Talk:Soldier Skills & Equipment Guide (EU2012)

Very through information, but please keep it with a Neutral Point of View, because there's a lot that I disagree (not the stats or the explanations) like your personal premise that Lethality is the most important issue regarding perk selection, or that you should choose Bullet Swarm over Holo-Targeting at the beginning, when to me Holo-Targeting is crucial to help rookies (and the whole squad) get kills and promotions. Some other things are incorrect/missing (Mayhem also increases damage from explosives) or it's just a matter of personal playstyle - I love Snap Shot snipers because of their ability to move and fire, it works great on the big UFOs and city maps with a lot of buildings but I also have a Sniper with Squad Sight for some maps. I think it would be much more useful to have a Guide about when/how to use each perk and let the player decide. Otherwise it's just a matter of personal opinion and that won't be much useful. My suggestion would be to have this content either reworked or moved to another page. And there's also the matter of what this Beginner Guide should have besides perk selection. Hobbes 07:33, 21 October 2012 (EDT)

Certainly has room for improvement on the NPOV side, but I think that's fine as starting point for an article. It can be reworked. However, I recommend adding a suffix to the page, otherwise it could be a beginner guide for any one of the many games if you came in here through a Google search or via another page. -NKF 07:37, 21 October 2012 (EDT)

I like the stats analysis very much (I haven't had time to do it myself so it's a great read) I just think it needs a more neutral analysis. Some perks are essential like Field Medic, Revive and Savior to have Support Medic right away, I think that one everybody should agree, but as for the rest it's really a matter of playstyle. Hobbes 07:49, 21 October 2012 (EDT)

The one question I have is, what difficulty level(s) were you playing when you came to these conclusions. For me, certain abilities that were previously useless made more sense when switching to Classic and Impossible. ~ Drakalu 13:50, 23 October 2012 (EDT)

Multiple POVs

While this is a great guide, I feel that this guide is good only for a specific playstyle-IE, an aggressive one. If you want to be aggressive then that's all well and good, but many people would prefer a more subtle or defensive approach, approaches which are almost completely disregarded in this guide. Perhaps if we had multiple guides, one for each style (I believe this is already in place-isn't there an entire page dedicated to listing all the different guides for the original?) I don't think I would be a good example, but if everyone would like I could make a guide for my style, which is three supports-one a rifleman, two field medics, a heavy, and an assualt (the second field medic can be switched out for a squadsight sniper) -Krikit386

That's exactly my point above. Before the game was released I thought that the most important perks were those that expanded your 2 Actions, i.e. Snap Shot allows for Move and Fire with the Sniper Rifle, Bullet Swarm allows the Heavy to shoot twice, etc. After I started playing the game I realized that they are important (the same way that Lethality is) but you need to think about their general effect on the squad's abilities and their uses. Example: lots of people go for Squad Sight instead of Snap Shot. I like to have both, because Snap Shot is great for Abduction missions where most of the time you'll need to move to take the shot. Squad Sight also works for me on those occasions but Snap Shot fits more my style. Another example: UFO missions, I usually take Squad Sight but sometimes I'll switch to the Snap Shot sniper since he's the one more capable of using the Battle Scanner (since you'll usually keep your Squad Sight sniper behind), and you really need the Scanner to avoid unfriendly confrontations. Hobbes 10:14, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

I've started rewriting the content to make it NPOV but I only got to the Heavy and Holo-Targetting/Bullet Swarm analysis. Before I continue can everyone please check the page and give some feedback on the part I've rewritten? Hobbes 11:08, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

Great work as ever, Hobbes. Apart from the NPOV improvements, I wonder if the article needs more context at the start though. Or if it needs renaming. It's called a Beginner Guide to the (whole) game but seems to focusing on only one important aspect, how to pick upgrades. Spike 11:38, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

