Random questions

[Slythe]

First off let me say that I bought this game originally when it was first released, played it a ton and loved it, and only just recently decided to reacquire and install it (windows version) to play again. It's easily one of the most well-designed games of all time. I had forgotten a lot of the details of the game since it's been so long, but picked most if it up rather quickly. I remember I had gotten pretty good at it until I finally got burnt out on it and uninstalled it...many years ago; but now after having read some posts about tips, a strategy FAQ, and playing through the beginning of a game, I have a few questions.

 

1) How much money do you usually try to keep on hand through the first several months ? I'm finding I have anywhere from 400k to 1 mil just in case my HWP needs to be replaced (which has happened 3 times already).

 

2) I've read some posts in this forum of people saying they can play through a game with little to no deaths. This seems a stretch. In the game I'm currently playing, it's early April and I've lost probably 5 soldiers total. I seem to lose about 1 every 2 or 3 missions, that is until recently. I assaulted my first medium and large ships that had landed, both had sectoid leaders that proceeded to launch psi attacks from the safety of its bridge. Now this is obviously before I'm able to research any psi stuff or even find out the strengths of my soldiers, but I've had people taken over who then proceed to gun down the nearest comrade. This seems unavoidable. It took forever to get anyone to the ship then up and around to where the leader was to take him out.

 

I've also had times when I had a few soldiers all waiting with full TUs, guns aimed, and still an alien was able to come out from a door or around a corner, fire first, and kill a soldier. I've never claimed to be the most skilled tactically, and as a ground mission progresses I tend to get impatient and speed it up, but still most deaths have seemed unavoidable. Any extra tips to improve my survivability ?

 

3) Speaking of psionics, I've read I should immediately sack any soldiers who seem too susceptible to attacks, but at that point several months have gone by and some of them have gotten pretty well trained in combat, not to mention any new soldiers I get might take awhile before they run into psi aliens and I get a feel for how strong they might be. Bottom line is it seems to take so long before researching the psi stuff that by then I might be 'stuck' with very well trained soldiers who are psionically weak, or a bunch of rookies due to me constantly sacking the psi weaklings. Does this seem about right ?

 

Thanks if you've made it this far.

[BladeFireLight]

Hear is my take.

 

1. keep your money invested. you should capture enough from each misstion to sell to cover your costs.

Build a manufactuing base and sock it with 250 enginers. Start this as soon as you can. build the best bang for you buck. as you get them availible, First Motion Scanners, Then craft Lasor Cannon, Finaly craft Fusion Ball Launchers. Then you will have all the money you need.

 

2.As the original manual says. "Combat is like chess".

so bacily it is easy to learn, but takes years to master.

 

Veteran does not loose men becaus he knows the stats of the alien's and of his men and how this effect the game. He also spends from ten minuets to an hour just planing each turn.

 

I can only hope to be as good as him.

 

3. Week PSI is a death centance. They drain both money and score. Sack them. Once you have a transmisstion resolver you can send them agains non PSI targets. Like Muton and SnakeMen. If you must keep them. they are best left unarmed in the skyranger. they will just waste the aliens PSI attacs so your beter guys dont have to deal with that aspect.

 

-BladeFireLight

[Mouse Nightshirt]

1. In a contradiction to Blade's post, 5 workshops and 250 engineers? Do you know how much that COSTS? Let's do the maths.

 

Workshop ($800000) = 800000x5 = 4,000,000

Engineers ($50000 - i think) = 50000x25 = 1,250,000

Total = $5,250,000

 

Slythe says he only keeps $400,000 - $1,000,000. He couldn't even afford all the engineers.

However, it is an intelligent thing to do to manufacture/sell, however, later on it becomes pointless, as per month you could be selling 100 heavy plasmas +, which is a lot of cash. The best ratio of money earned/time are Laser Rifles, so manufacture those, but I dont advise increasing our manufacturing to that size until much later in the game.

