Talk:Experience
Just some thoughts I want to jot down before I forget them, based off a discussion I read on one of the forums:
- Kills. Just to be clear, it needs to be emphasised that kills do not count towards stat increases. Was this mentioned or has it been mentioned elsewhere?
- Similarly, kill attribution. When do you get the kill counter incremented. Grenades (thrown and unthrown), volatile battlescape element (i.e. gas tank), secondary explosion from cyberdisc, or volatile battlescape element set off by cyberdisc explosion. Probably by reactions and active attacks too. Don't remember if we ever quantified all the methods that'll increment the kill counter.
- NKF
- Tested the secondary explosion from oil drums, found within my X-COM base hanger. Waited til that last snakeman soldier roamed around weaponlessly, and then smacked the barrel infront of him him. Boom, and Tatsuo Iwahara graduates to a squaddie after this base defense with 1 kills in 3 missions, via a unarmed snakeman using a barrel for cover. Can someone confirm my test?
- Hmm, but is only just off one barrel exploding. I don't know if things change, if you say, line up barrels across the screen and fry the poor sectoid at the other end. --Vagabond 01:53, 15 March 2007 (PDT)
- I'm not positive, but I think the rule is "whoever takes the action gets the kill", i.e., the last soldier to take any sort of action which results in an enemy death gets credited. I infer this from how Proximity Grenades work: credit for the kill goes to whoever sets off the grenade. I suspect this'll be borne out for "chain reaction" kills and the like. Alien-on-alien kills probably don't apply (Cyberdisc explosions probably do), and grenade kills are already known to go to the last soldier who threw it.--Ethereal Cereal 02:54, 15 March 2007 (PDT)
- Might also want to double check that the guy credited with the kill is not the first soldier in the list just to make sure it's not like dropping a grenade. --Pi Masta 14:42, 15 March 2007 (PDT)
Hi folks, I've been off playing other games a long time (even caused a new wiki to be made for a game, plus of course contributed to many), but still love X-COM - and the many great folks on this wiki.
NKF, the fact that kills don't matter to Experience per se has been long cited at Firing_Accuracy#Improvement. The Experience page says to see each skill page, to see exactly how to trigger it. Apologies if you asked before I revised the pages - correlating History timestamps takes time. And also, apologies if it's now well understood. But if you or others would like to repeat it on Experience or elsewhere to hammer the point home, please do.
I, for one, don't remember too much being posted about attribution of secondary kills. It sounds like something to be explored. The exact same could be said for the Kill counter. I can't recall anything at all being said about any nuances of it. But then my memory is famously retarded. One interesting thing is that both UNITREF.DAT and SOLDIER.DAT have a two-byte field for it, so the programmers really pulled out the stops - they thought players might deliberately / well have a favorite soldier get hundreds of kills (>255).
Ethereal, don't forget the Prox Mine is an exception to the rule for every other weapon. In a sense, if you die from it, you get experience from dying, laugh. FWIW it was a real surprise, discovering how it worked. I wonder if the programmers screwed it up.
- MikeTheRed 20:57, 5 October 2007 (PDT)
P.S. The details that some of us wikians are getting into these days, can sometimes can really benefit from savegame postings where the first person took the time and care to set everything up, and then test it. Please folks, don't hesitate to post zipped savegames you used for testing!