rocket launchers only mission.

>download Collector's Edition from abandonware site
>use a USB drive to copy it onto an old P4 box with XP Pro since this thing is apparently incompatible with W7/8

It worked, but the Battlescape is kind of too fast which is disconcerting. Also it forces the computer into 640x480 resolution which looks distorted on the monitor I was using.

Tried a test game. Got off to an ok start. One fucking Sectoid who was playing hide-and-seek in a barn killed half my squad, then the next mission I bagged a Floater Navigator with no casualties, and then came the first terror mission which cost me six dudes because I'm an idiot and bunched everyone up thus baiting grenade attacks. You're not supposed to get a Poor rating on a daytime Floater terror mission for chrissake.

>>2740257
>anything remotely resembling a modern machine
>run it natively instead of in dosbox
>complain about shit being wonky
ayy lmao

>>2740229

We need a sequel to TFTD that isn't agonizingly hard. The ocean environment, seabases, etc. would look great in a modern engine.

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Did anyone enjoy playing Apocalypse.

It had a lot of good ideas but somehow the execution is lacking.

>>2740294
I could run it on DOSBox, I just wanted to see what differences were in the Collector's Edition. As far as I can tell, aside from the difficulty bug being fixed, the major difference vs the DOS version is the music and some sfx.

>>2740257
Floaters are slow and have shit reactions so capturing a navigator was a lot easier than when it's Sectoids. After the mission was over, another large scout showed up, but since I got my navigator, I just shot that one into the Gulf of Mexico.

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>>2740316
And now they're basing the storyline for the remake's sequel off of this game.

>saw an argument on Youtube comment section about what triggers a retaliation mission
>one dude insisted it's more probable if you score well during the month

AFAIK, this has nothing to do with your score. The game just gives a random chance of a retaliation being triggered each time you shoot down a UFO, after which the aliens have to scout out your base and if they fail, the mission ends. If they find you, a battleship comes and attacks.

There's also a roughly 2% chance that the battleship simply comes and attacks your base with no prior scouting.

Anyone here play UFO 2000?

I used to play it against friends some time ago and it was really fun, especially if we didn't use heavy loadouts.

>>2740229
Still waiting for a good OpenTFTD mod

>>2740370
Yeah, that's what my experiences have been like. That guy on YouTube sounds like a stupid cunt.

Kikoskia's LPs are quite hilarious, but his tactics are less than outstanding.

>never learns that kneeling improves your firing accuracy
>won't use grenades or Blaster Launchers when it would make his life so much easier
>had a mountain of heavy plasma guns in his main base, but didn't think to ship some to his auxiliary base and ended up leaving the soldiers there armed with laser rifles when they were fighting Mutons

>>2740341
CE has a bug where you can't shoot blaster bombs straight down a grav lift. The aliens of course don't know this and often end up blowing themselves to bits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dySz5Z_NrLY

This German dude has a pretty good LP. I use a slightly modified version of the tactics he does in here with Terror Ships, which is shooting Blaster Bombs in the upstairs side rooms because there's usually always an alien or two in there.

Also share his sentiment about Cyberdiscs. I hate Sectoid terror ships, I really do. I can beat Snakeman terror ships like pudding, but Sectoid ones are a whole 'nother level of torture. I've had some unbelievably, spectacularly disastrous missions with them.

>>2740514
X-Com LPs are interesting because you can see how everyone has their own style of play.

>>2740518
Very true. I'll give you some of my personal tactics methods.

>small/medium scouts
I don't bring heavy equipment on these missions and my dudes are armed with grenades/laser rifles only unless Mutons in which case they have heavy plasma.
>large scouts
One guy with a Blaster Launcher. If the UFO entrance is facing away from the Skyranger, I blow a hole near the bridge. If the entrance is facing the Skyranger, I just send my guys in the front door and shoot a hole in the wall of the engine room with heavy plasma shots (assuming the UFO is intact and the power supply hasn't blown).
>all larger UFOs
Two BLs to make entry holes in the UFO or leveling barns that have aliens inside.

In early game missions, I have four Auto Cannon guys and one dude with a rocket launcher, but I phase them out once I have advanced weapons except one AC that I keep exclusively to fire incendiary rounds during night missions.

>>2740294
X-Com CE is a Windows 9x game. He can't run that shit in DOSBox. It's called DOSBox for a reason.

>>2740518

>X-Com LPs are interesting because you can see how everyone has their own style of play.

Too true. Here's mine:

>make base in Cyprus or some shit
>send in the clowns when aliens crash
>lose a couple, gain some experience
>repeat 2-3 times
>a proper mission appears
>embark
>everyone is killed by enemies far beyond my means
>quit because no savescum and avoid the game for another year before starting a new game

I'll never get how this works.

>watch Lord Finisher's Antarctica Challenge LP
>September terror mission is Ethereals in North Africa
>he manages to shoot the terror ship down off the coast of Brazil

Lucky for him because his squad had all HP guns. He would have been pretty fucked if he'd taken on those buggers since plasma weapons don't do jack to Sectopods. I guess he didn't know that.

>first terror mission of the game
>Floater is so desperate to kill one of my officers that he throws a grenade into the Skyranger, kills the guy, and horribly wounds all the rookies around him
>most of them have med kits so we patch them up
>even so, they're out of action anywhere from two weeks to a month
>save game at the first day of March
>one of the wounded guys (DMX) had made sergeant
>he doesn't have much combat experience and dies taking down a scout ship
>as the month comes to an end, aliens terrorize Paris
>save, send Skyranger out, just as a Battleship shows up to attack my base
>reload and just ignore the terror mission because the survival of my main base is more important
>defeat the attackers with eight casualties, mostly because of guys getting mind controlled

That was freaking insane. Especially because a Sectoid with a Blaster Launcher actually blew up my entire access lift. I swear, the walls were totally gone leaving an open space into the hangar area. Most of the aliens died in that blast, which left a couple Cyberdiscs and one Sectoid remaining.

Despite ignoring the terror mission, I still did enough UFO recoveries during the month to earn a Good rating.

I reloaded at the start of March and redid the month over again. Also DMX got killed again. Seriously, I don't know how you manage to be a rapper with those skills.

This time the retaliation mission failed and they didn't find my base. Also I went and did the terror mission which was pretty intense. One of my sergeants got so badly wounded that he was down to 3 health when we saved him with a med kit. He was essentially useless for the rest of the mission and due to the extreme recovery time he needed, I just sacked him after the mission. My colonel fired Auto Cannon HE rounds at a Floater in a grocery store and took some serious injuries that put her out of commission for 34 days.

And shortly after April started, a Sectoid infiltration fleet came into my backyard.

>go after landed terror ship
>at night
>in the forest
>seriously, why am I attacking a Sectoid terror ship at night
>I'm going to regret this one
>on the plus side, this is the first mission where my squad are all carrying heavy plasma
>clear out area around the Skyranger in an intense shootout
>make it to the UFO entrances with (miraculously) just two casualties
>turn corner
>my one sergeant runs almost smack into a Cyberdisc parked outside
>holy crap, retreat now
>next turn
>nothing happens
>other squad goes around the left end of the UFO, spots the Cyberdisc, and kills it
>step inside, shoot Cyberdisc, get the fuck back out
>there's another one on the other side that we take out
>the alien turn is getting short so there can't be too many left
>shoot hole in the wall of the engine room
>surprise butt secks the alien engineer
>send guys up the grav lift
>just then, one rookie on the first floor gets mind controlled and drops a high explosive, killing himself and two other dudes
>fuck, the Sectoid leader is getting desperate
>send dudes upstairs, around the bend, and one miraculously survives a burst of Cyberdisc fire
>the thing is like halfway in the main hallway and halfway in the side closet
>the fuck?
>shoot it, it explodes, destroys the navigation table on the bridge, and takes out the leader in the process
>and that's it
>mission over, 5 casualties

>>2740341
CE fixes the ammo bug which was a problem in the DOS versions. Any clips inside a gun when you finish a mission are used up and disappear even if they've never been fired. The only way around this is to unload all your weapons when the mission is done.

The ammo bug becomes especially annoying once you have heavy plasma because you're constantly running out of clips that need Elerium to manufacture.

>>2740316
The game was fun. The aliens looked retarded for the most part though :(

>>2742617
First few moments playing the game I can't tell random civilians from aliens if not for the hostile sighting markers.

>>2740341
CE pretty much runs too fast on anything over a Pentium II.

>>2742323
Almost, but actually the bug went that clips disappear even if they've never been fired. This was fixed in the CE so that any clips which haven't been used during the mission are retained, but ones that have had rounds expended are counted as used up unless you empty the weapon.

>>2744053
Yes it does. I was trying it on the machine mentioned in >>2740257 and it is rather uncomfortably fast. In fact, this makes battles harder just because the alien turn happens so fast that it's hard to figure out what's going on either because you can't tell what direction a shot came from or alien movement occurs too fast for you to tell what's going on.

Also it's quite glitchy and crashes a lot.

>>2740316
>It had a lot of good ideas
Best one is how you have to pay for damage to civilian property which puts the kibosh on one of the most commonly used tactics in UFO Defense/TFTD.

>current game
>have just started May and not encountered any alien bases yet
Nads. I still have no Blaster Launchers in my arsenal. Sometimes you're unlucky and don't get an early base mission.

