Now, Cults. I've seen around this forum claims that you should strive to remove at least one, possibly two before the first year... How the hell? I found the two HQ missions I did a pain in the ass with eight people delivered by Dragonfly - and thinking about it that would have been an incentive of building a logistics base with a hagar, living quarters and storage to base an Osprey in range of where certain HQs appears. That in fact was the reason why I had to skip the first two times the Red Dawn one popped up - my Osprey couldn't get to it, and it was a suicide trying it with five people. However, I did get the Dragonfly researched and available before I could get the money for a third base so it became a moot point.
I've noticed that the enemy, especially Red Dawn suffered less from such issues, however that once again might have been luck and the volume of auto-fire sent my way.I tried Nitro Express and it felt useless. Too slow rate of fire, can't use shield. Then I faced Red Dawn Coordinators, who one-shot me through shields :) Guess, some weapons work best when you outnumber the enemy.
A notable memory is the first time I encountered those green dogs employed by the Cult of Dagon. I spent close to thirty turns crawling all over the map hoping that when one of those show my people would be able to take them out with reaction fire before the beastie could close and eat their faces.What weapon did you have? I normally have Desert Eagles or Magnums at this point and gill dogs are bearable.
That's another thing range related - as it turned out when I completed the research that showed psi strength of my people, all but a handful got scores from zero to thirty something. That in turn forced me to face the base defense while bringing only a handful of heavy weapons because otherwise by people gleefully blew themselves and any friendlies around when they either panicked or got mind controlled.It feels sad every time I fire them, but low psionic agents are best sacked as early as possible. Gives you more time to train replacement. In some earlier versions there was a period when every Sectoid UFO had psionic enemies (or it was just luck). It's not hard to get psionic screening by early 1998, if you have enough researchers.
And here comes another issue I'm torn on. The X-Com Files is a great long mod... and after investing a lot of my spare time over the last couple of weeks in in, I find myself unwiling to grind through it again. By the time this campaign ended - I had close to two hundred completed missions and a significant part of those were frankly tedious zombie and other alien lifeforms hunts that I used to train rookies. Even if I won that base defense, after loosing so many people I simply wouldn't have been willing to subject myself to the grind necessary to rebuild my troop roster if the enemy actually let me do it.The thing I loved about this mod is the gym. While some missions do allow to raise a stat by 4-6, about half of growth is given by the gym. Maxing stats only takes several months.
By the way, how many soldiers do you expect someone to have by the time the second year is over? How many bases?I try to get 6 bases with at least radars. With the limits on the number of labs -- 1 of each kind per base -- you'll need many bases to research fast. Up to 6 Skymarshals and Thunderstorms -- or as many as I can afford. Many missions can still be done with weaker craft, thus I don't bother with intermediate models unless absolutely necessary. I never filled Skymarshalls -- that many agents make a good target and take a few turns to disperse. So, it's usually something like 3 developed bases in the North hemisphere -- 2-3 hangars, stores, living quarters, gym, pens-prison-containment, intelligence center, biolab, laboratory, workshop, radar, 10-15 agents -- and 3 underdeveloped ones with a subset of the former list.
Speaking about missions... I found myself basically ignoring the cover operations after experiencing one of each type. Once again I found them too dangerous for my agents for no real gain. As far as money was concerned, fighting cults, selling corpses, etc and building what I can for profit was more than enough to keep me in the green.I liked Black Lotus Party. Assassins' camouflage doesn't work in close quarters. The only mission where capturing them is reasonably easy.
While thinking about building things, did I miss something or is the durathreed not really useful beyond a moneymaker if you don't have anything better? I found the X-Com jumpsuits underwhelming and kept using the armours offering the best protection even if that meant my agents were overweight.You need durathread manufacturing to unlock alien alloy research and cyberweb.
Now, Cults. I've seen around this forum claims that you should strive to remove at least one, possibly two before the first year... How the hell? I found the two HQ missions I did a pain in the ass with eight people delivered by Dragonfly - and thinking about it that would have been an incentive of building a logistics base with a hagar, living quarters and storage to base an Osprey in range of where certain HQs appears. That in fact was the reason why I had to skip the first two times the Red Dawn one popped up - my Osprey couldn't get to it, and it was a suicide trying it with five people. However, I did get the Dragonfly researched and available before I could get the money for a third base so it became a moot point.I did all 4 with a van on beginner level :) With a lot of reloading.
