[TrashMan]

Nice LP.

Now hire some new meatshields.....and give them proper (our) names!
It will be fun to watch our virtual counterparts get horribly mangled by alies

[Colonol Dekker]

Nice LP.

Now hire some new meatshields.....and give them proper (our) names!
It will be fun to watch our virtual counterparts get horribly mangled by alies

I second this motion and hope to make commander before Zane.

[jr2]

Can I be an engineer?   

[Commander Zane]

Nice LP.

Now hire some new meatshields.....and give them proper (our) names!
It will be fun to watch our virtual counterparts get horribly mangled by alies

I second this motion and hope to make commander before Zane.

Eh?

Edit: Besides, I've made no real contributions to HLP so why would I be mentioned?

[SpardaSon21]

Shade, why aren't you using redshirts?  You can't possibly hope to win the war against alienkind without redshirts to get shot instead of the main characters.

[FireSpawn]

I demand to be the sacrificial goat strapped with high explosives!

[redsniper]

* redsniper is just waiting for the first night terror mission... with snakemen.

Because with snakemen come.... some other guys...

[Shade]

Being reminded of those... other guys... is the reason I got started playing X-Com again

[FireSpawn]

Just started replaying X-Com again. Six days of absolutely nothing across the globe then BAM! Terror mission with nothing but rookies, basic weapons and a commander who was never really good at this sort of thing in the first place. Suffice to say that Advent Base was re-purposed into a protein extraction plant.
I am NOT responsible for the end result of the human race being reduced to alien pet food, it was...uh...Redsniper! Yeah, let's go with that...
 

[redsniper]

My bad...

[NGTM-1R]

MEANWHILE, IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE!

Equippage:

Ten soldiers. I don't carry pistols, because A: I don't have a tank to draw fire so they will return it, B: seriously, **** the basic pistol forever, and C: redshirts. If you feed the game a few casualties it won't attempt to murder you.

The TO&E
All soliders carry a Stun Rod in the event of close-quarters action. Also a Grenade and, if appropriate to the environment, two flares. If a day mission, the flares stay aboard the Skyranger.

6 Rifles, 2 clips each, to be replaced with laser weapons as fast as possible.
1 Laser Pistol, all that was ready in time.
1 Heavy Cannon, 1 AP clip, 2 HE clips, 1 IC clip. 1 HE and IC usually left behind with starter soldiers. HE general-purpose, AP for close quarters.
1 Autocannon, 1 AP belt, 2 HE belts, 1 IC belt. Same deal.
1 Rocket Launcher, 2 Small Rockets, 1 Large Rocket, 1 IC Rocket. IC and a Small are left on the Skyranger for now. Eventually I'll get around to assigning someone as a pack mule for the Rocket Launcher but few people have the strength at this stage, and few things require the firepower.






Dispositions, turn one; two disembarked, two ready to do so. Immediate area swept for hostiles, none found, one watching north and one south.



Dispositions, turn two. Four disembarked. North-south pairs; this spacing is a little bit of an aberration even for me, but I don't want to tempt anyone to blow the ramp off the Skyranger. Not making a rush for the UFO; I almost always sweep the UFO last.



Dispositions, turn three.  Eight disembarked. Without hostile fire or contact I moved more people out. Teams firming up into the groups they'll fight the mission in. Red is Team One, with two rifles, sweeping the building, each oriented to cover a door I haven't opened. Orange is Team Two, with two rifles, watching the corner behind which the UFO is. Blue is Team Three, covering the open area, rifle and heavy cannon. Green is Team Four, rifle and autocannon, with the rifle guy against the building and the autocannon hanging so far back because he ran out of TUs. I'll close the gap up next turn. One pair, Rocket and Laser Pistol, still aboard the Skyranger. Guess we know who the mule is.



The distance between members of Team Three is about my standard spacing, designed to prevent a grenade thrown at one from killing both. The only excuse I use for stacking up closer than in the open this is preparing to assault a door or corner that I suspect enemies are behind (see Team Two). Otherwise I'll keep people at least that far apart where practical. Exceptions are made for areas where grenade-throwing isn't possible (see indoors and Team One)

Think that's enough to demonstrate what I meant.