>>2740429
It seems to me like it's completely random whether the alien scouts manage to find your base. A lot of times, they send a battleship which just hovers around for a while and then leaves with nothing happening.

>>2745323
From what I can tell, they seem to find your base usually if one of their scouts passes over or very near it. The last game I did, a Sectoid Battleship flew right over my base which was followed by the attacking UFO a few days later.

After I defeated the attacking aliens, another small scout on a retaliation mission showed up shortly afterwards and I couldn't figure out what that was about. Then I realized what happened - I shot down a scout on an infiltration mission shortly before the base attack which triggered a second retaliation mission. To summarize, this is how it works:

>scouting battleship locates the base
>the game then disables the retaliation mission for North America (my home region)
>the actual ship that attacks your base is generated by a separate routine and isn't counted in MISSIONS.DAT
>thus because retaliation in NA had already been cleared, shooting down that other UFO happened to randomly trigger a new retaliation mission

I had reloaded my save file at the start of the month and this time the scout battleship didn't come close enough to my base, thus it left without finding anything and no base attack happened.

Tricks to avoid retaliation missions:

1. Avoid shooting UFOs down in the same region as your main base
2. Shoot the UFO down with an Interceptor based in somewhere other than your home region.

Essentially, the way this works is that retaliation missions happen either in the region the UFO got shot down in or the region the Interceptor was based in (drawn at random and depends on the difficulty level). Thus if your base is in Europe and you shoot a UFO down in North Africa, the retaliation may occur in either region. While you can of course still get a retaliation in your home region, the odds will be slightly lessened by not shooting it down there.

And also of course you could just wait for the UFO to land in which case you don't have any worries about retaliation, the main downside being that it might be during nighttime and nobody likes night missions.

>>2745348
Ok but you can't usually catch UFOs at full speed until you have advanced craft,

Identifying retaliation missions before you have a Hyperwave Decoder is pretty easy - if a small scout shows up out of nowhere and it's at a speed of 440 knots, there you go. It's a retaliation scout.

>>2745349
Uh huh. UFOs only slow down when they reach their target region, but once you have advanced craft, you can nail them anywhere. The one thing I dislike about the Avenger is that it's so fast that you often end up reaching missions during nighttime while the slow-ass Skyranger gives you plenty of time to get there when it's day out.

>>2745361
Why can't you just send the Avenger back to base and then do the mission in the day?

>>2745367
You could, but it takes addition Elerium to refuel it.

>>2740492
He gets a Snakeman base in February in his one LP. Usually you don't encounter Snakemen before April and trying to take them early in the game is difficult mainly because Chryssalids are tough to kill with laser rifles. The game takes that into account btw - Snakemen are rare until April and Mutons never show up until then by which time you normally have heavy plasma.

Really though, any early base mission is tough unless it's Floaters. By the time you have HP and Blaster Bombs, they're pretty cake.

>>2740492
I watched Aulddragon's UFO Defense LP and I wasn't impressed. The guy's commentary was boring as heck and he also gave all his soldiers names like Sergeant McNutpunch and Joe Kickass like some awful 80s action movie.

>>2740364
Because of course, Apocalypse is about a resistance group fighting against the puppet government of victorious aliens?

Oh wait, no it's not.

I hate Large Scouts tbh. Even on Beginner, there can be as many as 10 aliens on them. Superhuman goes up to 13, although I rarely encounter that many.

It just occurred to me that I've never seen a UFO Defense LP where the guy takes on an Ethereal base or a ship bigger than a large scout.

>>2745976
If you actually went after an Ethereal base, you'd understand why players avoid them like the plague.

I hate Sectoid terror ships, but I can well imagine Ethereal ones are much worse.

Also I've rarely ever fought a Floater terror ship. Probably because they mostly appear early in the game before I have the ability to shoot them down.

>>2745995
Once downed a Snakeman terror ship with like four Chryssalids and two Snakemen in the landing area. I managed to take out all of them, but it was tricky and if I didn't have blaster bombs with me, I would have been royally screwed.

Best strategy against Chryssalids is traveling in packs. Snakemen by themselves are not much of a threat. Very slow, shit reactions, and not very durable health-wise. Their one ace card is good firing accuracy (only second behind Ethereals).

>>2746135
Here, I'll give you the rankings. As you can well guess, Floaters are shit in every category.

Firing/throwing accuracy:

Ethereals > Snakemen > Sectoids > Mutons > Floaters

Speed (TUs):

Ethereals > Mutons > Sectoids > Floaters > Snakemen

Health:

Mutons > Ethereals = Snakemen > Floaters > Sectoids

Psy strength:

Ethereals > Sectoids > Snakemen > Floaters > Mutons

Reactions:

Ethereals > Sectoids > Mutons > Floaters > Snakemen

>>2746135
Chryssalids can sure take a beating. I've seen games where it took five heavy plasma shots to down them.

>May passes with nothing happening for weeks
>suddenly aliens terrorize Pretoria
>and it's Sectoids
>we prevail after demolishing half the town via Cyberdisc explosions
>a fleet of Muton infiltration ships appears on their way to North America
>aw dammit
>month ends
>everyone is pissed off, I lose funding, and the US signs a pact with aliens
>X-Com agents have located an alien base in North America

If you didn't know, when you get a bad month, sometimes the game will automatically find alien bases for you. It's a pity feature.

>begin June
>the Muton base is up in the far north of Canada
>get everyone ready to go
>suddenly Ethereal scout en route to a terror mission in NA shows up
>hmmmm, I have a crazy idea of what I can do here
>remove heavy plasma from the Skyranger and re-equip everyone with laser rifles
>head up to NA
>spot the UFO hovering around the central US
>go after it when it lands
>it's daytime and I removed a couple guys that I found out from the Sectoid terror mission were psy-vulnerable
>also loaded up with mostly rookies because I'd rather not risk my elite soldiers here
>spot Ethereal off in the distance
>line up my dudes
>they're blazing away like British redcoats but still can't land more than one shot which barely tickles him
>end turn
>alien fires, shoots one rookie dead
>oh well, nobody I really cared about
>finally bring the cocksucker down and begin moving towards the UFO
>one rookie gets MC-ed and shoots a sergeant with his laser rifle
>now you see why I gave everyone laser rifles - if someone gets psykered, it won't do as much damage
>the officer was wearing a Power Suit and took some arm wounds, but he's ok after we patch him with a med kit
>as we prepare to bum rush the UFO, another rookie loses it and throws a grenade
>one squaddie gets killed, another wounded
>there's two aliens inside the thing
>shoot them, mission still not over
>the only possible place this alien could be is in a barn in the upper left of the map
>suddenly hear the UFO hatch opening
>see nothing
>wtf
>continue exploration of barn, suddenly spot Ethereal moving inside the UFO
>you little punk
>rush inside and he's unarmed - apparently we didn't kill one of them
>quickly fix this little problem
>mission over

>now we can get on with this alien base
>it's Mutons so not too much to worry about
>put back all of my psy-weak dudes on the Skyranger since that's no concern here
>head up to the base
>clear the entry lift areas
>shoot a couple Mutons and two Silacoids
>begin our deployment
>there's one of those stupid garden things with the jagged little corridors next to the command center
>while I'm deploying, I contemplate that I should have stunned one of those Ethereals earlier to get psionics
>oh well
>shoot one Muton who's packing a Blaster Launcher
>and more scattered through the garden thing
>make our way to the command center
>suddenly surprise BL
>one soldier dies but nobody else is hurt
>thank god
>go around, kill him, find the command room empty
>the aliens' turn is getting short so they're running out of dudes
>spot a Muton and a Celatid moving around a corner
>kill both of them
>next turn, hear plasma shot and alien death sound
>the fuck just happened
>I realize that one of the Silacoids I shot earlier was just stunned, so he now woke up and one of my dudes reaction fired him
>there can't be more than 1-2 left by this point
>one of my soldiers suddenly dies and I didn't hear a plasma shot
>uh...
>send another guy around the corner to investigate
>it's a Celatid and he just gave that poor squaddie an acid enema
>auto fire him, but miss
>still have enough TUs for a snap shot
>hit and kill the bugger
>damn, we got lucky there
>Muton soldier panics
>move three guys down to his location
>the alien recovers his senses and guns down one of them before we take him out

Mission over. Seven dudes died. I'm a little pissed about that and the fact that this base had no power station thus no Elerium.

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>large battleship enters atmosphere in Gulf of Mexico
>immediately goes to max speed and beelines
>Skyranger is 10,000km away from HQ

>>2747527
That happened to me once not too long ago.

>>2747481
I was playing the Collector's Edition and I notice the Ethereals seemed to be much more aggressive with using psionic attacks than the DOS version. I'd taken out Ethereal scout ships on the latter with comparative ease and only had sporadic MC-ing of my troops, but the CE they went hellamonkey with it. Maybe they changed the AI around a bit.

When fighting Ethereals, you need to kill as many of them as you can as fast as you can. Also it helps to have your guys drop their guns/grenades at the end of a turn. Sacrificing reaction fire is well worth it.

Laser rifles and small launchers are effective when dealing with Sectopods on the lower difficulty levels, but Superhuman-grade ones are usually too powerful, so use Heavy Plasma on their backside where they have soft armor.

