Let's Play OpenXcom: UFO Redux

[NKF]

Yes, Heavy Plasma's can cut through interior UFO walls. That's handy as you can now make your own shortcuts when storming through a UFO.

 

On the tank - you probably should have listened to your own advice and have it pull back to safety. They are great devices when used well, but even they have their limits when their health is down down to a single digit!

 

Even with 4 shots I still think that Fusion Balls are too expensive.

 

Heh, 4 shots makes them even more expensive. To put another spin on it - they can help you take down bigger ships, which often have some elerium to recover. That allows them to be somewhat sustainable as long as you are frugal with their use.

 

- NKF

[silencer_pl]

... step on Space Voyagers corpse...

 

No sanctity of the dead.

 

 

Also a sad story about hover tanks is that the late they come, the less tank they become. When aliens are fielding only Heavy Plasmas (mutons especially), they are only good for spending 60% TUs on scouting and then fall back.

 

[Space Voyager]

Yeah, dammit! What do you think, that standing on a dead body increases accuracy?! Well, think again, he MISSED!

 

 

Kidding, kidding. As long as I was avenged. Please, clone me!

[Nookrium]

Also a sad story about hover tanks is that the late they come, the less tank they become. When aliens are fielding only Heavy Plasmas (mutons especially), they are only good for spending 60% TUs on scouting and then fall back.

I don't remember the last time I saw an alien carrying anything other than a heavy plasma or stun launcher, does not bode well for my tanks. I suppose I could build a launcher one, but I've never really seen the value of them. I guess once I get Avengers it wouldn't hurt to have one or two hanging around, since space is no longer an issue.

 

 

Yeah, dammit! What do you think, that standing on a dead body increases accuracy?! Well, think again, he MISSED!

 

 

Kidding, kidding. As long as I was avenged. Please, clone me!

LOL

Funny thing is, I recorded this just after I read your previous post about being happy that you were still alive.

 

 

 

btw, Happy Birthday

[Space Voyager]

Obviously, I jinxed the game... https://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b348/SpaceVoyager/Smiley/woodoo.gif

 

Thank you!

 

@Silencer: YOU SEE, even that modest request was too much!

[silencer_pl]

That's because your death was my telepathic request. However I didn't ask for corpse desacration

 

Nah, kidding. I only want to be commander again.

[Nookrium]

Your hope in commander relies on Mr. Badger setting a blaster bomb off in his face

 

 

Speaking of heroes, and lightnings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3urvLeTtA0

[silencer_pl]

Your hope in commander relies on Mr. Badger setting a blaster bomb off in his face

 

That's highly expectable from him

[Space Voyager]

HE HE HE!

[NKF]

Fear the Badger!

 

To be honest, I've been waiting for that Blaster Launcher to misfire. But it appears Nook's mastered the trick of the diagonal first way-point. That does help reduce the chances of clipping of the Skyranger tail when firing BB's from the equipment pile.

 

On the last video - trees? Large rocket. Large rocket, trees. Or high explosives if you've got anyone with Herculean strength.

 

- NKF

[Nookrium]

Fear the Badger!

 

To be honest, I've been waiting for that Blaster Launcher to misfire.

I really need to hand the launcher over to someone else and let Badger take a sniper spot on top of the skyranger. He has some nice stats that aren't being used at the moment, and any old rookie can handle it just as well. I don't think firing accuracy has THAT much of an impact with it does it?

[silencer_pl]

It has no impact.

[Nookrium]

Base Attack, invincible enemy, and poor intercepting...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh9vgXFO1qM

[Zombie]

You certainly are doing a great job with deploying smoke ahead of your team to cover their advance Neptune! Not much to say about episode 63, it went basically flawless (well, as flawless as Neptune is capable of at least)!

 

Where do I start on episode 64 though... geez. I harped on you about getting decent weapons+soldiers+armor+tanks at each base asap and you ignore Fiji completely. "I told you so" seems to be fitting here. With the squad you had and the types of aliens I doubt it's possible to complete the mission anyway (unless you were able to snag a Blaster Launcher off of a body). Mind Control is tough to combat, and I found out long ago that the best way to deal with that is to strike early, strike hard and hope to kill enough aliens to cause widespread panic on the survivors. If they are panicking, they aren't MC'ing.

