The Save & Load Rules

[Alienated]

The Save & Load Rules

 

I made this topic/post hopefully to stimulate other gamers to play X-COM more.

 

I can defeat every UFO without casualties by the save & load rules. That's why the save & load rules. I tried to play some missions straight ahead but I found that way of playing very boring. It's no fun buying soldiers like rifle clips. Normally aliens kill one or two soldiers in almost every mission, and sometimes I can feast if I am able to take the craft from the site with one survivor. I for one don't play games to lose but to win. I can lose in life anytime if I wanted to get some reality feeling. The main point in the save & load rules is that I must win each and every mission without casualties (I usually count wound recovery more than a couple of days as a casualty) and I must defeat every UFO (maybe except the small scout of retaliation). I mean every UFO that comes to Earth, not every UFO my radar systems report. I must prefer ground assault missions to crash recovery. I must let the aliens terrorise cities. I must prefer saving all civilians especially if the alien race is of a weaker type (floater, snakeman). I must not let aliens comit suicide (lame grenadier, berserker, blind blaster launcher, stander in a burning UFO power source ruin). I must prefer scoring the maximum per mission.

 

As you can see, it isn't easy at all. A blaster bomb may come from anywhere and anytime in an alien base for example. The command center is a place you better stay away because a commander, a leader, and an engineer may hold a blaster launcher in the hand. That is six possible blaster launchers though I don't know for sure. So the origin of an upcoming blaster bomb is mainly the command center. I can't hide away in Battleship assaults, so I have to get in the UFO quickly. I can't hide but a blaster bomb may miss my soldier and leave the battlefield without an explosion. That's not the case for alien and X-COM bases. There is always an explosion in bases which brings about (1) alien suicide; (2) X-COM casualties. I already lose if they have the random idea to use the blaster launcher. My other "favourite" is the stun bomb when a berserk medic or engineer makes a trip. You can imagine how I like TFTD with the half of aliens holding thermal shok launchers.

 

It's my fun to get the aliens walk in my traps at doors, corners, and windows. Long ago I just shot them down by the scout-sniper exploit and my men learned to shoot but their reactions remained pathetic. I used reaction-shots the fisrt time when I trained my men but now I don't train soldiers. The only training is allowed to shot dead the alien who gets conscious again (by medi-kit usage for example). I know killing the aliens by reaction-fire is fun but it is not just fun but a successful tactics also. Normally the maximum amount of hits is three (auto-shot) and it still may not be enough. But I can hit an alien more than three times by reaction fire. Reaction fire is the safest tactics by the save & load rules.

 

I mentioned the highest scores as possible. This can be achieved by not researching the alien artefacts. Killing aliens by earth technology isn't easy. Smashing UFOs by earth technology isn't easy as well.

 

Well, now let me write you about my campaigns in X-COM: Enemy Unknown. As I mentioned, I had many campaigns before the ruled ones. One of the early ones included the one when I named my soldiers such as Duke Nukem, Ripley, Dutch Shaefer, and funny names. That was the first time I tried to attack Cydonia. I played that straight ahead just out of curiosity. Here's the story: the outside was not too bad. I don't remember how many people I lost but I do remember one guy who died of a fatal wound in the first turn in the base. I brought many greens and a hovertank-plasma. The hovertank did the 90% of the kills in the base because my people were more times on the enemy's side than mine. Actually it was one of my men who destroyed the hovertank and I didn't know whom I hated the more, the ethereals or my man. That man ended his short alienated life in the chamber of the brain, the ethereals killed him. I had two people left altogether but the aliens too got very few somehow. I don't know exactly what happened, I had had two guys in the entrance area. Somebody had wanted to kill them by a blaster bomb but there had been a sectopod on the first floor of that closet and I had heard a whoosh, a bang, and deathscreams in chorus. I had gone down to check out what had given. There had been a big loneliness all around. But I was not always so lucky. When I finally spotted two ethereals (actually I couldn't even get close to them, I mean with the soldiers under my control), I primed a grenade and was thinking where I should throw it to avoid reaction fire (they had their backs to me). Okay, I threw it. Damn, I forgot to click on to throw the grenade, so the man walked right behind the ethereal! They of course killed him but the grenade blew them up. I had one soldier left: Ripley, how funny. I don't remember whether she had any more jobs to do. I know the ethereals could not control her though she panicked a lot, and I don't wonder that. She gave a grenade to the brain and said farewell to the Cydonians. I told you this story to see how lame the straight ahead missions can be.

