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)

From my experience (Win CE Superhuman) the "Early/Middle/Late game" logic is incorrect. I always have, say, Medium Scouts of mixed loadouts (for example 2 pistols, 2 rifles and 2 heavies plus 2 MPs). I think, that this distribution, you've got from Small Scout tests (50/30/20) is actually an each-time calculated distribution per each Alien. So in my Medium Scout scenario for each of 6 Aliens game ran a random coin flip, resulting in smth like this: 2 Navigators got 2 E-loadouts, and 4 Soldiers got 2 M-loadouts and 2 L-loadouts. I also think, that this 05 unknown byte may be actually encoded 3 probability values for this distribution (for each entry!). I can't right now think of how one can encode 3 values into 1 byte, but these values must be 100 in sum, so one needs to encode only 2 values (the 3d is got like this: c = 100-a-b), and putting two 0..99 values into one 0..255 value is pretty simple. --6AP6APblCKA 01:24, 18 June 2011 (MSK)

And a have a proposal on an actual way of storage of these values. Lets take Small Scout Soldier. From testing we know its 50/30/20. 05 unknown byte for him is 32 hex. This is 00110010 binary. If we take high and low of this binary as parts it would be 0011 and 0010 which is 3 and 2 decimal. Multiply it by 10 and you get 30 and 20. Now find the third value as 100-30-20 = 50. So here we go, its 50/30/20. So math-way L-loadout is low(05-byte)*10, M-loadout is high(05-byte)*10 and E-loadout is 100 minus E and M loadouts. I looked up 05 byte for Navigator in Medium Scout - its 14 hex, from which we get 50/10/40 distribution. This can be tested on Beginner level (1-2 Navigators in Medium Scout), but it's not that simple. Probably it's better to calculate the distribution for a Leader in Abductor (exactly 1 on each difficulty) and test it. --6AP6APblCKA 01:52, 18 June 2011 (MSK)

I looked up an Abductor Leader value - its 0! Which is very good, because it gives us 100/0/0 distribution, which means that he will ALWAYS get a E-loadout - can be easily checked by testing! Can someone do it? --6AP6APblCKA 02:02, 18 June 2011 (MSK)

Loaded a late game campaign and shot down an abductor. The leader had an L loadout. Started a new campaign, shot down the first UFO that appeared and altered CRAFT.DAT to switch that to an abductor too. The first time I visited it, the leader had L, the second time he had E.

Both craft were crewed by Floaters. Somewhat to my surprise, the E layout doesn't seem to involve shoving a pistol into the rifle clip the leader carries, nor does he equip any of the items he's given. -  Bomb Bloke (Talk/Contribs) 23:14, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

Thank you, Bomb Bloke. But i didn't quite understand, did Abductor Leader have an E-layout (that erroneous PRC/PP/PP), could you please confirm it? Because i have another variant for 05 unknown byte: it is a probability for E-layout. Then L-layout is constant at 20. and M is the rest. So for Small Scout Soldier we get 50/30/20 (as in tests), and for Abductor Leader we get (0/80/20) - he never has an E-layout. This can also explain, why he has this erroneous layout - it never shows up! And one more variant - same as previous, but L-layout is not constant, but dependent on Alien Rank. Say for Soldier it's 20 (so we get 50/30/20 for Small Scout Soldier), and for Leader it's 60 (then we get 0/40/60 for Abductor Leader) --6AP6APblCKA 12:47, 18 June 2011 (MSK)

Yes, it was definitely E - two pistols and a rifle clip is kinda hard to mistake (hence my comment about how the game didn't try to load one of the pistols into the clip, as it seems quite obvious it was supposed to be a gun, not ammo).

Your progress through the game very definitely has an effect on which weapons aliens use. You will find pistols very, very rare after a certain point (assuming you can find them at all), so 05 cannot solely be responsible for determining loadout odds. However, it could well be a modifier (difficulty is definitely one of the other factors). I'll take a stab at generating some more statistics tomorrow and see if any patterns crop up.