 

What's the answer to the radar base problems? Possibly to bite the bullet and actually manufacture Blaster Launchers+bombs just to equip your listening post bases. I'd still highly suggest the Hovertank/Launcher though, as those 8 shots should be plenty for small bases. Another solution would be to add another Hangar. This seems counter-intuitive because it just makes your base bigger, but what it does is add more high priority spawn points for the aliens to occupy. I'd much rather have them concentrated in the Hangars rather than spawning within your base, right? (That's why the Sectopod was in the HWD module). On superhuman, there are many more aliens that need places to go so an extra Hangar or two will help prevent the aliens from showing up where they aren't wanted. On the flip side of the coin, if you eliminate the Hangar completely and hire enough soldiers as there are spawn points, you'll prevent the aliens from spawning completely giving you an auto-win mission (not sure how OpenXcom handles this though). One thing is for sure, when you are dealing with lots of aliens, you need more than 10 men to defend a base. Get some more men in there along with a Hovertank, build another Hangar and you should be golden. Oh, and before I forget, you accidentally built a Large Radar at Fiji II instead of a HWD. Fix that!

 

On that Overloard mission, I was curious to see how many plasma shots it would take to get to the center of that armored Tootsie Pop. It's possible they are immune to plasma completely. But why didn't you whip out the Blaster Launcher to see if that had enough oomph to knock one down? I know I told you to conserve ammo for it, but in cases like this where nothing seems to work it's your only option. Most of your guys were either in the ship or could have pulled back a bit outside to prevent splash damage to your team. I would have let a couple rip to see if it had any effect... especially when there was three of them clustered together!

 

- Zombie

[Nookrium]

You certainly are doing a great job with deploying smoke ahead of your team to cover their advance Neptune! Not much to say about episode 63, it went basically flawless (well, as flawless as Neptune is capable of at least)!

See, I learn!

 

"I told you so" seems to be fitting here.

Yeah, I deserve that

 

Someone commented and mentioned having 3 hangers in each base to help spread the aliens out also, probably a good idea. I didn't even think about that sectopod spawning where it shouldn't have.

Throwing a tank in each spot is probably a good idea, and more than 10 soldiers. I just got done selling off most of my excess heavy plasmas but I should be able to restock pretty soon.

 

 

On that Overloard mission, I was curious to see how many plasma shots it would take to get to the center of that armored Tootsie Pop. It's possible they are immune to plasma completely.

I certainly looked that way, I really wish I had been able to grab one. The blaster may have come in handy there, I was thinking about being able to bring one back for research and I didn't see any way of getting someone out there to pick one up if I did manage to take one down, but if the blaster had worked that would have answered my question about resistances right there.

 

Oh, and before I forget, you accidentally built a Large Radar at Fiji II instead of a HWD. Fix that!

oh! good catch.

[Hobbes]

Ah. It seems things are starting to get interesting

[NKF]

Nook, you might as well leave the large radar in until the Hyperwave Decoder is built, or replace it with a small radar so that you can get some scanning in done before the HWD is completed. .

 

On the Overlords, for some strange reason I'm thinking these guys might be vulnerable to some of the oldey-time weapons you've stopped using. Perhaps due to some perverse sense of humour, they take little to nothing from plasma, but drop easily to pistol slugs or knife stabs. Okay, perhaps that's stretching it a bit. Still, it may be worth taking an Alloy Shotgun or two along to see if they're vulnerable to AP. Or stun weapons, come to think of it.

 

Speaking of stun weapons, have you got any Medics captured? May want to steer some scientists towards one and see if they hold the secrets of the Small Launcher.

 

- NKF

[silencer_pl]

Looks like Rio incident didn't teach you anything. And yeah, if you can't kill it, blast it.

[Nookrium]

On the Overlords, for some strange reason I'm thinking these guys might be vulnerable to some of the oldey-time weapons you've stopped using. Perhaps due to some perverse sense of humour,

I have a bad feeling laser weapons might be their weakness...

 

Speaking of stun weapons, have you got any Medics captured? May want to steer some scientists towards one and see if they hold the secrets of the Small Launcher.

Ya know, I thought for sure I grabbed a medic a long time ago, but I'm starting to think I may not have. Either that or the stun launchers are buried under some other research somewhere.

[Hobbes]

Looks like Rio incident didn't teach you anything

 

Please let's not mention Rio anymore on this thread lol

[Zombie]

Nook, you might as well leave the large radar in until the Hyperwave Decoder is built, or replace it with a small radar so that you can get some scanning in done before the HWD is completed.

 

Why leave the Large Radar though? The build time between a Large Radar and a HWD is 1 day. By dismantling the Large Radar and building a HWD in it's footprint you'll only lose 1 day of scanning - possibly 2 depending on when Neptune removes it. Is that make or break? The Small Radar I could see as it has a quick build time, but not the Large. I'd remove it and start work on the HWD rather. Well, the only reason I could think of to keep it for the time being is to readjust the base layout which Neptune completely messed up, so yeah.

 

If you get really worried about missing something in the interim, lease another Darkstar for a month and park it over the base to fill the gap.