>>2740316
I read somewhere that the developers had intended for deeper faction interaction amongst themselves, and with xcom.
I like Apocalypse, but it's sad that this didn't get implemented. It would have made interactions with other humans much more meaningful and interesting, particularly when dealing with the respective city gangs and Megapol.

>>2740229
Making of: http://www.pcgamesn.com/x-com-ufo-defense/the-making-of-x-com

Has anyone ever beat the game using only human technology, not counting the necessary alien stuff to beat the game.

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>>2740316
Despite the inhuman amount of time i've spent with UFO defense i haven't actually gotten around to playing Apocalypse yet.
I need to try it one of these days.

>>2747481
As an experiment, I reloaded my save file at the start of June and redid this mission with the Ethereal scout ship and tried out the trick mentioned in here of dropping your weapons at the end of the turn. Well, it worked but it makes the battle a lot slower and more tedious. I lost three dudes. One got shot by an Ethereal, another grenaded, and the third was my fault because I didn't notice she had a fatal wound and ended up bleeding to death.

The aliens were MCing/panicking my dudes relentlessly, but since they'd all been disarmed, they couldn't do squat with it. Was a bit of a nuisance though since I had four dudes out in the battle (the rest all stayed in the Skyranger) and only one of them had high enough psy strength that nothing happened to him the whole time. I did fear that my guys would be sitting ducks without any ability to perform reaction shots, but it was actually not a problem at all because the Ethereals kept burning all their TUs with psionic attacks and couldn't shoot anyone. After I cleared the UFO, there was still one bugger MC-ing people and I remembered that he was one that I'd knocked unconscious earlier, then got up and hid in a barn like a little bitch mind raping my dudes.

Since he didn't have his gun anymore, it was just a matter of sending my one guy with god-level psy strength in there to give him some laser surgery.

And then I redid that Muton base and beat it with an interesting strategy - keeping everyone in the entrance lifts and just going up and down repeatedly to shoot aliens as they approached. And they kept coming like flies on honey. It was glorious. The area around the entrance lifts was carpeted with Muton and Silacoid corpses. Wasted a lot of ammo though because many of my soldiers were rookies who couldn't aim for shit even when auto firing targets a few squares away.

Now, this strategy relies on the fact that the Collector's Edition essentially lets you cheat - the aliens tried a couple times to shoot Blaster Bombs up the grav lift at my soldiers, but couldn't because the CE has a bug that you can't fire BBs directly up or down or they'll just fly straight ahead. You have to shoot them at an angle, but of course the aliens don't know this. If you were on the DOS version, the aliens would just fire the BBs right up into the entrance areas and kill everyone.

So once I'd killed most of the aliens, it was just a matter of hunting down the few panicked holdouts. I also finally got Blaster Bombs in my arsenal because at least five Mutons were carrying them.

After the base mission, I shot down a Floater Harvester in South Africa. Not a lot to say about that one. It was in the jungle and was just silly target practice Floaters. May was a bad month, but the successes I've had so far in June should make up for that...except pity that there's an Ethereal terror mission on the way.

So what does happen to crashed UFOs when they disappear after a few days?

>>2749589
I'd guess aliens can't survive long in Earth's atmosphere and probably expire from prolonged exposure to it. In fact I remember the manual for the game had a comment in it that "Earth's atmosphere is hostile to the aliens, thus they won't venture far from their ship."

The aliens in UFO Defense in all seriousness aren't that smart or capable.

>forget where your bases are after attacking them so they have to scout the things all over again
>lack decent armor
>their smaller ships are easily shot down with conventional Earth weapons
>even their biggest, baddest ship can be taken down fairly easily
>alien bases have no external defenses and your soldiers can land near and enter them unopposed
>they don't put any protective stuff around UFO power supplies to prevent them from exploding in a crash
>they apparently have no defenses around their Martian stronghold because the Avenger is able to arrive there and land unopposed
>only real advantage aliens have in combat are mind control ability and superior night vision

Considering that X-Com is a little black ops covert outfit that manages to eventually get to Mars and crush the aliens' command HQ, imagine what would happen if all of the Earth's nations were launching a full-out offensive.

>>2748340
"Comprising just four people - Gollop, his brother Nick, and two artists John Reitze and Martin Smilley - the X-Com team was formed. Up to this point, Mythos Games had grappled with the technical restrictions relative to the era: programming games on PC was an inherently difficult process as a result of crude memory models, lacking processing power, and non-specific ways of dealing with memory over one megabyte; yet at MicroProse, Gollop was introduced to state-of-the-art equipment."

That is true. M-prose were an elite-level developer in the 80s-90s and they always put a very high degree of polish into their games.

>>2740257
>>2740294
Why not use openxcom? Am I missing something?

Just caught sectoid leader on first terror mission, only one soldier survived the mission but whatever, it was worth it

Is it possible to place soldiers in ship in specific order ?
i want to place my future psychics in back of skyranger

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>>2749836
>always put a very high degree of polish into their games
>Polish

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>Start a superhuman game.
>Make it until May.
>Ethereals out of nowhere.
>Lose 10 of the 12 guys sent to investigate their crash, but come back with a captured ethereal.

Now if I can survive until the psilab is up and running, things should get much easier.

>>2749240
The Ethereal terror attack hit New York City on June 24. Of course it _had_ to be at night. This required some careful preparation, namely in leveling everything with massive Blaster Bomb attacks. I am not kidding. You would not believe just how much devastation I caused. The entire bottom half of the map by the end of the mission was a massive smoking crater. There was nothing left. I mean, I completely wiped a gas station out of existence except for two pumps in the lower left corner. The roof, the buildings, everything totally gone.

Mostly because I don't have a reliable way of taking out Sectopods short of direct BB hits. Also one of my sergeants in a flying suit got mind controlled, wandered off into a building, and got killed by a Sectopod. That was facepalm.

I actually don't find Sectopods that annoying because their weapon is less powerful than heavy plasma so your soldiers are fairly safe if they have power armor. The main problem is the difficulty of trying to take them out. Ethereals though...oh hell no. When they're not mind-jacking your dudes, they have insanely good reactions and firing accuracy. Even though I had my guys put down their weapons at the end of turns (unless they're ones I know have good psy strength) it still sucks because at least half your squad is totally useless.

None of the civilians survived and most were actually killed by my Blaster Bomb attacks rather than the aliens. Oh well, I still got a better score than I would if I'd just gone to the terror site and dusted off.

>>2751668
>nighttime Ethereal terror attack

Why would you subject yourself to that? Just land and dust the fuck off. If it was during daytime, maybe I'd say gopherit. But night? Come on.

>>2751693
Most because I can.

As the Skyranger was on the way to the terror site, a Floater retaliation scout showed up and I shot that down. You have no idea how much of a relief it is to fight Floaters after all that Ethereal crap.

>>2751668
Get your boys some heavy lasers aka Sectopods' Kryptonite.

>>2748127
>Laser rifles and small launchers are effective when dealing with Sectopods on the lower difficulty levels, but Superhuman-grade ones are usually too powerful, so use Heavy Plasma on their backside where they have soft armor.

Laser rifles do 60 damage, but since the game actually rolls 25 to 75 percent of a weapon's rated value, it's really between 15 and 45 damage. Heavy Plasma is rated at 115 damage which translates into anywhere from 28 and 86 damage. However, Sectopods resist plasma weapons (which do 80% damage) while taking 115% percent damage from lasers.

Thus, laser rifles are effective on lower difficulty levels, but Superhuman Sectopods have substantially thicker armor which means that the laser rifle is actually less powerful than HP (but only by about 2 damage points). On the plus side, laser rifles can get off more shots per turn.

If you can get lucky and catch a Sectopod with its backside pointed at you, about three HP shots will drop it.

Never fight Ethereals if you can avoid it. The one time you should is when they set up a base because you have to take them out or they'll negatively impact your score.

And if you do fight them, only do it in daylight.

>>2749836
But X-Com was really buggy at release, least we talk about TFTD.

>>2752323
Considering the sheer scale and complexity of the game for 1994 standards, a few programming mistakes are forgivable.

>>2752410
Agreed. Especially things like calculating blast radius/effects from grenades. Think of how much effort that had to take when you also consider that the dev deam for UFO Defense consisted of only 4-5 or something guys.

>>2749707
I would imagine the aliens were cutting funds. They did just come from a dying planet. And while the humans found that elerium is a very powerful energy source, the aliens had hundreds, probably thousands of elerium-eating ships and weapons. They had to make a choice, and they chose to send in that sectoid naked.

>first time playing X-Com
>set up base in Washington, DC
>a whole month goes by without action
>some nations getting mad
>whatever

>finally, pick up a medium scout on route to Mexico
>shoot it down
>send in Alpha team
>clear out all Sectoids with no losses
>major success
>research going well
>suddenly aliens terrorize Manila
>shit, send in Alpha team
>laser rifles and plasma pistols
>Chrysallids and Floaters tear my shit apart
>everyone died
>no civilians saved
>Japan pulls out that month, all other countries lessen funding

>my base is under attack
>my only base
>Sectoids and Cyberdisks leave no survivors
>Earth turned into mutant slave race

That was a year ago. I was so unprepared.

I don't see how anyone can complain about Chryssalids after doing Ethereal missions. Those are a whole 'nother circle of Hell.

