Can you turtle in this game?

[vassock]

Just wondering if it's possible to turtle in this game. I played Xenonauts and really liked it, except for two things:

1. You had to overextend yourself to keep world opinion positive. Otherwise, you lost funding and lost since government funding was pretty much the only source of income.

2. What really did it for me is encountering one of the boss characters which could apparently cause half your squad to randomly go crazy and become unusable.

How does openXcom compare?

[7Saturn]

1. You had to overextend yourself to keep world opinion positive. Otherwise, you lost funding and lost since government funding was pretty much the only source of income.

AFAIK, you can't loose Russia, so the game could go on indefinitely. And when placing 4 fusion defenses with a grav shield and a mind shield in each base, you are mostly secure from retaliation missions. (However, it gets kind of annoying, once every base is under constant attack, as they mostly fail at the approach and just come over and over again.)

2. What really did it for me is encountering one of the boss characters which could apparently cause half your squad to randomly go crazy and become unusable.

Well, it's kind of similar with Ethereals, at the beginning... And also Sectoid leaders will give you a run for your money. But eventually you will have their abilities as well, so at the end of the day, it's only a matter of not loosing every base and not making negative balance twice in a row. That are the two things, that could make you loose.

[ohartenstein23]

(However, it gets kind of annoying, once every base is under constant attack, as they mostly fail at the approach and just come over and over again.)

This was a bug in the original, fixed in OXC - once the battleship that's attacking your base is destroyed or lands to do the base assault, the aliens consider that mission 'complete,' and it'll be a while before they have another go at it.

To avoid failing the game by negative score, you have to counteract enough alien activity with scoring of your own, and that means getting enough radar coverage to see what they're doing, i.e. building more bases for radar.  Usually it only takes a few ground missions and not failing a terror site, and your base's don't often get attacked unless you're shooting down their UFOs.  So turtling is a fine option.

[7Saturn]

I'm not sure, as I never tried it out: Can you actually loose by having to much negative score? Or does that only make countries drop from the X-COM project?

[ohartenstein23]

Yep, but it's difficult to do unless you just fast forward time doing nothing.  I think it take multiple months of lower than -500 score on Superhuman, even more lenient on lower difficulties.

[yrizoud]

If you've never played (the original) UFO/TFTD, I recommend you reload save games when you see a catastrophe happen. If you don't, you quickly run out of money, soldiers and equipment, and it's a situation you'll never recover from anyway, even if the "Game Over" screen is still months away.

In any case, in OpenXcom you're expected to choose your battles : It's tempting to try attack everything to maximize income, material and combat experience, but you should always remember that no battle is mandatory, and even mid-battle, retreat is possible.

[Solarius Scorch]

Just FYI, completed research also generates some points.

[Arthanor]

Yep, but it's difficult to do unless you just fast forward time doing nothing.  I think it take multiple months of lower than -500 score on Superhuman, even more lenient on lower difficulties.

It's two months regardless of difficulty, but what is considered low depends on difficulty. I think on beginner it's -1000, while on Superhuman anything lower than -400 is bad. But generally, breaking even is pretty easy.

[vassock]

Is it possible to have a profit from base production alone?

[Starving Poet]

Is it possible to have a profit from base production alone?

More than enough to make money meaningless.

[7Saturn]

At least from mid game on. Once you can produce laser cannons or fusion ball launchers, money shouldn't be an issue. That's also, why you are not depending on the countries funding that much. That's only an issue during early game, where you can't make much profit from production as you haven't got the really profitable items researched, yet.

[Hobbes]

I'm not sure, as I never tried it out: Can you actually loose by having to much negative score? Or does that only make countries drop from the X-COM project?

There are 4 ways of losing:
* Having a negative score for 2 consecutive months (dependent on the difficulty, starting on 900 for easy and 500 for superhuman)
* Having twice a negative money balance on the monthly, regardless of if it is on consecutive months or not
* Losing all your bases
* Losing the Cydonia mission

Is it possible to have a profit from base production alone?

Yes if you mass manufacture and sell Fusion Ball Launchers or Laser Cannons. Those two are the most profitable items you can manufacture and sell. A pair of workshops fully staffed and only manufacturing either item will give you a net profit of roughly 4.3 million per month, with the engineer salaries and facility maintenance costs included. At the beginning of the game Motion Scanners are the best thing to do this, since they can give you a 1.3 million profit.

Add sales of recovered loot and you can stop relying on Council funding for your activities. 

[Meridian]

This was a bug in the original, fixed in OXC - once the battleship that's attacking your base is destroyed or lands to do the base assault, the aliens consider that mission 'complete,' and it'll be a while before they have another go at it.

Nope.
They still come in an endless loop in OXC if you just keep destroying them with base defenses.

This was fixed in OXCE+ (by giving modders a possibility to specify a chance to stop being so stubborn).

* Having twice a negative money balance on the monthly, regardless of if it is on consecutive months or not

This is also not true in OXC.
It must be consecutive months for the balance check (more than 1M debt) too.

[7Saturn]

So I remembered that one correctly. I don't play that way any more, as it's usually less of a hassle, to simply live through the experience of base defense than having to click away that OK-box over and over again.

[The_Funktasm]

A small amount of turtling is unavoidable during slow months. One can also rig this a bit by ensuring dogfight wins are over the ocean. Also of note is that even if every civilian dies at a terror site, winning badly is still better for scoring than never actually showing up or losing outright.