Ode to the small rocket

[NKF]

Okay, so I'm not good at odes. But a good mindless ramble should do - 'tis good for the soul.

 

Decided to download an updated copy of Dosbox today (my last was 0.61 - please don't laugh), and ran EU to give it a test drive.

 

I loaded up a savegame that I have no recollection of creating, but appears that I'd started up a test game as my first base name consisted of random letters from the asdfg... row of the keyboard. It seems I'd started it up with the intention of making it a rocket-launcher-only campaign. It was in the early stages of a night terror site against floaters. The team consisted of absolute greenhorns armed with only small rockets. Probably 7 or 8 out of the 10 soldiers were armed. Nothing else, no tools, no flares, etc - or at least I took no notice of them.

 

Not having properly played a game in a while, my movements were very reckless and I did not heed the TU/reaction relationship and merrily had everyone using up all their TUs everywhere they went. None of the sensible scout/sniper techniques - it was shoot-on-sight most of the time. In short I was playing very badly.

 

In the end I got -130 points from 4 lost soldiers and the loss of most of the civilians (to my credit, none by X-Com). Despite the negative points, my rusty playing, and the fact I played through without saving, I thought that was rather an acceptable win. So I quit and didn't save the game afterwards.

 

It was, pardon the pun, a blast.

 

There were a couple of memorable moments. The first was an absolutely stupid death-by-reaction-fire where a soldier ducked into an alley to reload. Just because he was looking the wrong way, he ended up reacting to a Reaper that walked past him. At point-blank (1-tile) range, neither survived.

 

Another quite memorable moment was where a soldier ended his turn in an area that was clear of enemies (the big blue house, standing outside in the north-eastern corner by the fence). Next turn, someone just glances in his direction and there's this reaper standing right behind him. How did it get there? Quite baffling. Took about 3 steps away, swung around and launched a rocket. Took out the reaper and no damage in return. Thank goodness for the small rocket's small blast radius!

 

There was one technique I found myself employing quite a bit in this mission and that was rocket tossing. As you can probably imagine, with only 4 shots each, the front-line soldiers tend to be quite exhausted of ammo. I had to run some soldiers around getting ammo to the front line (if they couldn't attack the targets themselves). Often I couldn't cross the gap between the soldiers because they were being pinned down by snipers. So - the answer was to toss the missiles over. At 6 weight, they are as heavy as large rockets, but I think this stunt might not have worked had they been as heavy as the Large Rockets.

 

Well, I've had my turn on the soap box. Carry on.

 

- NKF

[FullAuto]

The first was an absolutely stupid death-by-reaction-fire where a soldier ducked into an alley to reload. Just because he was looking the wrong way, he ended up reacting to a Reaper that walked past him. At point-blank (1-tile) range, neither survived.

 

*looks at Reaper*

 

*gauges distance*

 

*looks at rocket launcher*

 

*looks back at Reaper*

 

*shoots anyway*