One shot aliens

[Axiddy]

I started playing and then I realize that the aliens (almost) always one shot my guys (Even on my turn) am I missing something?

[Hermitifier]

You don't realize how powerful alien weapons are compared to conventional ones. Additionally, at the beginning you don't have any armour for your soldiers. This makes a wounded soldier a rarity, unlike later game.

[Bob of Mage]

In this game do not expect your troops to last very long if they take fire. Even with the best armour they can still be badly hurt if the RNG hates you. The best tactic is to never end your turn in the aliens' line of sight if you can help it, and always try to have TUs on some of your units for reaction fire.

Even then expect a high turnover rate for your frontline troops. It's cheap to replace them so get as many as you can, and only worry about losses if it threatens to cost you a mission. Nothing wrong with the Skyranger returning with 3 out of 14 seats filled (so somthing like an 80% deathrate). You can easily get enough points shooting down UFOs, so the main point of most ground missions is just loot.

[Tetsuri]

that's only in early game. You should expect 95% return rate if you train your troops and play well(after unlocking certain tech)

[ojpete]

By default, all weapons have a damage range of between 0 - 200 %, you're going to have a high turnover rate until you develop armor of some kind and equip med kits to your soldiers. Even then, personal armor provides decent protection against plasma pistols, while the best armors provide decent protection against plasma rifles and pistols. You'll still get one shot by heavy plasma a lot. Use smoke grenades and cover as much as you can, reserve time units every turn more so you have time to move into cover if you find an alien than relying on reaction fire. Use of explosives is highly suggested, except when facing psionic aliens.

[Ohio9]

Originally posted by Boopis:

I started playing and then I realize that the aliens (almost) always one shot my guys (Even on my turn) am I missing something?

Nope, that is normal. No armor means you die with one hit 95% of the time. Personal Armor drops it down to about 70%-80%. The best you can do is Flight Suits and even then enemy shots will kill with one hit roughly 50-60% of the time. You basically have to assume most of the time you take on hit your guys will die.

[Tetsuri]

I pretty much only build flying, personal armor is a waste of rez and time with pretty much the same death rate

[Ohio9]

Originally posted by packor:

I pretty much only build flying, personal armor is a waste of rez and time with pretty much the same death rate

Personal armor is better then nothing. Before the enemies start using heavy plasma, you have roughly a 30% chance of surviving their hits with it.

Also you have to take into account new players who don't know what to research in order to get power or flight suits. On your first playthrough, personal armor might be your only armor for a very long time.

[Tetsuri]

30% is an overexaggeration. You are wearing paper and you have disposable troops. Troops that aren't worth anything if you need to depend on personal armor to try to save them. Troops that are rendered useless for days even if they survive. Giving useless troops 10% more chance to survive at the expense of resources is not worth. + their chance to survive is just as high if they're not wearing anything. I don't even carry medkits at this point.

What would save your troops is high reactions, high TU, and accuracy; if your soldiers had enough stats for you to want to put personal armor on them, they probably don't need it.

To make matters worse,personal armor isn't worth ^*+=, but flying tech is. You can't do anything if you don't even have a firestorm except pray you get lucky. So flying armor as a research block isn't even an issue because you're gonna have a tough time by having no flyers; and all the prereq for X-COM craft also unlocks flying armor. For nubs and vets, personal armor is a trap.

[Ohio9]

Originally posted by packor:

30% is an overexaggeration. You are wearing paper and you have disposable troops. Troops that aren't worth anything if you need to depend on personal armor to try to save them. Troops that are rendered useless for days even if they survive. Giving useless troops 10% more chance to survive at the expense of resources is not worth. + their chance to survive is just as high if they're not wearing anything. I don't even carry medkits at this point.

What would save your troops is high reactions, high TU, and accuracy; if your soldiers had enough stats for you to want to put personal armor on them, they probably don't need it.

To make matters worse,personal armor isn't worth ^*+=, but flying tech is. You can't do anything if you don't even have a firestorm except pray you get lucky. So flying armor as a research block isn't even an issue because you're gonna have a tough time by having no flyers; and all the prereq for X-COM craft also unlocks flying armor. For nubs and vets, personal armor is a trap.

30% before heavy plasma may be inexact, but it's not an exageration. I played a large chunk of the game with personal armor only, so I got plenty of experience seeing what it did and didn't do. Yes most hits will still kill you, but it works enough to not be considered useless, especially since it costs almost nothing to build. Just 4 alien alloys, which are plentiful even in early game. There's just no reason not to use if that's the only thing you have.

You can't do anything without a firestorm? Where did you get that idea? With plasma beams, your interceptors can shoot down anything except battleships. I was still using some interceptors at the end of the game to save elerium. I only used firestorms in certain situations such as fighting battleships or when speed was essential.

[Tetsuri]

LOL, the only thing interceptors are capable of is chasing small craft. If you need to save resources in this game, you're not playing it well. It's probably because you got rid of all your alien bases. You should be controlling the entire map with your craft, so you don't have any infiltrations or terror missions. This is probably why you argue with me on Chryssalids, because you have to fight against them in terror missions left and right and raid their bases, and you also probably raid their battleships too, which is also completely unnecessary.

I reckon you also are low in resources, which is why you don't have flying armor by the time you get Snakes.

Firestorms' primary purpose is SPEED. If you don't have full hyperwave decoder coverage on the map, Firestorms help you chase UFO's to their landing zone and they help repell unwanted missions.

You're losing out a lot because you aren't using them. And you can't use them because you aren't efficiently farming elerium. At the end of the game, because I like to drag it out for so long training near perfect soldiers, I can field full bases(3 each) of avengers; and it's not even necessary, I just do it because I can.