 

I usually don't go to Cydonia. When I get to the point where I am about to go to Cydonia, I restart the campaign instead. However, I went to Cydonia once to see whether I can do it with standard weapons on superhuman. I brought a tank-cannon too. Now that was a tipical save & load game because I might have run out of ammo otherwise. The sectopods were tough all right. And they cheated. I wanted to get in their backs but they always expected me from the right direction. Some of them stood right in the corner looking both ways. The point in that campaign was to beat the game as early as possible. It rarely happens that the randomiser generates not one but two research missions. I built a (the) base in Central Asia and I got sectoids researching in Central Asia and South-East Asia, and floaters terrorising North Africa. This time there was no terror site, I needed the Terror Ship to sell. The superhuman difficulty is a key element in the campaign for the earliest victory. Numerous enemy carries numerous weapons, numerous weapons make much money. Much money feeds numerous scientists. I succeeded to anger the floaters to attack my base (named Aegis), so I got the commander in January. I could have done better because I changed the scientists to engineers to build the Avenger. I should have done it parallelly, I had the money. The Cydonia was the 19th mission near the end of February. I had eight soldiers from the start to the end. One of them had originally 60 reaction points, he got 98 in the end. I have their stats in case somebody is interested.

 

If I don't play my campaigns to beat the game usually, then what do I do? Currently I play three campaigns, one of them is capable to beat the game, the other two basically can never beat the game because they are restricted to earth technology. I call the former campaign the War. I exploited the retaliation mission bug, so I have the mutons attack one of my bases from July four or three times per month. I shot down 14 Battleships and I can't see the end of this. It isn't easy to catch a Battleship at 5000. I usually attack it from other bases so the target base could almost always have the defensive fleet ready for worse cases. And I have to manufacture fusion bombs a lot.

 

One of the two earth technology games is restricted to laser weapons, the other is restricted to medi-kit research only. I play the latter on beginner level to be able to pierce through the sectopods' armor but I edited the soldiers' data to have everybody start as bad rookies, every skill is lowest (except psionic strength). I'm near the 100th mission and I begin to have people with 50-60 reactions and 50-60 firing accuracy. The aim in this campaign to have all countries quit X-COM funding. This means many large UFOs in a group in infiltration missions. When they show up, I start one extra Skyranger in case the randomiser generates a Base Supply mission so quickly (it happened), you know the Skyranger can't catch a Supply Mission if the alien base is too distant from the X-COM base, so it is vital to erase the alien base from the map as soon as possible. I usually destroy their base before the UFOs even land. So this counts seven Skyrangers (2 Battleship, 1(+1) Supply Ship, 1 Terror Ship, 1 Large Scout, 1 Alien Base). And you can imagine two such missions, a base and an infiltration...

 

So I have the War and the Infiltration campaigns. And let me call the other Laser Squad campaign. The Laser Squad campaign may go for the greatest mission score as I play it on superhuman with all alien artefacts scored. I have to admit that my Infiltration campaign does not accept ethereals too early (first I have to teach my men to shoot otherwise I can't tell how they may kill sectopods) and I avoid great missions by mutons due to AP resistance. The randomiser gave me for the current month (September) a floater terror, a sectoid harvest, and a muton research, and I have on-going missions too (snakeman terror, floater harvest, floater abduction, snakeman infiltration). I have already knocked out Australia, Nigeria, and India from the funding. I don't have to discriminate among races in the Laser Squad and the War campaign, maybe if I am bored of a race or a mission type.

