Talk:Exploits
Does anybody mind if I delete the "Extra Ammo" exploit? What is described there, is actually avoidance of a glitch, not an Exploit. And it's already described under Known_Bugs#Disappearing_Ammo. I'm about to flesh out the Glitch, and it's annoying to have to repeat in two places when the second's not really an Exploit. I'll do it in a week if nobody objects. If somebody objects, it stays. ---MikeTheRed 13:35, 11 December 2005 (PST)
Actually I just realized that the Extra Ammo Exploit differs from the Glitch description. It says that even clips that are partially full, become full if unloaded. I vaguely recall I tested this in the DOS version, and that my experience reflected what's described in the Glitch entry. NKF and others, do you know for sure which one is right? - MikeTheRed 17:33, 11 January 2007 (PST)
Repairing damaged UFOs
Want to stop a UFO from doing it's mission? Shoot it down. Want to get a full load of engines and elerium? Leave it alone for about 2 days. The longer you wait before launching the ground assault, the smaller the hole and smoke, and eventually the craft will be completely repaired.
Note that you will also get a full complement of enemy soldiers -- all the dead will come back to life when you do this.
(You may want to save the game before landing, so you can resume waiting if the UFO was not fully repaired when you attacked.)
Actually, UFO damage is random. You see, the damage done to a UFO in the battlescape is caused by the game detonating the power units with varying detonation strengths every time the map is generated. Sometimes it's only strong enough to destroy the power unit, and if there are many power units, some of the might not even be detonated at all. So there's no wait, just save the game in the Geoscape, and enter the mission. If the damage is not to your liking, reload and try and try again until you get a favourable outcome. - NKF
Keybouncer and NKF, you've both tested this likelihood versus time? Seems easy enough to do. Two related questions (have they been answered here?): 1) How long do crash sites persist?, and 2) If one Power Source (PS) blows up, yes, it will destroy E115 within a particular distance, but will it cause them to explode?
The reason I ask is that page 311 of the OSG says PSs have a 70% chance of exploding, which sounds about right to me. A table of probabilities of finding intact PSs for the various UFOs could be generated. I would have thought the answer to #2 is that they don't cause them to explode; they're not an explosive object. But in my experience, the ground floor of a Terror Ship is always the same - all four PSs are always blasted up, and the surrounding interior walls are always in the same bad shape (i.e., they're always all gone, except by the door at the south).
Anyway, a probabilistic thing would be fun to do. But the question of successive explosions has been puzzling me. Could E115 trigger something special in crashes? (Successive explosions even though it's not registered as an explosive?) E115 has always had that odd boolean checkmark at OBDATA.DAT[45]. - MikeTheRed
While I have not collected large amounts of data to show any pattern in the extent of the damage vs time, I haven't really seen any difference in damage between the moment the crash site was created or at a point just before the crash site vanishes. It's roughly the same and varies from game to game. If the UFO is repaired over time, this information will have to be stored somewhere. Craft.dat or loc.dat are probably the most likely files to watch. As for the explosions - I guess during the pre-detonation stages, the game may take into account nearby power units that get caught in the blast and detonate them as well. The 70% chance still holds true for isolated units. Can we add extra power units to the existing craft maps to test this I wonder? Or what about setting this boolean flag for enemy corpses, and crossing our fingers? Heh. That might not work. - NKF
Hehe, it might be fun to play with those booleans. Or not. ;)
I wouldn't think info has to be stored anywhere; after all, the crash site is not created unless/until you fight it. (If I remember right.) If it does "repair", it could simply be based on the time since the crash... and I guess this would basically equate to, a lower probability of PS explosion. FWIW, I never had the impression that more time meant less damage, but then I wasn't paying attention to the possibility.
I guess that, since PS explosions are performed by code that is "above" normal battlescape properties (i.e., PSs are not explosive per se), it's entirely possible they also programmed in, that they trigger successive detonations. It could be fairly easily tested, in theory... There are only 3 UFOs where PSs can "interact": Harvester (2 PSs), Supply (3), Terror (4). Supply UFOs might be the most interesting in terms of teasing out whether there are successive detonations. FWIW, straight odds (no interaction) of having 2 PSs intact is 9.00% (.32), 3 intact is 2.70%, and 4 intact is 0.81%.
Remind me, is there some quick way to "lift the fog of war" and see the whole map? Maybe with Mapview? (I don't have it installed ATM; I recently got a new PC.) If so, it would be fairly easy to see e.g. if terror ships ever vary their explosion pattern, etc. Also any differences between combat early or late after a crash.
Maybe we should move all these comments, maybe even this whole section, to Discussion? - MikeTheRed 17:43, 10 January 2007 (PST)
Moved - and discussions split up and line breaks inserted for your reading convenience. Coincidentally, Mike, it has been a while, but I'll let you decide what to do with your earlier comment up above.