Also, HWPs at that point are rather crap, and shouldn't really be used, especially in levels above Beginner, as the aliens tote round meaner weapons from the start, which basically makes your HWP a very expensive Heavy Cannon.

 

2. I have played several games with minimal losses (maybe 5 in the entire game). It takes time to learn, but you must take cover if possible, and take into account your reactions. (Reactions are the more important of the Reaction/Time Units equasion in order to react fire. If your soldier has 50 reaction, he WILL react fire, regardless how low his TUs are, obviously leaving enough to fire) Make sure you also leave the time units.

In my honest opinion, TJ goes overboard, but thats an opinion

 

3. I have never ever had problems with people with low Psi-defences. I personally see a greater loss when you sack your Colonel/Commander because his Psi-defences are low. I'm definately in the minority here when I say don't worry too strongly about sacking your soldiers, unless they turn out to have a psi-defence of 10 or less.

[NKF]

1. I'd say spend no more than you need to and sell off all surplus equipment like the plasma weapons (well, you won't be able to use them just yet), alien corpses and craft components (you only need a few)-- just don't forget to first start their research projects so you can research them even though you don't have any samples in storage. This should keep your bank balance healthy enough to deal with any immediate problems in the first few weeks.

 

Also, it's not immediately apparent, but if your base has several HWPs but not enough ammo to rearm them, and if the base gets attacked by the aliens, all the HWPs defending the base (at least those that appear in combat) will get a free load of ammunition. I'm sure you even get to keep any that's left over after the battle. Therefore, you can save a bit of money on HWP ammunition and storage space by only buying enough for the tanks that will be loaded on the Skyranger. Granted, it's not much, but it is still a saving.

 

- - -

 

2. Only those very gifted players with bottomless reservoirs of patience and who are very careful tend to be able to breeze through combat with little to no losses (though, their HWP losses may be another matter entirely). Wish I was one. I generally have quite a high soldier and HWP turnover rate in the first few months.

 

There are so many ways to play well, it's hard to think of where to start.

 

I'll offer this thought though: If you want to use reaction fire to kill your enemies, you might want to consider the laser pistols and standard pistols.

 

Weak though they may be, they are by far the best weapons to use for opportunity fire in the game due to their cheap snapshot cost. The lower cost means you can have a lot of bullets or lightning bolts flying in the air, and they're bound to hit something eventually. Watching six or more soldiers raise their laser pistols at the alien that just stepped out of the door is quite a sight to behold, particularly if the soldiers are facing it at a variety of angles. Even if the alien does get off a shot, it'll get back far more than it bargained for. Zap zap zap zap zap!

 

I'd only recommend their use for lightly armoured aliens though.

 

- - -

 

3. Yep, that's about right. It's harsh. The best solution is to not get too attached to your small group of soldiers just yet. On harder settings, with good equipment, even a bunch of hopeless rookies with only a few missions worth of experience under their belt tend to be very formidable.

 

Your best bet is to just spread the experience evenly among your troops and try not to let any particular soldier or soldiers hog all the glory. A good way of doing this is to have a large pool of soldiers and rotate them regularly. When the time comes and your psi-evaluations are in, you won't be too heavily disappointed.

 

As for those super soldiers with poor psi stats, well, hold on to them for a bit. Bring them into combat with little to no psionic threats, but slowly phase them out and don't concentrate too much on improving them from what they are already at. Just bring them in as support units. Decomission or reassign them later once everyone else outclasses them.

 

If you must bring these soldiers with poor psi into combat, equip them with standard pistols (not laser), standard rifles or autocannons with HE shells. Then have everyone else wear power armour. Now, even if they get mind controlled, the pistols and rifles will never ever be able to punch through power armour. The AC-HE shells can, but only very mildly, and only with direct hits. With any of these guns, you'll still be able to kill all but the most heavily armoured aliens. Alternately, have them carry stun rods and other non-combat equipment.

 

- NKF

[BladeFireLight]

Mouse.

