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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Help! Hp Ammo Gone In Base Defense!


Torgen

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I had my first base defense, and thanks to an early sectoid navigator capture, had hyperwave decoder so knew it was coming. I took all my soldiers off the Skyranger, and my heavy weapons. When the base defense started, I assigned weapons as normal, but when the fight started, NONE of my heavy plasmas had any ammo! OMFG

 

I was reduced to using one rocket launcher and a HWP rocket tank, then running guys up to the dead sectoids to scavenge clips and HPs. That lasted all of about three turns, when a blaster bomb came into the lift, killing three guys and four more guys when it took out the two storerooms down the hall!

 

I gave up at that point, and now am going to have to start over from a saved game two hours back.

 

What the heck happened??? Between the stock I emptied on the Skyranger and what was in storage, I had something like 35 HPs and 75 clips.

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I had my first base defense, and thanks to an early sectoid navigator capture, had hyperwave decoder so knew it was coming. I took all my soldiers off the Skyranger, and my heavy weapons. When the base defense started, I assigned weapons as normal, but when the fight started, NONE of my heavy plasmas had any ammo! OMFG

 

I was reduced to using one rocket launcher and a HWP rocket tank, then running guys up to the dead sectoids to scavenge clips and HPs. That lasted all of about three turns, when a blaster bomb came into the lift, killing three guys and four more guys when it took out the two storerooms down the hall!

 

I gave up at that point, and now am going to have to start over from a saved game two hours back.

 

What the heck happened??? Between the stock I emptied on the Skyranger and what was in storage, I had something like 35 HPs and 75 clips.

You were victim of the infamous 80 items limit applied to tactical missions. Only way around is doing tight housekeeping by selling unused items (you can also keep some laser rifles in you base). If you know an attack is on the way, you can also transfer some stuff to another base to make sure the 80 items left in your base are weapons and clips.

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Yeah, get rid of those 100+ heavy plasmas. Nothing clogs down the base like heavy plasmas. And alloys - but they don't show up in the battle so don't count.

 

You don't have to unload your troops or equipment from the Skyranger - they get added to your stores if they're not out on a mission. So keep that in mind when you spring clean your stores.

 

Laser rifles are good to keep at the base since they're mid-way up on the equipment list. By the time you're using heavy plasmas, you probably won't be keeping very many of your starting equipment, with a few exceptions like the Rocket Launcher. So if the base gets attacked and you didn't have a chance to clean out your stores, the likeliness of lasers appearing for use are pretty good.

 

- NKF

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You don't have to unload your troops or equipment from the Skyranger - they get added to your stores if they're not out on a mission. So keep that in mind when you spring clean your stores.

 

Apparently you have to for tanks. In my penultimate game I had two tanks, one loaded, got attacked and only the unloaded showed, I had a save right before, so I reloaded to see if unloading the second helped and then it showed too in battle

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  • 5 months later...
This limitations (80 items) should be definitively lifted in case of base attacks. I see it as very annoying that I can't have large enought store of munnitions and weapons. Having 60 flares, for example, leave my guys with grenades only. And grenades are painfully inefficient against Mutons... for example.
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  • 1 year later...
This limitations (80 items) should be definitively lifted in case of base attacks. I see it as very annoying that I can't have large enought store of munnitions and weapons. Having 60 flares, for example, leave my guys with grenades only. And grenades are painfully inefficient against Mutons... for example.

 

Agreed. There is a way.

 

XCOMUTIL can modify a battlescape save on turn 0 and outfit your squad with a set kit. It's a bit complex to make work, but it allows you to work around the need to "spring clean" all the time and can be used to get around the 80 item limit.

 

EQP:n = Equip the current squad of soldiers/aquanauts from base n according to
the equipment type specified at the end of each name.  Since equipment
is taken from the base and not the ship, use of this flag eliminates the
80-item limit during combat.

 

Steps. (Don't do this in dosbox. Works with Windows versions for this purpose)

 

1. Install XCOMUTIL. Annoyingling it won't run until XCUSETUP.bat is run.

2. Create a file called XCOMUTIL.EQP in your xcom folder with the following text. This assumes you have enough Heavy Plasma's to go around. See XCOMUTIL docs for more options.

/
RH1:Heavy_Plasma:Heavy_Plasma_Clip
RS1:High_Explosive
LS1:Alien_Grenade

3. Save your game as soon as the base battle starts, for this example I saved in slot 10 (which I reserve for this use). Don't do anything else and don't end turn. You get one chance at this!

4. run XCOMUTIL.EXE EQP WRT GAME_10

6. Load the game and your people should be outfit how you like.

 

If you use the dosbox version of the game, you can make this a seemless part of the game.

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Steps. (Don't do this in dosbox. Works with Windows versions for this purpose)

 

1. Install XCOMUTIL. Annoyingling it won't run until XCUSETUP.bat is run.

2. Create a file called XCOMUTIL.EQP in your xcom folder with the following text. This assumes you have enough Heavy Plasma's to go around. See XCOMUTIL docs for more options.

/
RH1:Heavy_Plasma:Heavy_Plasma_Clip
RS1:High_Explosive
LS1:Alien_Grenade

3. Save your game as soon as the base battle starts, for this example I saved in slot 10 (which I reserve for this use). Don't do anything else and don't end turn. You get one chance at this!

4. run XCOMUTIL.EXE EQP WRT GAME_10

6. Load the game and your people should be outfit how you like.

 

If you use the dosbox version of the game, you can make this a seemless part of the game.

 

???? What do you do for dosbox?

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I haven't looked into the technicalities of it all, but I imagine you just modify the game's batch file and insert the appropriate XComutil line in between when the game switches over to the tactical portion to do all this for you. I think you'd have to make it modify the MISDAT files as opposed to the files in the save slots.

