Re: The X-Com Files - 3.5: Whispers In The Dark

[Juku121]

You can manually overwrite the 'retain interrogated aliens' option. That allows you to kill in addition to selling, so you can always slaughter your surplus for parts.

You also get dead bodies after interrogation. A little cruel, perhaps, but what else might X-Com be doing with its captives that both consumes them and doesn't leave a corpse? Hmmm, smells like a coverup...

[psavola]

I wonder, what are the best ways to deal with mutons in open areas?

They are very tanky (125+ health and 28+ armor), and have reasonable reactions and firing accuracy. Usually taking one down takes 2-3 hits which is liable to cause you casualties or at least serious wounds. If they weren't 60% resistant to KINETIC, bigger gauss weapons might do the trick, but I don't think any main gun is likely to one-shot them. And if you don't deal with all of them quickly, the snipers are likely to fire back or throw explosives.

Their major weakness appears to be a very low PSI strength, so inside confined areas I guess mind control or panic should wreck them. But this is not really an option in the open areas.

[krautbernd]

Blasters Turbolasers and fire, like the majority of other things. In "open" spaces I find a turbolaser sniper rifle, a (as in multiple) soldier with decent accuracy and smoke (keeping in mind their 20% HV) is usually enough to deal with them.

[Thunderwing280]

If I destroy Alien colonies, will the funding nations come back? Like the Embassies from ages ago.

[Chuckebaby]

If I destroy Alien colonies, will the funding nations come back? Like the Embassies from ages ago.

I could be wrong but the answer there is no. Once a country has signed a "pact", they will never fund you again.

[psavola]

OXCE allows modders to enable rejoining (allowCountriesToCancelAlienPact) but in XCF this is set to false. So, they won't rejoin.

[Thunderwing280]

I could be wrong but the answer there is no. Once a country has signed a "pact", they will never fund you again.

I see, though the Colony description does make it sound like it would, might need to be changed to remove the implication.

[Chuckebaby]

And still no mysterious parcel from the syndicate, even though I destroyed them 6 months ago and decrypted the testament. Therefore no access to Spartanism transformation yet. Really annoying that the probability of getting the parcel is only 25 %, instead of other "rewards" for completing arcs which you always get immediately. But I suppose you can argue this to be balanced because the spartanism seems to be by far the best transformation. I'd still suggest increasing the probability a lot.

You were right. The same thing just happened to me. A year later after terminating the syndicate I just received the mysterious package (for Spartanism). I'm not really sure what triggered it.
But it wasn't the ring like I thought it was.

[Chuckebaby]

I see, though the Colony description does make it sound like it would, might need to be changed to remove the implication.

I've never really sweat it if one country (or two) has stopped funding. The game is still beatable. If your neglecting raids often and losing funding from loads of countries then I would be concerned. The ability of not being able to win back funding from pact signed countries is part of the challenges.
All these small challenges is what makes this game disturbingly amusing to me 

[Akamashi]

I wonder, what are the best ways to deal with mutons in open areas?

They are very tanky (125+ health and 28+ armor), and have reasonable reactions and firing accuracy. Usually taking one down takes 2-3 hits which is liable to cause you casualties or at least serious wounds. If they weren't 60% resistant to KINETIC, bigger gauss weapons might do the trick, but I don't think any main gun is likely to one-shot them. And if you don't deal with all of them quickly, the snipers are likely to fire back or throw explosives.

Their major weakness appears to be a very low PSI strength, so inside confined areas I guess mind control or panic should wreck them. But this is not really an option in the open areas.

It's strange, but a Gauss sniper rifle, even with a coefficient of 60%, hits Mouton with one shot much more often than a turbo sniper rifle. What is even more paradoxical, the Gauss sniper on sectopods is also more effective than the turbo sniper rifle. This is according to my humble observations.

[psavola]

I have since then found out that plasma sniper rifle is the most reliable way of one-shotting mutons (far away). The downside is that it takes so big a chunk of TUs to fire (you can essentially never fire two shots), so if you're looking for total DPS, turbolaser sniper rifle provides the biggest punch. And I agree, gauss sniper rifles are also surprisingly good overall at the point you've obtained lots of power suits (with the same caveat as plasma sniper rifles: inefficient TU usage).

Also, to avoid most problems caused by mutons on open areas, I strongly suggest skipping turn 1 completely (except possibly throwing smoke) and deploying out only on the next turn. Like most aliens, mutons have aggression 2 so once they get the chance, they waste a lot of their TUs running around. So it makes sense skip the first turn crossfire with full TUs.

