Interceptions.

[FullAuto]

Just started playing this, sorted some research, raided some CoS temples, cleaned up a few alien infestations, but I cannot intercept any of the alien craft. I usually arrive in time to chase them back to their own dimension, destroying half the city in the process as laser beams and missiles go wild. I can mop up the aliens they leave behind, no problem, but shooting them down...

Either there's a fair few craft, so I split my forces and end up not bringing to bear enough firepower (where I do, said firepower hits everything BUT the alien craft) or I just don't get there in time to do anything but trail behind them.

Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

[Bomb Bloke]

The alien craft move fast, and can deal your ships a lot of damage. Don't split your forces, chose one craft and hit it hard.

 

If it runs off... Well, better luck next time. You'll take one down eventually, and it's all downhill from there, because the craft you can build are a lot better then anything else in the game.

 

Speaking of which, the craft you can build don't use fuel. There's no reason why you can't leave them flying in the air, bringing them back for repairs as need be. Beats flying half way across the map to where the gates are all the time.

[NKF]

Parking ships in buildings other than your own costs nothing and they don't spend their fuel. Once you hit the hybrid aircraft, they can be left in the air indefinitely. Arm them with shields, lasers and disrupter weapons and they can literally be left in the air forever, with the only reason for returning to a base to obtain new shields and hull repairs.

 

Split up the city into sectors and have a pair or four hoverbikes, one or two hovercars, or even a single Hawk Air Warrior stationed in the middle of these sectors all over the map. Actually, use whatever mix of forces you want - those were just suggestions for the early game. When the UFOs arrive, you'll have ships scattered all over the city ready to intercept them wherever they go and you can bring in support from the next nearest stationed ships if you need more firepower.

 

I generally do this with hoverbikes and hovercars as parked 'patrol' vehicles because they're cheap and easy to obtain en mass.

 

- NKF.

[Stun Grenade]

Call this cheating if you will but this works everytime!

 

On average, there are two dimension gates. So I have 2 fleets - 1 fleet at each dimension gate. Each fleet has around 10-20 aircraft. Before you move them, save and then fast forward until the UFO's come. Remember the time! Then load and fast forward until its like 30min before the proper UFO arrival time. Save now. When the time comes, the UFO's will plunder anything that comes through.

 

Hehehehe...

 

~SG

[FullAuto]

Much appreciated, thank you. I'm loving the game, and though I do keep running out of ammo in the battlescape, it's bloody good.

[Cap'n Kyth]

When your ACs can spit 2-3 rounds per half-second, then you can complain about running out of ammo.

[NKF]

Try to get into close combat with the aliens. It's hard to miss up close and saves a lot of ammo. Even better, assuming you're playing real-time mode and the aliens anthropods haven't started using shields, go up close and use the stun grapple as your secondary weapon. This can disable most enemies in an instant. For multiworms, it allows you to disable it before it bursts into 4 hyperworms in 80 less hitpoints - allowing you time to either stand on it to keep it down indefinitely, or do other preparations prior to destroying it. Actually, the stun grapple's good at temporarily disabling hyperworms too. Force-attack them rather than rely on reactions. It's faster.

 

- NKF

[Bunnysays]

Call this cheating if you will but this works everytime!

 

On average, there are two dimension gates. So I have 2 fleets - 1 fleet at each dimension gate. Each fleet has around 10-20 aircraft. Before you move them, save and then fast forward until the UFO's come. Remember the time! Then load and fast forward until its like 30min before the proper UFO arrival time. Save now. When the time comes, the UFO's will plunder anything that comes through.

 

Hehehehe...

 

~SG

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

I was going to suggest the same thing. I do it every time. I save a lot, usually in alternating save slots in case I screw up something. So I would always have a save roughly close to the time before they would come out. And yeah, I would just fast forward until they did, check the time and remember it and prepare. I would save about an hour before they came through and fly out two groups of about 4 or 5 fighters next to the gates and blast them as they appeared.

 

If one or two of your fighters are catching up to shoot at a ship, it feels like they are doing nothing. If you have 5 of them right there next to eachother hitting the a single alien ship at the same time, they go down pretty fast. As long as it's something roughly that they can handle.

