xcom1 vanilla single mission

[greg77]

anyone heard about anyone ever trying to finish the game with a single ufo recovery? i thought it was possible, theoretically, but could not find any info here in the forums.

[7Saturn]

On a single Battle ship you can find a Commander, a Leader, an normal Alien (which you will need all three), the normal one as a navigator and you will have the Hyperwave decoder. And on top, if it is Sectoids, you can even have psi. But that's quite a challenge, considering, that you will have only a Skyranger, so bringing 14 Soldiers, tops.

[greg77]

i managed to do it with the following setup:
10x soldier
1x tank/laser cannon
10x laser rifle
10x stun rod
i got a battleship first with mutons. after a somewhat long battle, i ended up with several live mutons, all soldiers/navigators/engineers, but no leader or commander. the next one was an ethereal one, i managed to neutralize 2 leaders and a commander, lost 3 rookies. it was at the beginning of october, 1999.
i tried cydonia first at the middle of february, 2000, and i was successful, but got most of my crew killed.
next time i had 10 rookies screened with 85+ psi strength and some skill, too, all in power armor, with a single blaster launcher and 12 bombs for it, and 10 psi-amps. this time it was a great experience, without losses.
i made 8 plasma beams, one for each interceptor on every base. other interceptors were present with dual avalanches.
all of these were funded by manufacturing of motion scanners, then laser cannons globally.
the save/load function was extremely heavily used throughout the game.

end result:
victory, 1st aug 2000
difficulty: beginner
average monthly rating: 466
total income: $9 434 725 675
total expenditure: $9 083 686 452
missions accomplished: 2
missions failed: 0
night missions: 0
best mission rating: 1795
worst mission rating: 851
soldiers recruited: 18
soldiers lost: 3
aliens killed: 8
aliens captured: 2
friendly fire incidents: 0
average accuracy: 3%
most effective weapon: psi-amp
deadliest alien: ethereal
longest months in service: 10
sick days: 0
ufos detected: 610
alien bases discovered: 14
countries infiltrated: 5
terror attacks: 6
bases built: 8
craft owned: 22
scientists hired: 0
engineers hired: 1710
research completed: 46

"missions accomplished" should possibly show 3, for cydonia is made up of two.
"night missions" should read 1, because the first part of the cydonia mission goes always at night (but why?).
soldiers, engineers and scientists shown here are counted at the beginning of the final mission. of course i had 200 scientists once, but sacked them after finishing the research. at least 1000 more engineers got sacked/lost.
"aliens killed": it seems that the cydonian kills are not included here.
"aliens captured": the first part of mars was finished by mind-controlling the last sectoid. somehow the 2 leaders and 1 commander i stunned on my only ufo recovery mission ended up as a "2" here.
"bases built" is also inaccurate, because i lost 6 bases to retaliation attacks. of course at the launch of the cydonia mission, there were 8. i would appreciate a "bases lost" entry here.
"craft owned": not accurate either. although i did not lose any, i sacked my skyranger two times.

[greg77]

i will try to repeat without any losses, possibly with stunning a navigator that was mentioned earlier. i also made several mistakes that led to at least 6 months of delay. i'm sure it can be done without psi, albeit very difficult to. one saves a maximum of 10 elerium on psi-amps, but the 200 elerium must still be divided between plasma beams (to help keep score near zero), power armors, and blaster bombs - sheer force must be used, i think. i will also try to keep score high by using 30+ dual avalanche interceptors, but its low number of shots makes it difficult. also, power armors can possibly be replaced by personal armors. one can have as many as 75+ shots for 6+ blaster launchers, and it may provide enough firepower.

[Hobbes]

You can find a description + strategy here:

1 Mission X-COM

[The Reaver of Darkness]

If you get mutons, it won't work. They only have three ranks: soldier, navigator, and engineer. Ethereals also have three ranks, but they have the ranks you want: soldier, leader, commander. All of the other races have all of the ranks you want and more.


This guy does it in 2 missions, but it doesn't look like he was really trying to do it in one.

[Hyper2Snyper]

Man that guy is good. I barely won Cydonia with 16 men 2 fusion tanks and an assortment of pistols, stun rods, rifles and a couple grenades on easy!

[The Reaver of Darkness]

He did it quite a bit easier than I did. When I attempted to emulate his strategy, I realized he's no better at the game than I am, and I'd been hitting Cydonia wrong. If you don't try to blaster the brain at your first convenience, and especially if you move any soldiers near it, you're setting yourself up for trouble. That's what he did on another run.

I think this time he tried to shave off a few seconds by save-scumming. Perhaps if you make enough attempts, you will eventually have all of the ethereals choose to stand in place and face the brain, making it easy to run up with no armor. I'd like to see an ironman speedrun done in under 20 minutes.