Really? 4 alien alloys? 26k worth of alloys and 22k labor cost. A soldier costs 40k to purchase, at 10% more chance to survive for over double the cost. Go buy moar disposable soldiers and stop wasting resources.

[Hermitifier]

For unarmoured rookies shot with Plasma Pistol, death rate is 50%-72%, depending on shot location and starting stats. For Personal Armour that drops to 14%-48%. That's much more than just 10% improvement in survivability, rather 24-36 percentage points depending on location. It also significantly improves chance to come out unharmed. Additional cost is not that big once you start screening your recruits and sacking whoever doesn't match your criteria. I immediately sack 90% of soldiers.

Even Heavy Plasma has only between 61% and 77% to kill a Personal Armour wearing rookie in one shot. Once you have veterans in Power Suits, and aliens have Heavy Plasma, it's 30%-44%. With Flying suit it improves further 4 percentage points.

You might manage to intercept and shoot down a Terror Ship with elerium fuelled craft, but nothing will stop infiltration missions. They will happen and there's nothing you can do about it. The same applies to Alien Bases. You can't prevent them from appearing.

[Tetsuri]

First of all, Idk where you got those numbers from, but they're wrong. You can only have one percentage of death rate, so you must be pulling it out of the air. Unless you meant that percentage from back to front armor. Even if you were, you must not be using a real percentage, because if you went out and just go get shot by aliens, you'd get a significantly different percentage.

Secondly, it's not worth screening or keeping early game soldiers because you don't even know their psi strength. You are just throwing cash away when it's most important, when you need to be spending that cash on growing your money.

And you're deadwrong about being unable to stop missions. When you shoot down the initial SCOUTS in the SCOUTING PHASE, the entire mission is scrapped. Also, you DON'T want to cancel base missions because you WANT them to build their base.

[Hermitifier]

Originally posted by packor:

First of all, Idk where you got those numbers from, but they're wrong. You can only have one percentage of death rate, so you must be pulling it out of the air. Unless you meant that percentage from back to front armor. Even if you were, you must not be using a real percentage, because if you went out and just go get shot by aliens, you'd get a significantly different percentage.

Rookies have between 25 and 40 Health. Armour soaks 30/40/50 damage. Best case rookie can sustain 89 damage, worst case 54. Plasma Pistol deals anywhere between 0 and 104 damage. This gives you 52%-86% survivability for every individual scenario, depending on shot direction and rookie himself.
You can't argue with numbers. They have been calculated and proven in game numerous times.

Originally posted by packor:

Secondly, it's not worth screening or keeping early game soldiers because you don't even know their psi strength. You are just throwing cash away when it's most important, when you need to be spending that cash on growing your money.

Money is never an issue. Neither is unknown psi strength, it's easy to deal with.

Originally posted by packor:

And you're deadwrong about being unable to stop missions. When you shoot down the initial SCOUTS in the SCOUTING PHASE, the entire mission is scrapped. Also, you DON'T want to cancel base missions because you WANT them to build their base.

When you shoot down any UFO, their mission keeps on going. The only effect is that next UFO for that mission sequence will be delayed by about a week, but will appear eventually anyway.

[Tetsuri]

Originally posted by Quantifier666:

Rookies have between 25 and 40 Health. Armour soaks 30/40/50 damage. Best case rookie can sustain 89 damage, worst case 54. Plasma Pistol deals anywhere between 0 and 104 damage. This gives you 52%-86% survivability for every individual scenario, depending on shot direction and rookie himself.
You can't argue with numbers. They have been calculated and proven in game numerous times.

show it; and how long do aliens even only field plasma pistol?

Originally posted by packor:

Secondly, it's not worth screening or keeping early game soldiers because you don't even know their psi strength. You are just throwing cash away when it's most important, when you need to be spending that cash on growing your money.

Money is never an issue. Neither is unknown psi strength, it's easy to deal with.

you don't make money with no money. That money you wasted on armor and soldiers would have propelled you to moar money and better tech. By the time you caught up to where you could have been that junk you bought wouldn't have made any difference.

Psi strength doesn't grow unless you enabled it from a mod, so hell no. You're total bs.

When you shoot down any UFO, their mission keeps on going. The only effect is that next UFO for that mission sequence will be delayed by about a week, but will appear eventually anyway.

Sounds liek you're pulling ^*+= out of your ^*+ again. It also sounds liek you have no real argument. You prevented them from infiltrating and terrorizing, mission accomplished.

From your posts, I suspect you don't even legit play this game. If you're sacking 90% of your troops, you spend 100*40,000=4,000,000 just to get 10 soldiers. Let's see how you pull that off in early game. Unless you want to tell me you run the game with 1 soldier at 400k a pop. I'm pretty sure with the 9999999 you cheated in, it's "easy"

[Hermitifier]

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Damage
This has been created based on findings from various threads on Xcomufo and StrategyCore forums sometime around 2004, for example:
http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/topic/746-damage-modifiers-for-aliens/
These guys would gather 1000's of samples, checking damage with mindprobe.
Go there and talk to them if you have further questions on the damage model theory. One that has been discovered, confirmed, and even reimplemented in OpenXCom: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=2679.0

If I have more money than I can spend, why would I need more? Ultimately, progress is mostly slowed down by how fast base modules are built to get more Workshop and Laboratory space. No amount of money is going to make it faster.

I never said anything about growing Psi Strength. I said having it unknown is not a big problem. By the third mission agains Ethereals you very well know who is weak without screening in Psi Lab. Sending them again is as wise as not bringing flares for night mission.

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/ACTS.DAT
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/MISSIONS.DAT
This describes Alien missions mechanisms, confirmed by experiments, and further found in disassembled game executable.