>take out Sectoid infiltration base in North America
>this is near the end of April, which means my guys have heavy plasma, but not yet Blaster or Small Launchers

It was a slow, grinding crawl and took a lot of savescumming, but I beat the base and captured both Sectoid Leaders (unfortunately not the commander). Lot of mind control bullshit, but that's because my squad had many rookies. Psy strength does improve with your other stats, so soldiers who've been in many missions are usually pretty safe. I had one recently promoted sergeant that got targeted a bunch of times because he'd only been on the team for two missions or something.

I could have brought more of my hardened veterans, but they'd all gotten plenty of action in a quite brutal Snakeman terror mission (that cost me two of my best officers, one due to a stupid friendly fire accident) so I decided to let some rookies get experience. One of them somehow racked up eight (!) kills in this one base assault. Also finally got Elerium because I didn't have any and in fact wasn't even able to research it.

>step off the Skyranger
>find 4-5 Snakemen and three Chryssalids surrounding the landing area

Aw come on, that's not even fair.

I want to like X-Com but I can't handle the s l o w animations for walking/doing everything and the (to me) frustrating controls.

>>2755798
Snakeman terror missions are cake once you have Blaster Bombs, but early ones (April-May) are tough especially at night. You can't see anything, there's Chryssalids behind every corner, and Snakemen are second only to Ethereals for the best shots out of the main alien races.

>go after Snakeman base
>manage to clean the place out with comparatively little trouble
>Snakeman Commander has panicked
>realize that he's dropped his gun and is mere inches from one of my soldiers
>I forgot to bring stun rods

This is the definition of poor planning.

>>2755808
>I can't handle the s l o w animations for walking/doing everything
You can change the speed of everything in the options.

>>2758052
The commander was actually hanging out next to one of the power stations because on Superhuman base missions, alien commanders often don't spawn in the command center like they're supposed to as it has four spawn points and on Superhuman, they're taken up by two leaders+two navigators. Which makes it harder to bag a commander on Superhuman since he's usually just wandering around some random area of the base.

As someone else said in here, small launchers and laser rifles are effective on Sectopods if playing the lower difficulty levels, however Superhuman gives them a considerable armor boost. The heavy plasma actually does about two points more damage than laser rifles in that case. On the other hand, this is balanced out by the higher fire rate of laser rifles.

The blaster bomb bug in the CE does give you a bit of an unfair advantage since aliens often blow themselves up trying to shoot a BB off at you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEUuK4-5Gxg&list=PLD91BACF0E36EE427&index=61

See here in Kikoskia's LP. He's playing the DOS version and look what happens. Floater leader sends a BB smack into his soldiers' faces. On the CE, that won't happen of course. The BB will just fly into the wall of the control room and blow all the alien officers to kingdom come.

blump

>exhausting playthrough
>lotta Snakemen everywhere
>bagged a commander from a Snake base
>August terror mission is Mutons in Jakarta
>turns out to be piss-easy and I only lose two guys
>mostly because I leveled two big apartments with Blaster Bombs, turning much of the map into wide-open space where the aliens couldn't hide
>as August ends, get my Avenger finished

Start of September. I have two alien bases to take out and decided to commit my elite officers to psy training. That'll take them a month to finish and then another month of putting them on missions to practice their psionic skills. I'm looking at a November mission to Cydonia.

Also I've reached that point in the game where the aliens just throw retaliation missions at all your bases once per month. I did a test run and thank God the retaliation mission turned out to be Floaters. I also found that the terror mission for September is Ethereals because their opening scout popped up on the first of the month. I shot it down and took the buggers out pretty easily (being that it was only a medium scout). In fact, I never saw the UFO because I killed all of them before my soldiers could get to the other side of the map. Also two squaddies turned out to have Jello brains which makes me glad I didn't commit them to psy training. Luckily they panicked and dropped their weapons so nothing bad happened, but three soldiers including my Flying Suit-clad sergeant got badly wounded by the Ethereals' 250% accuracy reaction shots.

When the terror mission happens, I'm just going to go there and immediately dust off. Like shit I'm fighting an Ethereal terror site.

>trying to think of some of my more memorable soldier deaths this run

Mr. Krabs was one of the early members of the team and rose to become an elite sergeant who slew many aliens. He ended up getting shot dead while clearing a Snakeman terror ship.

I also had Calvin, Hobbes, and Susie Derkins. Calvin is still on the team, the other two bit the dust. Hobbes perished in a Snakeman base mission, Susie was killed while clearing a Floater Harvester.

Ika Musume got Chryssalid-ified in a Snakeman base.

Steve Jobs died on the above-mentioned Harvester mission.

>>2761293
That Harvester mission was one of the more bizarre ones I can remember doing.

>send one of my Flying Suit sergeants over to investigate a suspicious-looking shed to the right of the Skyranger
>a burst of plasma fire comes through the roof of the shed and somehow misses him entirely
>peep into the hole made in the roof and there's a Floater right underneath
>kill the xeno with point blank auto fire
>off to the left, there's two Floaters sandwiched between the UFO front door and a barn
>this is a job for Mister Blaster Bomb
>fire a BB at the hull of the UFO with the idea of killing both aliens and also making an extra entry hole
>they die in the blast, but then another two Floater corpses materialize in the blasted-out side of the barn
>that's four aliens in one blow and I didn't even know there were two more inside the barn

And then after clicking End Turn, a fifth Floater came out the intact left side of the barn and started firing (he was quickly dropped). So now there's five dead Floaters neatly arranged in a row.

>>2761312
Also I have one for a Snakeman base mission I did.

>deploy at the start of the mission
>cautiously send a few soldiers out, spot a Snakeman and a Chryssalid in one of those alien entertainment rooms
>these guys are mostly rookies, their accuracy is shit, and I have to send down 2-3 guys to ensure that one shot actually makes contact
>after dropping the aliens, I have one soldier turn to the left and holy Jesus, there's a Chryssalid standing right next to him (in all the fuss of fighting those other aliens, I didn't bother looking to my left)
>shoot him with point blank auto fire

That was a near cardiac episode right there.

Supposedly alien engineers carry Small Launchers but sometimes I've seen crashed UFOs where an alien outside has one even though the engineers are dead from the power supply exploding.

>>2740652
Seriously, he gets almost amazingly lucky with that LP.

>first three terror missions all Floaters
>never sees a Sectoid terror mission until way late in the game
>gets multiple alien base missions in a row keeping him stocked with Elerium and loads of recovered Blaster Bombs
>manages to get all the way through January 2000 while only encountering Ethereals once (a terror mission that he aborts by shooting down the terror ship in the ocean)
>September and up retaliation missions the game draws nothing but Snakemen

A lot of runs you'll end up with Ethereal bases everywhere or you go months with nothing but Abduction/Harvest missions and you can't get any Elerium.

>>2761535
Also he gets an almost ridiculous amount of Snakemen.

>six terror missions including four in a row with Snakemen
>four Snakeman bases
>lotta Snakeman retaliation

>>2761549
Yeh the game randomizer is a funny thing. Sometimes it totally goes insane with one alien race and you don't see anything else for months. I had one X-Com run like that where I got nothing but Snakemen and more Snakemen. Snakeman bases getting built anywhere and everywhere. Since I was terrified as fuck of Chryssalids, I didn't have the balls to go after any of them.

Happened to me in a later campaign except that time it was all just Ethereals. Imagine six fucking Ethereal bases in a row. And I never saw a single Muton the whole game. None.

That was before I knew proper methods of taking out alien bases plus I didn't know that you can easily use Snakeman Supply Ships as an Elerium mine.

>>2749240
>game exploits
Shig.

>>2763074
That strategy works on Floater, Snakemen, and Muton bases. Not Sectoid or Ethereal ones obviously. Camp out in the grav lift, come down, shoot aliens as they approach, and then go back up. Because of the waypoint bug in the CE, any attempt by the aliens to shoot a blaster bomb up at your guys won't work.

Can anyone explain exactly what the waypoint bug is? I'm confus.

>>2763093
A bug in the Collectors Edition (Windows 9x) re-release of UFO Defense. You can't aim a Blaster Bomb directly up or down a level or it will just fly straight ahead. Instead you have to shoot the thing at a diagonal. The AI of course always shoots Blaster Bombs straight up or down levels, which means in the CE you can have your soldiers camp in the entry lifts of an alien base, go down, shoot aliens as they approach, and go back up again. The aliens will all start swarming towards the grav lifts and you can pick them off one by one.

The reason you can't usually do this on the DOS version is because inevitably some jackass with a Blaster Launcher will shoot it up the grav lift and kill all of your soldiers. Since this doesn't work on the CE for the above-mentioned reason, you're completely safe. Any attempt by aliens to fire a BB up at your soldiers will just result in it flying into the wall next to the grav lift and potentially killing other aliens in the vicinity.

On the downside, the waypoint bug sometimes ruins your attempt to bag an alien leader/commander because in base missions, the alien officers up in the control center will often blow themselves to kingdom come trying to shoot a BB down the grav lift. Also true of Battleships.

The waypoint bug does make it a bit harder to blow entry holes in the upper floors of the bigger UFOs since you have to map out the BB path a little more carefully than the DOS version especially since a common UFO Defense strategy is to use BBs to punch a hole in the roof of a UFO and then send in a second round to the bridge area, which will wipe out the alien officers and potentially reduce everyone's morale enough for them to start panicking (not to mention that if it'a Sectoid ship, you can quickly eliminate the psionic-using jackasses on the bridge). The bug means that in the CE, you usually have to shoot into the side of the UFO rather than the roof to get a path that will actually work.

