Base Defense...

[MJ12 Commando]

Base defense missions are annoying now, given that aliens either have:

 

1. Warp rifles/pistols

 

2. Mind control devices

 

3. Rocket launchers and minislugs.

 

And most of them wear bio armor...

 

Yech.

 

So, how do I stop these Reticulans? With a heavy dose of Vitamin Lead? With a plasma infusion? With warp rifts?

 

I've tried my standard team, but the fact that you start seperated is f***ing annoying. And they get cut to ribbons when seperated... the first one or two aliens are easy, but the next ten that swarm you... ugh.

 

How would I do this?

[Kret]

All those alien weapons you're describing have 1 main fault: they are short-ranged. Keep distance and use sniper rifles or heavy weapons. Vs the mind-controling problem, you should have your own. If you manage to take over just one of them you will be wreaking havoc against theirs clustered group of aliens or at least you can use it to break free your troops. You should also have access to some heavy machine gun weaponwry by now, they do wonders vs reticulans.

[MJ12 Commando]

All those alien weapons you're describing have 1 main fault: they are short-ranged. Keep distance and use sniper rifles or heavy weapons. Vs the mind-controling problem, you should have your own. If you manage to take over just one of them you will be wreaking havoc against theirs clustered group of aliens or at least you can use it to break free your troops. You should also have access to some heavy machine gun weaponwry by now, they do wonders vs reticulans.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

All I must say is that... it's a CQB situation. Not all that many places where I can setup mantraps.

 

Although, a modified version of my current base clearing strategy might work...

 

Either that or building more military bases.

[Accounting Troll]

At this stage of the game, my strategy is to have one soldier with enhanced heavy armour and one of the heavy machine guns. The other six soldiers are wearing the best alien armour that I have - two of them are equipped with psi-projectors (which work well against Reticulans, even through walls, although range is limited), one medic and three soldiers with enhanced plasma rifles.

 

I find a corner with only two approaches, and I deploy my machine gun there. With version 1.4 you can permamantly deploy a machine gun by telling your soldier to kneel. The other six soldiers run to the area protected by the machine gun, takin care to avoid the base enterances that tend to be swarming with Reticulans. Then I wait for the Reticulans to come to me and get blown away by the machine gun. The medic and the psionic soldiers act as backup to the soldier with the machine gun.

 

Once most of the Reticulans are killed I can send my three soldiers with plasma rifles out to kill off the few survivors.

[MJ12 Commando]

How do you get enhanced heavy armor?

 

First, sorry for the double post.

 

Second... I found EHA, hiding right under ECA. Fun little armor... but I demand strength enhanced armor.

 

Third, I beat a base defense mission today by just setting up my guns and camping at a chokepoint, while throwing grenades. My two turret gunners annihilated most of the enemy force within seconds, and my team took three hits, total.

 

Note to self: Incendiary and acid grenades are fun in a box.

[Slaughter]

Note to MJ12 Commando: Indeed they are!

[Raion]

Never use the grenades. Like the Super-Striker, and cover and rifles, or the run up and shoot with a shotgun blast!

[MJ12 Commando]

Never use the grenades. Like the Super-Striker, and cover and rifles, or the run up and shoot with a shotgun blast!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Pshaw. My l33t area denial skills laugh at the aliens.

 

And, besides, what should I do with the grenades, if it isn't beat up aliens with them? Play catch?

[Obi-Mark]

Well, once in Base defense mission I watched with horrifed fascination as Ret in Sky Armour takes TWO, sorry, make that THREE full bursts of CAWS at pointblank range and then calmly vapourizes my two soldiers.

He was walking down the corridor that opened up in a room. My two guys were standing 1 meter from the corridor, so that Alien has to come out and I can see him before he sees me. Those two emptied two full bursts, sure,he was injured, but that was all. Puff, lefty goes down, I shot another burst, point blank, but to no avail, and poof there goes the other.

