Bunch of game mechanics questions

[Executor]

Just bought the game, and even though I've watched a lot of youtube playthroughs by xwynns/JoINrbs/Marbozir/Perfidious Pete and read a lot on this forum and the Ufopaedia, a few things remain unclear to me.

1. Does the Firewalls Dark Event affect the hacking chances on security towers and mission objectives?
2. What is affected by the Spy Ring continent bonus? Looking at the code, it seems it only increases Intel gained from scanning on the strategy map. Are mission rewards, Intel Cache hacking rewards, and Advent Data Pads/Caches unaffected?
3. What happens if you liberate a region with say, 10, Advent strength when all adjacent regions are already liberated? Does all 10 Advent strength get destroyed?
4. What happens to vigilance in a region after it's liberated? Is it reset to 0 or does it decay normally?
5. What happens to Advent strength if they have a successful Invasion? Is strength transferred from the invading region or do they gain bonus strength?
6. Does Combatives work vs chryssalids, ie. can you stand inside a pack of them safely?
7. Are bombs considered grenades for the purpose of Heavy Ordinance/Protector/Full Kit Grenadier perks?
8. Are corpses destroyed by any subsequent explosives that land on them?

[Antifringe]

[*]What happens to vigilance in a region after it's liberated? Is it reset to 0 or does it decay normally?
[*]Are corpses destroyed by any subsequent explosives that land on them?

1) It gets set to 1, which is the minimum. Unexpectedly, ADVENT strength also gets set to one (not zero), and this residual point still contributes to global strength, and therefore, AVATAR progress.

2) No

[8wayz]

Here you go and welcome to Long War !

Q: Does the Firewalls Dark Event affect the hacking chances on security towers and mission objectives?
A: It should affect the towers but not the mission objectives. The objectives themselves have a 0% of failure, you are only rolling for extra rewards.

Q: What is affected by the Spy Ring continent bonus? Looking at the code, it seems it only increases Intel gained from scanning on the strategy map. Are mission rewards, Intel Cache hacking rewards, and Advent Data Pads/Caches unaffected?
A: All Intel rewards should be affected. By the way you get very little intel from scanning with the Avenger, so it would not make much sense to affect only that.

Q: What happens if you liberate a region with say, 10, Advent strength when all adjacent regions are already liberated? Does all 10 Advent strength get destroyed?
A: For that to happen the aliens will need to have only 1 or 2 regions remaining. To my understanding if they can not flee, they will be destroyed. However the loss of so much strength should also trigger reinforcement events for the aliens in the remaining regions, so you should see some frenetic activity in the next month.

Q: What happens to vigilance in a region after it's liberated? Is it reset to 0 or does it decay normally?
A: Vigilance should drop to zero, since there are no more aliens there.

Q: What happens to Advent strength if they have a successful Invasion? Is strength transferred from the invading region or do they gain bonus strength?
A: Strength is transferred, I do not remember by how much. From memory should be between 3 and 5 strength. Also if you repel the invasion the Strength of the region from which the attack came should be lowered by that amount.

Q: Does Combatives work vs chryssalids, ie. can you stand inside a pack of them safely?
A: Combatives works only for the first mêlée attack. What you are looking for is probably a Shinobi with Bladestorm - once each of them closes, the Shinobi will get a reaction mêlée attack and can kill a whole pod of Chryssalids with some luck

Q: Are bombs considered grenades for the purpose of Heavy Ordinance/Protector/Full Kit Grenadier perks?
A: Yep, they are still considered HE or support grenades, depending on their type. They are just late-game upgraded versions of the regular ones.

Q: Are corpses destroyed by any subsequent explosives that land on them?
A: Funny thing is, they should be destroyed, but they are not. It probably has to do with explosive damage fallout from the centre of the point of impact. As a rule of thumb, if the alien does not die in the explosion, then the corpse is pretty safe, even if the whole building falls over it.

[stefan3iii]

I'll piggyback my own question:

Does the free radio tower you get from liberation count towards the increasing cost to manually build radio towers?

[Rikokrates]

[*]Are corpses destroyed by any subsequent explosives that land on them?[/list][/quote]

Shooting gas canisters and killing the aliens will destroy their corpse. It just happened to me yesterday on gatecrasher, shot a gas canister, it blew up and killed the officer. At the end of gatecrasher you receive all the corpses, though I did not receive the officer corpse.

[johnnylump]

Does the free radio tower you get from liberation count towards the increasing cost to manually build radio towers?

It does. (The vanilla code just counts how many towers you have when pricing the next one, and I didn't see a compelling balance reason to add a large coding overhead in distinguishing between free and paid-for towers).

[stefan3iii]

Does the free radio tower you get from liberation count towards the increasing cost to manually build radio towers?

It does. (The vanilla code just counts how many towers you have when pricing the next one, and I didn't see a compelling balance reason to add a large coding overhead in distinguishing between free and paid-for towers).

Sounds good, doesn't bother me either way, just want to know before hand.

[Executor]

Thank you for all the answers.

Q: Does Combatives work vs chryssalids, ie. can you stand inside a pack of them safely?
A: Combatives works only for the first mêlée attack. What you are looking for is probably a Shinobi with Bladestorm - once each of them closes, the Shinobi will get a reaction mêlée attack and can kill a whole pod of Chryssalids with some luck

Your answer made me re-read the Combatives description. Hadn't noticed before that it only applied to one melee attack each turn. Really good to know.

Q: What is affected by the Spy Ring continent bonus? Looking at the code, it seems it only increases Intel gained from scanning on the strategy map. Are mission rewards, Intel Cache hacking rewards, and Advent Data Pads/Caches unaffected?
A: All Intel rewards should be affected. By the way you get very little intel from scanning with the Avenger, so it would not make much sense to affect only that.

My bad. Looking at the code again, it affects both GetScanIntelReward() and GetIntelReward(), the latter which I didn't notice the first time around.