quiescat

rifles vastly improve in utility once you have higher accuracy, where as shotguns are basically pointless out side of the 2-3 tile range no matter how good of a shot your trooper is.

you sir i think have summed up my feelings on the universe as a whole, its scary philosophical how 3 lines can have so much meaning

shock sticks work better then gas for any thing with a helmet, unless you have electro grenades

its 10% per square of smoke the shot has to pass so 1 square is useless, but 7 or 8 makes you nearly untouchable for single shots; grenades can still ruin your day. highest accuracy andron is 65 modified by the weapon being used, you likely either did not have much smoke in the way or just got unlucky. minimum accuracy for shots to be taken at is like 35; if it had been any lower he would have moved, so i think chances are you just did not get much smoke or it took a battle rifle aimed shot and you had no natural cover.( all wild speculation but no, its not that random.

in that regard i would have to ask how far have you gotten. see the aliens can do a TON of things that i don't mind one bit, grenades, one shot kill reapers who can run around at lighting speed, sebs who regen like crazy so if you dont hit them hard your going to end up dragging out a fight you cant win, androns who in the early stages are almost immune to shotguns(my favorite weapon) oh and the tag along buddys who start takeing sniper pot shots from half way across the map and instan gib a guy in full health and armor with a lucky crit, all that does not bug me one iota but my 80 bravery shot gun wielding commander loses his mind to an alien literately on the first turn of an alian base then processes to turn and blows my predator armor wearing machine gunner away all because xenonauts have guns that are better suited to kill one another then aliens added to the fact out side of luck the "armor" that i have vs Psi attacks is next to impossible to level and even if it is really high at best your looking at a 20 maybe 30% reduction vs attacks that can effectively 1 shot troopers with no line of sight, which all translates to me as pointless so i tweaked my settings so at max bravery most psi attacks are only going to work about 15-20% which makes for acceptable risk as long as i put in the work to have my bravery leveled( which i am also looking into tweaking just not sure i can change much out side of being able to gain more then one point at a time)

so, as a guy who LOVES shotguns. i will go ahead and warn you that about the time androns show up you will need to mix your tactics up a bit. this is because they have armor it takes about 3 shotgun shots to guarantee a kill; assuming laser which is about what you will have when they show, combined with the flying sniper buddy who reaction fire pretty much all the time, your shotgun running will get you shot in the face so much from reaction fire alone. as to the merits of rifles which suck massively in my opinion once you have troopers who built up accuracy stats in the 80s or so you start to be able to burst fire from further away and remain effective while you may still be on the receiving end of reaction fire it will be far less effective then if you had been standing point blank range thought i must admit i think sniper rifles are by far the most hurt but the nature of single shot damage in this game, the armor penetration it has is effectively useless for doing any thing but killing your own troopers during mind control

for what ever its worth once you do a alien base if you recover the prop needed for base research it upgrades your labs and workshops which cuts the production times about in half. so the mag weapons that would take you 40 or so days gets cut back to 20(with 30 engineers)

or if you want you can go to aiprops.xml and find any aliens with PsionicPower= and chance the number down to something your more comfortable with, with out removing psionics 100% of the time

so for what ever its worth, i got one by just shooting down every thing that caused events ( ufo spotted you may want to ignore) so if they blow up a plane, oil rig or any nonsense out side of landing i shoot them out of the sky, small side note if a ufo does land send a jet to do a fly over as radar coverage alone wont spot a base instantly but a plane will. you may run the risk of a base attack getting threw this way if you let one wonder around your bases.