 

It takes a lot of time to build a manufacturing base. like 6 months. so start early! The base pays for itself becaus it is alwase making the best stuff. (check KC's FAQ for a compleate analisys of best mony making, you have to take in account the time it takes to make. not just the build/sell ratio)

 

by the time I have at least 100 enginers at that base I keep arround 1-2 mill in extra cash for my current projects. building 50 laser cannons can be costly if you dont want to have to do it 5 at a time.

 

but by the time the base is finished I can make, after expecnces, between 8-9 mill a month. more than enough to cover any lost funding. how ever I need arround 10 mill (30mill is better) in investment capital or I spend to mutch time manageing my enginers

[Fox]

A good way to generate cash in the early-middle part of the game is to let an alien base hang around for a few months. If your radar/hyper decoders can catch them, theres usually 2-3 supply ships that land there per month. If you can assault all of the ships that try to land there for two months or something, you will get the mother lode in heavy plasmas etc. to sell off. And after that, if not one supply ship goes through, the alien base dies off, it just kinda disappears I believe. I'm sure Vet or NKF have exact numbers on that.

 

And if you have trouble with the constant supply ship raids, have a guy launch a blaster bomb in the very middle of the left hand side of the third level of the ship. It's the command room of the ship. If you drop two one after the other, you can usually take out the leader and a couple of guys right from the start. Morale of the aliens drops, and you can usually get your last aliens in the battle to panic and give themselves away.

[NKF]

The bases do not disappear for lack of supplies. They'll disappear if you kill off their staff or destroy the four command tables. Supplies are either unloaded when the ship touches down, or they're really picking up goods. Who knows, but that's how it goes.

 

As for engineering for cash -- I'd say don't rely too much on it. It's good for generating a bit more money when your account is really low and you're in a tight spot or during those quiet months, but I find as you progress in the game, cash becomes less and less of a problem. Besides, most of your money will be made off the equipment you take from the aliens.

 

You might also want to consider using smaller research teams as well to save a bit more money. Scientists cost a lot to keep in employment, and there are a lot of research topics that aren't really that important. If you can identify what topics are not all that useful and what are, one lab can usually get the job done.

 

- NKF

[Slythe]

Thanks for all the replies. After playing some more, a few more things I wanted to throw out there.

 

1) I was curious what path of research most people take beyond the obvious laser weapons or heavy plasma/armor for soldiers/medkit. Getting plasma cannons seems helpful. If you're lucky enough to capture a medic very early on is it worth it to get hyperwave decoders right away ?

 

2) Will all aliens eventually exit the small cross-shaped scout ship unless they're panicked ? I get impatient and decide to storm the ship and invariably lose 1 or 2 people. Let's say I move them in the outer door, and there's already an alien standing there, if I miss or don't kill him I'm almost guaranteed to die. The same applies if I enter and there's no alien so I station people outside the inner doors hoping for opportunity fire. Again what usually happens is an alien walks out and is able to fire and kill before I get a shot off. I'm always reluctant to drop proximity grenades because I'm screwed if they never come out. By the way this is the early game I'm talking about here when my soldiers are either unarmored or maybe have personal armor.

 

3) Is it just me or does every single terror mission seem to occur at night ?

 

God I love this game though.

[Fox]

1) The absolute number 1 thing I try to research is Laser Rifle. To me, it is an extremely valuable weapon and really the best gun for the first part of them game. If you can get your squad equipped with rifles in the first month, you will be pretty set to go. There are also the king of killing sectopods and cyberdiscs. Then I try and get the Personal Armor, alien grenade, medi-kit and motion scanner. The rest I just kind of pick depending on the situation.

 

2) If you have trouble with large scouts, always check to see if there's a hole in the roof. Sometimes when you down the scout there is a giant 4x4 hole in the roof, which you can easily toss a grenade in and kill a few weak aliens. And if they aren't tripping the proxy mines, just shoot an HE weapon at it to blow it up and then send some guys in.