[Polpolion]

You guys and your daytime scout raids make this game seem easy. Lemme see if I can get some shots of a nightime sectoid-cyberdisc terror mission I just played up here.

Won't be as detailed as NGTM-1R's or Shade's but it'll certainly show off some cool things for people that haven't had the pleasure of playing X-COM.

Terror missions are just what they sound like: Aliens raid the suburbs of a large city looking to coerce governments to cut X-COM funding. Also kill civilians. This one's at night, and I've deployed with 1 Tank/Laser HWP, two squads of three laser rifles and AC with HE and Incendiary ammunition, and a demolitions section with a rocket launcher (3xLarge, 3xIncendiary) and several HE packs. For the ACs I actually never bother with AP ammo early on because ACs for me never really go indoors. They just serve as fire support and at this point, all users really can't hit anything with AP anyway... But All this careful logistics got thrown out the window because I have neither medkits nor armor yet. It was a slow start to the game, and I usually get medkits after I get armor on the assumption that if you get hit without armor you're dead anyway.



The start was pretty tame for terror missions. Usually I can't even disembark without casualties this early into the game on terror missions because there are so many enemies. Cyberdisc in the building on the right, but he's stuck there or some **** so I'll just need to not walk by the windows. The sectoids started mind blasting my troops and a rifleman panicked and ran up towards the street and got shot.



Moving my HWP down to try and find the culprits, I found, without a doubt, many. Several sectoids and at least two cyberdiscs in the street. Cyberdiscs generally explode upon death but unfortunately they didn't for me so my HWP had to manually shoot both of them, while a rifleman and gunner were able to gun down the rest of the sectoids. Meanwhile, I had to euthanize a riflewoman that had been mind controlled by an enemy sectoid, but before doing so for some reason I decided to have a rifleman shoot a hole into a warehouse and hide by a cyberdisc next to some boxes.



I could get my HWP into the building, but it wouldn't have enough TUs to shoot the cyberdisc. So what I did was I moved it in there anyway to distract the cyberdisc while I withdrew my rifleman and had a demoman toss an HE pack in there. As the picture shows, it worked, but at the cost of my HWP. Oh well.

After several more close calls with a frightened demoman with a rocket launcher, I was finally on the move. My troops were too spread out to have regrouping be safe enough to be practical, so they had to move out in what groups they could. I had a rifleman and a gunner on the left side of the map moving down, though the gunner was gravely injured with two fatal wounds, another rifleman and a gunner providing suppressive fire down an alley way, and on the right side of the map two riflemen moving left to meet the other rifleman and gunner. I had lost one rifleman to panic and running blindly into the enemy, and another to my own troops after being mind controlled, and the demoman with all of my HE packs was seriously injured.



I didn't find much else until I came to a gas station. At least three cyberdiscs were there, one having tried to move up and met a few of my gunner's HE rounds and riflemen's laser bolts (if you've been wondering, my laser guns are indeed rifled!). Several sectoids also tried to move up but to no avail. After several rocket shots and liberal application of boolit, apperantly everyone had died. Unfortunately, my demoman's wounds were too severe and he did not survive.



Looks like I even managed to save five civilians! No doubt they're probably insane now, but that's not X-COM's concern!

Seriously, though, you don't want to know how many times I needed to save and reload.

[NGTM-1R]

You guys and your daytime scout raids make this game seem easy. Lemme see if I can get some shots of a nightime sectoid-cyberdisc terror mission I just played up here.

My first attempt to demonstrate actually was a nighttime scout mission which ended in loldie on the first turn when an alien chucked a grenade into the open back of the Skyranger.

[redsniper]

scout mission which ended in loldie on the first turn when an alien chucked a grenade into the open back of the Skyranger.

This is X-COM in a nutshell.

[BloodEagle]

So after having a nightmare of a time getting this game to work (X-Util has a wonderful bug with loading missions involving very small and small ships), I finally have a game running (and am doing rather well, I think).

One of the last missions I encountered forced me to start save-scumming (which I hate doing).

Spoiler:

It was a large floater ship (note: the first time I encountered a multi-level ship, I had no idea how to go up (well, I knew how to go up, I just didn't know that I could do it there and on that).), and every now and then one of the bastards would open the (center) landing hatch doors and fire what I can only call an Artificially-intelligent Nuclear Device (A.N.D.).  The A.N.D. would seek out the most damaging location to explode, and take out EVERYTHING within twelve-or-so tiles. 

One time, and this is funny, it zigzagged its way across the map*, went passed my skyranger (passing by a number of troops and a tank), turned around, flew up into my skyranger, and then blew up, killing my two most valued troops.  And I don't have cloning, yet.

*Rough view of the map:
  _____________
|                            |
|                        X  |- Skyranger
|                        X  |
|                            |
|                    ____|
|                    |       |
|                            | - Apple orchard
|                    |___|
|         0                 |
|                            |
|  0     O     0         | - O is the landing hatch
|                            |
|         0                 |
|______________|

If there's any way to defend against that, please let me know how.

[NGTM-1R]

Ah, the Blaster Bomb. The greatest device for blowing your guys up ever devised, whether it's blowing yourself up from missetting the waypoints or flying out of the darkness to annihilate a half-squad.

Spacing. Won't cause it not to fire, unlike not presenting grenade target, but it does minimize the damage. and it does seem to noticeably slow down the rate of fire.

Kill the spotters. (The door-opening you noted was very likely someone moving out to spot; also if you killed him, he wouldn't be opening the doors so really you're safe either way.) No, really, the game does cheat on that, but not that much. Aliens have slightly superior night-vision and will remember your location for two-three turns after sighting you if you sit still. Kill the spotters and move around.

Move quick. Don't give the heavy weapons time to play on your position; blitz straight up and assault the UFO, where they're likely to be.

[Goober5000]

And I don't have cloning, yet.

Cloning?  wat?

[Shade]

Ah yes, the Blaster Launcher. When facing enemies using that, it's time for a major change of tactics. I was going to go over this when I first encountered them in the playthrough (and I'm still on that, just haven't had much time this week so far), but since you have trouble I might as well jump the gun a bit and add my bit to what NGTM-1R has already said.

What you want to do is not give them any target to shoot at, which can be a bit tricky. See, discounting psi attacks, aliens more or less obey the same line of sight rules as you do. That is, they'll only fire on enemies they can see... or have seen on a previous turn and which happen to be in the same location as they were then. So when faced with blaster launchers, at the end of your turns you'll want to move ALL of your agents a couple of paces just in case, and also place anyone on the front line that might get spotted directly into some sort of covered position. That usually (but not always) keeps aliens from using their blaster launchers against you.

If you have blaster launchers yourself, you have another option: Fire first. In UFO recovery missions, the enemy blaster launcher users are generally concentrated around the bridge of the UFO. So use the good old bunker-busting trick of firing one shot to make a hole, then follow it up with a second one through the hole to level the entire bridge section. Also has the benefit of taking the strongets psi users out if going up against a race with that capability.

Goober: I made a reference to cloning in my playthrough, but it was just poking fun at the way that X-Com, if funding allows, can apparently call on a limitless number of troops with noone ever asking questions or wondering if perhaps a 90% casualty rate is a bit high. There are no actual cloning facilities in the game.

[headdie]

With flying suits the blaster becomes your biggest friend in your hands and less of a problem in the enemy's.

a few things to remember

1. Explosions only travel laterally iirc and not vertically so floating your soldiers across several levels will greatly reduce casualties from explosions while having a minimal effect on the ability of your troops to cover each other.
2. The blaster is the only weapon that can reliably puncture the outer hull of a UFO and it dont matter what class is so a battleship is just as vulnerable as a scout, use this to blast a hole in the (top if you have flying suits, side if not) and swarm in once you have secured the surrounding area.

[BloodEagle]

Note to self: research the blaster.

And I am disappoint in your joking abilities, Shade.