>Floater terror mission in Madrid
>chuck high explosive at the side of a warehouse because I want to create an entry for my troops
>click End Turn
>high ex blows out the wall
>two Reapers who were inside come barreling out and across the street
>one of them promptly has one of my soldiers for dessert

That wasn't one of the smarter moves I ever did.

>>2761397
If you see an alien outside a crashed Large Scout with a Small Launcher, rest assured it is the engineer. Sometimes they do spawn outside and the dead aliens around the exploded power supply are in fact soldiers. Yeah it's a weird bug and engineers/navigators are always supposed to be inside the ship, but sometimes the game does put them outside. I've sometimes been foiled trying to bag the alien navigator because he spawned outside and I shot him thinking he was a soldier, so then it turned out that the guys still in the UFO were just soldiers.

>attack landed Battleship at night
>Turn 2, a blaster bomb comes streaking out of the darkness into the Skyranger and obliterates my entire crew
I never even got to find out what aliens I was facing.

>>2761259
>Also I've reached that point in the game where the aliens just throw retaliation missions at all your bases once per month

January-June: One random mission a month, one terror mission a month. Random chance of a retaliation mission whenever you shoot down a UFO.
July-August: Two random missions a month, one terror mission a month. Random chance of a retaliation mission whenever you shoot down a UFO.
September onward: Two random missions a month, one terror mission a month. Random chance of a retaliation mission whenever you shoot down a UFO plus one retaliation mission a month in every region that has an X-Com base in it (the alien race for the latter is drawn randomly).

>start new game
>a few weeks into January, I get surprise retaliation out of nowhere
>it's hopeless - my ten guys with pea shooters have no chance at all of beating off a Sectoid Battleship crew

And I never even saw the UFO. It just happened out of nowhere.

>>2763250
That's because retaliation Battleships charge into your base at full throttle (5000 knots). Until you get Hyperwave Decoders, you can't detect them. The regular radar can only pick up UFOs travelling at lower speeds (IIRC up to 2600 knots).

>chase down Snakeman terror scout
>take out the mostly destroyed UFO easily, no casualties
>several promotions including one of my captains becoming commander
>after that, just a matter of waiting for the Blaster Launcher to get done researching so I can take out an alien base
>one day after, surprise Snakeman retaliation!
>Battleship shows up out of the blue and charges into my base
>ah...shit
>manage to beat off the attackers, but it's a horrendous mess
>two guys Chryssalid-ified, several wiped out when a Snakeman fires a Blaster Launcher
>the base is saved, but I lose 20 soldiers out of my 30 total

That was not cool.

>>2764745
Yeah the game gives a roughly 2% chance that your base can be insta-attacked by a retaliation Battleship with no prior scouting. It's rare, but you evidently managed it.

>reload my save file at the start of the month
>miss the first Snakeman terror scout entirely, but the bigger second one shows up
>shoot it down right in the middle of the Amazon
>it's at night
>I could wait until morning, but I'm feeling lucky
>the UFO is almost right next to the Skyranger, which makes my job hella easier
>stun bomb wings out of the darkness
>throw flare out there
>spot Snakeman with a Small Launcher
>shoot, miss, and kill another Snakeman next to him that I didn't know was there
>next turn, move rookie soldier cautiously in that direction
>she gets dropped by a plasma shot that came from some unknown location
>this is the first mission I have a Blaster Launcher with me, so let's have at it
>fire blindly into the dark jungle
>look at the map screen
>holy Jesus, there's four corpses out there
>move soldier out there and see three dead Snakes all lined up in a row
>the fourth is a bit further off
>only one guy left now
>is he still out in the jungle some place?
>nah, he's just inside the UFO
>shoot him, mission over with one casualty

>as soon as we're done refueling, set off for that alien base in the central US
>which is Sectoids
>this will require us to be careful for obvious reasons
>one squaddie quickly gets panicked, so we have her drop her gun the next turn
>one of the entrance lifts is next to a big room with body part containers
>there's at least three Sectoids in there
>fire a BB, kill two of them
>deploy my soldiers and find the control center a little bit to the south
>fire another BB blindly into the corridors around it
>check map screen
>holy crap, two destroyed Cyberdiscs and seven (!) dead Sectoids
>I don't believe it, nine aliens taken out by a single BB
>but there's still two Cyberdiscs around there, so we pull back into cover
>next turn, one Cyberdisc moves up and parks smack next to a soldier
>uh heh heh heh I think I'm gonna just run like hell
>move him to a safe distance while another soldier shoots and blows the thing up
>as we move back towards the command center, the other Cyberdisc has evidently retreated around a corner
>this worries me
>one rookie soldier gets shot by a Sectoid
>about two or so turns later, a Sectoid fires from somewhere followed by an explosion and alien death sound
>did a Sectoid accidentally fire at that Cyberdisc and blow it up?
>I have no idea, but I think it did
>there's no psionic attacks happening now, which unfortunately means the leaders/commander are dead and I can't bag one
>finish up by shooting two panicked, weaponless Sectoids

All in all, that had to be one of the easiest base missions I ever did.

Base defenses are kinda useless because of the bug that results in endless Battleships charging at your base.

>>2764928
http://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=2921.0

"Even in Superhuman, the aliens follow progression rules. They may fly battleships in the first month, but only to defend basic missions. They cannot take retaliatory action until they have been attacked enough times, and they cannot assault your base without first discovering it through taking scouts on retaliation missions in the correct region for enough time. I don't think it's possible in vanilla X-Com for the aliens to assault your base in the first month, let alone the first week.

Sounds like something is going wrong in your game."

He's wrong btw. The game simply gives a random chance that any shootdown of a UFO may trigger a retaliation mission in either the region the shootdown took place or the region the craft that shot it down is based in. Further, there's a 2% chance of triggering an instant attack on your base with no prior scouting like happened in my game. As I said, I shot down a Snakeman scout on a terror mission, cleaned it out with no casualties, was preparing to go after an alien base, and then suddenly a retaliation Battleship shows up and charges into my base.

So yes, you can definitely get a base assault in the first week of the game.

>>2764928
If you're properly equipped and tooled up and you constructed your base with a choke point, you should be able to defeat anyone aside from Ethereals without too much difficulty.

Say, how do aliens find your base anyway? It seems to be completely random. Sometimes the battleships show up, fly around, leave, and nothing happens.

>>2764960
As far as I can tell, the AI "finds" your base if one of the retaliation scouts passes directly over it. Because of this, some locations on the map leave you more vulnerable to base assaults than others because they coincide with the preset routes that UFOs take. Also if one scout fails to find your base (either because it missed the base or you shot it down), a bigger vessel replaces it until finally they're using Battleships for scouting. If the Battleships still fail to find the base, then the retaliation mission is terminated.

I always have a slight angina attack if a retaliation scout passes right over my base because that means they probably found me.

http://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,3999.15.html

This guy claims that the game does not do that and retaliation attacks aren't possible without prior scouting.

>>2764979
Well it sure happened to me. I shot the Snakeman scout down in South America, well away from my Antarctic fortress and like two days afterwards, got a retaliation Battleship coming for me. There were no scouts preceding it and I had a Hyperwave Decoder, so I know I didn't just miss them.

Therefore I stick with my claim that there is a small chance of getting an insta-retaliation with no scouting any time you shoot down a UFO.

>nighttime Snakeman terror mission
>manage to clean the place out pretty easily
>there's still an alien or two somewhere, most likely a Chryssalid waiting to leap out at my guys from a corner somewhere
>hear zombie sfx
>crap, it is
>I didn't lose any guys, did I?
>no, everyone's fine
>must be civvies
>turns out that a Chryssalid in some buildings near the Skyranger was munching on civvies
>I have at least two zombies on my hands now and the Chryssalid that bore them
>march my soldiers back there, kill the buggers, and a panicked Snakeman with no weapon

That was annoying as hell especially because I wasted tons of ammo trying to hit the damn things. I had a lot of rookies with shit accuracy and I didn't want to get too close to the Chryssalid. It could have been worse of course, I still had three soldiers in the Skyranger and I'm lucky the thing didn't find and munch on them.

>>2764745
In the course of this base defense mission, I found another interesting game exploit/bug which is that on Superhuman, some of the aliens end up with no weapons b/c item limit.

>three Heavy plasma bolts hit your Power Armor-clad Captain
>he's okay, but will require 100 days rest after the mission

>a Chrysallid strikes my Flying Suit Commander three times
>now he's a zombie

EVERY
TIME

>>2766003
> guy with power suit gets hit once
>he dies
shit man, I wish my men could survive 3 hits

>>2766003
Yeah...armor won't protect you at all from Chryssalids unless it's a Flying Suit and your guys are airborne so that the buggers can't reach them.

Until you play TFTD and realize that Tentaculats are Chryssalids that can fly.

>>2766243
Even the lowly personal armor is still an improvement over naked soldiers, especially in terms of surviving grenade attacks. Power armor makes you essentially immune to alien grenades unless you're at ground zero of the blast.