take this with a slight grain of salt as i hardly have perfect memory, but basically yes if the unit it question had more health it would have less of a chance to get stunned. all damage goes threw a 50% to 150% dice roll, so say stun gas does 100 damage( to make the math lazy for me ) there is a chance it can do as little as 50 or as much as 150 stun damage, which can further be reduced by your armor rating( in the case of stun gas it self chemical armor ) so if the guy had been in predator armor he would have an even higher chance to not be stunned. all of the above applies to aliens as well, so the more health an alien has the harder to stun, in the case of stun gas units like the Harridan and "leader types" have rather high chemical armor if i remember right so stun gas it self is a pretty poor choice by that point. health and stun health should be the same for all units until you start shooting them, then as there health lowers so does the amount of stun they can soak which does regenerate the exact number i do no know sorry its still caped at what their max health is, i would hazard a guess its probability a % similar to how Sebillian regenerate as apposed to a fixed number. but a unit who has taken a large amounts of stun damage one turn will retain at least some of it for the next turn but very small amounts are pointless. chances are your not going to intend to stun an alien over 2 turns regardless but your stun damage not wasted assumeing your putting equal effort in stunning a target that you would in killing it. a small side note its been awhile since i have tested this but if you stun an alien then shoot it reducing its health wont also do stun damage, but the other way around of shooting it a little then using stun damage will reduce the amount of stun damage needed to KO the alien.a special case on alien stunning if you stun a reaper zombie it will go down and stay "stunned" if its the last alien on the map or you kill last said alien shortly after. if you leave the stunned zombie for too long however the baby reaper will still be born as normal and in a un-stunned state to bite you in the @#$ quite literally just for clarification on my part, when you say stun grenades do you mean the pink ones that pop up the pink smoke, or the green ones that just go bang. or the even later ones that are kinda black and whitish. as each grenade has some stun effect to it, in the case of flash bangs (green) it would take an absurd amount of them to stun even a non-combatant alien but it can be done. the gas grenade and by proxy the stun gas rocket( pink ), have a fairly small amount of front loaded stun effect but then larger amount of gas based stun from the smoke it leaves, in that case the smoke it self does not in stack much if at all, it just stays longer the more you drop. where as the electro shock(black/white) is all front loaded but a comparably small radius. as depending on which your speaking of the answer to some of your questions changes slightly but i think i have given a fair over view if your still unsure about something ask i will try to clarify

i dont know if you want to bring the real world into it, my personal example would be Chucky (Child's Play) scared the living hell out of me as a child( 10 or so ). i had nightmares and all that jazz. today i could marathon pretty much any scary movie made, i bet pretty good money i find most of them funny or sad, yet despite my yearly Halloween horror night movie marathon to this day creeps me out despite no traumatizing moments for me with a harmless cute doll yet chuckys just funny now yet trying to rebuild the real world limits it self when you account for trying to make effectively a DnD system with the way bravery gains work as i understand it, you would have to rework at lot of things to gain skill every time a solider "passed a check" because effectively they do so every turn, at the start if the moral is above a level they are immune to the non-psionic moral effects IE dropping their gun and running away, which can happen by losing a lot of friendly's or even simple weapons fire. if they break down because of that they still gain bravery. more on point with the Hallucinate vs berserk think if i am not mistaken berserk is just something that you soldiers can do if there moral gets to low, where as hallucinate is a pisonic that makes them shoot at stuff but if there out of turn units not much happens, where as mind control it self lets the aliens use your guy on there turn with full turn units ( if some one better informed would like to correct me feel free )

not sure about airstrikes, but salvage values are saved in the props as i understand it. if airstrikes are not a pretty easily modifiable location i would be shocked. as to grind factor it self, frankly i don't know why you play the game. don't get me wrong here i understand not wanting to do an entire wave but in general wounded soldiers and drop ship speed prevent me from "everything". i do find it useful however to have more then one squad, right now i am playing 3 main bases effectively( haven't gotten squad 3 up just yet) and i take about 2-4 missions per wave, however to keep up with production, i am cheating my way past air combat to keep it pretty much on par with the original games air combat

i was in fact hoping some one had already tested, anyways setting it 100 gives both your starting squad and all your recruits a total lack of y chromosome with no ill effects best i can tell, so one would hope that setting it to 0 would have effectively equal results.

so, small trouble shooting question, i am having some maps turn up as solid black or with chucks of maps that are that way they are not able to be walked over as if they where the edge of the map, but they don't block either vision or weapons fire, as far as i know i only have your map pack so i can rule out conflicting mods at least, however i think i may have shot my self in the foot, as i dropped your maps into each file by sub group instead of taking the entire maps folder i put farms with farm, industrial with industrial etc.. and did not make any back ups because i am just that cocky ( or stupid ) if it helps the maps that showed up with big black spots where both light scouts at night anyways i am also coming off of beta to final build via steam so going to validate, and all that jazz, so this might 100% be unrelated to your maps and its just my install that is in need of some TLC( will edit in if i find out for sure as i don't think i can delete a post either(done) ) ok, so validated and added a screen shots, it does appear to be the maps, as i think i have every thing else coming up as clean install, if no one else is having any issues even remotely like mine let me know and i will do a fresh install, small note 3rd times the charm on it being a night mission and yes i am that bad a timing my drop ship just to confirm a fresh install has resolved the black lines, also loving the new maps so far

so, this is a bit of a toss away open question slightly related, any one know what happens when you crank that to 100 or zero even? would it only effect "new" recruits, or would that play a role in generating my starting squad, or just bug the game.