I do have durathreed, I think I had the implant researched, however personal armour - I presume you don't mean the green armoured vest/shield combo?"Personal armour" is the 1st armour out of alien alloys in the original game. Alien alloy research is split into several stages here and personal armour is unlocked fairly late. If you can make Skyranger and better, you can research personal armour. But if I remember corectly, cyber armour is better, if more expensive.
So not the tritinium vest or however it's spelled?The shiny vest comes a bit earlier. Checked the armors*.rul file -- the vest has better front protection, especially with the shield. Xenonauts' vest is:
I haven't really tested the Nitro Express. By the time I got it I had better options.I gave it as an example that some weapons may require change of tactics. Which may not be worth it.
It was a Dagon attack mission on a very built up mapOuch. The first time I got it, no civilians survived.
When comparing armours, do not forget to also check the resistances. ;)My bad :) I'm so disinclined to enter this maze, I keep forgetting it exists. In the same order:
0 None 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
1 Kinetic 0.7 0.8 0.8 1.0 1.0
2 Inc 1.2 1.0 1.0 0.8 0.8
3 HE 1.0 1.0 1.0 0.85 0.85
4 Laser 1.0 0.8 0.8 0.8 0.7
5 Plasma 1.0 1.0 1.0 0.65 0.8
6 Stun 0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9
7 Melee 1.0 1.0 1.0 0.7 0.7
8 Chemical 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
9 Smoke 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
10 EMP 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.3
11 Electric 1.0 0.8 0.8 0.6 0.6
12 Psi 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
13 Warp 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
14 E-115 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
------------------------------------------------------
melee dodge reactions 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.1
tu -5 -5 -5 0 0
stamina -5 -5 -10 0 0
reactions -5 -5 -5 0 +10
Did I get the order right? 0 None
1 Kinetic
2 Inc
3 HE
4 Laser
5 Plasma
6 Stun
7 Melee
8 Chemical
9 Smoke
10 EMP
11 Electric
12 Psi
13 Warp
14 E-115I played very little vanila before finding openxcom and mods. Most of my X-Com experience has been with Enemy Within with the Long War mod. Needing to interrogate the same type of captive multiple times is a new for me and compared to every other type of research is counter-intuitive. If I got a new type of research unlocked the few times I did it I might have thought of doing it repeatedly. As I didn't I believed that it was just a nice flavour feature of X-Com Files. To add to that, the other mods I've tried - FMP which I played for some time a few years ago and more recently the WH40K one, in neither of them it occurred to me to interrogate the same time of captives multiple times.Vanilla allows to study each species-rank combination at least once. (Makes perfect sense to me.) If there's more to learn from a particular combination, they remain available, the biggest example being medics. As far as I know, megamods behave this way too.
It is.
First impression of the new version - it loads orders of magnitude faster on the ancient laptop I'm using for old games. It usually was up to five minutes until it loads and processes everything and earlier tonight on the new built - less than a minute.
A question and some more feedback.
What do I need to produce Alien Laser Rifle ammo? I had the rifles themselves and the clips researched for months, I'm able to build laser cannons for my aircraft as well as laser HWPs - both tanks and hover and would soon be done researching the laser defense. I just got cyberarmor built for most of my people and decided to build some laser rifles to help with logistics so I could remove some of the various mid to long range weapons I have cluttering my deployable craft and bases, I got some rifles built and got the unpleasant surprise of not being able to make ammo for them - all I have is two clips I captured during an UFO mission a few months back.
The Cyberarmour makes a huge difference and allows a lot bolder gameplay, especially when capturing enemies are concerned and as importantly, in underground missions, which up to that point were suicide without saving and loading as if there was no tomorrow.
Mission wise, range continues to be an issue, especially in the Americas. All Exalt missions that spawn lately have only people I've already captured enough of for them to no longer show in the research tab for interrogation and no joy with finding anyone who can unlock their HQ.
A note about the T'leth Embassy - I had my first underwater mission earlier tonight and it almost turned into a complete disaster because it put a bunch of rookies I had in the Skymarshal for training into the submarine and ignored most of the ten experienced agents I had inside to babysit them during missions. Perhaps a note that not only you shouldn't bring dogs on such a mission because they will drown but only the soldiers who will fit in the submarine and no extras? Having five of the nine divers as newbies was very, very painful.