>Snakeman terror ship headed for South America
>send Interceptor and almost catch it, but it lands in Rio De Janeiro
>oh well, at least the Skyranger will get there during daytime
>try the Lord Finisher tactic of equipping rookie scouts with primed high ex as suicide bombers
>ultimately, none of them die and several kick ass during the mission and level up
>I only lost two soldiers, one a sergeant in a Power Suit (hate when that happens) and a rookie who got zombified (but didn't happen to have a grenade on him so no kablooie)

Overall a very easy battle although I had to take out a couple of civilians that were turned into zombies. Seven of them died, but three survived the mission. Given how well my would-be suicide bombers performed, I feel almost guilty about my plans for them.

>>2766424
I use to send rookies in personal armor to scout the area and absorb reaction hits. Many were lost this way.

One time, a rookie was scouting when a sectoid shot at him, but missed. Through some stroke of luck, the rookie had enough TUs to shoot back just once, and the sectoid was kill.

That rookie became the leader of my first squadron in that particular playthrough. I would think how easily I could've lost him if he served his true purpose, so I stopped using suicide scouts.

>daytime terror mission
>send out my 100+ TU soldiers with stunrods to knock out civvies
>put the civvies in their backpacks
>unload them in the Avenger
>carry out as usual

Minimal losses were taken that mission.

>>2766424
After the sergeant got dropped, I was feeling particularly vengeful and fired a Blaster Bomb into a house as the shot came from somewhere around there. The thing was totally wiped off the map and three Snakemen died in the blast.

The next mission was a Sectoid base assault, but to my chagrin something like half my squad had abysmal psy strength including some of those guys who'd performed so well in the Snakeman terror mission.

>>2766525
>One time, a rookie was scouting when a sectoid shot at him, but missed. Through some stroke of luck, the rookie had enough TUs to shoot back just once, and the sectoid was kill

Luckily Sectoids have the durability of wet tissue paper and once you have heavy plasma, you'll OHKO them about 80% of the time. Cyberdiscs usually about 2-3 shots.

>>2766525
>That rookie became the leader of my first squadron in that particular playthrough. I would think how easily I could've lost him if he served his true purpose, so I stopped using suicide scouts
I don't normally use suicide bombers, but I tried it this time because I was slightly pissed about a couple of recent Snakeman terror missions I did, especially one that was going great and I'd almost cleared all the aliens when a Chryssalid came charging out of a pitch-dark gas station and zombified 3-4 guys in a row.

>>2740229
When the fuck did I open this thread? I don't even play X-Com, the hell is going on?

*

>>2740492
I watched his LP of UFO Defense. Not the best tactics although he does beat Cydonia quite competently with only a few casualties despite having no psy-trained soldiers.

>>2740492
>won't use grenades or Blaster Launchers
Blaster Launchers are psi-tier broken. Game would be better without them (and psi should be nerfed to line-of-sight only).

>>2768473
Further balance tweaks that should be implemented:
Huge accuracy penalty for blind firing
Downed UFOs self-destruct on turn 20 destroying everything inside
Aliens use more grenades and blind throw them
Manufacturing costs doubled

That should shut down all the boring but effective tactics. As it is, clearing Superhuman Ironman is just a matter of patience.

>>2740492
>>2768470
Well, he is playing on beginner mode, and you can notice that easily. He isn't aware of the difficulty bug in the original game.

>>2768508
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD91BACF0E36EE427

This LP he's using Veteran mode and it's the Steam version so the difficulty bug is fixed. One thing you notice is the high amount of lag which apparently is some peculiar issue with the Steam version.

Lord Finisher's LPs used the Collector's Edition and I noticed he repeatedly complains about Superhuman mode overrunning the game's memory limits and crashing. Well, I tried the CE and it does bail out with crashes quite a bit although they seem to be fairly random and most of the time occur at the start of a mission. I also haven't had it crash on base defenses despite the huge amount of soldiers/aliens/equipment present, although amusingly I did notice that some aliens end up with no weapons.

I do kind of appreciate the blaster bomb bug in the CE since it's saved my ass a bunch of times in alien bases when some cocksucker tries to fire up at your soldiers in the entrance lifts and can't do it. If that was the DOS version, you'd be fucked.

>>2768483
>>2768473
Heyheyheywhoawhoawhoa. There's no way you can survive Ethereal missions on anything bigger than a Large Scout without massive use of Blaster Bombs.

>>2768689
>Steam version
That must account for the odd nature of alien retaliation attacks in his LP. Normally the aliens doing the retaliation should be the same guys who's ship you shot down, but he gets totally random aliens every time.

Only exception are the scheduled retaliation missions starting in month 9 where the alien race is drawn at random.

>>2768701
By the time you're doing Ethereal missions you should already have high psi-strength soliders.

I admit, alien bases are a lot easier with BBs. Usually I fire some around the command center since that's where most of the aliens hang out. You can kill almost half of their total force with two well-placed hits.

>>2768706
Ethereals begin showing up in June. You probably won't have good psykers until October-November.

Seriously, I did a nighttime Ethereal terror mission and I literally destroyed 60% of the map with BB attacks. Even then, it was still a difficult battle because half my squad were totally useless due to being mind controlled/panicked.

The Ethereals themselves aren't hard to kill, it's the Sectopods. I really needed the Blaster Bombs for them more than anything.

Soldiers' psy strength improves with all other stats the more missions they're in. Generally if you bring along experienced veterans, you will have less trouble with mind control on Sectoid/Ethereal missions. Of course some rookies have high psy strength to begin with.

The caveat of course being that, unless you use a save game editor, there's no way to know how good/bad a soldier's psy strength is unless you put them into psionic training when the game shows you how well they can resist psionic attacks.

>>2768721
I learned that the hard way.

>my commander is a fellow named Bill
>because he's the commander, I didn't have him do missions more than 1-2 times since getting promoted
>thus he was quite short on combat experience compared to some other soldiers
>take him along on a Sectoid base mission, assuming that being a high ranking officer meant he was safe
>turn 2
>Bill is under alien control

...

>>2768713
So you land, see an ethereal, and get the fuck out of there. Same as with with snakemen terror missions before you have flying suits.

If it's a ethereal base defence you're probably screwed, but that's rare.

>>2768721
Find a sectoid leader/commander, kill all the other sectoids, send men near it one at a time and see how close they get before they get paniced/MCed. Not perfect, but you can at least find and fire the dangerously weak soldiers this way. Obviously take standard anti-psi precautions (drop weapons for your reserve troops, keep your active troops well separated, have stun launchers ready).

>>2769073
You can dust off from Ethereal terror missions, but if they build a base you're in pretty big trouble because you get a negative score each month the thing is operating (unless it's a Floater or Snakeman base since you can just leave those up and milk their Supply Ships).

>>2769073
>Not perfect, but you can at least find and fire the dangerously weak soldiers this way. Obviously take standard anti-psi precautions

You don't need to fire them, just keep them away from Sectoid/Ethereal missions.

>>2769083
TBF an Ethereal base assault is probably worse than a terror mission because there's more of them and bases don't have wide open spaces and weak structures that can be easily destroyed.

>>2769083
You can survive low scores long enough to get your Laser Cannon factories running, and by then you have enough resources to be winning enough recovery missions to keep your score up.

>>2769089
They're a liability on sectoid/ethereal base defense, so better to fire them or treat them as expendable.

>>2769083
Don't you have to worry about alien retaliation if you raid Supply Ships?

>>2769171
Only if you shoot them down which you shouldn't be doing anyway. Each alien base gets a Supply Ship once a week. The ship comes and lands on the base for a few hours, during which time you can assault it. Caveat being that they seem to usually land at night.

Anyway, as I said, Floater and Snakeman Supply Ships can be easily looted for cash and Elerium so you may leave those bases up if they're close enough to your home turf that you can get the Skyranger to the ship while it's landed.

>>2769097
Ethereal base defense is pretty rare anyway, but to minimize the chance of that happening, don't shoot their ships down in the same region as your base. Or else don't shoot them down out all unless it's a terror ship heading for a city or a retaliation Battleship.

>>2769083
In Kikoskia's LP, he has at least two active Ethereal bases up and he just ignores them. Probably smart move.

>>2769073
>So you land, see an ethereal, and get the fuck out of there. Same as with with snakemen terror missions before you have flying suits.

If it's during daytime, you might be ok but sure as fuck not at night. Also yes, early Snakeman terror missions (pre-flying suit/blaster bomb) are pretty bad. One of the most epic UFO Defense battles I ever fought was a nighttime Snakeman terror mission in April (which is the earliest they can occur). I lost 7 dudes in a death struggle with my rocket launcher guy expending his entire ammos supply including a couple large rockets.

But that still wasn't even as bad as the Ethereal terror mission that resulted in me completely destroying half the map with Blaster Bomb attacks. I think I used all eight of the Blaster Bombs I took along.

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im gonna ask it here since i havent seen a ja thread and im not gonna start a new one just for this, and one of you faggots probably knows the answer:

im gonna start a new game if ja2 1.13, and i wonder if the new aiming system still shit? also does the new disguise system work?

much appreciated, sorry for being offtopic...

>>2769831
I could never get the disguises to work. What the fuck is up with that picture Jesus Christ

>>2768721
That's definitely unlikely, it never gets better. My Captain in TFTD was practically in every mission I made. And it still had 1 MC Strength. Which was kinda the point, since I named him Murphy.

