TFTDExtender/Combomod Terror mission story : "Hey..Wait!"

[localhosed]

A TFTDExtender with Combomod gameplay/semi AAR.

An aquanaut's story :

Or "Hey, wait , I'm still alive"

 

Our troops just got out on an island resort in the pacific that called for help. Our thought-to-be indestructible tank moved forward ,.. aquatoids. but this time they're swarming. We were starting to think they were the low-rung of some alien hierarchy.

But what, some guy in a 50 year old diving suit? But it wasn't, since this thing hesistates a second and then starts shredding apart our tank like it was made of construction paper! The treads go up on one side, the headlights, part of a wheel, turret and most armor is all mangled in a few seconds.. what are those, claws? Somebody take that thing down, not even 5 tank shells stopped this insane thing. ..

A minute later another gauss pistol round punctures the suit and some green slime comes out..the suit hits the ground hard..

But not to flinch, aquatoids were at all sides... gaston and anatoly were not responding to radio calls for a minute when the triton's security door shut automatically..so we waited inside...a minute later they both reported back, gaston said he blacked out but was now safe inside the coat-room of the main in front of us. Anatoly didn't say anything but...."uh..i'm back"..

Our medic shot an aquatoid single handedly (literally), that he barely saw peeking at us from the roof of that dining hall...we've got to watch the roof.

 

Gaston peeks out the coat room and snipes a few aquatoids east of the dining hall using our trusty harpoon rifles. Gauss versions are in the works. While he does that, the triton security door closes and I hear a muffled explosion. Why does it always have to be the new guys? Two more die in this crazy fight.

An aquatoid from the west is lobbing those sonic "grenades" that turn things into powder, including our poor new recruits. Another one, and the second floor of the place collapses. Better collapsed on than powdered, we all rush into the first floor.

Another one of those goo-suits seems to be in a daze in the next room, so I blast out the wall and we all give it all we've got. .4 harpoons through it and it is still in a daze. Then it rushes up as though something turned it on with a switch, and anatoly is dead in an instant. The new guy lets out maybe half a dozen gauss rounds, taking apart the room, missing this beastly thing and making a huge hole in my back! Somehow it was so fast and clean, I hardly felt it. But from the new feelings coming including lots of pain, and my lungs going weak, I think I won't last long like this..but I fire at the thing...More gauss and 4 harpoons later it collapses like a machine turned off. The pain is worse now and I already hear Sergei's medical pack starting up. I run over and it works, I don't know how but I can breathe again and I didn't feel a thing.

Sergei says to me "Better go back to the triton, you have broken ribs and blood loss.."

."Are you kidding?" I say. We both smile and he ducks down in the coat closet with gauss pistol ready. The Medi-kit's display glows in the corner and then goes to stand-by....

Back to the dining room.

We noticed what an unattractive place to eat this would be. Or at least unusual.

Stuart peeked out the other hole in the wall and saw an aquatoid behind the Triton with one of those bulbous sonic weapons. Two tourists were staring at it with mouths hanging open. Stuart tried to tell them to take cover. Compared to what we're used to , they seemed to move slower than nano-gel in siberia.

 

Another aquatoid comes from the west, blasting like possessed , with a bulbous sonic weapon. Trees go down, the Triton reverberates with sonic energy. I duck behind a tree and jump out, but my arm doesn't work like I expect it to, that hurts but not nearly as much as the sonic blast I get in the leg.

Well, I would be dead if I didn't decide to play dead instead.

I don't know if it works or if that aquatoid gets distracted. But I hear this next :

 

Sonic blasts..the two old men near me yelling like banshees..one old man sobbing and the yelling and feet pattering on pavement and swishing in grass into the distance..

The Coelacanth rattling along loudly on the farther side of the dining hall, and then two very loud CLUNKs. And then nothing. Practically rapid-fire breathy harpoon blasts upstairs, followed by a wailing/screeching...distant door crashing open, one of the two snipers yelling "Run..RUN!"" ,,Something wooden crashing over, more harpoons flying, 6 gauss blasts, crumbling something...shrieking...Sergei saying "Woot!"

..running near me....triton door opening...

..silence for a long time..What's going on?

Distant blast...distant gauss shots..one ..two...ten..all evenly spaced...