 

3) With terror missions at night, typically you can wait three hours before sending the skyranger, before it dissappears. Then send the skyranger, and with any luck it'll be daytime. And if it isn't yet, target the terror site with another skyranger, and then after it's targetted by the second one, send the first one back. Terror sites don't disappear as long as they are targetted. I'm not sure if that works with Interceptors/Firestorms. So just wait it out and see when you can get there in the daytime.

 

Also, don't forget electro-flares, it throws in a cool atmosphere to the game when it's pitch black and you've got elctro-flares all over the place. I usually have 10 on my skyranger at all times, just in case.

 

------

NKF

 

I believe I read in KC's walkthrough that you can starve an alien base into disappearing. I thought I had done it before, but I haven't really tried it any time as of late. You could be right, and I'll double check on it sometime.

[NKF]

1. Yes, most definitely. Being forewarned is being forarmed. But you want a navigator, not a medic. Medics are only useful near the end of the game when you want to fill in gaps in your interrogation and autopsy reports.

 

As for research: Recently, I've started taking a particular interest in the small launcher. A stun bomb can literally murder multiple sectopods and cyberdiscs at the same time if they're standing together. It's a little silly when you think about it, but the results are rather impressive.

 

2. For the large scout (the cross shaped ship you mentioned), if you wait long enough, all but one alien will eventually walk out of the ship. The one that remains inside always waits in the same spot and can be very deadly if approached in the wrong manner. A safe way of dispatching it is to toss a high explosive into a corner wall near it. This might feel like kicking them below the waistline though.

 

Alternately, if you're going up against an intact large scout take a look at the following poorly drawn diagram I made up. It attempts to describe one of the methods I' use to lure that last alien out. It has worked successfully for me many times before, so I feel it's a valid procedure.

 

https://www.geocities.com/nkfarma/temporary...y/lsc_lure.html

 

 

3. Not always. Of course, you can control the time your Skyranger lands at the site if you want. See, a terror site will always remain up as long as a ship is targeting it.

 

- NKF

[Slythe]

You're right, I meant navigator but thought and typed medic by mistake.

 

I've started about 3 games so far, playing through the first couple months, just to get the hang of things again and figure out how I want to go about everything. The 5 or 6 terror missions I've encountered have ALL been at night. Each time I place my first base in Europe and the first terror mission is usually in South America too. Maybe this has all just been chance.

 

I definitely do better strategically (geoscape and base management) than I do tactically (combat missions), but I'm doing fine now overall, it's just that I inevitably get impatient during the ground assaults.

 

My typical research path seems to be laser tech-laser pistol-laser rifle-alien alloys-personal armor-medkit-heavy plasma/clip. I may experiment with holding off on medkits until I get power armor, or going for alien grenades and stun launchers before pursuing plasma cannons. Oh and I also usually go for laser tanks because I find tanks *extremely* helpful in the early game, primarily as scouts.

[Fox]

Power armor is a long way down the road... requires quite a bit more research. And once you get power suits, there really isn't any need for the medi-kit anymore, really. The medi-kit comes in most handy with unarmored soldiers, or soldiers with personal armour. Thats when the fatal wounds typically come. So I'd say stick witht he medi-kit in the beginning, but that's just me

[Mouse Nightshirt]

At the lower difficulty levels, hold off the med-kit until personal armour. Anything higher, leave it until Power Armour.

 

At harder difficulty levels, your troops simply wont survive a shot from a Heavy Plasma (which they tote around from the beginning) in Personal Armour, unless the person has high health.

[Slythe]

Oops !

 

Well regardless of reading the good advice from another post about not downing UFOs too close to your base, I did anyway. Sure enough, on January 17th, when I had only 4 laser pistols and no armor at all, my base was attacked by sectoids and cyberdisks. I lost either 1 or 2 soldiers, can't recall now, not so bad I guess, but my question is can I expect constant attacks on this base now ?

