Talk:Alien Weapon Loadouts

Lots of aliens carry plasma pistols and rifles, especially in some of my Floater & Snakemen games, although quite possibly this gets upgraded to Heavy Plasma as standard when playing Superhuman? Normally since I have laser weapons, I sell all the scavenged plasma pistols and rifles ASAP. Equipping troops with them is too much trouble as it involves scrounging or manufacturing the different ammo types. --JellyfishGreen 06:48, 3 April 2009 (EDT)

The game actually holds a comprehensive list of specific loadouts for the various UFO and crew combinations. Well, UFO combinations at least. From recollection, I pointed out one equipment anomly to Zombie (who knows a lot more about this subject than I do) a while back about finding an alien carrying a weird set of mismatching equipment. Forget the exact setup, but I think it involved two plasma pistols (empty) and some plasma rifle ammo. -NKF 07:15, 3 April 2009 (EDT)

Could you extract and post this list up, please? Jasonred 08:28, 3 April 2009 (EDT)

I'll do this later this afternoon. It'll take me a little time to convert the table into HTML and analyze it for other issues. (Last time I looked I think there were three problems with the standard loadout). --Zombie 08:52, 3 April 2009 (EDT)

Weird. I just had a Sectoid Leader armed with a Small Launcher. That doesn't seem to appear on the chart. Jasonred 05:42, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

What version are you using and what type of mission were you on? Any mods, or editors? The table on the article page is for the CE. I could look up the loadouts for the other versions but it takes some time to compare all those values. --Zombie 08:40, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

... sob sob. I overwrote the savegame. Curses. I can't even remember what race it was... which might be significant! ... actually, er...

AHA!!! I had a theory, and just tested it... you know how Mutons do not get Leaders or Commanders or Medics, they will be changed to Soldiers? ... guess what the LOADOUT is for these demoted troops? ... you guessed it, they are assigned their equipment first, THEN they are demoted... or promoted in Ethereals' case.

So now we know why we find Muton Soldiers, snakemen soldiers and Ethereal Leaders (I must have gotten my memory mixed up between sectoid leader and ethereal leader???) carrying Small Launchers, Muton Soldiers carrying Blaster Launchers, etc etc...

In hindsight, it seems fairly obvious. I'm sure we've all encountered these guys and wondered to ourselves why soldiers were carrying small launchers / blaster launchers... it's cause these guys were originally Medics and Leaders! Jasonred 11:10, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Reason for Abductor error?

I wonder if the Abductor loadout error - basically giving the Leader no usable weapon - is actually a buff rather than a nerf. Maybe they are trying to force the Leader to use Psi more often. In the initial work I did on AI weapon preferences, it sometimes uses Psi, sometimes uses a viable weapon. But it will not use an unloaded weapon - the AI loads a weapon, switches to a loaded weapon, or (as in this case) if no weapon is available, uses Psi. Spike 11:27, 19 June 2009 (EDT)