Now while I'm at, here's a huge tip (that I discovered myself only in this campaign) for those interested: Thanatonautian Manus is an extremely useful mid-game PSI weapon to take down armored enemies, especially heavy MIBs (always seems to one-shot them), but it also works on many others. With 90-100 PSK it is very accurate and makes tremendous amounts of damage with 0.1 armor effectiveness (with the only limitation being range 20). Felt almost cheesy using it.

[Akamashi]

I have since then found out that plasma sniper rifle is the most reliable way of one-shotting mutons (far away). The downside is that it takes so big a chunk of TUs to fire (you can essentially never fire two shots), so if you're looking for total DPS, turbolaser sniper rifle provides the biggest punch. And I agree, gauss sniper rifles are also surprisingly good overall at the point you've obtained lots of power suits (with the same caveat as plasma sniper rifles: inefficient TU usage).

Also, to avoid most problems caused by mutons on open areas, I strongly suggest skipping turn 1 completely (except possibly throwing smoke) and deploying out only on the next turn. Like most aliens, mutons have aggression 2 so once they get the chance, they waste a lot of their TUs running around. So it makes sense skip the first turn crossfire with full TUs.

Now while I'm at, here's a huge tip (that I discovered myself only in this campaign) for those interested: Thanatonautian Manus is an extremely useful mid-game PSI weapon to take down armored enemies, especially heavy MIBs (always seems to one-shot them), but it also works on many others. With 90-100 PSK it is very accurate and makes tremendous amounts of damage with 0.1 armor effectiveness (with the only limitation being range 20). Felt almost cheesy using it.

This manus has an explosion radius.)) It can be guaranteed to kill sectopods with a single shot. We need to try it out)).

[Chuckebaby]

For Mutans, if you haven't gained access to plasma or laser weapons yet (you should) Black opts sniper rifles with tritanium clips. With a good aim soldier you can get 3 well aimed shots off (which typically kill a muton) and still have half your TU's left.
Etherals however are a different story.

[zee_ra]

Oh, great! This mission was a hell earlier, considering how early it spawns, and now with unspecified amount of reinforcements...  :'(The only mission where Dagon's Staff was useful...

Dagon's Staff is pretty good on underwater missions as well.  You could even take a city with it (if your agents are high in psiStrength).  This obviates the need to research sonic weapons by that point (which may or may not be possible by then).

[psavola]

All right, the date is 2000-05-28. At least half a year passed since I researched the last available topic in ufopedia. I have sacked around 7 Shogg villages: 1 antman, 6 spiders. No sight for Etherials, no sight for MiB commanders. In order to save last remnants of my sanity, I decided to stop here. (...)

For what it's worth, I'm kinda in the same spot here (SH). February 2000. I've researched everything, even the MIB commander. Essentially the only thing I need to progress to the endgame is Ethereal commander: because this is missing, I can't hijack MIB-Alien communications and can't get to the MIB lunar base and progress from there onwards. In this case, the chances of ethereal retaliation mission is (only) 33 %.

Some months there have been the ethereal retaliation mission, but most of the times they haven't found my bases. Arbiters seem so tough that I don't think you can shoot them down even if you deployed 4 tormentors (but I could be wrong, didn't test this). So shooting down the arbiter and getting the commander that way does not seem to be an option.

I've already dealt with one Ethereal retaliation against my base earlier, but trying to find the commander among all the ethereals was a pain (no visual clues - in contrast to most other alien commanders). And there were 20+ sectopods crammed in the hangars (essentially every hangar square was filled by a sectopod). If you need to capture the commander, you can't shoot shrapnel rockets and need to deal with them some other way. If I bothered to continue this campaign, I guess I'd have to try to kill them off with lasers the next time and not use explosives at all.

Maybe there should be other and/or more probable ways of obtaining Ethereal commander to progress to the lunar trail. I've already had two lunar missions (UAC base and MAGMA cosmonauts), so it shouldn't all that difficult to find the rest on the moon. Or just require any alien commander for this (preferable), so that you don't get locked out of the late game so easily.

The current requirements are somewhat strange in any case, because Cydonia or Bust requires any commander, Ethereal GM and Lunar colony. But you can't the latter two without ethereal commander in any case. So there is actually no point in obtaining and researching any non-ethereal commander, and you'd probably want to avoid that because doing so  triggers researchRetaliation (15 % per month).