Since then I don't use CAWS for base defense. I try to position turrets at the crossroads just behind the corner so that enemy has to walk in my sights before he can fire at me. Of course once the main entrance point opened up on a wide corridor and I had missile turret in that corridor. Deploy it and wash the entire corridor in flames. The fire rate of missile turret is impressive. 20 rockets in maybe 4 seconds.

[infael]

Those Rets seem to almost always be in the longest corridor in the base. That tends to be one next to the base entrance/exit. Last night, there were 9 Rets clustered around the base entrance. I held them off with a Super Striker and laser rifles.

 

My soldier carrying the SS was near the far end of the corridor. Luckily the Rets were within range. Since he was the first to fight, I kept the Rets pinned down while soldiers with snipers or lasers ran to the corridor. I actually won the fight with few scratches!

 

You can never have enough heavy weaponry or throw enough heavy weaponry. I can now make Sun armor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Even if it takes 11 days. Gotta get more bases!

[Kret]

The fire rate of missile turret is impressive. 20 rockets in maybe 4 seconds.

 

As a little bit of info, this is due to a misconfigured rate of fire. They placed the value under the burst fire which the weapon doesn't have and left a 0.0 value in the rate of fire field. This value indicates how much time pases between shots, as you can figure out, there's no time lapse between rockets.

[Platoon Crusher]

For base defense I've always had good luck with (in order of availability)

 

1 Shotguns + various grenades

2 Neosteads + high end pistols w/high rates of fire + grenades

3 Caws + above

4 Warp Demolition Device is by a very large margin the deadliest weapon in the game. It vaporizes the Rets in one hit and is a very close combat weapon.

 

All of these weapons take into account that you want to use a close combat option. Wich for me doesn't come naturally. In truth I prefer ranged weapons but, in close quarters you can't use ranged weapons or area effect wepons safely like the grenade launcher. So I make all my base defense missions as a close combat option.

 

I remember reading a strategy months ago and I forget who posted it about base defense. I adopted the strategy as it seemed logical to me. Remember to use light armor or Bio armor so you can be fast. Essentially it is a close combat option and you 1st scan the base for the starting locations of the Rets. You then look for ways to seal them into those locations that you can get to before they can. You need to be careful of the possibility of being flanked by them. When you decide upon the "choke points" you are to seal off you then run there and hide behind the corners of halls or doors. You can see thier progress while this is happening when doors open due to thier movements. You can adjust your destinations on the fly while watching this. when you get to good locations you wait to ambush them at point blank ranges. When you spot a bad guy you simply disintegrate them with a shot from the warp demolition device. Try to get at least 2 soldiers to each position so 1 can heal the other while the battle rages. This strategy works very well with shotguns too but, you should try to have 2 guys shoot at the same time on 1 bad guy to put him down fast as possible. Have 1st guy kneel down at the corner and the next guy stand up behind him diagonally back from the corner 1 space or on the opposite corner if there is one. The key thing here is that you can see them before they see you and you can choose when to take the shot.

 

This strategy is the best 1 I have used so far and it works at all levels of technology you posess at the time. It isn't a strategy I've developed and I've read it many months ago by another player at the time. It seems to be a different idea then those in this post so far and I know it works well. I won't play a base defense any other way now.

 

Pump action Shotgun = 600 points of damage / shot

Neostead = 900 points of damage / shot

CAWS = 240 per shot or 480 per burst

Warp Demolition device = 7500 yes 7500 points of damage / shot (The king of crunch) All Close combat weapons.

[Maugan Ra]

Deployable four barreled machineguns makes short work of anything..

 

Just watching a reticulan getting torn to shreds is very adictive..

[NKF]

I'm a bit late into this discussion because I've had trouble finding this game. It's an okay game, but something about it just feels so ... empty. Anyway I thought I'd share a thought or two about base defence:

 

 

 

Has anyone considered the collapsable plasma cannons (I'll call them CPC's for short). I don't know - it just seems way too powerful to me - and the reticulans thankfully don't realise they're more powerful deployed than to walk around and deploy them briefly for a single shot. I find these weapons are key to successful UFO/Base assaults or base defence missions. The other collapsable turrets are good too, but the CPC just deals sick amounts of damage over long distances, and when deployed, has a ridiculous rate of fire.

