How do you manage missions with special requirements?

[Moth_Of_Decay]

I'm just curious about other people's strategies in relation to things like the undercover, underwater, and the other weird missions. Whenever I set aside dedicated space for concealable equipment, hazmat stuff, and other specialty gear I end up feeling like I'm wasting time and money. Do you guys keep bases specifically set up for specialty missions? Do you just sell off a transport temporarily to grab a van? Or do you just ignore those missions in favour of the non-specialty missions? If you have any advice, I'd love to hear it.

[Juku121]

Personally, I've decided that since we're stuck with an ever-expanding facility list, bases bigger than 6x6 or even more than 8 bases won't happen in OXCE, and custom hangars have been in the works for half of forever... I'll just go with pretending that hangars are 1x2 like in Xenonauts, and make it happen by housing 2 crafts in one hangar.

2-4 crafts per base gives me enough leeway to leave 2-5 guys on covert ops duty in one or two of them. It also helps that I have three strike bases with both a 'large' and a 'fast' team, so dedicating one of them to UW duty is not too bad.

Craft equipment and individual equipment templates are also a godsend. I know streamers love to spend eons faffing about with their equipment pre-mission, but I just have no patience for that.

[Moth_Of_Decay]

Base facility tax is real. The mod really does have a lot of conceptually justified but mechanically redundant things. Splitting up animal pens, prisons, alien containment... then the various labs and intelligence centre. I feel that X-Com Files really needs you to specialize your bases more than the vanilla game, which is difficult when you are trying to set up strike teams across various parts of the world.

It really is the soldier side of things that messes me up. Perhaps my games are just too much of a meat grinder, but having so many missions with 1:5+ ratio of agents to enemies always leaves me needing large living quarters and storage... and ships... and so on and so on.

That said - how do you manage to fit more than one craft in a hanger? I assume you are using some sort of mod to make that happen? (Or have I misinterpreted your words?)

[Juku121]

...leaves me needing large living quarters and storage...

I got fed up with the anemic store limits and increased those, too. I guess it's mostly be being a pack rat.

That said - how do you manage to fit more than one craft in a hanger? I assume you are using some sort of mod to make that happen?

Well, I just tweak XCF around whenever I hit something I don't like and it's not too much work. Although be aware that spending a few hours going through all unit bravery and weapon damage randomisation values was not too much.

Crafts are easy, just change the hangar facility's 'crafts: 1' to 'crafts: 2'. You'll lose visuals and one-click access to half of them, but at least they're reorderable.

[Moth_Of_Decay]

Crafts are easy, just change the hangar facility's 'crafts: 1' to 'crafts: 2'. You'll lose visuals and one-click access to half of them, but at least they're reorderable.

I'll have to try that out on my next campaign. I'm going to try to tough it out for now, even though part of me really wants to restart for better early game base development.

[Juku121]

You can change these values on the fly, no restart needed. Hangar space is at a premium all game long, IMO.

[Rag]

I went with 1 covert vehicle and 1 main vehicle as constant for the whole game in my main base, then used 3rd hanger for backup global range vehicle to begin with then used it for special crafts for mission requirements.

main vehicle gets everything I ever want to use in a mission including underwater stuff since I just send that to those, covert vehicle gets special stuff needed for covert missions and concealable weapons and some spare main weapons incase need to send it on a non covert mission.

For Interceptors I personally put those in secondary bases one in Asia one in America while main base was in Europe, that way they seemed to work for global coverage since I only really started using interceptors with Raven. Having an interceptor in the main base was just too limiting with space especially when needing to keep things like the Viper on hand while waiting for missions to appear.

As for storage, yeah my main base now has 3 small storage facilities, 3 hangers and the large living quarters and its still limiting on space, in hind sight should have found room for a large storage area in the main base but I wanted to do research in it too. As for animal pens, prison and alien containment...and ghost tank, I ended up having 1 of the main 3 in main base, never bothered with ghost tank since can't afford to waste facility space on it and then made extra prisons pens and containment in spare bases to store bodies for research. In the early game having a second pen and prison in main base can be nice but definitely can't waste space on that later.

I don't know how important base defence preperation is in this mod, I've only had 1 base defence so far at the end of year 2 and I'm on Veteran difficulty. Not sure if just lucky or if it is safe to use the extra 5 spaces I left un-used for a choke point for more facilities. As those extra 5 spaces would help a lot if they could be used.

As for special equipment for special missions, I kept 2 of "everything" I thought I might need for my covert car like baseball bats etc. that could be used in covert stuff then hoped that stuff would be good enough for the missions. I also bought some special equipment like sport rifle and bow etc. but those weapons really suck and not sure if I'd recommend them. Now that I'm near the end I just put tubrolaser pistols in my covert vehicle and overpower them as long as it lets me use them (looking at you Beach mission...)

The biggest change is underwater stuff, to begin with I just used Taser Cannon (still no idea why it works underwater but glad it does) and stun rods / tritanium blades since those worked way better than the speciality early underwater weapons. I tried the ADS darts but they were not worth it and I never bothered using the gas cannon etc. I also found the dart gun to be useless. Sonic weapons were great once I had them but Deep Ones still resist them so much I'd rather just melee them if I can get away with it.

