadout during a wave not only takes a lot of time, but it seems to fail to actually load the replacement fairly frequently as well.

Given that the spear cannons are called "spear" cannons, I haven't wanted to change it, but I could describe it as a bit of a misnomer. I do hold snipers in a high regard, yes, but the reason those are the only one mentioned is because those were the only ones I discovered being affected (it's only when digging deeper (in the files, not the game) I found some cannons were affected as well, and I haven't used cannons at all). I agree there are many aspects of games that should be discovered, but I don't consider analysis of numbers to deduce effects or getting caught by unexpected failures of things to work as expected because you didn't perform the math on everything to be one of them (in particular since you don't even have those numbers available when making a decision to produce the first of a weapon: as you pointed out, the numbers can jump around). In this particular case I believe it is something they would have discovered during production/testing, and thus something that they should be able to inform you of. Batteries: I may well have had Plasma batteries during the previous wave (I don't have any save that go back that far), which would explain it, although it's a bit odd if the progression to a Phase 3 battery is from one Phase 2 technology to the other rather than a Phase 3 one, and batteries isn't exactly something I tend to look at as the change is automatic and not something the player can affect anyway. I believe the first few base assaults resulted in a damage of about 50%, though, but yes, later assaults seem to have dropped to something like 25% on a hit. And you answered the original question: a battery is supposed to deal about 25% damage on a hit with a 50% hit chance (although the one I saw in my small sample was more like 25% or even worse, but that's RNG for you), assuming you've reached a fair bit into the phase so the battery has been updated (I'm at 2 months from the first wave of the current phase, with the wave in question happening just short of a week earlier). The reason the results were so abysmal was essentially that the phase progression has seen a huge jump in ship size. If the first base assault was made with a phase 1 craft pitted against phase 2 defenses it might have resulted in a damage of about 50% though.

I'm not suggesting a technical implementation to describe which weapons can and can not be used with exoskeleton armors. I think a description in the X-pedia entry would be sufficient, and if I've managed to get it right, that should be enough. I don't know what the "alternative word for spear = rod" is intended to refer to. The only thing I can think of are the various spear cannons. If I estimate it correctly, the Sentinel armor cannot be used with any weapon firing mode requiring 90+ % TU, which is found on sniper/precision weapons and a cannon. I can change the wording in the Sentinel to remove the judgement, of course. The Missile Battery question: I'm not sure what additional data you're looking for. A Terror Dreadnought has 43280 HP (I'm not using the mod that reduces the HPs), and air combat gradually increased its damage to 90% as displayed in the air combat view (zooming in the view to show the display). This was done by bombarding it with mini-mines with probably 11 sorties (a small number of mines failed to reach the target, or the damage would have been a 1-3% higher: I've found it takes 13 sorties to take one of these buggers down [unless you have more than one mini-mine launcher, which I didn't have]). Looking at the bases, they're shown to be equipped with a single MAG Battery. As my previous experience of base attacks was that undamaged ships would suffer around 50% damage from the battery, with the damage ranging from lighter to heavier depending on whether it was described as a "hit", I reloaded the nearest save and ran the base assault about a dozen times, and looked at the results described from the landing. When it was described as a miss, the screen showed 8% (which I assume means 92% damage: the screen is rather unclear when it comes to describing whether it's damage or remaining "health"), while on the runs where it was described as a hit the percentage was shown as 1%. This would indicate a 2% damage on a "miss" and a 9% damage on a "hit", which, when extrapolated, would mean you'd need a sea of batteries to bring a Terror Dreadnought down reliably, especially as they seem to "miss" more often than they "hit". On the research front, I've researched almost everything I've been able to research, with phase 3 explosives being researched currently, plus a Caesan phase 3 Bomber Operator caught in the wave after the base assault. Apart from that, I'm missing both Carrier Operators (none have shown up in any crash site), both Base Commanders, and the Sebillian Landing and Outpost Operators (no Sebillian Landing operations have ever shown up). As far as I know, I've shot down and raided every kind of UFO encountered.

Shock guns (and other shock weapons) and whiffle sticks can take xenomorphs down without them exploding (and you can harvest "chitin" from them afterwards). Massive missile overkill can clean out a neighboring room (destroying spoils in the process), allowing you some room to move out of the explosion radiii of the xenomorphs (note that ones exploding have a tendency to destroy the stunned ones). Smoke can make it harder for the enemies that move into the cleared room to hit anything. @Charon Another balance question: Are missile batteries really intended to become essentially useless? I had a terror dreadnought attacking a base when I'd damaged it (the ship, not the base!) to 90%, and the (single) missile battery missed most of the time, resulting in 92% damage (8% left), and managed to hit a couple of times, resulting in 1% left, so the damage seemed to be 2 or 9% depending on whether it hits or misses. This is well into phase 3 where I've researched all Gauss and Pulse weapons to Mk-2 (some/most Gauss to Mk-3), yet the missile system was described as being a Mag one. It can be noted that this happened after Base Upgrade, if that's supposed to have any effect on defenses. Edit: The advice to try which armor/weapon combinations work isn't as useful as one might think, as the decision to produce a weapon and/or an armor has a tendency to be made before at least one of them is available. I didn't produce any minigun before I had a Predator, for instance, as I saw little reason using one together with regular armor both because of the bracing required and because of the weight of the weapon (and ammo). However, I've tried various combinations using the OP ENDGAME save and have drawn the conclusion that the heavy armors (which I have assumed all have the same restrictions, and I've also assumed that the restrictions are per weapon type, so if one rifle doesn't work, none of them do) are limited to heavy/machineguns, cannons, miniguns, and flame throwers. I've updated xenopedia.xml: - Named the new effect "Slowed" - Fixed various typos found - Described that the base upgrade also increases the worker capacity of workshops and labs (I discovered that by accident, more or less) - Modified the Predator, Ripper, and Sentinel armor entries to mention the weapon restrictions. xenopedia.xml

Haven't attacked any mid level bases yet, as I've taken them out before building a base or allowed them to build an outpost and then raid it (and the Sebillians are AWOL: I haven't had a single Sebillian base building mission). However, you can curb reaction fire by not wielding any weapons (or only melee weapons, such as whiffle sticks). Queens can be killed with a massive dose of rockets, for instance.

Hm, then some descriptions probably need to be revised (I need to check. The Sentinel should definitely warn against this gotcha). A sniper rifle is considered a "heavy" weapon, which should mean a suit capable of only using heavy weapons should be able to use one (while it still makes sense that clumsy gauntlets wouldn't be suitable for precision weapons in the real world). If it means standard armor for the sniper, it's a good thing I haven't produced that many Sentinels before I got to use them (as well as before I tried to attack a base).

No, I'm not "forgetting": that's what "sniper shot" was intended to mean, together with the quotes around "can't be used". Looks like it's time to go in the complete opposite direction and use a Ripper armor on the snipers (assuming I can meet the rather hefty resource requirements).

Is it really intentional that the Sentinel armor can't be used with sniper rifles? What I mean with "can't be used" is that the number of TUs required to fire a sniper shot is higher than the maximum number of TUs (unless there's some later, unknown, development that allows soldiers to gain more than the previous maximum). It certainly throws a spanner in my troop layout strategy (although enemies being able to hit my sniper through a roof, while the sniper can't fire back due to a 100% blocking roof negates a large part of the "sniping from a high vantage point at the rear end of the map" strategy anyway). My laser sniper rifle required about 122 TUs, with the armor only providing 115.