Shooting down alien craft...

[Prine]

Hi folks,

 

I've been playing EU for a few weeks now, having fun and frustration in almost equal measure. I've got a few questions floating around in my head, chief among them this topic's namesake.

 

From what I've been able to glean, it's almost always both easier and more profitable to assault a landed craft than a downed one; you don't attract retaliation missions, the aliens are surprisingly no more panicked or disorganised or less numerous in a recovery mission then they would be in a ground assault mission, downed UFOs rarely have any Elerium supply intact, and they often have hull breaches, which only complicates the matter of sieging the craft (as I'm generally relegated to doing, because I'm far too poor at strategy to storm a UFO without losing a bunch of men). This is doubly true for downed battleships, where each destroyed reactor means an additional potential exit that needs to be guarded (how do battleships with only one uncompromised reactor pylon even remain upright?).

 

The only advantages of shooting down a UFO that I can determine is that it gives you time to wait until the day before recovering the craft, and to a more limited extent allows you to choose what sort of terrain to conduct the mission in. I suppose it also affects your X-COM activity graph and thus your score, but is this really a big deal? I had thought it was, and that you might need to shoot craft down to stop infiltration missions from succeeding, but that was before I shot down and recovered an entire invading fleet, levelled a base, and the damnable country still sold out to the aliens at the end of the month. If shooting these things down really makes as little difference as I suspect, then I'm happy to just blow up terror ships and let my guys take the rest of the craft intact. Am I missing anything here?

 

Cheers for any response.

 

Oh wait, I'm having one other large problem, and that's prescient aliens with guided missile launchers. The only way I've found to deal with them is to run somebody right up to them, apparently they're smart enough not to fire a rocket straight into my guy's face, but then again when they can take down half my squad from halfway across the map, or worse still completely nuke my troop transport before I even get a chance to properly disembark, I don't know how I'm expected to respond, other than reloading to before I entered the mission and trying again. How the heck are you supposed to avoid this? I've tried to wean myself off replaying missions that go to hell, but when a devastating loss is so completely out of your control I find it's really hard not to.

[NKF]

It's unfortunate, but infiltration missions are a bit of a mystery. The outcome, I've found, tend to be totally unpredicatable, no matter how well, or bad, you dealt with the infiltrator fleet.

 

Imagine letting several infiltrators land and get away, and still have the country the following month. Or shooting down each and every ship, even the battleships, and losing the country anyway. Then there times where I shoot down the small fry and take on the battleships before they can take off, and I'd lose the country. But then again, I have other occasions where I do this and the country is saved. It's frustrating. I've had so many different outcomes that I just put up with it an get on with playing the game. You can stay in business for as long as you want as long as you keep up a good monthly score.

 

That aside, it's indeed preferable to land at intact UFOs to get the best results, however, you don't always have the luxury of getting there on time, even with the Avenger. So rather than letting them get away, just shoot them down for later. Or not.

 

If you can't be bothered with dealing with the ground mission, shooting the ship down will at least net you a small amount of points to go towards your monthly score, and reduce further alien activity that'll go against your score.

 

----

 

Regarding blaster bombs, it's hard to combat them, but it's certainly not impossible. They only appear in missions that consist of Battleship crews. That being X-Com and alien base assaults and Battleships themselves. There are usually three aliens in the crew that carry blaster launchers, but on harder difficulty levels, there could even be up to four.

 

The first thing you can do to cut your losses is to spread everyone out. Way out. They tend to go after units that are closest to them, but appear to take preference to large concentrations of soldiers. This can be hard in base assault and base defence missions, but you can always make use of the many smaller rooms that you can find along the way to provide protection from a single bomb.

 

Have disposable units, i.e. tanks or mind controlled aliens, race on ahead, and the moment you spot an alien with a blaster, drop everything you're doing and take it out.

 

Develop blasters of your own. The first thing you should do is to shell any alien commanding officers, whether or not they're carrying blasters. This can be done in the first few turns of most missions as the commanding aliens start in set locations. In alien base attacks, find the command room and send a few bombs its way. In battleship assaults, shell the command room, the southern room on the top floor. In X-Com base defence missions it's trickier, but if you concentrate your firepower in the hangars, you're bound to knock out a few blaster launcher carriers. By attacking the higher ranking aliens first or large concentrations of aliens you can cripple alien morale. And as the battle progresses, hopefully to the point that they start panicking. This aggressive form of play is mainly geared towards combating psionics, but works well when adapted to fighting other blaster launchers.

 

Just keep at it.

 

- NKF

[Prine]

Thanks, that's a great help.

 

I tend to avoid using blaster bombs because it's too tempting to abuse them, but fight fire with fire, I guess. I've never actually used tanks or offensive psi much.

 

After my first couple of encounters with blaster bombs I thought I could avoid being targeted by just keeping my guys out of the aliens' direct line of sight, but it appears they can track non-visible movement. I've had aliens on the opposite side of a wall bomb the wall next to where my soldier was positioned, blowing the whole area to kibble and killing the oblivious trooper in the process.

[Bomb Bloke]

Aliens cheat. If they know where one of your units are, they know where ALL of your units are - and they get to see your units for a few turns, too.

 

I have a suspicion that this can be countered by killing the aliens that originally spotted you. All I know is, the more you kill, the less blaster bombs and psi attacks you'll suffer.

 

Basically, don't give the aliens spare time. Those who hold blaster bombs very rarely are able to fire them right at the start of combat, because there's no path for the bombs to follow. Most of these paths are blocked by doors.

 

In an alien base, usually the blaster bomb wielding units hide in the command center. They need a door opened in order to fire bombs out. Sometimes they start in other zones, and this is more dangerous for you - so guard the command center in case that lower door opens, and concentrate on killing the wandering aliens first.

