Talk:Explosions

Zombie, even gas station explosions don't hurt anybody nearby? - MikeTheRed 18:37, 3 August 2007 (PDT)

I'm pretty sure I've gotten civilians killed by stray shots blowing up gas pumps before. Arrow Quivershaft 19:59, 3 August 2007 (PDT)

Friendly units are not affected by any explosions caused by battlefield objects on UFO (on TFTD and some of my mod terrains this does not apply). There's some sort of quirk however concerning explosions that only generate smoke: I've seen often aliens/civilians get killed because of those explosions: I think (not confirmed) one factor might be if those units are already standing on smoke and the game wrongly allocates them damage everytime a barrel explodes. Hobbes 02:07, 4 August 2007 (PDT)

On that note, I've most certainly killed aliens by blowing up fuel barrels in the Hangar during base defense missions. Arrow Quivershaft 07:48, 4 August 2007 (PDT)

Just to throw a spanner in the works, sometimes I've seen aliens that weren't near the bowser or fuel drum die after it explodes. For Quite the explosive odd ball out. - NKF

Ok, this is what I know. MapView lists those "explosive" objects as having a damage type of smoke, not high explosive. This checks out on the battlescape as when you shoot one of these objects, the explosion doesn't damage terrain and it produces a dense smoke cloud just like a Smoke Grenade does. Moving X-COM soldiers near the fuel bowser and then shooting it doesn't do them any harm - that's basically a given.

However like NKF and Hobbes mentioned, Civilians and aliens can sometimes die after you shoot one of the objects. It doesn't happen all the time though and a quick round of testing reveals they normally don't take damage from the explosions either. This leads me to believe it is a bug of some sort. I did have a civilian die last night after shooting a fuel bowser: it was about 6 tiles away and wasn't standing in a smoke cloud. But, I did shoot a couple pumps out in the previous rounds which may be incorrectly allocating damage to nearby non-human units like Hobbes points out. Still, more testing needs to be done before we can come to a logical theory. Right now we have nothing to stand on other than our words. ;)

A main problem with the civilians is that they never get close enough to a fuel bowser on a terror mission to test this out properly and you can't use MC on them as that changes their ownership flag. I might do a little map editing and intentionally force civilians to spawn surrounding the pumps, and also give the civilians no energy or TU to force them to stay put instead of wandering off. Then , if the pump gets shot out and they all survive we'll know that thay don't take damage normally. (By normally, I mean no other object explosions happened on the map in previous rounds). After this I can go nuts and shoot off a whole bunch of pumps to see what happens. If the civilians die when standing in smoke, then we can come to a conclusion. --Zombie 08:06, 6 August 2007 (PDT)