 

I am planning a new campaign, maybe in TFTD. If I can get it run in superhuman level, I start a total-funding campaign, I mean I must not sell anything for money. I sell the items but accordingly reduce the sum by GameShark, or just handle the monetary part of the game on paper. If the paper says I have no money, I lose. I think the game may not be so hard with that either but I'll see. One thing can be hard, and I wonder you have ever tried this: go to a terror site by waypoint flight. If you hit the waypoint at the terror site (or artefact site), you are allowed to target the site itself. If your base is too distant and your Skyranger-Triton can't get there in time, you lose that terror site. This forces you to build more bases and have crafts ready as soon as possible.

 

Here's an overview of my X-COM forces:

			  Cash Current_date UFO# Mission# Soldiers_(total&ranks)
War		  532m 1999 Dec 6	208	  184 52/1/2/4/10/35
Laser Squad   60m 1999 Apr 1	 24	   26 100/1/4/9/20/40+26
Infiltration 270m 1999 Sep 1	 95	   94 58/1/2/5/11/39

The bases of War:

Deadly Levels

Location: Siberia, N50-E100 (H

[Jman4117]

How does save and reload make the game more fun? You know what's going to happen in advance. Where enemies are going to start, where they are going to move. You can shoot at them blindly with blaster bombs or grenades and just kill them without ever seeing them. There's no risk at all to your soldiers. You never learn how to properly play the game if you never face a risk of losing anybody as your tactics will never evolve to counter how the game works.

[NKF]

That's a bit of a role reversal.

 

Many players start learning X-COM using save/reload to revive soldiers and keep them alive all the way to the end-game mission. This is great as the game is hard and this helps the player get used to the game. Then they graduate to just accepting losses as they go along to keep the game interesting. In this instance they either lose a lot and give up or start changing and improving their strategies to adapt. This is generally done to keep enjoying the game.

 

Some go beyond and start making the game even more difficult than it needs to be just to see if they can.

 

We find many ways to enjoy the game.

 

- NKF

[Bomb Bloke]

Indeed, I used to save/load to ensure my troopers never died. If a trooper was exposed to the enemy during their turn, this sometimes involved a lot of reloading - I'd sit there and reload, over and over, until they survived the alien turn and got their TUs back.

 

This has a lot to do with why I recommend the kneel button so highly - I know exactly how big a difference it can made to the amount of reloads I'd have to do, even at point blank range it saved lives!

 

Anyway, later on I switched to ironman and decided that was the correct way to play the game. And there is indeed something to be said for the feeling you get when you polish off a battleship without losing any soldiers, in a single sitting. The reward means less without the risk.

 

Later still, I realised that the best way to play is whatever the individual player deems fun. Save scumming, cheatcodes and exploits, whatever.

 

Personally, these days I get more enjoyment out of finding features we never knew the game had... I'm sure there's still a few more in there!

[Crafty]

Kinda reminds me of the most fun I ever had playing this game. First game I played all the way to the end, before I really knew what I was doing. I think it was on intermediate level. The final moment of the game I had exactly four survivors in Cydonia, ready to shoot the alien brain. Everyone else had been killed but these four dudes had been with me from the very start and had seen it all.

 

Good times.

 

So yeah, Ironman all the way.

[Alienated]

You can shoot at them blindly with blaster bombs or grenades and just kill them without ever seeing them.

You can do that by trial and error too. The aliens know where your soldiers are, so they aren't even blind. I never use blaster bombs and grenades. They tend to destroy aliens without notice (the game gives you score if you make them scream in pain) and those methods are already some kind of cheating. You can throw a grenade farther than you see and more accurately than shoot.

 

And there is indeed something to be said for the feeling you get when you polish off a battleship without losing any soldiers, in a single sitting. The reward means less without the risk.

