Talk:Experience Training

It's implied here that you don't gain experience for shooting aliens under your control. That's just incorrect. I always shoot aliens who are under my control. In fact that's the only way I give new soldiers firing accuracy training, to shoot already-controlled aliens. It works great! So not sure where that misinformation came from...

-JonathanLB

Well, it was obtained from observations of the save game file before and after shooting an alien that is under mind control, with a soldier who had not taken a single shot throughout the battle. All hits to a mind controlled unit did not increase the soldier's hit counter. Without improvements to the hit counter, you won't get any firing accuracy increases. Increases to your secondary stats would've been obtained through the mind control and other primary actions that are tracked by the game. -NKF 01:08, 30 May 2009 (EDT)

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I didn't know how to meaningfully merge the top-to-bottom training guide I wrote with the stub page that this article started out as, so I moved the original page to the discussion page here. I hope other editors of the UFOPaedia do not take offense.

I have copied the extensive Kill Modeling section to its own page.

--Ethereal Cereal 20:21, 16 May 2006 (PDT)

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Thanks EC, I think you've done a great job. We can kill all the text you copied (below)... making a Kill Model page was a good idea; it was a little esoteric to fill up an Experience Training page. But I was more interested in the model results than fleshing out a Training page, laugh... it's good you finally fixed things up.

Also thanks for the credit up at the top. It's not particularly necessary since if folks dig, they'll eventually come across the fact I did the quantitative work. I changed the word "information" to "numbers" because many others before me (NKF, Z, etc.) had made many good qualitative observations on experience; what I supplied that nobody else had, is exactly how it worked numerically. Anyway, you can keep or drop that credit at the top of the page. Thanks!

This whole Discussion can be deleted after you read it, if you like. Thanks again for all your work!

---MikeTheRed 17:08, 17 May 2006 (PDT)

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Sure thing. And thanks for your work as well. With this discussion page, I'm satisfied that your credit will be easy to find, so I will indeed remove it from the article page.

I've deleted the original article from this page. I took the measure of copying it because the new article is a replacement, not just a rewrite -- I wanted to get your okay before I wiped the old page completely out.

--Ethereal Cereal 00:03, 18 May 2006 (PDT)

An alternate Bravery training method proposal

I was participating in a thread not too long ago where I somehow ended up explaining how bravery is improved, and this suggestion on how to safely improve bravery was put forward.

Use psi to round up all the aliens on the map, disarm them (as per standard procedure) then start killing them while they are still under X-Com control to drop overall morale under 50%. Repeat this a few times until everyone's had a good scare.

If this works, I can see that it'll be good way to increase bravery of even the toughest of soldiers.

There might be a few cons associated with this as well, but it theroetically sounds much safer than braving aliens with psi (thus revealing the soldier's Achille's heel) or killing lots of fellow soldiers just to get a measly bravery increase.

Then again, there is a counter argument where if you are capable of easily rounding up the aliens with psi, increasing bravery at that point is rather meaningless. Still, I suppose it would still be worth knowing for those wanting to max out their team's stats before launching the final mission.

I thought it was a brilliant suggestion at the time, however I can't run any tests of my own at the moment to verify if it actually works. Would anyone be able to check this for me? Thanks.

- NKF 22:47, 28 February 2008 (PST)

Can't run tests myself at the moment, but aliens killed while under Mind Control DO cause morale loss. HOWEVER, it is not as dramatic as you'd expect...I think the only unit that loses morale is the unit that does the killing. (Don't kill MCed aliens with tanks, they WILL take a hit on Morale!) However, the amount of morale lost is always an odd value. I THINK what happens is that the game subtracts the Morale from all soldiers for having a friendly killed, then ADDS BACK into the Morale for having an alien killed, and the net effect is that my troops(which tend to stay at 100 Morale) don't show a visible effect; especially since I generally have at least a Captain on my team(Usually at least a Colonel or the Commander), which means that I lose less morale from the 'loss' and gain more from the kill. However, the unit that actually does the killing takes the extra penalty for a friendly fire kill (-20) and thus the effect of Morale loss can generally be seen on that unit only. So my take is that it's interesting, but only of marginal use. And officers will make it fairly difficult to pull off. Arrow Quivershaft 23:26, 28 February 2008 (PST)

Fire and Gaining Experience

Has anyone tested how fire affects experience? Keeping in mind Incendiary rockets (90IN) and Auto cannon rounds (48IN) Specifically I want to know if:

• Does Incendiary direct dmg increase experience if the alien does NOT catch fire?
• Does Incendiary spash dmg increase experience if the alien does NOT catch fire?
• Does an alien who caught fire give experience to the solider the round after?
• Does an alien in a fire (but not on fire) give experience to the soldier the round after if he takes damage?
• Does an alien in a fire (but not on fire) give experience to the soldier the round after if he DOES NOT take damage?
• Does a 4 square alien count as 4 hits if fire is on all 4 squares?
• How does this all interact with the fire hurts all bug?