 

- Zombie

[NKF]

I'm anticipating that several videos have already been pre-recorded by the time the last episode was posted. A bit of time will likely have passed before the replacement HWD gets started, so may as well leave the large radar in and get some use out of it. No real downside to leaving it in apart from the maintenance cost.

 

- NKF

[Nookrium]

Nope,

I'm anticipating that several videos have already been pre-recorded by the time the last episode was posted.

Nope, I've been slacking this week. Speaking of, here's the next one...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qBExAj1kz0

[Zombie]

For the tanks, I was thinking more along different lines. Keep your soldiers mobile with Heavy Plasmas. You are in a base with plenty of doors to provide cover: shoot and scoot. Then have the Hovertank/Launcher shell the hangars or any problem areas. You can park it in a double-wide door area of the General Stores along with a soldier for protection & door opening duty. The soldiers of the base do the scouting, poke their heads out and shoot, and then duck back in. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

With Hovertank/Plasmas it's going to be hard for them to do any shoot+scoot maneuvers because they can't duck into small doors for cover and they will suck a little for scouting because of their size (gotta be careful plotting blaster waypoints around them). Another reason is MC. Do you want your only soldier with a Blaster to get MC'd and be out of commission for the mission (or even worse: use it against your team)? Or would you rather have it on a tank which the aliens will not even attempt to MC? The Hovertank/Launcher can carry 8 rounds of the ammo and not even bat an eyelash on the weight or inventory. A soldier can hold 7 (3 in the backpack, 2 on the belt, 1 in a hand and 1 loaded in the weapon), but he'll be hard pressed to do that without encumbrance. More than likely you'll need a mule to carry reloads which means another weak link (he can get MC'd too)!

 

Yes, the original Lightning in UFO:EU was bugged. Really bugged. The walls were like swiss cheese: soldiers could deploy through the diagonals and there was a big LOF "hole" in one facet of it's hull and there were cracks all along the floor where aliens could see in. Bomb Bloke and myself tried to button it up the best we could with my patch kit and it seems a lot better. Still, deploying through OpenXcom's variant isn't much better as the door doesn't function. Not sure what the answer is to that first soldier who died after throwing the grenade standing on the stairs. Personally, I wouldn't have thrown the grenade on the first turn. Poke your head out and check to see where the aliens are looking first, and if they are looking away, toss it. Otherwise, wait. The aliens have to move sometime, right? Might as well let them chew up their TU doing their alien stuff while you conserve and let loose all at once.

 

Normally when I used Lightnings for cleanup duty, I wouldn't move anyone outside the craft on the first turn. I would move everyone as close to the door as possible first turn, then disembark the next turn. You don't want to end up clogging the ramp with a soldier who used up all his TU shooting (and missing!) an alien. Best to give them as many TU as possible to use for movement if necessary.

 

Remember you can cut through inner walls of a UFO with Heavy Plamsa shots. With the hole in the top for the guy in a flying suit and the door nearby, you could have done a classic pincer maneuver to swarm the aliens at once. The reason why the mission didn't end after you killed the Ethereals in the craft was because one of your guys outside was still under MC and thus an alien unit. You are lucky that your guy under MC wasn't considered MIA at the end, the guys at OpenXcom seems to have fixed this for the better. However, I'd still opt to to it the old fashioned way: don't kill all the aliens on the map. Kill everything as fast as you can but leave one alone. The next turn, that single alien will only be able to MC maybe one soldier (if that, sometimes they switch to panic instead). This keeps the number of MIA's to a minimum, and also allows you to get a stun team ready to take out the last one peacefully. Be aware with using teams from different bases though, if you don't have Alien Containment built at the base, all the stunning in the world will go to waste.

 

- Zombie

[Hobbes]

With Hovertank/Plasmas it's going to be hard for them to do any shoot+scoot maneuvers because they can't duck into small doors for cover and they will suck a little for scouting because of their size (gotta be careful plotting blaster waypoints around them).

 

Once you've got Blaster Launchers you can always simply pulverize the entire building before sending the Hovertank to spot any survivors.

 

Yes, the original Lightning in UFO:EU was bugged. Really bugged. The walls were like swiss cheese: soldiers could deploy through the diagonals and there was a big LOF "hole" in one facet of it's hull and there were cracks all along the floor where aliens could see in. Bomb Bloke and myself tried to button it up the best we could with my patch kit and it seems a lot better. Still, deploying through OpenXcom's variant isn't much better as the door doesn't function

 

That wasn't mod related since I haven't changed anything on the Lightning. OXC does patch it to prevent the movement through diagonals and other things so there might be a bug there.

 

You are lucky that your guy under MC wasn't considered MIA at the end, the guys at OpenXcom seems to have fixed this for the better.

 

There's also an option to automatically end the turn when the last alien is killed. I'm guessing the MC soldier was the reason why the mission didn't end when the last Ethereal was killed.