It's certainly true that it's random on a per-unit basis. It's very rare to see an entire crew armed with the exact same plasma weapon (until the late game, where heavies are about all you'll see). -  Bomb Bloke (Talk/Contribs) 06:36, 18 June 2011 (EDT)

I've done a lot of code diving and I'm fairly certain that byte5 should be the % chance that a particular alien of this rank gets delayed in the first round. After reviewing this again, I think byte5 might be the % chance that this alien survives a possible UPS explosion if it's in its radius. The main effect of byte 5 is a % that bit 2 of the alien's UNITPOS 0A byte is set to zero in the alien spawn routine. It's still outfitted and in the following routine, any UPS explosion's damage is applied to unit's in its radius. However, units with zeo in bit 2 of their UNITPOS-0Abyte are skipped.

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)

But... IIRC, the most common occupant of the Abductor is the floater race? Whose use of psi is rather limited... Jasonred 02:43, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

But why even give the Leader something? If it was intentional, the programmers could have given the Leader nothing at all and left it at that. And why do it for only one loadout? Here again, if it was intentional the Leader should always get nothing from the earliest loadout to the latest. The intent is (I believe) a Plasma Pistol + 2 Plasma Pistol Clips, just like all the other early loadout. Couldn't be simpler than that. ;) --Zombie 20:24, 7 July 2009 (EDT)

That last paragraph

Now, if it wasn't for the last update, I'd never have noticed the bit right at the end. But where did that paragraph come from and do we even need it in the article? -NKF 05:50, 23 February 2013 (EST)

All right, I'm moving this off the article. I don't feel it is required. NKF 02:12, 26 February 2013 (EST)

These loadouts are useful to know, ESPECIALLY once you have psi, OR if you happen to get lucky and make the enemy forces panic... knowing which enemies can carry grenades, and which enemies do not carry grenades makes a lot of difference sometimes! An alien with its hands empty and standing on a Blaster Launcher or Small Launcher can be given low priority... shoot the more dangerous aliens first. However, a Heavy Plasma toting alien that dropped its weapons is HIGHLY dangerous, since it has just finished panicking, has gained 15 morale and has nothing in its armament except for an alien grenade... BOOM.

Also makes it much easier to capture that alien rank you were looking for! No more mind probing needed, just spot the alien carrying the Blaster Launcher!

TFTD Edition of this page?

Silly question, but did we ever create the TFTD version of this page? If not, do we have the data dumped somewhere? NKF (talk) 02:22, 17 February 2014 (EST)

I've never seen one. It should be pretty easy to parse the info from the executable. Tycho (talk) 07:30, 17 February 2014 (EST)

I have made it at Alien Weapon Loadouts (TFTD). Magic9mushroom (talk) 08:10, 22 December 2019 (CET)

Sectoid Leader with Small Launcher at Terror Site

I can verify that this loadout is real. I saw one myself. DOS version, Superhuman difficulty, I think it was March, unmodded except for hacking out the difficulty bug (manually, not via a utility, so I am 100% sure nothing else was changed). So one must assume that either a) this table is only correct for CE, or b) Terror Sites have a separate loadout from Terror Ships. Probably a). Magic9mushroom (talk) 22:21, 8 May 2015 (EDT)

Loadout chance

Does anybody know the chance of getting the various loadouts? I have a suspicion it's along the lines of:

• generate random number 0-99
• if random number < (40 - 10*months gone) then Early
• else if random number < (80 - 10*months gone) then Middle
• else Late

for a chance of 40/40/20 -> 30/40/30 -> 20/40/40 -> 10/40/50 -> 0/40/60 -> 0/30/70 -> 0/20/80 -> 0/10/90 -> 0/0/100 through the first nine months. Can't be 100% sure without a code dig, though, and that's beyond my abilities. Magic9mushroom (talk) 09:45, 22 December 2019 (CET)