Depending on how this works out, it may mean that the best way to skill up your squad is with an Auto-Cannon using Incendiary rounds.--Brunpal 09:53, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Unfortunately no to all the above. From the damage tests that were done extensively by our regulars that did most of the work on the damage/experience pages, incendiary damage does not increase your experience counters at all. - NKF 13:49, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Even a direct hit that kills the target? That seems odd. If that's the case then it should be noted on the various XP pages that it's totally impossible to gain XP with incendiary rounds loaded. It's a pretty big exception.--Brunpal 15:54, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Given the amount of damage inflicted by a hit from an incendiary round, a kill is unlikely. Nevertheless, IIRC, Firing Accuracy is incremented on an actual hit of the enemy. Arrow Quivershaft 16:02, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Actually, after skimming through the pages on training experience, I can't see mention of whether incendiary increments 'hit' experience or otherwise, so I'm left a bit unsure at this point. What I vaguely remember is that incendiary (standing in flames, on fire, etc) won't increment the kill counter - but then again the kill counter is just that, a counter. It has no control over your stat increases. Oh well, nothing a few practical experiments won't fix. -NKF 16:23, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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From a logical standpoint, it should, given that every other time your soldiers successfully shoot an alien, regardless of whether they do any damage, they get firing accuracy experience incremented. But tests are the way to go, yes. Arrow Quivershaft 18:25, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Shooting an alien with IN does not increase the "successful hit" counter. This could be considered an oversight by the programmers (an IN shot is handled differently to that of a standard bullet, and they skipped the bit which dealt with the counter).

I'm uncertain as to whether shooting an alien with IN - and killing it specifically with that shot, as opposed to the alien dieing in the flames a turn later - will raise the kill counter.

- Bomb Bloke 18:43, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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I'm not too concerned if the kill counter goes up or not, just if the hit counts towards xp. I used the example of a direct hit that results in a kill because a kill is the easiest way to check that damage was done, (vs a hit that did zero damage). It's also the most conservative test; if that doesn't count for xp, then it stands to reason that no other form of IN damage counts for xp.

There is also some discussion at Talk:Incendiary about this issue.

Sucks if IN doesn't count at all. I had visions of getting personal armor, then throwing 4 aliens into the back of my ship and firing one at point blank auto shot for a full set of xp actions. I'm looking for a way to train in early game. Generally I don't do much with xp training with psi. Soon as I have psi capable squad (vs godlike) I head to mars and end the game.--Brunpal 21:03, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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Experience works like this: Whenever you perform certain actions, certain counters are incremented. At the end of combat, the vitalstatistics relevant to those counters may then be incremented.

When you fire a weapon, if you hit a unit with it the "hit" counter goes up. As IN does not increase this counter (or any of the other counters, except maybe kills which doesn't increase skills anyway), it won't cause you to gain in any stats.

Hence why you can't use the kill counter as a way of checking to see if a soldier will gain "experience". You HAVE to check the action counters themselves. The game doesn't always do things in a predictable/logical manner, so when doing research it doesn't pay to assume.

So in case I wasn't clear before, shots made with IN do not count towards any form of "experience".

- Bomb Bloke 21:35, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

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The results are already out there, but I had run a practical exercise anyway. I fired up TFTD and started a brand new game. Bought only Phosphor rounds and made sure I had 8 gas cannons. At the start of the first mission, I saved and edited unitref.dat to give the first soldier all-round 255 armour - effectively making him invulnerable to enemy attack. Perfect for testing - although I had to restart my test as I corrupted my results with one reaction shot (my test was to see if any promotions were given, then to check if any stats have increased). I have got to say that TFTD has REALLY nerfed incendiary effects for underwater maps. Fire burns for about one or two turns before fizzing out. Had to repeat this whole test all over again on a land map to get better results.

In any case, my findings are that the Kill counter does increase with an IN induced kill to the person that performed the killing blow, but no experience is awarded. An alien dying from fire doesn't increase the kill counter nor is experience awarded (actually, one test did increase the kill counter, but that was the odd one out).

- NKF 01:24, 2 August 2008 (PDT)

Makes sense... incendiary is such an odd kettle of fish, it doesn't count as a hit in terms of experience, reaction triggers... basically acts very oddly... Jasonred 05:25, 15 March 2009 (EDT)