Quick and Dirty questions

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Doctor Sticks
Posts: 68
Joined: Sun Mar 19, 2017 5:40 am

Quick and Dirty questions

Post by Doctor Sticks »

How does this option interact with special missions, such as Council missions, or things like Portent? Also, what about Alien bases, Xcom Base Defense, Exalt Base Assault, and general Exalt missions?

Do those missions have appropriately reduced aliens/operatives as well? If not, is there some way I could do it? I am currently playing with Quick and Dirty, but dropped my squad size from 6 to 4 to keeps things fair.
Razmoudah
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Dec 07, 2017 3:13 pm

Re: Quick and Dirty questions

Post by Razmoudah »

You're using the Quick and Dirty option and reduced your squad size to keep things fair? Wow, you must both enjoy an extreme challenge and hate spending an hour or three (Without Save Scumming!) clearing a single battle. I haven't been using the option, and in the Exalt Base Assault mission I had nearly 40 enemies, just trying to keep a defensible location while letting most of them come to me was a challenge. Heck, I assaulted a landed Transport and ended up facing a total of 44 aliens in trying to take that ship. Actually, my biggest problem with how the enemies spawn normally is some of the locations are too close together or in some rather nonsensical locations. I only had to go through half of that Transport to finally capture it (yeah, that fight was a pain, good thing the aliens aren't any more accurate than my troops...), and my LZ was at the ass end of the ship. I remember in the base game that you almost always had to clear the cockpit because that's usually where the alien commander was, or at least the pilot(s) were usually hiding in there.

Now, I'll admit that I have no idea how the Quick and Dirty option would affect all of the missions, but do a Covert Operative Retrieval mission, and if at the end it doesn't feel like the streets should be running with blood from all of the Exalt operatives you had to kill then I'd say it is definitely affecting all missions, not just the ones original to Enemy Unknown. Seriously, the lowest number of Exalt operative kills I ever had was something around 15 and that was a mission where my spy just had to hack a pair of comm relays, when I had a 'defensive' type mission I usually saw something around 25-35 Exalt operatives across all of the waves. Sadly, I've been using the LW Rebalance mod as well as I hated it when the Floaters arrived and they reliably one-shotted my soldiers, and those are still the kinds of numbers I've been facing and I remember from the few missions with enemy reinforcements I did in just LW that the Rebalance mod has you facing smaller numbers early on (and slightly faster research, enough that by the time I was facing Floaters I had the first round of upgraded armor so my troops didn't die in droves with barely completed 'easy' missions).

Also, as someone who has studied computer programming it would be horribly inefficient to use different sets of code for determining the number of enemies for different types of missions. It's much simpler, and easier, to just use one set of code with a variable that affects different spawn counts for different types of missions instead, with either a master variable for difficulty (utilizing either a separate master set with, or more simply a separate variable for, Quick and Dirty) or if difficulty doesn't affect enemy counts then just a 'Quick and Dirty' variable that gets changed when the option is turned on versus turned off.
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