Pilot skills: How much do they matter? What precisely is the diff between piloting and evasion? Do pilots get experience for shooting down unarmed scouts?
Each time a UFO is shot down, the pilot of the aircraft which shot the UFO down gets 1 extra Targeting point. If the UFO was carrying weapons, the pilot gets 1 extra Evasion point.
A pilot with higher Targeting skills has a higher chance of hitting a UFO when he fires. The increase is on a curve that slows down as the pilot reaches a Targeting skill of 70. The maximum bonus is 29% better chance to hit.
It is the same for Evasion, but with a maximum 29% decrease to chance that a UFO will hit the pilot's aircraft. If you want to see the actual equation, the commit in which this was added is
here.
Soldier skills: Accuracy and the weapon skills. Which really effects soldier accuracy with a specific weapon? Any reason why grenade
launcher use improves HE skill so much faster than sniper rifle use improves sniper skill?
Every firemode of a weapon has a skill associated with it (close, assault, explosives, sniper). When the projectiles are being fired, the game will use the associated skill to modify the distribution of rounds (ie - the accuracy). I don't know the exact equations.
Skills improve based on kills. It's possible you're just killing more with the grenade launcher. It's also possible that the skill increase is a bit different for sniper skill. Someone would need to dig into the code to see.
Soldier promotions. Just fluff or is it something more than highest xp soldiers?
In theory, soldiers with a higher rank cost more. But I haven't verified if this is working. To my knowledge, that is the only intended effect of rank.
Why have turrets and ammo for UGV but not actually have them? just a place holder or am I missing something?
Just a place-holder. They've been on the agenda for a while, but still more work to do to implement them.
Manufacturing everything costs as much to make as to buy off the market. Makes having workers pointless until you get something to build not already on the market.
Production for (a very small) profit will probably be implemented in the future, but we need to go through and set appropriate numbers. We're not interested in making it a core part of the game's economy, but I think we do plan to give your workers something to do all the time.
Tempo. the amount of ufo activity versus the healing rate of soldiers is a little off. Ideally by June or July I'd like two mission squads, the veterans to do the harder stuff and a rookie squad to deal with shot down scouts etc.. But you simply don't get enough recruits and wounded soldiers heal too slowly to make that viable.
I think this will be changed in the future. At least you'll start off with more recruits on standard difficulty. Not sure if the rate of new recruits will change. Alien difficulty has recently been increased so soldier attrition is probably a bit off at the moment.