 

Oh I'm glad I found out about the 'keeping a terror site targetted' trick. I was able to alternate targetting with my 2 interceptors until daybreak then let my Skyranger touch down, avoiding a messy night terror mission.

 

Also, something I think would've been a nice addition to the geoscape - graphical overlays showing the radius of the radar coverage of each base.

[Fox]

radar coverage graphics would have been nice, but UFOs aren't detected in like ways you might think. It has to do with radar sweeps or something... I dunno. just forget this post

[NKF]

Hmm, the aliens who located your base will keep attacking it until one of their ships manage to break through your defences. So if you fend off the first attack wave that gets through, no more will come until the next time you alert them to your position (except if you alerted another group of aliens before the others sent in the battleship -- it's not that uncommon to have two or more base attacks immediately after each other).

 

It's funny, but they completely forget where you are after they deploy their troops in your base.

 

Early on in the game, you know what are good for cyberdiscs? Large rockets. Yep. One or two will jolly well do the trick. HWP rockets just don't seem to cut it on the higher difficulty levels. I usually end up spending 2 or 3 HWP rockets per cyberdisc on superhuman, and that seems like quite a waste of good rockets.

 

- NKF

[Slythe]

Games seem to vary wildly in how much UFO activity you see in the first several months, depending on what areas the aliens decide to scout out and make landings at first. If it's not near your starting base I've found it's not uncommon to go through an entire month seeing no activity at all. Since in my current game I've focused on getting my research staff up to 100 scientists as soon as possible, and I haven't seen a lot of alien activity, I've only been able to build the basics for one other base and start a third. So far this seems a good tradeoff though, as getting so much researched so quickly has been very helpful. In fact, it almost seems that at my current rate I'll run out of the worthwhile things to research and be on to sectiod corpses and plasma pistols.

[Ki-tat Chung]

i find that i really don't need to on purposly manufacture intems to sell. all the heavy plas's i get from UFO's and the clips give me like about 1/2 a mil or something. i can't remember the exact no. as i havn't played in a while.

[BladeFireLight]

as i havn't played in a while.

Have not played in a while!?! how can you ever stop playing?

 

YOU MUST PLAY!

 

-Blade FireLight

[Ki-tat Chung]

are ya gonna force me? :sly:

anyway, i'm too caught up in apoc and the e-mail/website sercivice dedicated to x-com to play UFO.

[darkvenom]

Listen Slythe...

 

It took me a long time and i have only finished the game six times to realise that to play the in game mission (landing, terror, bases, etc.) you should keep handy the save option within the game...

 

This helped me gain more knowledge of how the Aliens operate and more specifically how many i am going to encounter and whom in the different races...

 

After a while it all falls into action and in no time you'll be in cydonia

 

As for money i always keep 2 mil at the least... and then if more is needed manufacture cheap and sell more!!!

 

Psi is quite powerful when your on the losing end but the way i found to handle the situations of psi attacks is that if you know who's doing it take em out

ASF*@#&!P, but if you cant do this in one turn save and try again...

 

I know heaps of people will say "DONT SAVE!!!, ITS NOT HUMAN TO DO SO!" or try to insult you until you go back to slaughtering your men...

 

Get into the game and find out what makes the aliens tick... just make sure you dont loose control!!! (well not always)

 

And try not to fall into the use of XcomUtil... i realli dont like it... it does make the game more interesting to some extent but the only thing that i would approve would be the function to allow countries to begin funding for you again if you have eliminated aliens threat within their area!!!

 

Far out i talk to much.....

[Slythe]

At this point all I'm using xcomutil for is the automatic renaming and rearming of soldiers, which isn't any form of cheating; they are merely for convenience, and are functions that should've been in the original game.

[darkvenom]

True... i do like to idea of XcomUtil making the game seem a little more realistic but i dispise the people who seem to use it as a magic lamp and wish their way to victory if you know wat i mean...

 

it's besides the point.... :hmmm: