Let's Play: X-COM - UFO Defense

Wow, wasn't I lucky! I went to a hostile enemy encampment in a secret Arctic base and I was the only member of a six man team that wasn't either injured or killed. I think I earned my seargent stripes!

Cybernetic enhacements? It is like the future is here! Put me in one, please.

I feel as if my life isn't being put on the line enough here Eddie. Why are you trying to protect me?

If a soldier is wounded they're kicked off any plane they were on; if I remember correctly, three of those "wounded" were with you. The 10th was the mission's only casualty.

Two reasons: one, you're stationed in BASE CAMP which is seeing about 1/4 of the action that HEY AFRICA! sees. The aliens are just avoiding North America like it's toxic.

Two, I try and send soldiers on missions based on their mission/kill count; the lower, the better. You were near the top, so you were relaxing at home most of the time. You'll eventually see battle again, next update I believe in fact.

Man, that's way better than I expected! I figured I'd be killed by a reaction shot as soon as I poked my head out the Skyranger.

Oh man, I made colonel! And died...

Surely a man of my rank is too important to the mission to be allowed to remain dead?

Iron Man me up! This time I'll actually amount to something! Amounting to something not guaranteed.

I just want to state that despite my best efforts, there won't be an update today. The game sometimes enters a strange period where nothing exciting happens. I like to throw in one decent mission recap, which I feel I could if anything interesting was happening in my game right now. I literally went through the rest of the month shooting down and raising small Sectoid ships. I believe the Sectoids are trying desperately to find the base they assume I have in Siberia, so small scouts keep coming.

But that's pretty boring!

And the Base I think the Aliens have in Australia? I've spent over a day of game-time flying Skyrangers over that blasted country and I can't find it for the life of me.

Not even a Muton or a Ethereal in sight!

Boourns. I love X-Com, but it can drag awfully hard at times. I will see if I have something tomorrow after playing some more.

- Eddie

Dear Mogri, Captain of the First Degree of the Alien Extermination Command

I am the next of kin to NamelessEntity. She fought beside you in the assault on the alien base in Arberdeen. Her life was cut down when she bravely rushed the command station looking to take that darn commander out once and for all.

I write you as I hear tell of a secret project to bring good soldiers back with the discovered alien technology. I implore you good sir to put in a good word for NamelessEntity. Having fought with her first hand, you are aware at what a valuable asset she could still be to the cause.

Sincerely,
NamedEntity

Or, could I be put on the list to be resurrected?

I... I sniped aliens and apparently lived, despite my rad low stats!

This makes everything I've ever done worthwhile.

I'll speak with Captain Mogri and see what he has to say about this whole deal but I'm not convinced.

I tried to find the highest ranking person who was also in that battle, and must have totally missed you. Please don't let the inability of me to read effect your decision. You don't need no book learnin' to fire straight.

Welcome back! I'm not going to lie: a whole lot of nothing that interesting happens this update. But there are some important developments - maybe not interesting to read about, but important nonetheless - so as much as I fell asleep creating this update, hopefully it will bridge the gap to the game being more interesting to LP again.

As I mentioned earlier, as typical of many 4X-like games, there reaches a point in X-Com where the game has a distinct lull spurred by having all of the interesting technology researched, and the game stalling a bit as you build to the end game.

As a further aside, we were lucky to capture a psionic Sectoid as early as we did; it's quite possible to have to wait until the next Psionic race shows up to get a "start" on it, and since building Psionic Laboratories takes about a month (and it takes a few months to "train" your soldiers up), we'll hopefully not see the game drag too much.

But enough complaining, let's see some people die in this Sectoid Terror mission! Also: strange bugs?



We have two casualties this mission. The first is kaisel, who is tagged by a Cyberdisc reaction shot. I hate those guys.



Loki is next, the victim of a lucky shot by a Sectoid.



It's times like this that I wonder if I should just make a dozen Blaster Launchers and nuke the damn missions, but no we don't really have enough Elerium to do that.



Strange bug time! After taking a reaction shot, our PHILLIAM tank gets bugged out somehow. This happens rarely, but it's annoying; our tank is effectively stuck. He'll be fine for the next mission tho.



It will "remain" on the map where you leave it, but you can't do anything with it. It will fire Reaction Shots, so there's at last that.



So, stun bombs. Did you know they're effective on mechanical units?





It's strange, but they're in fact very effective against Cyberdiscs (and a later terror unit we haven't seen yet). Large units (like Cyberdiscs) take "stun damage" on each of their four squares, which can really add up. They won't explode this way (but you can never capture a Cyberdisc "alive"), but who cares? Cyberdiscs stink.



This is the last score screen I'm going to show until the end of this update; once again we get a crappy score but whatever.



We DO finish researching the "ultimate" craft. These things are great, because they've got two weapon slots, and can hold a ton of troops (read: tanks). They're also fast as heck. However, they use Elerium as fuel; as you can't "make" more, you have to ensure you always have some on hand.



Mind Shield's reduce the likelihood of a Base Attack. They're expensive to build, but cheap as heck to maintain so why not.



The aliens in this game are weird, but I think the "Floater" design is the best. Sectoids are your stereotypical "alien", Snakemen are He-man rejects, and Mutons are just muscular green and purple men.

Floaters at least give you this cool idea of an alien that has been genetically engineered and cybernetically modified to have a very specific purpose. Un-canonically, our Project Iron Man (re: resurrecting guys in Flying Suits) is based off these guys.



Speaking of these guys! I put the order for some new soldiers in and find Nich II. He'll do a lot better than his first incarnation (as you'll see at the end of this update).



We start creating Avengers for SPACE CAMP and HEY AFRICA!, and will probably create one for NERV HQ too.

They're pretty cheap to make really.

I don't remember if I've shown these before, but by "researching" live aliens, you can learn about the various mischief they like to get up to on Earth.



Even better (well, it would have to be) was that alien was a live Navigator, who gives us this awesome tech. Hyper Wave Decoders are one of the most important technologies you can get, not only because they let you know what the aliens are up to when they come to earth, but because they replace your old radar systems with a system that's 20x as better at detecting aliens.



Some tech. This is the second best "base defense" tech, although that's not saying much. Building base defense is generally a waste of time.



YES.



We start building Hyper Wave Decoders in all our bases. I might even build some junky bases in Australia and South America just to build some more of these, but we'll see.



The bulk of this update involves aliens - Sectoids in particular - searching for a X-Com base in Russia (this is not something that is going to work out for them as we don't operate inside of Russia). This means a lot of very small missions where we shoot down and then salvage small craft. I'm going to spare you all the boredom and just publish a "final tally" at the end of this update.



We're pretty much at the end of useful things to research, so...







Occasionally we see a Battleship, but they never seem to land. Just patrolling for "our base" I guess.



We've got lots of cash, so we go on a hiring spree at NERV HQ.



The dangers of screenshotting during combat. With Plasma Cannons, you can literally dance in and out of range of enemy weapons using Aggressive Attack/Disengage, but trying to screenshot it gets my craft hit. It's not a huge deal, although it takes your ship out for a few days, which can be bad.

In our case, a few alien ships show up but nothing too major.



Another month, another ~million in funding. I'm really surprised that no one has joined the Aliens yet; I thought Australia had a base for sure (but I guess my half-dozen attempts to find it just proved that this was not the case).

With Psi Labs built, this leads us to the most exciting part of the update!



Training!

Each Psi Lab can train 10 soldiers a month. You can still use these soldiers in combat, but if they die you can't "replace" them in the Psi Lab until the end of the month. We'll check everyone eventually, and hopefully create a squad dedicated to taking out Psionic aliens.



More ships near Australia... but I've given up on finding a base there.



Another Battleship appears...



And disappears at the North Pole. Santa!?



This can cut down on the amount of base defense you need to build... but you generally shouldn't need to once you have Mind Shields.



Sadly, on a night mission while trying to stop a Sectoid Terror ship, LancerECNM takes a bullet...



It sucks but stopping a Terror Ship - especially a Sectoid one - before it can land is worth losing a dude over.





So threatening, but none of them choose to land so I can raid them.



