experience?

[cyllan]

i pulled the console command, it looks you only gain experience in some kinds of mission(which ones?), not in the crashed ufos where you kill the rest of them, i dont use autoresolve

also stats dont increase much , specially health, and after loads of misions

[jerikojerk]

that do not match with my feeling of having soldier promoted only on the killed alien count.

[marc]

How about when using the electrolaser?  I noticed that my e-laser trooper gets 'assault' skill for using it, even though she scores no kills.  Does your experience gained have less potential when using this weapon as opposed to the regular lethal weaponry?  Also, if using stun weaponry does reduce your xp gain, what about a trooper using a lethal weapon but gets a stun hit instead of a kill b/c of previous stun damage?

[jerikojerk]

well let say for the 2.4branch you need at most 5 aliens and 1 for each specie alive (in order to unblock gaz grenade )... a alien containment is very expensive to maintain so you may avoid to use 2.

as i always say avoid to use weapon you have to pay for the ammo: it avoid to get soldier with empty backpack/unloaded weapon/.... plasma rifle & blaster are enough to fight back until at least alien base. but when you will be at this stage you will have your own advice on all weapons.

[marc]

I use both the plasma rifle and blaster, even though accuracy is quite horrendous for both.  Close-range they are deadly.  I like the 'ball' shot on the blaster, but it certainly does use the TUs and ammo.

Do you know whether you get same or less xp for stunning vs killing aliens?  Also, is the kill count important for promotion purposes?

[ptbptb]

The promotions and the skill increases seem to work on different systems.  What do you actually get for Promotions? Do you get stat increases for promotions, but skill increases for killing aliens with certain weapon styles?

[Sarin]

Experience is AFAIK awarded for every hit, be it fatal or not. Health is upgraded by actually using the stat, that is being injured.

Promotions are different system entirely. There are two conditions that both have to be met for soldier to be promoted, kill count and mind stat. The whole mind stat is actually quite important, since it appears to affect rate of increase of soldier's stats, including mind itself.

Also, third condition might affect promotions, but I never confirmed it...friendly/civilian kills.

[Nutter]

From what I remember, they'll never go past a certain rank if they have any friendly fire incidents on their record but I can't remember which one.

[sambojin]

I'll have to test this on the exp per hit thing. There's a few questions I'll try to answer:

1: Is it advantagous to go for lighter weapons? It will give you more hits for each kill, so therefore more exp? The machine-pistol is looking like a good close skiller compared to the others if this is true(as well as a testing device).

2: Does a kill shot give more exp than a normal hit? Or just any shot you fire for that matter? Do you have to hit anything at all? Is ammo spraying a viable exp harvesting technique? (it used to be in xcom AFAIK, making the almighty ammo-less laser rifle all the better).

3: Can you kill scum. Depending on which points above prove true (kill/hit/shot exp gains) do shooting dead bodies count as hitting "something"? And are the last shots of say a machine-gun volley counted as hits even against a dead target (as they're all resolved that "action").

Will report my findings, but it might take a bit of time. Some might not be easily testable, but I should be able to check a few trends from the above list at the very least. Or I'll learn a bit and check the code.....

[sambojin]

Double post (and soon to be a triple).

Testing procedure:

Simple mod of the machine pistol.

Changing Snap-shot to a range 120, damage 150, high accuracy shot, 5TU.

3-shot remains normal.

Changing Full-Auto to a range 120, damage 2, 120 shot burst, 5TU.

Magazine upped to 240 shots.

Two soldiers(1+2) in squad will use Full-Auto for kills. The rest will use Snap-shot. One soldier( will also try and kill-scum on Full-Auto (the percentage to-hit still comes up).

I'll report how they do on "Close" skill gain compared to missions/kills.

Initial thoughts (4 missions in) is that hits count for exp. At least, they seem to. Soldier 2 has more kills on full auto, but also has far higher skill gain. I'll report testing after I've got about 20 kills on each type of soldier, with soldier 8 only kill scumming. I might also just Full-Auto at walls with Soldier 7 to see if there's skill gain without hitting anything.