#XCOM ENEMY WITHIN RESEARCH TREE MANUAL#
#XCOM ENEMY WITHIN RESEARCH TREE UPGRADE#
#XCOM ENEMY WITHIN RESEARCH TREE SERIES#

Moving all three soldiers who need to move before the enemy discovery cutscene starts is a few frame window and saves 2-3 seconds. In addition to the map and hit tree, we also roll our base layout and timing for every mission for the rest of the first month. QS - Ends with a Quicksave AS - Ends with an Autosave

For the purposes of calculating SDA timing, I have noted below which are which.

#XCOM ENEMY WITHIN RESEARCH TREE MANUAL#

Some segments in this run end with a manual save and some with an autosave. The only exception is that timing for the last segment ends as soon as the boss's health bar dissappears, as this also marks the point at which the player loses control. The globe fades in making it quite hard to see, but it is visible if you go frame by frame. Timing for each segment starts right after the load and ends the first frame that the saving globe appears in the bottom right of the screen. It is important to note that one of our main limiting resources in this run is weapon fragments, so we will be unable to use explosives against aliens in the early game. During the run we will also dump the excess credits we earn into research labs to speed up research. The only resources spent on upgrades in this run are those incidentally gathered when gathering other resources or completing other missions neccesary to advance the game.

#XCOM ENEMY WITHIN RESEARCH TREE UPGRADE#

Though we will upgrade our squad to some degree, we do not go out of our way in this run to gather resources for upgrades. Routing a speedrun of XCOM comes down to, in the fastest possible way, gathering the neccesary resources and research to unlock each story mission. This makes routing each map and seed a fresh challenge, and can be extremely tricky on the larger missions. There are even fringe cases where the exact trajectory of a rocket or something which I cannot identify at all seeds a new seed. Attacks always seed a new seed, but other actions like explosives, spotting enemies, and critical strikes only sometimes seed a new seed. The difficulty is figuring out all the player inputs which seed a new seed.

#XCOM ENEMY WITHIN RESEARCH TREE SERIES#

However, because only one rng seed is independant of the player and that seed is seeded at the start of the map, performing the exact same series of actions twice after making a save at the beginning of the map will, theoretically, produce the exact same results (This isn't exactly true because of the random nature of enemy movement). Using this single seed as well as input from the player, xcom continually generates new seeds to seed chance to hit. XCOM seeds chance to hit at the time of map generation with the amount of time the application has been running. I'll do my best to explain what we do understand, but you don't need to read this if in depth game mechanics don't interest you. Our understanding of chance to hit and damage rolls in XCOM has evolved dramatically over time, and there are still many things which we do not completely understand. How chance to hit works (a tad technical): Units take shots with a percent chance to hit. The exception to this is the last mission which is always on the same map. Missions are on randomly assigned maps pulled from a pool associated with a mission type (there are abduction maps, small UFO maps, medium UFO maps, terror maps, etc.). It is also possible to encounter a game over condition if you allow panic levels to rise too much around the world. To complete the game, the player must complete three story-essential missions, each unlocked through research of one kind or another. The game also scales in difficulty with in-game time. Most researches also require a certain amount of in-game time to pass. Loot from enemies can be spent on research as well as items unlocked through research. Several research trees allow players to upgrade their squad. There is an ingame date and time which the player can accelerate to look for encounters. XCOM is a turn based strategy game with semi-random encounters. In these comments, I will attempt to explain the run so that as many people as possible will be able to understand what we are doing. XCOM is a strange and complicated speedgame with tons of variables and small optimizations. This run was done by Papers and Twyn on the 2012 release of XCOM without the EW expansion or any Second Wave modifiers. Hello and welcome to the segmented speedrun of XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Xcom enemy within research tree