You are always lucky in those "single sittings". What reward can be for just being lucky? But solving difficult situations by finding the proper squad set-up requires some patience. For example: the alien opens the UFO door and exits. My soldiers open fire, some miss and some hit, however the alien is still alive and throws a grenade at your squad, your squad opens fire again and kill the alien but the grenade kills your squad. I reload the game and make the faster soldier do idle moves to lose some TU. The alien opens the door and exits, my soldiers open fire but in a different order, some miss and some hit and the alien dies. The first time the alien was lucky, the second time I was. I was patient because I "waited" for my lucky moment. Another example: the aliens opens the door and exits, my soldiers open fire, some miss and some hit but the alien stays alive and escapes back where it's come from, however, another alien sends a blaster bomb through the open door and kills my men. I reload the game and do idle moves. The alien opens the door and exits, my men shoot it dead and the alien with the blaster launcher panicks. The next turn it too comes out and my men shoot it too dead. This is the Save & Load Rule. It is not about cheating. Just to make the gameplay comfortable.

 

Playing straight ahead can be tiresome. One has to comb carefully such parts of the battlescape where no alien is found. That can be exciting for a while but not after the 999th mission.

 

I bet you know the game Laser Squad. That game was fun in straight ahead playing because luck didn't play too much role.

[The Veteran]

This thread is a complete puzzle to me. I know there is fun to be had in playing a non-ironman game. My personal preference is somewhere inbetween the two when my favourite troops can occasionally see a reload when they die. It's to the beginning of the mission though with different enemies in different places with different weapons. This way, even if I do feel the need to cheat (that's what reloading is by the way) I'm not replaying the same 2 turns over and over until I get 'lucky'. I simply face a new tactical situation and my strategy is forced to change. This is how I learn what works and what doesn't work and also most importantly the way I find to be most fun.

 

To pick some points from your last post I think you're only really addressing your side of the debate. Example...

I never use blaster bombs and grenades. They tend to destroy aliens without notice (the game gives you score if you make them scream in pain) and those methods are already some kind of cheating. You can throw a grenade farther than you see and more accurately than shoot.

 

None of that is true... You score points for aliens killed, the game doesn't give a crap how they die. Also if grenades and blaster bombs are in the game then obviously it isn't cheating. It's debatable whether they are too powerful but it's seen by most as the players reward for making it so far with rubbish human guns. Also you CAN throw further than you can see but you can also SHOOT further than you can see so is that cheating too? Throwing accuracy and firing accuracy are also 2 different stats so the claim that grenades are more accurate is also untrue. If you have a soldier with high firing acc. and low throwing acc. then the grenade will blow his feet off but an aimed shot will pop a Celatid open from right across the map! The difference is that grenades don't need to hit the enemy as they deal explosive damage. If that's why you have a problem with them then I suggest you switch to HE firearms so a near-miss can be just as deadly as a grenade... (Like it matters, if you miss you can just reload and try again right?...)

 

You are always lucky in those "single sittings". What reward can be for just being lucky? But solving difficult situations by finding the proper squad set-up requires some patience. ...... The first time the alien was lucky, the second time I was. I was patient because I "waited" for my lucky moment. ....... This is the Save & Load Rule. It is not about cheating. Just to make the gameplay comfortable.

 

I honestly don't know where to start. You cannot force luck, if that was possible then it wouldn't be luck anymore just another statistical fact... And while it's true that luck does play a part in these games it's mostly down to the person playing. For example, if you're lucky then your troops will hit the enemy and the enemy will miss you. Alternatively, if you hire only troops with high accuracies and quick reactions, equip them with highly accurate weapons and fire only aimed shots while kneeling. Well, chances are they're more likely to hit than untrained, unskilled rookies standing in the distance with inaccurate weapons in both hands spouting autoshots...