>get psy lab built
>start September
>put 10 guys into training
>after the month is up, find out that at least half of them are a joke
>my commander has a psy strength of like 10
>as soon as October begins, kick out everyone with psy strength lower than 60
>you're not gonna survive Cydonia with a 15 psy strength, guys
>about 3-4 soldiers had ratings in the 80s-90s so I'm keeping them in to continue their training
>the psy weakings are going back on the front lines while I throw in a couple more guys
Crossing my fingers for when October's up and I get to check on their progress.

>get Mind Probe
>go after a Floater base in Japan
>do the trick of drawing them all to the entry lifts, mind probing them, and shooting everyone that's not the commander
>couple guys die but I finally bag the sucker

Everyone is expendable when it comes to capturing an alien commander, even your elite Flying Suit captain.

When you get to September, the aliens send a retaliation attack against your base once every month. I was expecting a scout to show up, but like 5 seconds into the month I had a Snakeman Battleship barreling into my base.

Beat them and lost six men in the process, thankfully none of the casualties were my psyker trainees.

>>2771528
I hate doing base defenses, but I wasn't given a choice. I could have shot the Battleship down with the Avenger but then it would spend a month in the shop. Besides, I'd just gotten the Avenger finished like two days earlier.

>>2740370
>There's also a roughly 2% chance that the battleship simply comes and attacks your base with no prior scouting

I don't think this is true. Battleships do sometimes attack without scouts, but in order for that to happen, some other UFO had to pass over your base. If that happens, the game sets the flag for "Base location known". When this flag is set, retaliation missions automatically send a Battleship to attack the base and the scouting phase is skipped.

Earlier in the game, during August, the Floater base in Japan was getting built and one of the UFOs on that mission passed over my base en route. It's likely that that set the flag so when September started and the game would normally schedule a retaliation mission, the result was just to send a Battleship right at my base because the game "knew" where it was thanks to those Floater ships passing over it earlier.

After defeating the base assault, I then got a normal retaliation mission w/ Snakeman scouts. Because I shot them all down and it was still going into October, I didn't get a new mission for that month. They eventually sent Battleships as scouts, but didn't find me.

>>2740652
Basically, the Superhuman Antarctica Challenge works like this:

>play on Superhuman mode
>you're allowed one base only - in Antarctica
>you can't savescum in the middle of a mission

>>2769831
>>2770929
I'm playing the game for the first time, and disguises do work, but figuring out how to do it was hard. Use a knife on a corpse to get clothes, give shirt and pants to SOMEONE ELSE, put them in their hands, right click, then click on who you want to actually disguise.

>>2740652
He gets the bug in his LP that causes endless Snakeman Battleships to crash against his defenses. This well-know bug happens because the game doesn't clear the flag in XBASES.DAT unless a retaliation Battleship actually manages to attack your base. If your defenses or craft shoot it down, the flag doesn't get cleared and the game will keep plowing Battleships into your base forever.

Only thing you can do is either edit XBASES.DAT yourself and disable the flag or else remove your defenses and defeat the aliens in a base defense mission.

>>2771530
>I hate doing base defenses
Why?

>>2740624

On the contrary, you can run Win9x on DOSBox and then run Win9x games in that.

Alternatively you could set up a Win98SE VM.

>>2768721
>>2769073
>>2769089

What if you use Mind Probe on your own guy?
Shouldn't this let you see his psi stats?

>>2771642
Good to know. I've tried replaying it a few times, but I get bored real quick playing the same maps. If there was someway to randomize the maps, I'd probably never stop playing JA2, I love the combat. And the randomization is what keeps me playing Xcom.

>>2771642
>>2770929

yeah i figured it out myself as well. this shit seems way to much hassle and unreliable, its better just to gun the redhirts down

thanks, anyways

>>2771758
Doesn't work that reliably desu.

Alien retaliation affects two save game files, MISSIONS.DAT and XBASES.DAT. The former of course contains all the counters for currently active alien missions. If retaliation is active for the region your base is in, the game will send Small/Medium/Large Scouts to search for a base and if those fail to find anything, Battleships. Afterwards, the retaliation mission is concluded and the entry in MISSIONS.DAT gets disabled by putting FFh at the start of it.

If a retaliation scout passes over your base, the game sets the "base location known" flag in XBASES.DAT which means that if retaliation is enabled in MISSIONS.DAT, the game will generate a Battleship to attack the base instead of scouts. However, due to a programming oversight, the flag in XBASES.DAT isn't cleared unless an actual base defense mission is initiated. Which means if your base defenses blow up the Battleship or you shoot it down with an X-Com craft, the game will keep sending endless Battleships at your base.

>>2771758
Just use OpenXCOM, it fixes all the bugs and UI annoyances of the originals. You could manually enforce the item limit if you really think it adds to the game.

And there's more - after a base defense mission, the XBASES.DAT flag is cleared but the game also doesn't disable the retaliation entry in MISSIONS.DAT like it should. Thus, after defending a base, you immediately get a new retaliation mission starting with a small scout. The game only disables the entry in MISSIONS.DAT if the retaliation mission concludes without finding your base.

>>2740652
In Lord Finisher's two X-Com video series, he gets fooled a couple times by these bugs that he has no idea about. In the first one, he gets a base defense in February but because the game didn't disable retaliation for North America, he ends up getting an immediate retaliation mission after that one and another base defense. The Antarctica Challenge series, he gets endless Snakeman Battleships charging into his base.

>>2772074
Oh crap, some wiseguy mod filtered that word,

Shit's annoying. That means every time you blow up a Battleship with your base defenses, you have to stop and manually edit the save game files because of those bugs.

Remember earlier I said I got a Snakeman Battleship charging into my base on the first day of September? Yeah, I figured out what was up with that. Back at the start of the game (January) I got a Sectoid base defense mission, but my guys were not anywhere near ready to handle this. After a few tries, I couldn't beat them off. A jerkwad with a Blaster Launcher would either blow up half my dudes or else they get killed by Cyberdiscs.

So I got sick of it, pulled my MISSIONS.DAT up in a hex editor, and disabled the retaliation mission. Call it cheating if you like, it was just something that was driving me nuts.

Anyway, unbeknownst to me, the flag in XBASES.DAT for my base was still enabled. So I went all that time, months without a retaliation mission until I got to September when the game starts throwing them at you once a month. Since the flag was still up, the result was that I got an immediate Snakeman Battleship charging into my base.

>>2772091
It seems 80 item limit was added since I last played, so you can play as just bugfixed vanilla and there's no reason not to use OpenXCOM now.

>yfw your crappiest soldiers somehow always make sergeant

I had one guy I named Gilbert Gottfried because...I felt like it. Well, he started with strength of like 20 and firing accuracy of like 40. Despite making sergeant and being in a bazillion missions, his strength and accuracy still sucked cock. He finally met his end in a Floater base.

Seriously, he'd been on the team at least five months at that point. How can shit soldiers like that last so long? Oh right, because I was a dumbass who gave him a Power Suit allowing him to survive mission after mission while many promising rookies with great stats went down because they only had personal armor.

>erecting four Fusion Ball Defenses and a Grav Shield
When you get to that late phase in the game with monthly retaliation, you're gonna need 'em.

Ok but how do I avoid early retaliation missions? I can't build Fusion Ball Defenses in February.

>>2773651
The easiest way is to minimize the amount of UFO shootdowns and instead wait for them to land. They don't always land on all mission profiles, but you get guaranteed Elerium this way and no risk of retaliation.

>>2773657
Downside...you may have to fight in the nighttime.

>like two weeks into a new game
>shoot down scout vessel over my base
>few moments later, a Sectoid Battleship comes knocking

I tried, but my 14 guys with pea shooters and no armor just couldn't beat them off.

So there's a fatal bug in OXC for me and a couple other people where you get a CTD if a zombie dies. So, I started playing Piratez, and it is pretty fucking cool. Anybody tried it?

>>2773910
Apparently killing zombies with incendiary ammo is the only way to keep them from hatching into a Chryssalid, but I've never been successful in doing that.

>>2773651
If a retaliation scout passes over your base, you're pretty much fucked. If it's Ethereals, pray to Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Zeus, Odin, and Shiva in that order.

>>2773996
I'd pray to Allah and Zeus before Jesus. As only 1/3 of the holy trinity his powers are pretty limited. He probably has pretty good psy strength (satan's tempting him in the desert and whatnot) but I bet he can't shoot for shit.

>>2774115
Yeah, right, what next?
Allah packing nothing but primed High Explosives?

>my Avenger chases a Muton Harvester halfway across the Pacific and brings it down in western North America

The mission was pudding - only one rookie and one squaddie died and the Mutons were essentially target practice. Also the power supplies didn't blow so that's another 100 Elerium.

>finish September
>review my troops' psy training
>remove all the weaklings from the psy lab
Would you believe it. There was one squaddie who had a psy strength of exactly zero.

>>2774115
And Thor's attacks are melee-only.

Retaliation UFOs like all missions have certain waypoints they use, which means that some areas of the map make your base less likely to be found out. I had one game where I built my main base on Crete and retaliation scouts never came near it.

>>2740370
I had a rather awful game where I was playing on superhuman (before the difficulty fix, so I thought I was hot shit for having done the previously difficulties without too much difficulty). First scout shows up, I chase, it escapes. My base was hit within the first week. Getting blaster launchers to research in the first week was not too useful given the damage the base had suffered. Then, of course, it dropped back to beginner so I thought I was hot shit for recovering.