 

When fighting in your own bases, you usually won't have doors to protect you. What you do have is a pretty good idea where the aliens are (access lift and hangers), so you can often kill many aliens very quickly indeed.

 

Then there's battleships. The blaster bombs will come from the top floor. The aliens in concern have to have the doors leading to the central grav lift opened in order to get bombs anywhere else, and they don't tend to do this themselves - but other aliens often do. However, because of the various other doors blocking firing paths, it is quite rare that a battleship crew member will fire a blaster bomb at you.

 

Usually you'll bump into groups of aliens on the bridge, kill the ones with plasmas first, the ones with the launchers won't fire them at such close range.

[Prine]

I'm petrified of doors when there's blaster-packing aliens around. In one alien base assault I remember being in a situation where there were at least three aliens with blaster launchers in the circular corridor beneath the command center. When one of them opened the door and got nailed by my reaction fire, one (or both) of the others would send their bombs through and smash my squad to bits.

 

On a similar note, is there any undocumented way of just opening a door without actually stepping through it? I read somewhere that you could do it on the Playstation version.

[NKF]

Unfortunately, no. I'd love to have that feature for the PC version! You can, however, detect whether there's something immediately on the other side of the door by using a medikit, but that doesn't help, does it? For UFO assaults, I generally wait until most of the aliens have left the ship (and right into an ambush) before moving in and taking out any aliens that are planted to one spot.

 

Speaking of alien AI, they don't need to see you. They already know where you are from the very first turn, although those with psi powers appear to give you a short grace period before attacking. If you give them enough time, their seemingly semi-random movement will lead the aliens to the soldier nearest to them. You can sometimes see this in action if you spend a long time in your troop transport (particularly one like the Lightning).

 

- NKF

[Prine]

For UFO assaults, I generally wait until most of the aliens have left the ship (and right into an ambush) before moving in and taking out any aliens that are planted to one spot.

Likewise. Usually works well, since the last few aliens mostly panic and run into a corner.

 

In the last mission I played, I was assaulting a landed abductor, and the last two aliens were a pair of medics who both went berserk. They were standing one each to either side of the examination room, both facing the entryway, and they wouldn't budge no matter what I did. I should've punched a hole in the back of the ship with a blaster bomb and come through the other door, but instead I lost one soldier and wounded another. Oh well.

 

I figured they could detect my guys automatically. It explains why they're unerringly precise with non-LOS-affected attacks like blaster bombs and psi (I've noticed that XCOM soldiers can also use psi attacks without line of sight, so long as they can 'detect' the target, or anyone else in the squad can or has seen them in the same turn). On the other hand, I've been totally ignored by aliens who didn't have me in their direct LOS. Weird.

[Bomb Bloke]

There is one way to get a door "open" without going through - blast it.

 

Reaction fire is your obvious enemy, but aliens will only fire upon the guy who does the shooting. If you get a few other units to back him up - get them looking through where your hole will be - then when the hole is made, they can hopefully roast any visible aliens with autofire. Place your "door opening" unit some ways back so he won't get spotted, and with any luck the aliens won't even get a chance to use reaction fire against you.

 

If you can't take out the aliens holding the blaster bomb launchers, take control of an alien on the other side of the door, place him in the hole (On their side of the hole, not yours). Even if they do fire at him (as they well might), it's no great loss to you.

 

There are a few windows which let you see into that circular passage, by the way, be careful of bombs being fired through them. If you suspect aliens are wandering around it, guard the windows and see if you can take them out from there.

[FullAuto]

I tend to assault UFOs rather than wait outside, but I ignore interior doors and simply blow a hole in the interior walls with Heavy Plasma fire, avoiding the normal chokepoints and ambushes.

[uriaheep]

On a similar note, is there any undocumented way of just opening a door without actually stepping through it? I read somewhere that you could do it on the Playstation version.

 

I seem to remember in TFTD if you right click the mouse at the other side of the door it opens without going through it but it doesn't work on my version of EU.

[Zombie]

On a similar note, is there any undocumented way of just opening a door without actually stepping through it? I read somewhere that you could do it on the Playstation version.

This feature is not available in EU. However, in the Playstation version you can open doors without stepping inside simply by right clicking beyond the door (much like in TFTD). This is one of the primary reasons why I love playing X-COM on the PSX. It doesn't draw reaction fire either, which is a huge tactical advantage in the battlescape.

 

So is it worthwhile to shoot down alien craft, rather than letting it land on its own? Sometimes it is. This is especially true when the aliens are trying to find the location of your base. Another good mission to avoid visiting while landed is a Terror mission. Personally, I'd much rather visit a downed Terror Ship than a Terror site itself. A positive side effect of shooting down scouts is sometimes the prevention of that mission from coming to a conclusion (think larger UFO's and more aliens). On the flip side of the coin, letting UFO's land is far more profitable (and in some respects easier) than shooting them down yourself. You get a better score for assaulting a landed UFO, more loot and a predictable UFO layout.

 

As for Blaster Launcher wielding aliens, they can be tough to combat strategically since that weapon does not need a direct line of sight to be effective. However, in my countless alien base missions I rarely use Blaster Bombs. Why? I guess it is a matter of strategy. Playing defensively helps. So does killing many aliens in one turn. My favorite messages in X-COM is "x Soldier has panicked", "x Leader has panicked" or "x Commander has gone Berserk" (where x is any alien race). Those messages mean you are doing your job correctly, as the aliens are too busy fighting off the instinct to run rather than fight.

 

- Zombie

[uriaheep]

Bases? I love em. Two special troopers with Blaster Launchers plus their own Protection Team, three troopers with loads of movement and stamina to find the control room and Bingo! Fireworks night. In and out without loosing a man. No goodies either.