 

So as I said, it's debatable how much luck has got to do with it, but at the end of the day, what you're doing has nothing to do with luck because you're just going to keep reloading until you have a perfect game! It's as if you're writing a story rather than playing a game. Anyone can make what they want to happen in this game happen if they follow your 'rules'. Say there is one guy on the ranger with a pistol and a battleship full of snakemen in front of him. I want that one man to kill all of those aliens and return home uninjured and carrying a stunned commander. Guess what, it'll never happen! But in your world it could...

 

And that's messed up...

 

Playing straight ahead can be tiresome. One has to comb carefully such parts of the battlescape where no alien is found. That can be exciting for a while but not after the 999th mission.

Going to throw one last fact at you. You're playing the wrong game... You've just told us that you dislike the action that makes up about 60% of the game. Go play Enforcer or atomic bomberman or something. Not only are they easy games that you don't need a brain to play, they don't have save features...

[chiasaur11]

So as I said, it's debatable how much luck has got to do with it, but at the end of the day, what you're doing has nothing to do with luck because you're just going to keep reloading until you have a perfect game! It's as if you're writing a story rather than playing a game. Anyone can make what they want to happen in this game happen if they follow your 'rules'. Say there is one guy on the ranger with a pistol and a battleship full of snakemen in front of him. I want that one man to kill all of those aliens and return home uninjured and carrying a stunned commander. Guess what, it'll never happen! But in your world it could...

 

And that's messed up...

 

Could happen in standard X-Com, assuming a laser pistol. Incredibly unlikely, but incredibly badass if he pulls it off.

[NKF]

Done it with floaters!

 

.

.

.

 

 

After dozens upon dozens of tries.

 

But it's rather exhilarating even if you just barely manage to pull it off. It's all 'whoa, I can't believe I've managed to get this far!'.

 

Was it luck though? Luck is certainly a big part of it, but it's also a test of your own ability to set up a situation so that luck will fall in your favour.

 

- NKF

[Alienated]

Say there is one guy on the ranger with a pistol and a battleship full of snakemen in front of him. I want that one man to kill all of those aliens and return home uninjured and carrying a stunned commander. Guess what, it'll never happen! But in your world it could...

Well, it can happen in both aspects. If a stright ahead player sees that a snakeman engineer blows up the half of the battleship crew with a wrong blaster bomb, he says "hah, the fools killed themselves, now it's my turn". But I usually don't nail my gaming style for extreme luck.

 

I'm not replaying the same 2 turns over and over until I get 'lucky'. I simply face a new tactical situation and my strategy is forced to change.

This is exactly what I also do. I always have a save on the beginning of the mission. I am able to notice the difference in extreme luck and the luck that could have been eliminated. If five or four men can't kill an alien (weapons are according to alien toughness) from one or two tiles away, the alien had an exreme luck. It is worth to reload. If I get a crowd of aliens coming out the door, I know I failed for playing too bravely so I don't wait for the luck by the five men kills five aliens but reload an earlier save.

 

You score points for aliens killed, the game doesn't give a crap how they die.

If the alien doesn't give a deathscream, then it doesn't die as well, it faints and usually gets destroyed without notice. Now if you get destroyed by an atom bomb for example, we call that dying, right?

 

You're playing the wrong game... You've just told us that you dislike the action that makes up about 60% of the game.

Well, I am playing the right game. The 90% of the action in my missions is waiting patiently for that the aliens walk in my traps. Sometimes it is 50 turns or more. Sometimes it is less if the aliens are faster. Sometimes (maybe I should say often) it happens one or two aliens just don't budge. Then comes the 60% you like, I actually comb the area. By experience I know well where the aliens usually camp in those cases.

 

Also you CAN throw further than you can see but you can also SHOOT further than you can see so is that cheating too?

Yes, it is. This issue is currently discussed in a thread in the UFOPaedia.org forum. I know aliens can throw grenades from out of sight (range), especially in TFTD, this can be called a cheat or a bug, but they don't shoot from out of sight, so that is human cheating.