 

That can actually work with the windows edition as well if you've used a utility like XComutil or Bomb Bloke's EXE splitter and are running the game with a batch file.

 

- NKF

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Unfortunately, I have never used xcomutil, so I guess I need to read up on that. I don't understand the difference between using xcomutil with dosbox vs. windows. I was hoping there would be a way to just patch a file (as you showed me how to do to fix the difficulty level bug) but I guess not.

 

I guess I could copy my xcom file tree to another location and experiment on that using xcomutil. But would I have to wait for an alien attack on a base to see if it worked?

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It's always a good idea to have two copies of the game if you're planning to experiment with XComutil. Always nice to have a plain vanilla game to return to after a while.

 

I've never used the auto equip feature myself, but I believe you can test it out on ordinary missions as well. Read the documentation for it at the very least.

 

Because of the way its designed, there are actually various ways you can make use XComutil, such as getting it to work with an unmodified game and only use it in the game's batch file to do a few light alterations to the savegames/game in progress between the Geoscape/Battlescape segments.

 

 

- NKF

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I've never used the auto equip feature myself, but I believe you can test it out on ordinary missions as well. Read the documentation for it at the very least.

 

- NKF

 

But this is a unique problem with base defense. In ordinary missions, you explicitly control which 80 items (or fewer) you want. The results with base defense can be very different because of the much larger inventory.

 

However, it would not hurt to get a little testing done with UFO missions, to get some kind of feel for xcomutil.

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It might be possible to just test it by loading the Skyranger with 80 flares or so and see if the equip function works. ;) Again, not being familiar with that feature of it, I can't guarantee the results.

 

Beyond that, good old spring cleaning is generally the way to go. See:

 

http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=S...g_Cleaning_Tips

 

I think that article doesn't touch on equipment precedence, but that's one thing to consider as well. Items that are most likely to appear before others such as basic weapons like autocannons being generated before lasers.

 

edit:

 

Now that I think about it, that's actually very important. I'll note that as one of the improvements that should be done for that article.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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Thanks.

 

Speaking of equipping, how many smoke grenades do you carry? In an Avenger with 2 HWPs and 18 soldiers, 36 for heavy plasmas + clips doesn't leave a lot for psi amps, medi kits, regular grenades, smoke grenades, blaster bomb launchers + ammo, electro flares. Let alone 26 soldiers with 52 for heavy plasma + clips.

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Smoke grenades? How many you need depends on how you play. For me, up to two. One for deployment the other for use in the field - if necessary.

 

With an Avenger, if you're going for a max crew, you probably want to reduce your heavy plasma requirements or restrict them to a few really good snipers. Fit the rest with laser rifles. That gives you a bit more room to add other items like grenades in. There are plenty of heavy plasmas you can pick up during the battle if you need to upgrade your firepower.

 

Other things I normally do to keep the item count down is to share medikits between several soldiers. With flares, about 4 or so - heavily reused.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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Thanks. I haven't been using laser weapons at all unless the hyperwave decoder indicates an ethereal terror crew (sectopods). I never even researched plasma pistols/rifles either.

 

Another question about smoke grenades. I have 2 HWPs. I want to put them in the hands of soldiers directly behind the HWPs, but from the equip screens it's not clear where the game will put each soldier. It may be the same configuration from one mission to the next, but not necessarily if one gets wounded or is taken out because of psi weakness.

 

How do you figure out who is behind the tanks on the first move?

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Laser rifles don't have high maximum damage, but they work against anything and their speed is good for reaction fire training.

 

With the Skyranger, it was quite easy. It zig zagged like the following:

 

1, 2

3, 4

5, 6

7, 8

9, 10

..

..

 

Soldiers are put into the slots in the same order as they appear on the soldier roster. So the soldier in the topmost position in the list is at 1, the next in 2, and so forth. If you put a tank in, slots 1 through 4 are used up and the first soldier in the list is pushed back to slot 5, the second to 6 and so on. So the first two soldiers on the ship are the ones that are immediately behind the tank.

 

For the Avenger, the ordering is roughly the same as the Skyranger, at least as far as the central column of soldiers are concerned. So the first two soldiers are the best ones to arm with smoke grenades.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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???? What do you do for dosbox?

 

Just read the XCOMUTIL docs and set up autoequip. I ran it for a while. It was handy once I got all the equipment researched and whatnot. It also bypasses the 80 item limit so a fully skyranger can still carry HP + grenades and whatnot that makes sense. I consider the 80 item limit to be a bug of sorts. The problem with autoequip is when you want to take a special kit for a particular mission. You have to edit names and create entries in the EQP file.

 

You can name your people you want to have the smoke grenades /smoke and set the autoequip up for that. Then you can use the sort function to put /smoke in near the door. XCOMUTIL is complex but it can really do a lot of neat stuff if you dig and experiment.

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[it also bypasses the 80 item limit so a fully skyranger can still carry HP + grenades and whatnot that makes sense. I consider the 80 item limit to be a bug of sorts.

 

Thanks. One thought I had was that there was an actual memory problem the programmers were solving in a DOS environment, and that if I changed the limit to, say, 120, the game might crash under certain conditions. Were you running the DOS or Windows version of xcom?

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It's like in the early days of computing where they thought that 640k conventional memory was more than anyone would ever need. :)

 

The item limit is more an underestimation by the programmers as to what players would want to bring in. I think it's partly their fault for putting so many seats on the ships in the first place. They did expand it in TFTD, but kept the ship limit to 80 items.

 

I think the problem with bringing more equipment than 80 in is that it will start eating into the aliens' equipment allotment. Some aliens may start the mission without any weapons.

 

- NKF

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