X-com For Dummies

[ALF]

X-COM has a lot of unknowns compared to other turn-based tactics games. I'm starting to get the hang of kicking alien donkey, but hopefully you guys can answer some questions.

 

I know kneeling provides an accuracy bonus, but I've also been playing under the assumption that it makes your guys more difficult to hit. I'm starting to suspect that's not the case. Does kneeling make soldiers more difficult targets? What about terrain features like tall grass or fences? Is there anything you can do to reduce the aliens' accuracy, short of staying out of LOS?

 

Secondly, how many missions can I expect to go on by the time the game's finished? Not that I'm eager for X-COM to end, but sometimes video games end just as you're getting into them, or drag on when you expect the last boss to be around the next corner. A ballpark figure would help put things in perspective.

[Lonevoinian]

1. As far as I know, kneeling does decrease the alien's accuracy. In the OSG it says something about taking the firing % for weapons and doing something to it involving a height number for the aliens or your guys. That way, you don't have a 73% chance to hit both a Reaper and a Sectoid.

 

2. There's no real limit. Some people claim to have finished in May or earlier, Zombie, AKA Offical Finder of Cool Statistics, has gone to 2007 or later. Generally, i find that, if you research constantly and at least TRY to capture some Alien commanders, it takes somewhere around or a little under I year. The last game I played I could have ended in late October/early November 1999 if I wanted to, but I trained my troops into early 2000 to make the last mission easier.

 

I really don't know the number of missions, as I've never had a rookie survive all the missions from the first to the last to count it. It's a least a couple of hundred though.

[[NKF]]

1. Let's put it this way, it doesn't decrease the base accuracy chance of the aliens. However, it does make a smaller target, and what with bullet drift causing accurate shots to veer off course, a small target is harder to hit than a bigger one.

 

Terrain features would indeed block incoming fire if the bullets bump into them. Speaking of kneeling, it also changes your own point of view somewhat, so that an alien you can see across a fence will sometimes not be visible (i.e. targetable or show up as a visibile target) should you kneel behind it.

 

2. The final mission is launched any time you want the moment you get access to it. Basically, whether or not you head to the final mission is entirely up to you. You can procrastinate as long as you wish given you don't do so bad that you get shut down.

 

I imagine you could go up to 65535 missions (or half that value) before the game decides to go back to 1.

 

- NKF

[Blood Angel]

Why's that? Is it like the bug in the original Laser Squad which caused the APs to go to 250-something if you loaded them up with heavy lasers, clips, and then threw a body at them.

[[NKF]]

It's not a bug. It's just the way computers handle data.

 

It has to do with bit and bytes, and bits falling off the end. Depending on the size of the data type storing the information, you can only hold so many values. And if you try to go over that limit, the computer will try to conform to it, but it will lose the higher value because it has nowhere to keep it.

 

One of the more common and smallest data type used is the byte, or one character. It's made up of eight bits. A bit is a binary value, which means it holds one of two possible values. True/false, yes/no, on/off - whatever. In computers it's mainly 0's and 1's. Now, as I said, a byte is made up of 8 bits.

 

In binary, numbers are expressed like so

 

1 = 1

2 = 10

3 = 11

4 = 100

5 = 101

6 = 110

7 = 111

8 = 1000

 

See the pattern? With eight bits, 1111 1111 equals 255, counting 0, that's 256 unique values.

 

Now say we're at 255 and we add one. We should get 1 0000 0000, right? A byte can only hold 8 of these, so it loses the leading 1. In effect, we end back at 0, as 0000 0000 is 0!

 

In UFO, it uses a 16-bit value to store the mission counter. So with 16-bits, we can have up to 65536 unique mission numbers. Go beyond that and we go back to the beginning because we've lost the high bit.

 

You can see this in action if you open up MS-Calculator and switch on the scientific mode. The modes, hex, dec, oct and bin allow you to switch between base 16, 10, 8 and 2. 2 is binary, 10 is decimal - the numbers we're mostly familiar with, and base 16 is hexadecimal. The byte, word, dword and qword options on the side (when you're in base 16, 8 or 2) allow you to switch between 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits.

 

Go to binary and and enter 'word' mode. Enter eight 1's. You can switch to any of the other modes to see what value it is in that base. Eight 1's will give you 255 if you look at it in decimal. Back in binary, add a 10 and see what happens. It should give you 1 0000 0001. that's what it should be. But now switch to the byte mode and watch the leading 1 get chopped off. All we'll be left with is a 1.

 

- NKF

[Blood Angel]

I see[/shamelessbullshit]

 

post by Astyanax (added by J'ordos): To reduce aliens' accuracy, you could try using smoke. As I understand it, the liberal use of smoke grenades is virtually essential in Superhuman difficulty levels... but that's only from heresay on these boards.

 

I think that being at a higher elevation than the aliens can help (especially once you get flying suits), but I could be wrong on this one. I do know that being airborne really helps against grenades, though.

Edited August 8, 2005 by j'ordos