I noticed that Ion Armor and Magnetic Ion Armor had very high defense in the front but very low on the sides. It goes well with the brutal nature of TFTD: your aquanaut will generally be fine when shot in front but it's like playing Russian Roulette because they can be hit on the side any time. It's brutal alright, but I felt it diminishes my options and forces me to leave the lives of my soldiers more up to chance--say when I have to go round a corner and there's likely an alien waiting there. I could throw explosives around every corner but that would be a huge waste of time and resources and won't even work every time.
So I came up with a small change that does make the game easier but I felt it made the game a lot more fun. This plus the realization of a few other already existing aspects of vanilla TFTD turned it into less of a rookie grinder and more into a game of strategy on a level I never saw in UFO Defense.
The change was that I swapped Ion Armor's front and side armor value, but I left Magnetic Ion Armor unchanged. Regular Ion Armor was now super strong on the sides but super weak in the front, while Magnetic Ion Armor was similar to Aqua Plastic Armor in that both were particularly strong in front but not so great on the sides.
When playing through, I initially was careful to use dye grenades and other tactics from the old game to keep my aquanauts alive, but once I got Aqua Plastic armor, I started a new strategy: always face the aliens. When hiding around a corner, face the direction the aliens will come from. When approaching the alien craft, be wary of where aliens will likely be hiding. Don't go around corners but take wide strides and approach hiding spots from a direction that exposes the aquanaut's front, not their side. If you must expose their side, do it at range to reduce the chance the alien will hit. This was a hugely successful strategy--while aquanauts would still die pretty often when shot from the front, they often did survive. I assisted the strategy by always bringing a coelacanth to every mission. I could use it to go around shady corners and I could hide aquanauts behind the coelacanth. I lost a lot of coelacanths but I always saved extra money to buy more, and it paid off with all the experience my aquanauts got as they remained alive.
When I researched Ion Armor, the game changed. It was time to start going on the offensive. On my first Ion Armor mission I put my first few armors on my freshest aquanauts, and kept the older ones in the back with Aqua Plastic armor. This time I attacked something bigger, a large landed craft. The Ion Armor rookies hugged the coelacanth up to the door of the alien craft, then they barged in and used that sweet sweet mutual surprise to their supreme advantage, taking out several aliens and finding cover inside the craft. I had them expose their side armor to where aliens were expected to come from. The experienced aquanauts remained outside and scanned the terrain for any stragglers outside the craft, and finally approached its exits to prevent any aliens from getting away.
It worked! I lost some aquanauts but came out with plenty still alive and lots of resources! My next target was an alien colony, but I still needed some preparation to make this operation "safe". I made sure to research the Pulse Wave Torpedo Launcher and then I got started on the research for Displacers. First we were going on a trial/training mission, a little OJT if you will. I packed up my Triton with a coelacanth and lots of rookie aquanauts. I brought nobody with low bravery, but poor firing accuracy was fine, I could work with that. My thinking is that a good commander can make up for the shortcomings of their aquanauts. My team had 1 tank, 6 aquanauts with ion armor and gauss rifles, 4 aquanauts with aqua plastic armor--two of which had heavy gauss and the other two had PWT launchers. Now this was pretty early in the game to be assaulting an alien colony but I wasn't going to go downstairs yet, this was just to raid the top and go home.
I took the tank outside and had it get a bit of a view. A sonic cannon shot came out of the darkness behind the craft and dropped the coelacanth in one hit. Well that's one more aquanaut still alive and one alien who has no shots left, if you know what you're doing. See, the Sonic Cannon requires 50% time units to fire and all aliens have an even number of time units, meaning if they spend just one to turn, they cannot fire. This means once one fires a shot, you can approach from a different angle and they can't shoot you. So I get some soldiers to come around the other side of the craft and sure enough there's a tasoth standing there with his side exposed. Took a few shots to kill him but he couldn't do anything about it on this turn. I ended the turn on the offensive, can't have the aliens shooting me with PWTs so I'd better start killing off their leaders. I fire one shot in each of their upstairs "office" rooms, the places with multiple viewports where they hide the high ranks and will shoot at your soldiers as they pass by. Got like six high ranking aliens down. I end turn with aqua plastic armor inside the Triton and ion armor outside, facing outward and exposing their sides.