The autopsies of the various aliens is worthless (from a "winning the game perspective") but they're certainly the neatest research.



We can finally sell all the Plasma Pistol stuff we find (although we won't find much now).



Our Engineers come in, but we need to build more Workshop space to use them all.



Floaters: so not threatening, but so cool.



We'll bring one of these along during the next Battleship or Base Assault mission so we can identify an Alien Commander.

More useless research from a "winning" perspective, but interesting from a "lore" perspective.



In case you didn't have Plasma weapons at this point, you can find out that Reapers are weak against incendiary weapons. I probably don't give them enough credit, but Plasma is just way too convenient.



Snakemen, quite weird.



In case you were wondering, a Chryssalid in-game will "transform" more than 20 units if given the chance, so these scientists are obviously bad at math.







More research from interrogating aliens. Not too useful at this point tho.



This is a terror unit of an alien we haven't seen yet... I don't know why that Sectoid I interrogated knew about this guy. I'll talk about them when we meet them.



Yesssss



This is what Hyper Wave Decoders do; not only do they tell you the information you could already tell, but they'll tell you what race is piloting it, where they're headed, and what they're trying to do. I'm pretty sure there's not an Alien Base in Northern Africa, so these guys must be trying to set one up. I shoot them down before that can happen.



Our first Avenger finishes, and is sent to HEY AFRICA!



Shooting alien craft down over the Ocean is the best because then you don't have to deal with them.

So hey guys I haven't checked this LP in a bit and wanted to see how

Oh. How ignominious.

Research.



Our new ship!

And new recruits! LOTS of new recruits!

















Another month. We shoot down and raid about ten ships - mostly Sectoid - during this time.



More training, and some results!



Psionic ability comes in two stats: Psionic Strength, and Psionic Skill. The former is innate to the unit; you cannot increase it at all, and it can only be "discovered" by having them train for a month in a Psi Lab. The latter requires training at a Psi Lab for a month too, which will "unlock" the unit's innate Skill (between 16 and 24) and will then increase slowly (by about 8 points) each month until the skill reaches 50, and then you only get a handful.

You otherwise raise it by doing Psionic skills in combat, which will train it like most other stats. In fact, once you get to "50" it's really the preferred way of doing it as it will otherwise train so slowly you might as well not bother.



Technically, both Psi Strength and Psi Skill have an effect on both your attack and defense for/against Psionics, but the Psi Strength is the more important of the two. Generally, I like to keep everyone who has a Psi Strength over 80 in training, as while you can train somehow with a low Psi Strength up to use/resist attacks, it's a steep uphill climb. Better to just start with someone whose naturally good at it!



I tend to mark people who are "good" at Psionics by marking them, either with a "*" or throwing "PSI" after their name. Some people like putting a whole string of stats in place of a soldier's name, but I just find it cluttery.

Cyberdiscs! Humourously enough by the time we're researched this, we've long since had "hover" technology (take that you bad scientists).



Finally, something new! Mutons!







We shoot them down over Russia (because the aliens love Russia right now).



Here's a shot of the roomy "Avenger", as well as a shot of one of our new Hovertank/Plasmas, a.k.a. CASSIUS 1. While you can carry double the amount of soldiers in one Avenger, I don't recommend it; it's just too much micro-management.



Sporting superior mobility, armor, and firepower, the one downside to Hovertanks are (like Flying Suits) the game will make you waste TUs moving up/down ramps,



The ship is pretty weird in the sense that you can actually "exit" out of the corners, or walk into them (as seen here).



A Muton! Or the back of one at least. Mutons are the most annoying enemy in the game in my opinion, because they've got a lot of health. Whereas most enemies will go down in one shot of burning Plasma, Mutons often require two (sometimes more!) shots. This means that they've got more chances to fire back at you with their high Reaction scores.

The other race we haven't seen yet can be more dangerous, but they're also less likely to survive a hit than these guys, so I prefer fighting them.





On the bright side (?) their high health makes them more likely to be knocked out (like this guy) than to be killed, so that can be something.





I think some of this is repeating, but I'm too lazy to check.