 

In fact, given the soldiers manning the cannons have good psi, they can generally take on almost everything on their own. However, I do try to get the bio armour soldiers with enhanced plasma guns to run to to their positions to draw away rocket fire, spot distant enemies or to provide additional firepower if too many aliens appear at the same time.

 

For Alien base attacks, I have at least two or three CPC's and a pair of the warp resonators (light long range warp weapon that doesn't need to be deployed) - these are used to provide immediate instantaneous kill attacks against bio-armour clad reticulans while the turrets are being deployed the very moment the mission starts. They're quite nice in twos when out in the open, and are quite nice indoors on full auto.

 

Once deployed, I just wait and knock off any aliens that approach with the warp resonators or the CPC's, and then make my move for the teleport.

 

Once inside, like the plain UFO missions, I just deploy my turrets in the starting room and have everyone that can kneel do so and go full-auto. Then I just pick off any aliens that appear and that's it. Yes, it's just demanding an incendiary rocket - but bio armour and the power suits can handle it until someone can pull out a medikit. The only time I lose my entire squad is when I decide to get smart and start splitting my squad up.

 

I don't know. This sort of gameplay is depressingly dull. The UFO/Base designs are just plain wrong - there's just little to no incentive to explore them.

 

The other weapon that's too good to be true is the enhanced plasma gun. At least it chews through the power cells very quickly and take forever to rearm.

 

For the early game, the trick for base defence that I found to work best for me was to bring a few powerful short range weapons like the Neosteads, Caws and Desert Eagles, and then move up to the next biggest weapon you can get your hands on. Mid way through, I found that enhanced plasma launcher thingy to be quite the life saver - for a short while - on account of its wide area-of-effect. Making use of the alien rocket launcher as early as you can is a good idea too. I just hated that thing - particularly when it's filled with incendiary rockets.

 

- NKF

[NKF]

I've completed the game and have uninstalled it to make room for Aftershock, or perhaps S2, which ever I decide to install first. Now a bit of an update on my base defence formula (anyone notice how frequent your bases get attacked once you're down to the last few areas that need to be captured?).

 

Soldier setup generally included 3-4 deployable weapons. I usually have a mix of collapsable machine guns, plasma guns (as they can reload), or the collapseable rail gun. The first two being my absolute favourites. Two soldiers generally get warp resonators. The remainder of the troops are either more heavy armour troopers with heavy immediate use firearms, extra collapseable weapons, or I use bio armour troops with plasma weapons.

 

As soon as a base defence mission starts, I leave the game paused and survey my troop locations and spot where the entry lifts are. The aliens will come through one of the access lifts, so you'll have a good idea of which direction to be watching. Next I locate troops with collapseable heavy weapons in or near good defendable areas. I then move them there and get them ready to deploy their weapons. All the other soldiers will run (or waddle) their way over to these areas.

 

I eventually end up with two locations where soldiers gather around a deployed machine gun or plasma cannon. Those with additional deployable weapons deploy to bolster the firepower.

 

Any aliens that come within sight are mowed down almost instantly.

 

The only spanners in my works generally include soldiers without deployable weapons that begin right near the lift where the aliens are entering through, or psi. I never got into the habit of carrying any psi stingers or whatnot to disable a mind controlled trooper.

 

Also, the only times I completely fail with the above strategy is when I have individual soldiers or pairs of soldiers break off to hunt for aliens. They often get so isolated that they get mowed down very quickly or are stunned then killed or mind controlled.

 

So, in the end, while I enjoyed the game, the game ended up following the same formula as a lot of other games - mostly winning and advancing through the game with steadily increasing firepower (like a typical cRPG). The one with the most firepower wins. I hope this isn't true for Silent Storm or Aftershock.

 

- NKF