Enemy turn, nothing happens. You'll find you get this a lot when you play aggressively. Stifle the aliens quickly and they can't fight back. But it's not over yet.
Turn two, I have to begin the difficult and unsafe trek across about 8 battlescape spaces to the downstairs lift. First thing I do is load up a PWT launcher and blow a hole in the wall, second launcher makes sure the entrance is clear by detonating on the inside. Can't take any chances. Then I have my soldiers dash around behind the Triton and take defensive positions around the hole. It's only 6 soldiers so it's going to be tricky to cover all directions especially if we sustain any losses. The Aqua Plastic Armor guys are staying in the Triton for now. As long as that door closes every turn, they're safe from enemy pulse wave torpedoes. I had the heavy gauss aquanauts poke their heads out and take pot shots at terrorist units every chance they got. The weapon is particularly effective against Xarquid and is powerful enough to kill Hallucinoids pretty well. And if the occasional tentaculat dies as well, that's a big bonus. These soldiers were acting as support to keep the ion armor aquanauts alive.
The mission was a success. I lost a soldier but stomped a lot of aliens on the way. The battlescape went pretty quiet after a while but there was still plenty of unseen activity on alien turns. I took some time to have my units gather up alien equipment and then ran them back to the Triton for departure. We go home, knowing that we probably got lucky and the second training mission probably wasn't going to go as well.
I had to send them out on another training mission before the real mission because we needed to be sure our strategy was effective. This time I had a lot of reaction fire coming from dead ahead out the door, lost the coelacanth quickly and had a few soldiers go down. It was going to be a bit of a trip to the lift area and my early PWT shots failed to take out very many high ranks. Despite my best efforts to keep my aquanauts in safe formations, we got hit with a PWT which took out two soldiers. I quickly scooped the remaining soldiers up in the Triton and we left. Not today.
Third training mission I finally had my first displacer, bringing much stronger armor and a powerful sonic weapon to the field. This time I was able to get the displacer to distract the aliens better without succumbing to fire, and it also acted much more effectively as a scout. The lift was on the other side of the map, but we made an excellent exit and killed off several high ranks quickly. I took my ion armor team inside the nearest colony structure and had them journey through the halls to get closer to the lift. This was their domain--going around corners. As long as they stayed indoors they were pretty safe. They could also safely pop outside and back in through another door. They simply needed to avoid wandering outside. That was the job of the Displacer. It took out a few terrorist units and scouted enough others that I was able to use my support team to keep the map clear. My ion armor team got closer, and I began to bring my plastic armor team in their wake. Eventually we gained access into the final lift area, cleared it out, and were able to restock PWT ammo on the way. This was so successful I figured maybe these soldiers were ready for a bit more training. We were going down.
I took the soldiers down into the colony. It spread them out a lot, getting several of them pretty far away from the exits. I had to move them carefully to get them back to the exit areas safely but I wanted to get ready to retreat in case this area became too hostile and we needed to make a quick exit. No sooner was I heading back than I saw them: Lobstermen. We'd handled them before on a terror mission by stunning them and detonating explosives to finish them off. It was going to be more tricky in this colony but I figured I'd see how many we can take out. It didn't work well, they were too far away and were able to see us coming and shoot at us. I had to retreat, and a few aquanauts didn't make it back. We'd probably need more advanced technology to win this. But I think that was pretty good for running around in a Triton in the early months of the game.
Once I got Magnetic Ion Armor, I was able to make a much better breaching team. The soldiers in regular ion armor would run around corners initially, but would then be followed by magnetic ion armor soldiers who would stand forward of their position and protect their front. It was highly successful and I won the game with fewer total aquanaut losses than I've ever managed in the past.