I find the idea that Mutons are purple skinned aliens in green jump suits to be hilarious. They (like most aliens) got much better looking in the 2012 "remake."



Our second Avenger!

I find it vaguely hilarious that the total cost of shipping an entire plane between continents is a mere $2000.



You unlock this by researching an Alien Leader, which we had several of.



We'll start using Psionics probably next update, so we'll need these. We send a few to each base; eventually I'd like to have a single base with a good contingent of Psionic Soldiers, but it's good to have one or two tag along every mission.



Reapers are so lame.



Just in case you weren't sure how to beat the game. Commanders only appear in particular missions - Battleships and Alien Bases - so you can maybe guess that I was a bit annoyed that those Battleships we saw earlier never felt fit to land.



I end the update raiding a Sectoid Supply Ship trying to establish an Alien Base; The Psionic aliens were wrecking me a new one. Sadly, one of them managed to get the drop on reibeatall...



... and two plasma shots later, he was in the dead book.





Well, at least two people got a promotion out of it!

Alright, that was a giant load of boring out of the way. Hopefully next update will be more fun!

Here's the giant list of soldier rank/mission/kill changes to save me a lot of screenshots. The fact that HEY AFRICA! has seen the vast majority of Alien threats should be pretty obvious; I'm going to do a "base swap" in order to get those slackers at BASE CAMP some practice!

Rank/mission/kill count changes:

SPACE CAMP
Alpha Werewolf: Rookie -> Squaddie; +1 mission, +2 kills.
Austin: Sergeant -> Captain; +1 mission, +3 kills.
djSyndrome: Rookie -> Squaddie; +1 mission, +0 kills.
Epithet: +1 mission, +0 kills.
Falselogic: +1 mission, +3 kills
Kirin: +1 mission
Lucas: +1 mission, +2 kills.
Meditative_Zebra: +1 mission, +0 kills.
Tefari: +1 mission, +1 kills.

HEY AFRICA!
Alixsar: +6 missions, +4 kills
BEAT: +9 missions, +4 kills.
CaptBlasto: +5 missions, +4 kills
Destil: +6 missions, +4 kills
Gerad II: +8 missions, +4 kills
jpfriction: +5 missions, +1 kill.
Kishi: Captain -> Colonel; +5 missions, +6 kills
Kylie: +7 missions, +0 kills.
Mightyblue: +6 missions, +8 kills
Mogri: +5 missions, +0 kills
namelessentity II: Rookie -> Squaddie; +3 missions, +1 kill.
Nich II: Rookie -> Squaddie; +11 missions, +9 kills
Nodal: +5 missions, +1 kill.
Olli T II: Rookie -> Squaddie; +3 missions, +2 kills.
Pajaro Pete: +9 missions, +6 kills.
PapillonReel: +3 missions, +0 kills.
Red Hedgehog II: +8 missions, +9 kills
sraymonds: +9 missions, +2 kills.
Stiv: +6 missions, +0 kills.

Killed in action:
kaisel: Sergeant. 7 missions, 5 kills. (killed by a Cyberdisc)
Loki: Sergeant. 4 missions, 6 kills. (killed by a Sectoid)
reibeatall: Colonel. 11 missions, 12 kills. (killed by a Sectoid)
LancerECNM: Squaddie. 3 missions, 5 kills. (killed by a Sectoid)

I'm going to try and have something more interesting for next time, but we'll see!

(I'm also going to put Falselogic in a lot of danger for his sass.)

Also, if you haven't been paying attention and your "solider" was killed - perhaps on the first mission they ever went on - then remember that you can apply again to be resurrected in a Flying Suit. It sure worked wonders for Nich!

See you next time!

It's about damn time!


If I die this thread is getting locked =P

Rock solid.

If you need more corpses for your undead abominations, feel free to use Sergeant kaisel's corpse. It'd be swell to be a robotic, undead, psychic abomination.

Woah, up there with the cyborg horrors in terms of kills and missions survived!

Yes! I'm going to rock those aliens face so hard with the power of my mind.

This is about as far as I ever got when I played X-Com years ago. It'll be exciting to see how the endgame progresses and how rocktastic psionic powers are.