I agree, I think a Beginner's Guide should have more tips for overall game play, rather than focusing on Skill choices. I really like this page, I had already thought of something similar that expanded the text on the Classes page. I think it needs to be renamed and possibly we could move it individual pages for each class to better split up all this information. Hobbes 12:16, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

Maybe add in those overall tips. As it stands, this is more of intermediate article rather than a beginner article. It has a lot of analysis which sounds like disputation between experts. So if it's a true beginner article it needs to be simplified I think. Probably just rename it and keep it as it is. Spike 12:21, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

Meanwhile the original poster just placed again his personal opinion regarding Holo-Targeting, so I've clarified things (I hope) about what NPOV means. My only problem is the size of this article but I think it could be a great guide to help choosing abilities. Hobbes 13:38, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

Hey everyone, the original author here. Sorry about the NPOV, I have a hard time scrubbing it from my style when I am dealing with something I care about. a couple things though. 1. I wasn't really intending to make a begineers guide, I was making a guide that hopefully could be useful to anyone, the begineers guide just had a big red empty spot that I plopped this into. 2. Matters of opinion I try to be honest about, but alot of things are not opinions even if they might seem like it. For example, the bulletswarm vs. holotargetting. I went back and editted your changes hobbes, sorry, I also threw in the probability curve that I was too lazy to add the first time. Or at least a part of it. Showing why the choice is a false dichotomy. Bullet swarm is more likely in a given sequence to produce more hits, period, at least for all the series I ran. 3. I would love for people to chime in about the less mathematically oriented choice and have a divsification of playstyles. I am working on a team composition guide and a guide to the geoscape, but the geoscape especially is not my specialization, I am a tactics and optimization man, and hopefully y'all can throw in. Ps apologies if I stepped on some toes, I don't have any real wiki experience. -Sodiumazide

Hey, no problem :) I wasn't not questioning the math, although at the end of the stats part you wrote something like: it's highly unlikely that all 4 soldiers will shoot at the alien, which is correct, but IMO, in that case the stats that show that 5 soldiers firing at the same time have better odds than 4 don't really prove anything. The more gung-ho style of writing isn't really a problem (plenty of articles here are written in a more lighter tone) it's really that people will have different opinions. Bullet vs Holo is one example but I'm sure there are plenty more where the choices will be polarized, like Snap Shot vs Squad Sight, which is very good because then you can contrast arguments. To me the correct NPOV is to think 'explain how it works and give the same space to both arguments' (which is easier said than done). About the guide, as Spike said, right now this is an intermediate guide, which is great to have, although we needed something simpler - it could have suggestions for class builds or an initial strategy, but it should be definitely K.I.S.S.

Here's one example from this wiki for such a guide: Starting_Your_Shadowy_Paramilitary_Organization Hobbes 15:16, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

I was trying to explain why Holotargetting is a false choice and why bulletswarm will in similar circumstances perform better. The problem is that an extra roll of the die is worth more than a small bonus and that the heavy himself has more valuable hits on a given probability curve. So while giving space for both sides is certainly important, it is also important to distinguish where there is only one side, despite being two choices. --Sodiumazide 15:26, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

OK, thanks for explaining where the article came from. Maybe a good idea would be to do what we previously had for EU 1994, where there were multiple strategy guides. Multiple strategy guides gives space for more divergent points of view and means we can slightly relax NPOV on those articles where they are flagged as subjective. They also tend to be more advanced in their thinking and factual argument, like this one is - less Keep It Simple Stupid and more analytical.

So we could add a main page link called Strategy Guides and then make this article the first Strategy Guide listed. The current article is better described as a strategy guide than a beginner guide. So I would suggest

• add Strategy Guides link on the main page, beneath Beginner Guide
• rename this page to something else, perhaps Sodiumazide's Strategy Guide? - without any redirect from Beginner Guide
• create the Strategy Guides page with a link to this first Strategy Guide page

Does that make sense for everyone? Spike 17:49, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

I am cool with that. Probably better that way anyhoo. --Sodiumazide 21:41, 22 October 2012 (EDT)