 

Once I cleared a muton base with two soldiers. I killed one or two aliens and the mutons very quickly got in the location and my soldiers were surrounded. My men were up in a small room and all the aliens were gathered below. I sent a blaster bomb (I scavenged it from a dead muton) down and cleared the place or it was a muton who committed a group-suicide, I can't remember well, but I know that entering a base with two people isn't fair-play because you are supposed to fail and it is only luck or mere cheating if you can complete the mission.

 

Was it luck though? Luck is certainly a big part of it, but it's also a test of your own ability to set up a situation so that luck will fall in your favour.

I agree very much with this in the general gaming aspect, but I believe your enemies in that case were just dumb, that you could do a floater battleship with a laser pistol indicates how dumb the A.I. can be in X-COM. I suppose you didn't win because of extreme luck that the floaters missed X times with aimed heavy plasma shots and Y times with blaster bombs. However, once you get inside the battleship, your chances of victory with a laser pistol greatly increase from zero to a not so insane rate.

 

An update: today I fought mutons with heavy cannons and auto-cannons (AP ammo) and I got the feeling lobstermen usually give. I actually had to reload the game several times just because the last alien tended to faint instead of dying. If you kill the last alien, then you have to click on the next turn button to finish mission, but if it faints, then the "smart" program finishes the mission automatically so you couldn't get a chance to stimulate it by a medi-kit and kill it properly. Thanks again, Microprose!

[Misotu]

I'm not sure why, but when I first started playing X-Com years ago I thought that you couldn't save during missions, only on the world view. So my very first game was played semi-ironman, in the sense that I never played the same mission (or the same turn of the mission) twice. I was quite surprised to find I could save during missions recently - I have no idea how I missed it before - and actually I rather wish I hadn't found that out as it's very tempting to do a quick save "in case".

 

I must admit that a lot of the pleasure for me is in developing my troops' skills - I tend not to use explosives all that much but I really like sniping and reaction fire. So after a truly disastrous mission, I would probably reload rather than start training a whole new batch all over again. On the other hand, on tough missions or terror sites, I'd consider myself lucky to get away with just a few losses (as long as one of them wasn't my favourite sniper, natch). By the end of that very first game I was consistently playing missions with no losses at all - but that was only on beginner level and of course it gets easier as your tech improves. I am trying now to play using rookies as cannon-fodder, but it's a hard adjustment. I think I should probably stop giving them names ...

[Alienated]

it's very tempting to do a quick save "in case".

It's wise to always save just in case. A wrong click here and there, and you may find your soldier going where he shouldn't. And it is always easier to try the enemy reactions potential than to calculate whether it will shoot if I walk one more tile. A lot of things can depend on one single tile. You walk one tile and disappear round the corner where the alien can no longer shoot at you. The program can calculate such movements easily so why not try and reload after a fail. Also, line of fire can be tried. You don't have to move to a tile where you can't shoot from. The program is extremely proficient in shooting from positions where you can't return fire, especially in jungle and through the fences of farm area. Same goes for grenades.

 

By the way, where does this ironman comes from? This rather indicates cheating as an iron man is invulnerable and unstoppable. Infinite HP and max power... Well, you don't have to save when you play by that type of cheat. Maybe the expression originates from there. There are some games where you can turn your character into a hunk of iron (ironman) by a spell and you become entirely invulnerable, however, you can't do anything as well. I prefer the straight ahead expression for playing without going back in time to do it better (save-load). Oh, and I prefer going back in time in games. I can do more than enough "ironman" fails in real life. I wouldn't play video games if I just could do the same as in life.

[NKF]

Not Ironman as in Tony Stark, rather Ironman as in sports. Ironman marathons for example where the participants go through trials of endurance.

 

edit:

 

Mind you, an invulnerable suit made out of Skyranger plating would be fun.

 

- NKF

[Alienated]

Ironman marathons for example where the participants go through trials of endurance.

Then the Save & Load Rule is an ironman gaming. Do you know how long I have to wait until the PSX reloads a battlescape? There is indeed a penalty for a killed soldier! And I also suffer when an alien comits suicide by its grenade.