Difficulty

[PurpleYoshi]

I have two things to ask about difficulty, and just one question:

1-What are the differences between alien stats on different difficulties? (accuracy, health, damage dealt, etc.)

2-Is there a way to adjust the starting employees?  Like for example, edit a text file so on very hard I can start with 15 soldiers instead of 8?

3-Not related to difficulty, but any way to make all soldiers male?  I want to make a squad full of NBA players to destroy the aliens.

[DarkRain]

1.) According to the code stats are unaffected! There' a comment in the character generation function that says: Add modifiers for difficulty setting here!
Damage is affected with following formulas: if the attacker is alien and the target is not, the damage is multiplied by 1.18 ^ difficulty (with difficulty ranging form -4 to 4), if the attacker isn't alien and the target is the damage is multiplied by 1.18 ^ -difficulty

2.) See: <ufoa dir>/base/ufos/campaign.ufo

3.) Sure, if you are compiling from source, see the function Com_GetCharacterValues in src/common/scripts.cpp

[PurpleYoshi]

This requires 2.5 right?  I'm playing on 2.4, but since it's a new game I'll switch over at this point.  If not, I don't have a ufos subfolder in my base folder at all.

[PurpleYoshi]

Also, does that mean there is no difference between difficulty other than tne starting resources and the income?  All battles are the same regardless of level, right?  And does difficulty effect how many UFOs there are?

[geever]

DarkRain mentioned reduced damage done by PHALANX and increased damage dealt by aliens on higher difficulty. Please reread his post.

-geever

[PurpleYoshi]

DarkRain mentioned reduced damage done by PHALANX and increased damage dealt by aliens on higher difficulty. Please reread his post.

-geever

My bad.  I feel stupid now. 
Also, any answers on those missing folders?  I have a 2.5 build now, and I can't find them.

[ShipIt]

You need to extract the ufos.pk3 file to get the folder.

[H-Hour]

Other effects of difficulty include the speed at which you will see new aliens and weaponry (and, if you have a very recent version of 2.5-dev, UFOs).

[PurpleYoshi]

Pardon my horrid computer knowledge, but extract from where?  The only thing in the download file is the setup...

[geever]

Pardon my horrid computer knowledge, but extract from where?  The only thing in the download file is the setup...

Once you installed the game it will create the 0ufos.pk3 file (somewhere in Program Files I suppose). You can unpack it (it is a zip archive).

-geever

[PurpleYoshi]

Ok, last but not least, how do I open .ufo files?

[Triaxx2]

It's nothing more than a .txt file with a different extension. Use Notepad, or Notepad++.

[PurpleYoshi]

Thanks everyone, I've got it all working now.