Time Units

Time units (TUs) are one of several vital resources available to X-COM Soldiers.

A single game turn is an unspecified amount of time. There has been many arguments as to what duration of time this could be, but no one can agree on any given figure. It could be a minute, it could be 5 seconds. In any case, a game turn is merely the duration in which actions are taken by each side.

The Time Unit is a fraction of this time. If a soldier has a maximum of 64 Time Units, then each TU is worth 1/64th of a turn. A soldier with 80 TUs uses 1/80th of the turn for every TU spent. This means that Time Units are synonymous with speed.

Note that TUs are spent in two ways. In fixed amounts and in percentages.

Actions such as walking, turning, moving equipment around, reloading weapons, using medicine and a variety of other actions all cost the same amount of TUs no matter the soldier. Soldiers with high TUs benefit the most from fixed TU actions more than soldiers with low TUs. Make these your scouts.

Actions that cost a percentage, such as firing a gun or priming a grenade, will always take a percentage of the soldier's overall Time Units to perform. This means that the amount of TUs has no bearing on how many times the action can be performed during any given turn. For example, if a weapon costs 25% to fire, it can only be fired a maximum of 4 times a turn, for every soldier, regardless of the maximum amount of TUs. Give low-TU soldiers support fire roles.

Heavy encumbrance will lower a soldiers available TUs, but as stated above, they will still have no change to how many times they can fire weapons. The lower cap for the base stat is 50 but encumbrance can reduce TU below this.

Due to integer rounding, a solder autofiring heavy plasma (35% TU) will get 3 auto shots at some TU values but not others. Below 38 TU they will always get 3 shots.

An X-COM soldier's TUs caps at 80, but integer rounding can cause still cause a soldier to receive a maximum of 81. Officially, it's 80. Older versions of X-COM did not have this cap and stats would reach 255 and then return to 0.

What is not apparent is that Time Units heavily influences a unit's Reactions. See Reactions for more information.

See also: Inventory TU Table