I did have two head-hunter missions tonight and the experience was very different. First, it was Master Lo - the Ninja trainer. I did get him alive with only one casualty - he used his super special, ten thousand times folded Katana to turn Amenyst, the base's Robo-Tank mascot into scrap. It was hard persuading my squaddies to bring him in one piece after that. I had to promise he'll be subjected to all the fun and games my Intelligence officer could think of to make them see reason.
Next, it was that alien assassin fella and he accounted for the first casualties I suffered, if you don't count poor Amenyst, since equipping most people with Cyberarmor - throwing grenades across the whole map after I had all his drones shot down was an unpleasant surprise.
On a related note - perhaps interrogating those special people if someone gets to all the trouble to bring them back mostly intact should give some info about them? In the Ninja trainer's case I got a short blurb that it might be a good idea to keep my people far away from each other if I'm facing psionic enemies and in the assassin's case, a dossier about a MiB affiliated agent, that gal who is supposed to be able to mind-control multiple people at the same time and has influence over multiple governments. Nice touch, however wouldn't it have been better if we actually learned something about the people we just interrogated too, after potentially going to some significant trouble to bring them in intact in the first place?
All things considered, those head-hunter missions were a nice touch, however, especially in the assassin's case, it was a very good thing it spawned after I had Cyberarmour otherwise he could have wiped out most of my people with his grenades without seeing a trace of him.
Now for an issue, one that the assassin mission highlighted. That was the fourth time since I began deploying tanks that said HWP got stuck into the transport unable to exit because there was something spawned right at the ramp. I had to either use its cannon, which would have blown up a lot of weapons I had in the transport, or let it sit the mission out. I tried to clear the trashcants with a trooper armed with a CAWS with AP ammo, it didn't get the job done.
Can anything be done about this? The only alternative is to keep just enough equipment in a transport to arm the people I'm bringing at any given mission and that's simply too much of a bother, considering that depending on the type of mission, expected terrain and how experienced the people I'm bringing are, the loadouts could vary quite a bit. It simply takes too much time to load and unload equipment before and after each mission to bother with not practically having most of a base's arsenal loaded in the transport stationed there.
Depending if you know what to research and what missions to push.... and being lucky actually getting them, the position in the campaign late '99 can be radically different. While cyberarmour did help tremendously and is the main reason I didn't scrap the playthrough and likely left the mod for greener pastures due to not being willing to grind through the first two years of light cult activity and alien lifeforms, once I knew what I actually needed, I had to spent months skipping a lot of missions and letting the aliens do basically what they wanted until I actually got the item I needed to unlock precise alloy shaping and thus the research necessary for the cyberarmour. It really didn't help that the mission types necessary were among those that in my experience spawned the least.
Now that leads to another issue, directly related with when I unlocked the cyberarmour and the time necessary to outfit my strike teams with it. By the time that happened, the aliens upped their game and I once again find myself in the unpleasant situation of being outclassed on the ground, which leads to the second issue - troop replacement. Once I had a full strike team, after a few months when in my three bases I my scientists being lazy, underworked and doing God knows what, I finally began tackling the various alien terror mission, shooting the odd UFO, going underwater and underground.
The point? While I did get some nice new loot to research, I lost nearly a third of my veterans in the spawn of a month in two underwater missions, one terror, the first I faced the sankement and those overgrown iguanas of theirs and bloody hell, the underground alien outposts - those in particularly were hell where my two best achievements after save-scumming like a champion were a lost laser tank apiece and no less than three or four veterans. That in theory is good, fighting in close quarters against explosive totting enemies and those overgrown slimes that are bullet sponges should be tough and generate casualties. The issue? It will be at least half an year to an year until I'm able to recover from the losses and that's an optimistic scenario. Ever since I took out the Lotus HQ a few months back, thus leaving only Exalt from the original four cults, the available missions where I can send mostly rookies were scarce. I've got an eight man newbie team in my third base that after an year of deploying all over the world hunting alien lifeforms that they can reach with a Dragonfly and lately a Hawkeye, they're still too fragile and green to even think about sending into anything serious.
So once again, any chance of hiring better soldiers at worst after Promotion III comes around? The biggest issue I have here is twofold - a long grind to make newbies worthwhile and to add insult to injury, the missions they can handle are the dullest and least fun... when those actually spawn. In the meanwhile, I have to curtail operations against the enemy, which incidentally includes going to some of the more engaging missions when they spawn or risk entering death-spiral as far as my troopers are concerned. That's not a fun way to play.