[Moth_Of_Decay]

Ugh, the dart guns are comically bad. Even giving them to my best bio-enhanced supersoldiers they end up being completely uselessly inaccurate and weak-hitting. Even if the character was the greatest sniper on my team it would be better to just walk up and beat the target into submission with a club or something.

That said - how on earth do you manage to only have one base with agents/loaded transports? Since the dragonfly and osprey can't travel to the other side of the planet, my early game usually involves creating at least three fully armed bases for global coverage. Not to mention the revolving meat-grinder that necessitates 16+ spare soldiers and a few gyms to get them up to par.

[Juku121]

...3rd hanger...

How are you managing to do things with just 3 hangars? The real craft with proper agent counts have nowhere near global coverage, and public airlines are slow as molasses for much of the early game. When three different missions pop up, do you just ignore one of them?

main vehicle gets everything I ever want to use in a mission including underwater stuff...

The big issue with that is reshuffling the equipment whenever an UW mission comes up. Much more handy to have a special team set up for that. They'll even specialise a little bit via commendations.

...made extra prisons pens and containment in spare bases to store bodies for research.

I have an entire base in Antarctica filled with rows and rows of alien containment tanks. You know, like a proper secret alien-fighting organisation.

As those extra 5 spaces would help a lot if they could be used.

Yeah. I guess you need to weigh your options carefully there, especially since the retaliations won't start until you've played a while.

...sport rifle and bow etc. but those weapons really suck and not sure if I'd recommend them.

The sport rifles and especially crossbows are pretty good when the next best thing you can take is a dinky handgun, you're in a tiny cottage in the middle of open snow, and the cultists have you surrounded.

...Taser Cannon (still no idea why it works underwater...

Yeah, for a mod supposedly big on 'realism' in its fictional concepts, the underwater weapon list has some eyebrow-raising entries.

I also found the dart gun to be useless.

Ugh, the dart guns are comically bad. Even giving them to my best bio-enhanced supersoldiers they end up being completely uselessly inaccurate and weak-hitting.

The dart guns suffer from the RandomStun thing that effectively halves their damage. Would you take a 15-18 damage weapon if the game actually told you that's what they are?

That having been said, after I fixed that and also gave them 25% armor penetration, they've been pretty OK. I've only used them with rather beefy soldiers with multiple enhancements, max accuracy and some commendations, but the accuracy seems fine with those. Kinda like how shotguns become almost rifles with a good agent.

[Moth_Of_Decay]

Kinda like how shotguns become almost rifles with a good agent.

I've been playing with the additions submod that adds (among other things) scoped shotguns, and let me tell you those can get downright hilarious in their reach. Questionable balancing aside, they are a ton of fun to use... and they do have their drawbacks.

That said - I think I need to get an antarctic prison base...

[Rag]

I don't know if I just got lucky but with the Dragonfly I was able to reach most big missions with it from my Europe base, built it on the mountain next to Budapest. I only had Black Lotus and Red Dawn HQ missions before upgrading to the Skyraider so maybe those HQ areas just happened to be within range. Wasn't pretty doing it with just 8 people so in hind sight was definitely worth bigger craft with less coverage in the different bases instead, probably a team in America and Asia since those two areas seem to cover a lot of ground together as that's where my interceptors are in my current game during alien invasion and they can reach anything that appears quickly.

I had the Humvee during Dragonfly for the global coverage and in the early game just ran with 2 cars and a van as the van kept failing to reach distant missions in time so I only used that for closer ones and just hoped the 2 people could deal with the further stuff. I guess putting vans in America and Asia would probably be safer than sending just cars for the start too so might do that in my next run. While I had just 2 people I relied heavily on the hunting rifles so would run to the edge / cover and just snipe things as best I could.

I found using the cars tended to always reach stuff before it despawned I think only a couple of times it failed especially with the private cars. But there were a few missions like Reptoid assassination which depsawned in like 1-2 hours so pretty much nothing that could be done about those, I had to hire a private car from a nearby base and send it before the mission spawned thanks to an autosave and it still only just reached it in time. But fortunately those were rare.

On the note of the special weapons compared to small arms, I did find even with tritanium ammo the spypistol was very weak, I liked it as it could be sent on most concealable missions and having something long ranged was better than nothing, but I can definitely see specialty weapons like the sports stuff could be better even if still weak.

[Moth_Of_Decay]

On the beach missions I always end up with agents hiding next to a door with a melee weapon. Maybe that's cheesy given the beach houses having the little hallway, but I've never found a reliable way to do those missions given their wide-open space and most enemies carrying firearms. Can't imagine trying to do them with the spy pistol - as the second best strategy would just be desperately grabbing whatever weapons the enemies have.

[Juku121]

Can't take Spypistols to the beach. :'(

Crossbows can be used to play shoot-n-hide. Later you get Heavy Crossbows, and harpoon guns that can even be fired several times a turn. Or use HE darts. Not sure how X-Com gets those past the fishing inspectors.

Flare guns are also beach gear and can be used to terrify any enemies who come come close.

Tasers if you need someone alive and don't want to risk the melee roulette.

But, yeah, the covert missions are exactly where you want to steal your enemies' gear.

The Spypistol is about volume of fire while crossbows, sport rifles and harpoons are more about long-range potshots. None of them are particularly powerful, but neither are most enemies in these missions. And beggars can't be choosers.