 

I also used another sort of cheat. I'm sure other people have tried this as well. Ships that come through are of different types and have different objectives (especially later in the game). If you save right before they come through and don't like the alien ship types that are coming through or what they are doing, reload and try again. And again, and again. If something came through that I just couldn't deal with at the moment, sometimes I would just reload until some other types (*cough* easier *cough*) of ships came out. Also, if there was a certain type that I knew I wanted to capture or whatever. I would just reload and reload until the groups had one of the kind that I wanted. Not original, but it could save hours of frustration. Remember, Save/Load are your friends.

[NKF]

I wouldn't rely on that too much, as in the later part of the game, that game event actually includes a whole selection of other possible outcomes.

 

Either nothing happens, a different attack fleet comes in (Various), a gang launches a futile attack against a building, one of your bases gets attacked (if you have any enemies), or the usual X was Y'd by Z.

 

Nothing wrong with parking teams in the general vicinity of the gates. Now, if you know exactly where the ship is going to go (easier in the AD as the UFOs just patrol about forever - harder in the Megaprimus as they have a specific mission in mind). If you set up a barrier of some sort, like a semi-circle of ships on various elevations, the UFO will be literally ripped to shreds a lot faster than if you were to send the whole fleet to 'attack target' and let things run their course. Ships on the move waste their weapon's rate-of-fire, because they're always rushing towards the target and then turning around. By always facing in the general direction of the target, weapon usage is maximised. It does leave one of your ships open to an attack, but the speed that you can take down the UFO more than makes up for it.

 

I've only had this work in the city a few times due to the difficulty in setting up these traps, as we don't know where the UFOs are going to go and the difficulty in having enough vehicles nearby to set the trap, but when they did work, they were amazing.

 

- NKF

[Stun Grenade]

NKF, sometimes it backfires when they come a bit later and you run out of fuel, but sometimes they don't come at all. It's all luck!

[NKF]

That's why you land inside a building. Fuel isn't spent when you're parked.

 

You can speed the deployment of your ships by only placing an equal number of ships to the launch tubes in each building you choose to park your ships at. Say if you've got 4 ships and there's two buildings with 2 tubes each, park two ships in each building. That way if you launch all four ships at once, they'll launch at the same time rather than get into a launch queue - which can take forever if there's just one tube and 16 hoverbikes... the horrors.

 

And yes - events that happen in the city are mostly luck based. If you saved just before your base got attacked a few hours after saving, and if you were to reload, it may never even happen or something completely different may happn. Like the Apocalypse mission (You know, the mission where the aliens go ape due to your continuous success, and send in a lot of their more powerful ships to blast away at a few pre-defined targets in the city)

 

- NKF

[FullAuto]

Don't stop on my account, this is good stuff, thanks!

[Pruimpje]

In the first stages of the game i use a swarm of hoverbike and such. They're cheap and carry enough firepower together to scare away or ever destroy the aliens

 

Later in the game they get destroyed in like one shot but they are still a good diversion to keep ufo's from attacking other buildings/ships

[Bomb Bloke]

If aliens hit buildings, they annoy the owners. I was only able to take down my first mothership when it had the majority of the police force buzzing around it first.

 

You can actually take manual control of craft, but I've only ever tried that once. Not sure how possible it would be to actually dogfight like that.

[NKF]

Manual works well with a single vehicle. The other vehicles in the group selection (apart from the leader of the current group) will just swarm around your lead ship, but they do appear to fire where you want them to, although more often than not you'll take on lots of friendly fire.

 

One useful side effect is that manual controls reactivate the guns on a ship if it's in stasis. Of course, you have to fire them manually.

 

For cars, you can use it to do a U turn in the middle of the road or overtake another car. Which reminds me, manual control also allows your ship/car to move at its highest speed. I don't think the game uses them at full speed for some reason.

 

Manual control is ideal for your occasional blow-the-city-up-for-fun rampages.

 

You can also use manual control to fire your missile defence guns at targets/buildings. Triple plasma defence guns will sap a battleship's shields in seconds - and it will blow Hawk Air Warriors out of the sky (try firing it over a launch tube - almost all of the ships that get out will not be able to escape undamaged). Unfortunately it does diddly squat against the hull of a battleship. Works well on the earlier UFOs though. Manual control and the defence guns do not allow you to easily shoot down missiles - although I suppose it's worth a try.

 

- NKF