BOOM! I'm covered in dust, dirt, powder, soot...I'm coughing but can hardly hear my cough...ringing in my ears...

Now the ringing and heart pumping stops.. Triton's doors open and close fast..The Triton is powering up...What!?

 

"HEY!! WAIT, I'M STILL ALIVE!!"

 

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Rules I use for this game (modded too, obdata, exe and others) :

Minimal manufacturing for money, if any.

 

No firing on an alien that can't be seen by the soldier firing, without aimed shot available on that weapon.

 

No flare relay, no grenade relay, no other game exploits that I know of.

Play as though grenades with explode in your hand if the timer elapses.

 

No reloading on mistakes...Several dead soldiers from my own PD grenades so far!

 

No research labs at bases other than the first. Across all bases, No more than 100 scientists, no more than 100 engineers,

 

No aborting of crash sites without making all reasonable attempts. Ignoring crash sites is allowed though, but discouraged, because , you know, aliens could wind up on beaches or start walking along highways into cities... And surfers and good highway samaritans don't like getting killed more than anyone else.

 

Probably more that I forgot.

[Tycho]

Are all weapons allowed on land? I would assume so since this is the combo mod...

[localhosed]

A screen blips on and you see a 20-something, wheatsheaf-haired Xcom recruit .. He says :

"Hey, this is a data disk recording for the squad's community logs..

I just got here..first mission...I hope it doesn't get crazier than this.,.

The guys are calling this thing "melano-kavita kancera" or "melano-kavita demoni" . which according to Ali Nomina from noweristan means "black-abyss crab, or black-abyss demon"

This was our first chance to test these new gauss rifles in the field. I know these things work, I tested them myself the past two days on base..We must have shot the thing a hundred times. I expected anything in reality to be a pile of dust with that many blasts...our best meter-thick alloys during tests would have been.

And also after a half dozen of blinding particle grenades, it kept coming. I thought there were two of them for a moment, but eventually the shock of concussions must have dislodged its insides, since a final particle grenade had it kneeling and then it didnt move just as we leaped on it with tazers.

Huge claws. And little appendages, i saw it had a sonic weapon and Davies got shot, but he's doing okay now, thanks to our medic device.

 

[Eyebrows go up, then down...shakes his head, primps the wheatsheaf-do a little].....Still not moving in the lab, but I will be personally keeping watch that it doesn't wake up tonight, even though the scientists tell me there's no way it can get out of the containment unit....even though they say its long dead and are drawing plans on how to cut it into pieces as I speak..

.Why take chances ..its like a sleeping tiger in your own bed. Or maybe a giant demon crab..How do you like that analogy?

Here's to a long caffeinated night. Korkia out."

 

The video stops and the screen goes back to another menu.. SECOND WAR DATABASE...LOGS, SCHEMATICS, ETC, BACK TO MAIN..

 

 

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Yeah, all weapons allowed on land. All of them are modded though too, so balance is different.

[localhosed]

"Took one for Australia"

 

The screen blips on....20:15 23rd May, 2040...LOADING AQUANAUT LOG....

....

"I heard what happened in Australia last month..who didn't? The whole world is scared. I volunteered for the xcom project because of that ...I'm not going to call it a blunder, but others have....that tragedy I would say.

I can't let them do this to our planet. I have never been to australia, but what does it matter now? No place is safe.

 

MY introduction to the xcom project has been of these huge lobster-men, they call them. Absolutely ruthless..You've seen bugs devour other bugs before..there's no humanity in them, and in that way it's hard to hate them, but still I don't know what xcom has planned to do to deal with these things...

 

We get out on some island in the phillipines, our tank rolls over one of them, lobster just picks it up and batters our tank back, after many stun bombs the thing finally stops flailing those big pincers.

We crack open the survey ship door, throw a magna pack in and all heck breaks loose

A sonic pulser comes flying out, somebody screams, another lobster is tearing our tank up a second later...

 

..at the same time I notice Alkaviades tazing that lobster right in the eye...with his only arm! and he's bleeding bad all over, collapses, so I jump on em and put pressure on as many bleeding gushes as I can. A millisecond later a stun bomb goes off and command is saying "report, report!" at us

..really fast we were all in the triton with as many medi packs we could find on him..he survived..our doctors say it will be a month before he can speak but what a hero, I'll tell ya.

