Talk:Celatid

EthC, why would their weapon strength, equal their "muscle" strength? Weapons are handled as "separate add-ins", even if they are "inherent". You can kill this note after reading.

---MikeTheRed 06:13, 21 May 2006 (PDT)

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Hmm...

• On the Zombie page, it states "Zombies have a melee attack equal to its strength."
• The Celatid entry formely read "its acid spit does a whopping 140 points" -- which is 2x its Strength (70) and the normal maximum for a weapon of damage rating 70
• I've also seen elsewhere someone claim Sectopods' weapons are slightly less powerful than the Heavy Plasma (115) (Sectopod Strength is 90-105)

But just now I hacked Sectopods' Strength down to 2 and Mind-Controlled one -- its weapon was just as damaging as before, both when under MC and not. Does anybody know which field(s) in GEOSCAPE.EXE determine weapon damage for Sectpods, Celatids, etc.?

--Ethereal Cereal 13:15, 21 May 2006 (PDT)

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I know the rough whereabouts of the terror unit 'built in turrets'. My offsets are for the CE version - so you'd need to adjust the offsets accordingly for the dos version.

I can't give you the exact offset, but you can look at the values within the region of the byte no 448, 073. If I'm not mistaken, it's in the Tactical.exe portion of the game. If you want the closest reference, try looking for the 'missdat/direct.dat' and move about 3000 bytes or so past that.

You'll see sets of data that resemble weapon stats. From damage type, damage, firing costs, etc. They're all stored in 16-bit words (i.e. 2 bytes).

The rocket tank's launcher for example will have a value set of 2 (high-ex), 12 (default ammo), 85 (damage), 55, 45, 0 (aimed-snap-auto costs), 115, 75, 0 (aimed-snap-auto accuracies). Etc.

We've actually done some damage tests the hard way (reiterative testing in-game with various armour levels). In the end the weapon damages have already been confirmed against Dave Ellis's Official strategy guide, which lists the damage levels of the terror unit weapons.

- NKF

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Ahh, I see it, it seems to start at 447,868 for the Tank/Cannon. And it looks like the Sectpod weapon is 100/Laser. Been wondering about that for a long time.

Is Str = melee damage true? For all the units with melee attacks?

I read a thread of Zombie's on Strategycore that alien melee attacks took 14 TUs, not 15, as is listed on this site in several places. Any idea which is correct?

--Ethereal Cereal 00:10, 22 May 2006 (PDT)

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Zombie has done a lot of work on melee. I'm too rusty to remember.

Great job on the trajectories, and important to know for this lethal creature. Did you MC one to measure it?

If possible, one of you should put this info on where stuff is (above) on the GEOSCAPE or TACTICAL page or whatever. I'm still confused about what files which versions have.

NKF, do you know where the Damage_Modifiers are? I tried to help Danial once and looked through all the files for them so we could confirm the OSG. But I never could find them.

---MikeTheRed 18:30, 22 May 2006 (PDT)

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Yep, I MCed it, I'm an MC junkie. I wish MC was less powerful, actually; once you get psi supertroopers, the game's over.

I added some notes about the turret/inbuilt weapons to the geoscape.exe page.

--Ethereal Cereal 20:33, 22 May 2006 (PDT)

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As a matter of fact Mike, I sent a private message to Zombie on the damage modifiers over at Strategycore a couple of months back about this. Let me just go and see if I can dig it up.

Assuming you're using MS-Edit and the CE version, open it up at 100 columns. Look down within the region of line 4502 (that translates to byte 450,200. Or for those that prefer hexadecimal, 0x06DE98), then scoot across to column 37.

It's a short way above the line I mentioned earlier. In fact, it's not too far above the block that stores the name strings for your troops. Not exactly, but it's a good place to start looking if you want to spelunk through the dos executables. That's assuming they're in the same place. If so, use the name strings as a reference point and start scrolling up.

Or you could try looking for a region filled with lots of lower case d's and a space. One line looks a bit like d d d d < d d d d P and etc. Lower cap d's translate to 100 in ascii - after all. The space just shows that the value is stored as a 16-bit integer.

They are stored in blocks of 14 values. 1 unknown or base value and the 13 unit types in the game. It looks like:

0 - Unknown(possibly baseline?) 
1 - Soldier, civilian, sectoid, celatid, floater
2 - Personal armour
3 - Power suit/flying suit 
4 - Tanks/hovertanks
5 - Snakemen
6 - Etherael
7 - Muton
8 - Silacoid
9 - Chryssalid
10 - Reaper 
11 - Sectopod
12 - Cyberdisc
13 - Zombie

Each block is ordered in AP, incendiary, explosive, laser, plasma, stun, melee and acid spit.

You can send your thanks to Zombie for looking up these values and confirming them against the OSG. Everything's jake. - NKF

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In response to Ethereal Cereal's questions about melee, I'll try my best to explain it. Pulling from my tests in damage modifiers, HTH-only aliens have a strength = melee damage. It's true. Also, the same strength nember is considered to be the base accuracy of the HTH weapon. Multiply this by melee accuracy of the alien and you get the base chance to hit the target. (It's the same principal as weapon accuracy. Weapon accuracy * Soldier FA = Base chance to hit).

All melee attacks require 15 TU as I reported in this post. I also changed the numbers in the wiki to match, so if you still see some listed as 14, go ahead and change them. (The reason why I originally said 14 TU was because I was using the Playstation to test. It's very hard to nail down an exact number in the PSX version since you cannot edit the game files. The computer versions allow more flexibility in this area and thus an accurate value could be determined).

While on the same subject, Psi-enabled aliens require 26 TU for one attack. It's a fixed cost just like melee and doesn't change if the aliens stats change or by difficulty level. See this post at the StrategyCore forums.

Any other questions in this area? I probably have answers. Some of this info may need to be moved into the relevant areas when this discussion is finished.--Zombie 21:54, 11 June 2006 (PDT)

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I think I may have discovered an exploit, though I am not one hundred percent sure about it yet. Okay, here it goes: if you equip a Celatid with any ranged weapon, it will break its accuracy-spitting-targetting-thingy, causing it to miss every attack. If this proves to be true, one could give the flying livers a Heavy Plasma for target practise without risk, eliminating the need to carry pistols in the process (at least into Muton missions).--Trotsky 00:12, 18 July 2006 (PDT)