Learning the truth was fairly painful.

>start new game with my base in Yurop
>begin February, a Medium Scout shows up over North Africa
>well at least I know where the terror mission for this month is going to be

>shoot it down
>ah fuck, I'll do a night mission
>kill a couple Sectoids around the landing area easily, losing one guy
>of course I now know that this is the start of a Sectoid terror mission
>godfuckingdammit
>anyway, march over to the UFO while encountering no further opposition along the way
>send rookie meat shield inside
>there's three aiyys in there
>kill one, the others reaction fire my dude
>get another soldier into position
>end turn, alien comes out, shoots him dead, and my captain fires an auto cannon HE round blowing up the alien, but wounding himself in the process
>send another squaddie in, alien reaction shots him
>bullshit
>send my captain in and...reaction shot and dead
>I only have one other guy outside and he's some distance off
>now what?
>move him towards the UFO
>end turn, the cockbag that killed my other guys rounds the corner and gets dropped by an insanely lucky reaction shot
>mission over, six casualties

I could have savescummed and redid it, but the UFO was intact and I got Elerium out of it. Besides, that squaddie's reaction shot was that awesome.

>clean out Snakeman base with only three casualties
>forgot to pack stun rods, couldn't nab the commander
facepalm.jpg

If possible, avoid fighting Ethereals on anything bigger than a medium scout and Sectoids on anything bigger than a large scout.

>take on a Floater or Muton Harvester
>go around, shoot aliens, done
>take on a Sectoid Harvester

*Weeeyyooo*

Mr. Garrison is under alien control

*Weeeyyooo*

Hillary Clinton has gone berserk

*Weeeyyooo*

(drops a grenade in the middle of your troops)

I hate Sectoid Terror Ships the most of all. Those are my most hated alien/ship combination.

So what do you guys name your X-Com soldiers after?

>>2776104
Use a lot of Pokemon names and cartoon characters. Sometimes video game characters. All my rookies are just named Barack Obama followed by what number soldier they are since the game started. Why? Because "Barack Obama" is a synonym for "useless garbage". After they prove themselves in battle, they get proper names.

>>2740652
He had a previous set of videos that was just a regular playthrough. In that LP, he manages to take out all the ships of a Sectoid infiltration fleet because (mainly) he's playing on Beginner mode. There's no way you can pull that off on Superhuman. You'd take an average of 5-7 casualties for each of the larger UFOs. Worse than that, there's more psykers due to the increased amount of leaders. A Beginner mode Battleship has one leader while Superhuman has three. That means four psionic-capable jackasses.

I've done it before. The larger ships can be quite costly, especially if it's Sectoids.

>>2740316
Loved it. Completed it twice. Loved the better air combat. 400 cars with machine guns for the win.

My best x-com memory, at least from the /vr/ ones, has to be my one man base defense.

Now this was a long time ago (I was running this on a 486) but I remember it like this:

>Aliens attacking x-com hq
>Skyranger not at home.
>Only one soldier, was at base recovering from injury but now ok.
>Defenses fire, but miss.
>Mission starts, my brother and I have one guy with a laser pistol.
>Cyberdiscs and... floaters? I think? Whatever cyberdiscs come with.
>Find the weapons room. Nothing helpful but it opens out into the longest corridor in the base.
>Spend like 90 turns opening door, auto firing at everything I can see, then closing the door.

Dude single handedly repelled the aliens. Sure all the civilians died and the base suffered major cyberdisc damage, but he fucking did it!

Plasma rifles have a better aimed/snap shot while heavy plasma has better auto shot. In TFTD, the pistols/rifles are better because that game is dominated by aimed/snap shots while UFO Defense is dominated by the auto shot.

The plasma rifle is a fine sniper's weapon if you do that sort of thing, but very hard to keep them supplied with clips late game. By September, the aliens are completely armed with HP and the plasma rifle vanishes from their arsenal.

>>2777009
I managed to beat off a January base assault by the skin of a nose. Had like three soldiers still standing and fired off a snap shot large rocket at a Cyberdisc which turned out to be the last enemy left. If the rocket had missed, it would have been game over.

>>2776104
>naming your characters

I've given one guy a nickname because he kicked ass for a mission, then he died the next mission. I just keep their fandom names.

http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/topic/10946-x-com-challenge-openxcom/

Nice playthrough but why do the aliens love South Africa so much? There's mission after mission there.

IDK but for some reason the game loves making the May terror mission Sectoids in Southern Africa. I've seen a bunch of LPs with that.

>begin March
>shoot down Floater scout over Russia
>two days after this mission, a small scout pops up near my base
>oh boy here comes the retaliation
>send Interceptor after the bugger, but it gets away a few times before we manage to blow it out of the sky
>two days after that, battleship comes charging towards the base
>oh...hell...no
>thank god this is Floaters
>standard tactics...throw proxy grenades at the lift, watch aiyys blow themselves up every time they walk through the door
>suddenly..."Floater Commander has panicked"
>you're kidding me
>you are kidding me
>see the weaponless commander milling around near the access lift
>have one of my captains grab a stun rod and rush down there
>keep my other guys just out of the way so they don't reaction fire the commander
>stun rod him and take out a Reaper hiding in the access lift
>and that's it - I lost one guy in this base defense and bagged an alien commander two weeks into March

Top that record, niggers.

Base defense missions are a mess:

>half your guys don't show up due to spawning limitations
>sometimes this will mean your elite soldiers are MIA while you get scrub rookies with like 41 firing accuracy included in the group
>mismatched armor, weapons, obsolete weapons, wrong ammo

>>2777962
I'll give you a little tip: When you do base defenses, the game engine prioritizes conventional weaponry over researched alien gear which means you could be stuck with pea shooter rifles if you forgot to sell those off.

Unless it's early game, I like to just fire a couple blaster bombs into the hangar areas which will wipe out the vast majority of the aliens.

>>2777967
I know. When a base defense mission is about to happen (ie. the retaliation battleship is heading towards my base), I immediately sell all unnecessary crap like auto cannon rounds, smoke grenades, flares, etc and just buy them back afterwards.

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>>2764748
>Get X-COM for a friend.
>Shoots down a scout, kills the single sectoid.
>Immediately gets a retaliation battleship on week 2.

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>>2740316
Love the designs of the Aliens. So properly.. well... alien.

>>2764748
>>2778496
It's been discussed in here already that this is a myth. The aliens can not attack your base without previously scouting it out. Most likely the small scout you shot down was on a retaliation mission and it found you.

>>2777962
>sometimes this will mean your elite soldiers are MIA while you get scrub rookies with like 41 firing accuracy included in the group

Just sack anyone with shit stats.

>>2778670
I never fire soldiers with crap stats because you don't know their psy strength until putting them in training. You might have a guy with 20 strength and 43 firing accuracy, but his psy strength is like 90 while your elite captain with like 15 kills ends up having psy strength of 10 or something.

>>2778665
It's not true across all versions, actually, but is true for Open X-COM.

Retaliation explained:

Any time you shoot down a UFO, there's a chance you'll trigger a retaliation mission which will be in either the region the craft that shot it down is based in or the region where the UFO was to perform its mission. Retaliation scouting starts with a small scout and proceeds through bigger ships if they fail to find your base or if you shoot them down. The final wave consists of battleships and if they still don't find the base, the retaliation mission is ended. If the UFO passes over your base, the game enables the flag in XBASES.DAT which generates a battleship to attack you.

Due to a bug, the game doesn't disable the flag in XBASES.DAT unless the battleship actually attacks and initiates a base defense mission, thus if it's shot down either by base defenses or an X-Com craft, the result will be endless battleships attacking you.

When you get to month 9 (September), the game simply schedules one retaliation mission each month for all regions that have a base in them. Of course shooting down UFOs can still trigger a retaliation attack as well.

>>2778786
Retaliation scouts also never land and scouting battleships are easily distinguished from the ones that perform the actual base attack because the former travel at a lower speed and simply circle around your base. The attacking battleship travels at full throttle (5000 knots) and always moves towards the base in a straight line.

>begin April
>Snakeman terror scout lands in South America
>the Skyranger can't get there from Europe in time to catch it
>oh well
>meanwhile we have problems closer to home
>a huge fleet of Sectoid ships is arriving to set up a base in North Africa
>they actually should have done this last month, but I'd delayed them by shooting down their scouts
>while this is going on, a fleet crewed by Mutons are heading to Southern Africa to set up another base
>goddamn, Africa is going nuts
>decide to gopher the battleship
>it touched down, it's in the jungle, and it's daytime
>push through the place, make our way to the UFO pretty easily, shoot up a bunch of Sectoids and a Cyberdisc or two
>inside the UFO, the remaining aliens have mostly panicked and dropped their weapons
>two guys outside get mind controlled but it doesn't matter at this point
>go upstairs to the bridge
>shoot a few aiyys including one with a blaster launcher
>the last ones left are a leader and a navigator
>I would have liked to take the leader alive for psionics, but forgot to equip the troops with stun rods
>oh well, I'll get one from one of the supply ships or the alien base

Lost four guys which is pretty good for a Superhuman Sectoid battleship.

Battleships are actually pretty easy - only one entrance to the ship and an easy to navigate layout. Supply Ships are just annoying even though they don't have terrorists/Blaster Bombs.