Talk:Time Units
Question: Is the TU usage for urban and rural items different? I see entries about broken urban fences, or Urban Garden Beds, but nothing for the rural equivalents.
The TU Usage is based on each tile's MCD data. The Farm terrain doesn't have fences or garden beds. It does however have a wheat field, which is in the list.
--Danial 15:52, 28 December 2005 (PST)
EthC, on second thought I'm thinking the chance of cap+1 for secondaries, is one third. Basically, three things can happen:
Cap-2: Roll 2, final value = cap Cap-1: Roll 1, final value = cap Cap-1: Roll 2, final value = cap+1
No other values or rolls matter in this regard, AFAIK. We assume we have approached the cap randomly, IOW, a player can't try to play with the rolls and influence them - but that's easy because the secondary stat would've been something much lower as a rookie, would've gotten lots of varying rolls as it increased, and then is constrained to 0-2 in the final leg of its increases. (The same cannot be said for primary-stat rolls because a person can use the experience counts to try to "edge" to cap-1, then make 11 actions to try for a 2-6 roll. Secondary stats are immune to manipulation. Not counting hacking, of course.)
This is not something I could've modelled easily, because a rigorous test would've required edging a lot of soldiers up from some secondary-stat score low enough that it would have been "random" by the time they approached the cap. Then rinse and repeat thousands of times. IOW, tons of real-world time.
I can say with certainty that if you are at cap-1, you are uniformly likely to roll 0, 1, or 2. Thus cap-1 acheives cap+1, one-third of the time. (Ok, 32.762% of the time, N=15,920.) But this is only an affirmation that XCOM uses the usual "roll within a range" (here, 0-2), not a true statistical proof of what happens when you approach the cap. AKA, it's one thing to hack a savegame so that all secondaries are at cap-1, then reload that a ton of times... that's 30 seconds per data dump, times the number of soldiers in the savegame. But it's way more work to do actual, real combats through multiple combats - and do this dozens or hundreds of different times.
Then again, it could be simulated simply by doing a zillion 0-2 rolls (start from 0, have a cap of 100, repeat a million times)... hmm.
Your thoughts, or anyone else's?
---MikeTheRed 20:10, 17 May 2006 (PDT)
Well, here's how I figured it:
First, I believe you have about a 50/50 chance of landing at Cap-1 or Cap-2 on the way to the cap. (As I understand it, there's a forensic accounting rule that says Cap-2, being a lower number, will be very slightly favored.)
From there, here are the possibilities:
- Cap-2:
- 50% chance of Cap
- 25% chance of Cap-1 followed by Cap
- 25% chance of Cap-1 followed by Cap+1
- Cap-1:
- 50% chance of Cap
- 50% chance of Cap+1
Averaging the 25% chance at Cap-2 and 50% at Cap-1 gives you 37.5% chance of hitting Cap+1.
Then again, I might be wrong.
--Ethereal Cereal 21:47, 17 May 2006 (PDT)
Heh. Okay, I was wrong. I ran the simulation you suggested: with 50,000 iterations, the result was unambiguous: cap 66.698% of the time, cap+1 33.302%. I'm not sure what your N=15,920 refers to, but that's not right either.
Now that I think about it, the 50% chance of being at Cap-1 already includes the possibility of getting there via Cap-2.
--Ethereal Cereal 23:32, 17 May 2006 (PDT)
Thanks for nailing that down, good work! Now we know for sure. The individual Secondary Stat sections and the Experience page should all be updated to say one third.
Nevermind the N=15,920. That's just how many times I sampled XCOM behavior for what secondary stats do when at cap-1 and a primary action was performed (via savegame reloads). But that's not the same thing as this "ultimate chance" of winding up with cap+1.
For what it's worth, if you've got the code set up, it might be easy to confirm my other chance, for getting a primary stat to cap+5 (Experience#Regarding_Caps). It should come out to a 5% chance in the event that a player starts doing 11+ actions when they get near the cap; in other words, just set your re-roller to roll 2-6 (instead of 0-2), start at 0, cap at 100, and see how often you get 105. This simulates a person who always maxxes their primaries and is not "paying attention" to just where they are relative to the cap.
Another possibility is for players to manipulate their primary actions and be sure they get to cap-1 (you can edge forward by 0-1 points by doing just 1-2 primaries) and then do 11+ actions to get a 2-6 roll when at cap-1... this gives you a 20% chance of cap+5. Of course that would take incredible dedication (and attention!), more than hardly anybody cares about, including myself. Still, it's interesting to know.
Most players probably shoot for 11+ actions on each combat but don't always get them (once they're rich and doing experience training), so for everything but psi skill, cap+5 is probably pretty rare... especially considering that probably few folks play a given game long enough to max anything besides psi skill. (Anybody correct me if wrong! We probably have a few very hardcore players here on the wiki, hehe.)
Ethereal, let me take this opportunity to thank you for all the good work you've been doing around the wiki. Some of the pages I worked on, like Experience Training and Profitability, were sorely in need of organization. Otherwise you've been doing lots of appropriate or useful edits here and there, plus have found two mistakes of mine. (What, me make a mistake? Hehe.) Thanks for being here! Maybe I'll get back into XCOM and the wiki in a big way some time again. There are some things I really want to test more. But not right now. :P
I'll try to get to that CMs table in Experience if I get the chance.
---MikeTheRed 14:35, 18 May 2006 (PDT)
Yep, cap+5 occurs 5% of the time when you're doing 11 actions each combat. Which seems less likely to me to happen in real life than some crazy hardcore player who does inch up to cap-1 then shoots for +5.
Thanks for the thanks. I've had the most fun doing Destroying Terrain and Reaction fire triggers, both of which revealed new combat strategies to me as I was researching them. I'm about to finish a rewrite of Research and after that I want to make the Main Page point to all the best info on the site -- right now it makes the site look like it's barely more than a reprint of the UFOPaedia.
The way I see it, Psionics is the next juicy research project -- it'd be nice to finally discover the correct formulas. A bunch of disarmed Ethereals trapped in the Avenger should make it easy to figure out, I think... I might take a swing at that one.
I think the site is still lacking a really comprehensive tactical guide, and a good guide on what your first $20mil should be spent on. We still need Zombie's data on all alien stats at all settings, and the alien and item pages need a bit more standardization. Other than that, everything I would ever want is here (on UFO Defense, anyhow).
(This has basically become an open letter to all ufopaedia editors :-)
--Ethereal Cereal 17:57, 18 May 2006 (PDT)