As for the maps - I know XComutil has an option to clear the fog of war and make everyone on the map visible (and sets the lighting for the whole map to the brightest setting until you move). Use the command line utility's VIS command. Like so: xcomutil game_n vis wrt - game_n being the directory for your tactical savegame.
-NKF
Or the time left until the crash site disappears. That is almost certainly in the savegame, and would be worth mapping in its own right.
-- Zaimoni, 9:25 Jan 11 2007 CST
NKF - Cool, I just tried that XcomUtil and it worked like a charm. And guess what... I happened to try it on a Terror ship... and only ONE PS was blown up (although it did, of course, destroy the other 3). Damn, that seems like low odds... and OMG it instantly explodes (cough) the possibility of successive explosions. One other thing can be done via a screenshot of it... one can determine a PS's explosive strength (but maybe not its radius). (Has anybody determined this stuff yet?) Anyway here goes (dusting off Explosions memory cells):
Edited after I looked closely and got the equations right - MikeTheRed 17:48, 12 January 2007 (PST)
- UFO floors (their "initial" tile) are destroyed out to radius 3. They need 80 HE to kill them.
- Tiles are hit with average/2 damage; this damage decreases by 5, each tile outward from Ground Zero. So average/2 must be 80-84 at tile 3, and 95-99 at GZ.
- Twice this value (for the average) is 190-199. A PS explosion is almost as strong as a blaster bomb. (Notice how blasters scorch UFO floor tiles out to 4 tiles, 1 more than a PS, and are average damage 200.)
- Initial destroyed tiles are not blown through to raw earth anywhere, even at GZ. The slightly stronger blaster also does not blow through to raw earth at GZ on UFO floors. (Can someone look up the death tile armor strength for a damaged Power Source? The GZ PS was not raw earth, either.)
- Those walls around the PSs on a Terror ship are only destroyed up to where the floor tiles were; they also are 80 initial / 50 dead tile "armor".
- PSs at 6 straight-line radius and 3 diagonal (walking TUs means its considered 4 tiles away) are destroyed, consistent with UFO_Power_Source info that they have 50 "armor"... average/2 HE strength is 65 at radius 6.
- All the Elerium is gone, of course... it only takes 21 HE.
- A Snakeman was also killed, at a straight-line radius of 7 (just past the radius-6 PS). Here, the average/2 HE should be 60, and strength against units 60 to 180. It's a Superhuman game, so the lowest stats (Superhuman Snakeman Soldier) would be Health 45 and armor ranging from 16 Rear to 20 Front, for a minimum of 45+16=61 to kill. Easily enough to kill this weakest example; stronger aliens near to the edge of the blast (wherever it is) might have a chance of only being injured.
Does anyone ever remember seeing aliens injured by crash-landing? In my vague recollection of times when I MC everything, they are all either fine, or dead, at crash sites... never injured.
FWIW there wasn't any other vulnerable stuff around, to tell the whether the blast went farther than radius 7. In theory it could extend to radius 18, with a GZ strength of 190-199... but the largest blasts seen in the game are both clipped at radius 11 (blast and fusion tank).
Zaimoni, I'm sure you're right. If, of course, it's not always the same amount of time. I vaguely recall that my impression is they always lasted about 3 days (72 hours). I don't know the Geoscape files well... perhaps one of you who do, would know where to look for this? Then again it would be cake to take a savegame from just before shooting down a UFO, then see how long the crash persists. It should quickly be clear if it's always the same, to prove or disprove that. If no variation is seen with that one test UFO, a few other types (small to large) should be tested, to see if it differs by type.
- MikeTheRed 17:33, 11 January 2007 (PST)
I've seen injured aliens from pre-BattleScape power plant explosions. They're generally toast if the walk into a fire :( [This is from studying XCOMUtil reports at DIS:2.] It's more common with Large Scouts, but not unthinkable with crashed Terror Ships.
Even if it always is the same amount of time, the "in theme" way to code it would be a countdown timer (like manufacturing, research, and time to next UFO).
-- Zaimoni, 9:25 Jan 11 2007 CST
Ok I just fixed a glaring error in my math above. That's better. The soldier was practically gauranteed to be dead. FWIW a supply ship where only one "outer" PS has exploded will confirm whether 11 is the limit of the blast radius. It's probably also the best place to try to find an alien caught at the edge of the blast, to see where its edge is. Not that it's a real big deal. The probabilities of finding intact Elerium for various ships can be stated already. Probably. :)
A new wrinkle that may affect it was raised by my Terror Ship example: Only the "top most" PS exploded. And as you will recall, I had previously thought all 4 PSs exploded, and only the door and the walls near it (at the "bottom") were left. In hindsight, maybe PSs have a fixed "order" in which they explode, and what I had actually seeing is that 3 exploded (which is good for the odds of 70%) - but it was the "top 3". If the "bottom" last one had exploded, the door and walls around it would've been gone. But that's not what I remember encountering most/all the time. See? Perhaps they explode, starting from the top-most one, down. Depending on some dice roll as to how many would explode. This possible predictability in terms of the order (top to bottom) in which they are "slated to explode" could mean that e.g. seeing a particular Battleship "foot" intact tells you something about which others might be intact, at a glance (and how much E115 is left). Something worth testing with a few reloads some night.
