Talk:HE vs single target weapons

General Discussion

Just a few thoughts:

HE's accuracy is really inaccuracy compensated for by its area of effect nature. It's careless accuracy if you will.

Training is another aspect. Direct fire weapons train Firing Accuracy once per hit - but so does HE on every enemy caught in its area of effect. What's true for both types is that the more powerful the attack, the less overall training you will get.

Now, HE in the form of grenades banks on both of the aspects I've just mentioned. HE rounds just have to land near their targets to strike them - and this in turn improves your firing accuracy which you can then use to improve your use of your ranged weapons.

Then there's damage. HE does 50% to 150% the listed damage. So while it doesn't have a high max damage roll, it is guaranteed to deal at least 50% damage minimum at its strongest point. Single target weapons have a much higher damage roll, but the damage is wilder, going from 0% to 200%.

Area-of-Effect Stun is the oddball out - it uses the 0 - 200% model, but all the same benefits as HE without the lethality. -NKF 15:05, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

A few more thoughts.

This discussion is not quite the same as the other weapon comparison discussions because HR/area vs single target weapon selection is surely a matter of the tactical situation, not what you equip troops with as standard? HE-only is one of Scott Jones' suggested special challenging scenarios - i.e. not a routine load-out choice. Or maybe not - maybe some of you would equip HE rounds as standard, default issue? By the way, if you carry HE as primary and AP as spare, you lose out on the ammo weight bug and have to carry the full weight of weapon plus ammo - usually the loaded ammo is 'free' weight. But you can only take advantage of this if you carry no AP, since AP is loaded by the game in preference to HE. (Or possibly you are ok if you use XComUtil, not sure about that.)

So isn't this really a discussion about the pros and cons of area effect vs direct single fire, and the tactical situations where you use one over the other? Personally I would never equip troops only or even primarily with area effect weapons. But maybe that's just because I find it too difficult to control the various downsides which are listed on the main page - self-harm, friendly fire, loot damage, and missed fire opportunities due to avoiding the risk of any of those.

Probably we should consider all area effect weapons and not just HE, as they all suffer from similar limitations. The IN limitations go away when you have sufficient armour of course. And Stun rounds are not quite as dangerous to friendlies - though they still take them out of the fight and vulnerable to HE.

You could also consider auto weapons as more similar to an area effect weapon in some ways. OK they are unlikely to rebound on the firer at point blank range and cause self-harm, but the low accuracy and multiple rounds does create a sort of area effect - conical rather than circular.

Spike 18:34, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

"self-harm, friendly fire, loot damage, and missed fire opportunities due to avoiding the risk of any of those." But stun counteracts those, mostly. As for being out of the fight, ah... but there's MEDI KITS, which mostly solve the problem."

Actually, this discussion really popped up due to recent TFTD discussions, where the Gas Cannon is in the running for becoming standard squad equipment. Specifically, the GC-HE? I'm not sure, actually.

Training is an issue of it's own. Due to Xcom's experience mechanics, Firing Accuracy and Reactions (the most important directly trained stats, other than Psi), are weird, in that they reward inefficiency. So lethality is directly opposing training. I've had a few campaigns where my reaction ace is half blind, the fact that he always misses makes him take many more reaction shots before he kills the enemy. And Firing Accuracy training is almost directly inverse to how many shots it takes to kill something. For Firing Accuracy Training, nothing is as time efficient or ammo efficient (in terms of items carried into battle) as autoshotting a 4 square unit with HE rounds. Though I haven't verified this with an editor, I am fairly certain that each hit on each tile is calculated individually for most game purposes, so 1 autoshot burst fully hitting = 12 firing experience = maxxed firing experience for the mission.

You can't really equip troops with ONLY HE weapons, as that makes UFO breaching practically impossible... but for wide open spaces, HE is like a king! My first playthrough, I used all rifles. Later on, I experimented with other stuff. Recent playthroughs, I juggle equipment a lot more, the tactical shenanigans can quite hilarious, actually.

An all HE game is fun. Try it with grenades or rocket launchers. If you don't mind using other weapons for the single target acquisition in TFTD, you can always just load up the GC with HE shells. Many ways to go about it. I take it the ammo loading bug is negated during the pre-arming phase if you unload/reload weapons before starting the mission?

Reaction and firing accuracy don't really reward inefficiency per se. They reward effort. High powered weapons just kill the targets faster, hence less chances to train against them. It's one reason why I often recommend the plasma rifle as a weapon for training snipers that are already fairly good. It's not as strong as the heavy plasma, so won't drop enemies as quickly. Yet, its high accuracy and speed of its snap mode lets snipers get off more shots per turn. Rather a happy medium there for the mid to late game where enemies don't drop from one or two pistol rounds.

I'll just confirm the large unit hit theory. Just went on a new game to a terror site with only rocket launchers and small rockets. First guy reaction fired and killed a Reaper in one hit. The unitref.dat file reported 1 reaction, 4 hits. Makes a bit of sense since each part of the large unit has a unitpos.dat entry, which also stores all the coordinates for each segment. -NKF 20:24, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

Errr... when I do reaction training (and there are not enough aliens to last normally), I make my troops stand as far away as possible, make them fly in the air, arm them with a rifle in the left hand and medkit in right hand... in other words intentionally buggering up their aim in order to increase number of reaction shots fired.

I had a really idiotic night Terror Mission once. This is 90% amusing anecdote 10% topic discussion. Anyhow, the guys in the front of the skyranger randomly fired off 2 auto AC-HE shots each, knelt, let the back row do the same... eek, I heard 2 civilian screams. -100 points. Actually, it's really only -40 points, since the aliens would have killed them anyway, Xcom civilian kills are 20 point extra. Anyhow... back at base... eh. 2 of my troops gained Firing Accuracy of 3 and 4 points. ... In retrospect, it's not that difficult, if 1 Rocket Launcher round hits 2 sectopods, BOOM, that's firing exp right there. ... At the time though, I thought that was rather a lot of firing gain to be handed out for civilian slaying, lol! For a while after that, I was tempted to go out slaying civilians on purpose. Ah, the good old days when I didn't know WTF I was doing in Xcom... sometimes knowing too much can be a bad thing? :) Jasonred 20:50, 7 April 2009 (EDT)