Talk:UFO Recovery Values
God God Ethereal, you've done it again!
These are real good, hard numbers. They can be compared against Profitability and Country Funding (once it's copied in) to make comparisons over time. ("An early operation can expect to get x mil/month from country funding, y mil/month from recovery, and little or none from manufacturing. A mature operation might make ... yada yada yada")
I would give a higher estimate than 180k recovery per alien, once they've progressed to heavy plasmas. In my experience, the majority have HPs, a few have Blasters, and one or two have a Stun Bomb. (I wonder if certain types of aliens, such as navigators, carry certain types of weapons? hmm.) In other words, the average is likely to be higher than 205k, not lower, IME. Once they're carrying HPs.
I see you got wiki tables to work ok. I never could figure them out in a way that I liked. I still prefer text tables; they're more compact. Anyway, good for you... I'll probably peek at what you did, and might try it. Do you run your tables through a "wiki table maker" somewhere? Most of my stuff is in Excel before I post it to the wiki, if that matters.
I wonder where they (Danial?) got the counts for Alien Deployment on UFOs... from the OSG? (I don't have an OSG.) I'd be interested in a similar count/recovery estimate for bases. So I know how they compare to UFO raids. And how much they're worth it (or not) to make "milking" raids, just to recover stuff.
---MikeTheRed 22:23, 22 May 2006 (PDT)
I chose 180k to take into account the difficulty of unloading all clips and the likelihood that the aliens are going to get off at least some shots. It also somewhat reflects the lower values you'll see at the beginning of the game (Mind Probes notwithstanding). Call it a slightly conservative estimate.
Yeah, wiki tables are kind of a pain, but if you're doing lots of similar tables, they're much easier to use once you get the basic formatting set up. The big thing for me is the spacing -- by default, there's not enough padding between columns (they're too compact) which is why I use the "width" tag. It's all hand-coded, and I might've made an error here or there.
I wonder where the deployment #s come from too, but they're great to have. I think I've seen slightly different numbers on occasion, but they seem mostly correct.
I'm kinda surprised no one's OCR'ed the OSG yet, copyright violation notwithstanding.
--Ethereal Cereal 23:36, 22 May 2006 (PDT)
I have yet to get an OSG... in some ways it's helped that I don't have one; there were a few points where I didn't assume things that e.g. Zombie had seen in the OSG, which led to new insights. I can't recall any clear cases of the OSG being majorly wrong though (i.e., not counting a few typos). Some stuff on the wiki also originally came from Chang's USG, but it's known to have quite a few typos, esp. for alien stats. Good point about OCRing, but it would require work on somebody's part, shrug.
That's fine for the prices. Dealer's choice. I would've assumed only a few would get off a shot, maybe 3 of 10, for an average of, eh, 1.7 clips and 0.9 AGs, shrug. But this is for later combats (all HP, with serious MC ability). Maybe break out early combats from late ones?? Your choice... the page is a bit long already, and it's easy for me to ask you to do more work, laugh.
---MikeTheRed 11:36, 23 May 2006 (PDT)
While on the subject of item recovery, I thought I'd mention elerium recovery (or more to the point, multiplication of existing elerium rather than actually recovering any) for base defence missions. It's at least worth a footnote.
If I'm not mistaken, earlier versions of UFO (pre 1.4), elerium pods, if you had any elerium and if you had the room in the item table for them to spawn, would appear in battle. 1 pod per unit of elerium that is spawned in battle. If you win the mission and these elerium pods are saved, each elerium pod will be multiplied by 50 - as per the normal rules of elerium recovery. So if you had 10 appear in battle, for example, you'll leave it with 500.
If I'm not mistaken, this is no longer possible in v1.4, but still worth further investigation for completeness sake.
- NKF
From my personal experience the number of aliens on a given mission don't seem to vary much (except for the possible exception of terror units).
(all examples from beginner) For example a medium scout will ALWAYS have 3, a large scout 6 an abductor 10 etc. It is possible to encounter multiple ethereal leaders on a large scout, since the game replaces the 'specialists' with leaders when that 'rank' is not available. I've noticed that it's the engineers that tend to get stun launchers and leaders/commanders that get armed with blaster launchers. A large scout on a retal mission will have 3 mind probes, that's nearly a million dollars. The leader on an Abductor seems to be armed with two plasma pistols and a plasma rifle clip?? this means they will NEVER shoot at you. Sectoid Leaders will mind control/panic you however.
On Veteran a medium scout has 4 crew, I presume this is also consistant for that difficulty level.
By the way, does anyone know of something that will fix the difficulty level bug WITHOUT changing other parts of X-Com? Please drop a line on my talk page if you do. Thanks :)
--Hot Logic 21:41, 7 November 2006 (PST)
Exactly what version and with what utilities are you playing?
Even restricted to missions without exploded power plants, I see a lot more variability. E.g. (Superhaman, Windows CE/XcomUtil), I have seen everything from 0 to 3 mind probes on a Large Scout. [Same mission, because I was trying to get a maximum live alien count.]
--Zaimoni 12:38 PM, 8 November 2006 (CST)
Ammunition issue
"You will only recover ammunition clips if they have not been used." That is wrong. You will lose that clip even if you haven't fired it. The rule is this:
- Clip in weapon: you lose it.
- Clip not used: you keep it.
- Clip used but unloaded: you keep it as if you haven't used it (i.e. full capacity).
This info is based on the USG and personal observation (if I didn't unload clips during battle, I end up with about 12 Heavy Plasmas and 5 clips in salvage. There goes the Elerium...) but I think that the Exploits page also says this.
- If memory serves me correctly, the different versions of the game out there may handle clip recovery differently. At the very least a comparison between v1.0 and 1.4/1.4ce (all without X-Comutil - that features a workaround), Amiga and Playstation versions should be taken into consideration. - NKF 16:31, 30 August 2008 (PDT)