As for effects on E115 survival probabilities in general, it looks like the Supply ship is the only ship where there is a chance for this potential "fixed order" to affect the likelihood. The central PS will always destroy the other two PS's E115. If it is more or less likely to explode due to a fixed order - if the left/top one "goes first" - this would affect the probabilities. For all other UFOs, though, the PS spacing is such that any PS explosion kills all the others' E115 - or not at all (battleship, harvester).
Thanks for the feedback on the injured guy, Zaimoni. It sounds like PS blasts are like blasters... it's possible for someone to survive it near the edge, but not likely. Combined with how I usually try to farm intact elerium (i.e., not crash UFOs), probably explains why I don't remember seeing anyone injured from crashing.
- MikeTheRed 17:48, 12 January 2007 (PST)
Did some more testing, on a Terror ship. I made a savegame with a Terror Ship crash site not yet visited, then visited it 10 times, using XcomUtil's "lights on" switch. Some observations:
- Right Zai, there can be injured folks. Three times out of 10. One of these was stunned, even. Oddly, this stunned one briefly showed in the equipment pile at initial loadout(!), but disappeared from there once I finished the loadout (and appeared in the blast area).
- Dead or injured guys are always standing right next to a PS. There were always 1 to 2, dead or wounded. The PS they stand next to is random, out of the 4 on a Terror.
- Very very oddly: Out of the 10 reloads,
- 4 had identical radius-3 UFO-floor-damage blast patterns centered on the top PS, like the first one described above. (The four includes that first one.)
- Four had an increased level of damage (floor damage radius 5), centered on the top PS, still.
- One had an even larger blast pattern of radius 8 or more; it could have been more, because it damaged the floor of the whole interior PS room, but did not extend past any of the walls (all were blown out). And it was still centered on the top PS.
- The final one had floor damage to radius 4, and was centered on the left PS.
This doesn't make any sense to me. *scratches head* Ok, that's enough for now. - MikeTheRed 19:22, 12 January 2007 (PST)
So a Power Source explodes with a power = 190-199? As a quick calculation a while back, (see this post for the specifics) I determined the PS has a strength of 200 on a desert landscape. Guess that desert tiles aren't sensetive enough to pick up on that 1-10 point difference in strength you calculated.
It's easy to create your own ship designs with daishivas mapview program: just delete everything on the ground floor of a UFO and stuff a PS smack-dab in the middle. When you visit the crash site, all you see is either a PS (if it didn't explode) or a huge crater - lol.
I wonder if BB's custom tile testing landscape could be tweaked to nail the power of the explosion down exactly? If not, I suppose I could edit the alien spawn points on a ship so that they are clustered around the PS. After properly editing alien stats of the race contained in the UFO, shoot the UFO down and visit it many times. Log the alien stats near the explosion over a few thousand reloads and we should have our answer (extrapolating damage to take the extra tile into consideration). Might need to call in a favor to BB for a "special" logger for this, but hey, it's possible. Heck, it may be easier to just edit the UFO floor tile properties to show this. ;) --Zombie 23:13, 12 January 2007 (PST)
Hiya Z! Yes well... in the follow-up testing, it suggests that PS explosion strength is variable. But this (and the finding) don't make sense relative to what you might've expected - i.e., just let some of the PSs blow up or not, at a fixed strength, with a probability of 70%. I get the feeling it may be jerry rigged in the code. Especially disconcerting is how there were bigger or smaller explosions - all centered on the top-most PS. 9 times out of 10.
If it helps any, here's a montage of the four types of damage seen in those 10 samples. The radius-3-floor-damage (seen 4x) is in upper right, radius-5 middle right (4x), radius 8+ lower right (1x), and radius 4 left PS is on left (1x). You can clearly see how all three of the pix on the right are centered on the top-most PS; notice the explosion blockage "shadow" due to the other PSs in the pic on the lower right. (Did I get my math right, when I said the strength seems to be 190-199 for the pic in upper right?)
I am so rusty on all the details of map editing. But if you can combine BB's numerical tiles with a UFO with no floor or interior walls, it should be good to go! Why not stick in more than one PS so we can see what it does relative to this head-scratcher of, is only one PS exploding, but with variable strength? A part of my head scratching is, with Battleships, it's clear that you don't always have only one PS explode. - MikeTheRed 09:13, 13 January 2007 (PST)
Whether Medium Scout Navigation consoles survive a pre-BattleScape power plant explosion is inconsistent. [It's relatively rare, but does happen.]
-- Zaimoni, 9:25 Jan 11 2007 CST