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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
Weapon Rankings Vs. Celatids
%TUs per kill (average; FA=50):
HvyPlas 33 Blast Bmb 38 Stun Rod 44 PlasmaR 48 HE Pack(XCU) 58 HvyLas (XCU) 59 PlasmaP 80 LaserR 80 HE Pack 116 HvyLas 136 LaserP 144 RocketLg 148 Alien Grd 149 Stun Bmb 174 HC - AP 198 Prox Grd 209 RocketSm 215 AC - AP 232 HC - HE 234 AC - HE 236 Rifle 340 Grenade 349 Pistol 414
Spike 21:15, 27 February 2009 (CST)
Bugs and stuff
Whenever I MC a Celatid and move it, I get explosion sounds (for every tile it moves). Any way to fix this?
Also, I saw a Celatid clone itself once (with the same "bag" on the ground as shown under a living specimen in Ufopaedia), but it was years ago and I don't even know if it was CE or regular DOS one.
n
Brain Waves and Embryos
I did a test for 40 turns with 20 Celatids and did not see any of them spawn new Celatids nor any other form of new unit or object. The test included leaving them alone, stunning some of them, eventually killing all of them - but no spawning effect.
However there did seem to be some evidence of the brain wave effect, as the Celatids quickly formed a semi circle around the ramp of the Skyranger, even though I had moved all 8 soldiers to the back, out of sight except from more or less straight ahead.
As a caveat, these tests were done using XComUtil to add the Celatids. Also it would be better to test the brain wave theory using a transport that has doors that close and so can block line of sight...
Spike 23:56, 15 October 2012 (EDT)
- They don't exhibit any of that at all. The mention of Celatids sensing by brainwaves may just be psuedo sci-fi way of explaining how they can see nearby targets even though they don't have sensory organs. Also it might also be a subtle hint at the 20-turn free look all the aliens get, which would cause them to head directly to (until they forget naturally) you even if you were well hidden for a very long time. You could try it with the Lightning, and Zombie's Lightning mod that truly solidifies its walls. -NKF 00:50, 16 October 2012 (EDT)
- Yes I realise my test didn't control well for if they just spotted me through the XComUtil created portholes in the Skyranger. My main focus was on seeing if they would spawn (they didn't). May try again with the modded Lightning, and possibly real Celatids if I can find them. Or I might just accept the received wisdom - and write it up as a Ufopaedia error. Spike 12:21, 16 October 2012 (EDT)
- Not an error - just flavour text to add more to the mythos, like the Chryssalid and its '20' eggs. NKF 01:32, 17 October 2012 (EDT)
- You're right. And actually the Ufopaedia scientist reports on all aliens seem obsessed with reproduction and reproductive organs (!), but clearly in almost every case (bar one) the scientists are not talking about reproduction during the tactical timescale. It's more of a strategic concern for XCOM I think, and a valid one. Spike 05:47, 17 October 2012 (EDT)