I told him. "

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These are the first screenshots of combomod features for this playthrough..USO crash site in desert on the land. Magna packs are supposed to have 210 damage and are much heavier now, somehow it didnt seem nearly that high...dunno what might have gone wrong yet..

"uhoh.jpg" is from a mission a week before this one. Thermal tazers worked better than I thought, but everyone but three died on that mission, and just barely..

[Space Voyager]

Great to see a story-driven AAR! Good read, love the rules. BTW, how can you tell who sees which alien? With multiple contacts it may get a bit confusing.

[localhosed]

I'm glad you like it!

I guess I don't understand what you mean. Or maybe I don't understand my own rules?

What I do is this : If a soldier has the alert icon (alien spotted - with numbers) , that's snap and auto range for that soldier on that/those aliens.

All else, only aimed shot can be used by anyone else. Aimed can also be used for snap/auto range.

Same for area of effect weapons shooting in the general area of an alien, it needs aimed shot to shoot outside alien spotted range (rough but it usually works)

I'm using grenades at any range...not sure about that one yet...seems okay since grenades take so long to prime and throw in one turn, and they're explode-in-your-hand now.

 

It seems okay to me management-wise. I usually only use 10 soldiers at most and they go in groups of 2 to 4. A medic or two stays behind. That's just what happened here today :

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWS1Y60_ec0

 

One of the things I miss about xcom 3, it took care of that automatically especially in real time mode. There were effective ranges and also hard range limits for every weapon. Soldiers could move as a group (one click, move to general area - less micromanagement), Armor could have psi protection, all sort of other good things.

[silencer_pl]

In this situation you could drop the nade - less TU's spent and you probably could hide but oh well still fun to watch.

[localhosed]

Glad you liked it. That was one of the hardest not-immediate loss missions I have played..

 

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XCOM:\>COMAC

HELLO, COMMANDER...PASSWORD DECRYPTING...

COMMAND ACCESS GRANTED...

DISPLAY SATELLITE FEED RECORDING? (Y/N) ?

Y

...BUFFERING....

[media=]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zzTWCg6GEo[/media]

 

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39 minute terror mission....Something unusual about the site..maybe some altered maps from combomod, the size of the site seems small, that's fun actually, but maybe its the warehouse that's bigger? An easier terror mission with gillmen, for a change, ..I am having big trouble with lobstermen until I get sonic rifle, but stun launchers work pretty well on them, they aren't as all-purpose as rifles.

Frames skip a bit, I can fix it for the next video.

[silencer_pl]

This warehouse looks just fine to me.

[Bomb Bloke]

The map modules are the same, but ComboMod is more likely to choose the larger ones then UFO:EU is (usually you'd be seeing more of the smaller houses and empty plots of land). kryub's posted the proper distribution odds but I've been lazy in implementing them (partly because I'd like to know them for all terrain types first).

 

Edit: Is it just me or is the grass grey in that last video?

[localhosed]

I didn't notice until you mentioned it about grey grass, I just saw that as being pavement, which I think Civilian modified for his big mod for EU. It does look more urban to me that way. The grass in other map types isn't changed, like farms. Since the thread is a few years old now, you can check out civilian's mod here if you want to import his maps into Combomod :

 

https://www.strategyc...my-custom-xcom/

 

I haven't finished 'importing' all other settings he used, and I think I may go ahead with grenade weight changes since the super long-range grenade throwing is kind of unpleasant to me as the game balance goes right now. Alien strength then needs to be edited too to compensate for it as in his mod.

 

Edit : Yeah, I like the choice of more often larger map modules by Combomod. It helps give maps more of a theme sometimes.

[Tycho]

I just came across this awesome video of an epic fail in TFTD.

 

https://spoonyexperiment.com/2010/07/11/well-played-aliens-well-played/

[Space Voyager]

HE HE HE! Isn't Spoony the whiny crying game reporter (as opposed to Angry Joe)? I'm glad he took it with laughter this time, much easier on the ears than whining.

[localhosed]

Yeah, I know the feeling in the video. Good mission.

Triton-1, do you read us!?

...Triton 1?