User talk:NKF

NKF:Talk

Welcome to NKF Talk. Pardon the mess.

The NKF-Centric TO-DO-List of Doom

• "X-Com Apocalypse Starter's Guide" - kind of there. Kind of not there.

Total Randomness

UFO Base Kit

The UBK is a transclusion template I created so that you could plug base layouts into your articles and discussions. Go see the template and its documentation at Template:UBK to see how to use it.

Stats Card (complete)

Well, it has been ages since I thought about making a stat cheat sheet, and not knowing how to organize it without making it overly confusing has kept me behind. But with all the wonderful stuff that came with the recent Mediawiki software updates, and getting some ideas from Madned's infobox templates followed by a crash course in understanding named parameters over the last few days, it's there. Kind of. Check it out on the Lobsterman page.

It's not the fancy GI-Joe style action figure dossiers that I envisaged below, but I guess it's sufficiently functional. Of course, as with the nature of wikis, it needs to be perpetually improved!

One future plan is to create a separate infobox style template to create multiple-column rank/difficulty combination data tables. -NKF 03:46, 13 January 2011 (EST)

Lobsterman
Time Units 56-112 Energy 90-148 Health 90-125 Bravery 80-90 Reactions 60-108 Firing Accuracy 21-87 Throwing Accuracy 62 Strength 70-86	M.C. Strength 35-62 M.C. Skill 0 Melee Accuracy 78-115   Front Armor 8-26 L/R Armor 8-26 Rear Armor 6-21 Under Armor 4-14
This is a staggering creature, taller than a man and boasting six limbs, it resembles nothing more than an aquatic Demon. The similarities between this creature and the Earth lobster have earned it the nickname of Lobsterman with the X-Com troops. This is a behemoth of the deep. A carefully designed fighting creature of incredible strength and practically invulnerable to missile fire. Its pincers alone can crush steel.
Autopsy Once past its virtually indestructible shell the creature is an amazing construction. Powerful muscles ripple around a titanium skeleton, a sophisticated targeting system with multi-band scanning ability is hooked directly into the creature's brain. Its multiple eyes are protected by harder than steel plastics and it is clear that when well deployed by their masters these creatures are all but unstoppable. Buried deep in its body are devices of unknown construction and function.

Clean up

Wiped old discussion for brevity. Cleanup of the vandalism of the Russian pages has been resolved for the moment. Will keep a watchful eye out for further abuse of the the wiki. Thank you. -NKF 07:17, 26 October 2010 (BST)

Test of Gallery markup

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  Yes, this is a caption

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Now with adjustments

• Icons
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  Oo-fow

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  Tee-eff-tee-dee

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  Ah-pock

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  Yoo-eff-ow

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  Tiftid

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  Ay-pock

Note to self: The new wiki software is really case sensitive these days! A good thing in one respect.

Spam

I'd recommend adding the following extensions to the wiki's installation, if you can get hold of the person who runs the wiki:

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam#IP_address_blacklists

And blocking open proxies: set $wgEnableSorbs = true; in your LocalSettings.php

While we're at it, it would be really nice to add http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SphinxSearch since the default Mediawiki search engine sucks.--Ethereal Cereal 02:06, 29 January 2011 (EST)

Agreed, I'll pass those along. Pete's going to add a QA section in the signup page as well, so hopefully we'll be able to clamp down on them soon. -NKF 03:28, 29 January 2011 (EST)

Smoke Grenades

IMO they're only useful turn 1. And even that goes out the window if you have a tank. A tank is worth it in the early game, if only because it draws alien Plasma Pistol fire away from your squishy unarmoured dudes. Later on, though, when you have armour and the aliens switch to Heavy Plasma, tanks become less useful and you can bring out the Smoke Grenades. Magic9mushroom (talk) 00:02, 22 August 2014 (EDT)

Like the tank (or 4 rookies, for the budget conscious), the smoke grenade is just another tool at your disposal that you can use depending on how you like to play. The smoke grenade is certainly most useful for the initial deployment, but that's not so say that is the only time you can take advantage of it. I know I've had many occasions where I managed to save a bunch of soldiers that were stuck out in the open in full view of some aliens by throwing a smoke grenade between them. The Smoke Grenade page has some scenarios listed. NKF (talk) 03:26, 22 August 2014 (EDT)

Four rookies die to four plasma pistol shots or one alien grenade. A tank can take either and keep trucking. It's also faster.

I guess Smoke Grenades are okay if they're pre-primed and kept on the shoulder straps. Otherwise there's too big a TU cost to use opportunistically. Turn 1, on the other hand, you're not doing anything anyway because of all the full-TU aliens.

At least we can agree that Dye Grenades are terrible! Magic9mushroom (talk) 05:59, 22 August 2014 (EDT)

I'd take the tank myself as it has plenty of merits, and the later Plasma Hovertank/Sonic Displacer are superb. However those that prefer 4 rookies do argue that they are cheaper, can spread out, carry more weaponry and still take the 4 (or more) shots to dispose of. Those that live through can go onto greater things. The tank just needs one bad roll of the die and it ends up a very expensive afterthought. Bit of a RTS peon pumper meat grinder mentality going on here methinks.

Grenades are in the same boat as the smoke grenade and do cost a lot to use. That's probably why they are best relegated to the support units that back up those on the front. Then again, front-line units carrying pre-armed grenades are handy for ninja-style retreats. NKF (talk) 16:21, 22 August 2014 (EDT)

Well, like I said, the main advantage of the tank is against aliens with Plasma Pistols at the very start of the game. A tank's front plate is guaranteed to survive at least 7 Plasma Pistol shots even if they all roll absolute max (which they won't), so you can park it on the opposite side of a UFO hatch to your firing line, close in, and draw fire from the aliens coming out until they use too many TUs and get reaction-fired to death (since on Superhuman, alien Reactions are usually high enough for them to avoid taking reaction-fire from stepping out of the hatch alone). In addition, you don't lose a huge amount of firepower by going with a tank right at the start since its cannon does twice the damage of Rifles. Once you've got lasers, the tank starts to hurt your firepower significantly, and once you've got decent armour and the aliens start using heavier weapons the defensive qualities of the tracked tanks go down the drain.

HWPs do have something of a renaissance later on when you get Avengers and are running into the 80-item limit, since a hovertank, while not reaching anywhere near the firepower of four Heavy-Plasma-equipped soldiers, does have more firepower than four soldiers without guns. Hovertanks/Launcher also don't count their ammo against said limit.

In TFTD it's a whole different kettle of fish thanks to the existence of Tentaculats and the lower fire rate of Sonic weaponry. Displacers/Sonic are absolutely essential due to their ability to lure Tentaculats - taking Artefact Sites without them is almost impossible thanks to That Goddamned Room. There's also the lower clip sizes making the 80-item limit an even bigger problem.

A pre-loaded Small Launcher does a lot of the same stuff a pre-armed Grenade does, and has the upside of taking the "suicide" out of "suicide bomb". There are a lot of ways to use those things. Magic9mushroom (talk) 21:49, 22 August 2014 (EDT)

Small Launchers are certainly quite handy beyond just capturing key aliens, and the Thermal Shok Launcher in TFTD is scary indeed. But they have their own share of drawbacks as well. Deciding which to use to get the best result for the task at hand is all part of the fun I guess. NKF (talk) 03:18, 25 August 2014 (EDT)