Is there a reason you didn't let the supply ship set up an alien base so that you could raid it and get a commander? By now you really shouldn't have to worry about the hit to your score (especially if you take it out right away). Are you waiting on something you are researching?

You see enough Battleships on Veteran difficulty; one's bound to land eventually.

Plus I still really thought they had sneaked one in somewhere on Earth (they hadn't). Anyway, it won't be a problem, trust me.

Welcome back!

The first thing we do this update is do a base-swap with some of our soldiers. HEY AFRICA! was seeing much too much action relative to our original base.



The one thing all of these soldiers have in common is that they're not in Psionic Training. You can move people who are, but they "leave" psi training if moved - even if there is a Psi Lab at the destination. As training is very useful, we're just moving those who haven't started/are psionic neanderthals.



Unlike last update, we won't be doing too many UFO recoveries, but I figured I could keep the running tally still. This one was a small Floater ship we shot down over (where else) Russia.



Kill tally:

Balrog: 1 kill.
Yimothy: 1 kill.
namelessentity II: 2 kills.
Tomm Guycot: 2 kills.



Most UFOs we either shoot into the ocean, or just shoot down and ignore. There's no really penalty for ignoring "crashed" UFOs, except for the loss of score and salvage materials, the governments don't care that there may be aliens running around in their backyard I guess (although they do prefer that you destroy them).





Did I show some of these? Apologies, the game is actually very poor at letting you know what is new research and what isn't (sometimes they won't even show you; you have to look in your UFOpaedia).



At this point in the game you want one thing: an Alien Commander. You'll generally only find them on Battleships and in Alien Bases. They will appear on X-Com "base defenses" but at this point that's unlikely to happen.



It lands in the desert near HEY AFRICA!, which is ideal (save for it being night).



I bring along Nodal with a Psi-Amp to try and get some training in. Psionic attacks depend on two other things besides your soldier's Psionic Strength and Skill: distance, and the enemy's Psi Strength. Sectoids have a good psi strength, so good luck controlling them. Your best bet is to try and make them panic.

I'm honestly not figuring it will actually "work", but training it training.





We use a Mind Probe to see the effects: -30 morale. This won't really do anything (you need to drop it below 50 to start seeing effects), but training.



Balrog shoots the slightly demoralized alien down.



On the alien's turn, we see one pop out of the Battleship...

And one Sectoid take some shots (none fatal) around one of the legs of the Battleship.



The enemy psionics start in full earnest, which means we're going to have to be careful about ending the turn with a weapon in our hand.





Sneaky jerk. It's a lot harder to fight when you're worried about Mind Control.





This darkness doesn't help things either.



Nor do blaster bombs. This one strikes namelessentity II down for the second time. Sorry man!



Another one whizzes by our troops into the darkness (i.e. the edge of the battlemap). The enemy can be quite poor at using these.



For example: they opened a new hole into their Battleship for us. Thanks guys!



Mind Probes are really heavy and Pappy's got a poor strength. We have to drop it to actually have a chance of firing Blaster Bombs of our own.



Ha! Didn't think I'd let StriderDL end the turn with a weapon did you!?

(I forgot.)



Tomm manages to spray that other one that was bothering us out of his nest (and into some Plasma).



Our CASSIUS tank spots this one lurking behind the Battleship. StriderDL notches another kill.



Yimothy II gets his own reaction shot off; I'm playing a bit risky here but the aliens will generally focus on a few soldiers, and those soldiers have not been Yimothy.



BLASTER BOMB!

But they forgot to open the door first. Not a problem now!



StriderDL peeks up the elevator and sees a murder machine waiting to Reaction Fire the heck out of anyone who tries to get in.



I get Olli T II to toss him a loaded Small Launcher; this will work better than Plasma will.





And how! Balrog goes up the "secondary" entrance the aliens opened up for us and sees the carnage that one bomb wrought. That stun bomb took out two Cyberdiscs, as well as two Sectoids. That's probably the best shot of the game right there.



We get another Sectoid lurking on the third floor from the ground floor.



Still a few yet to kill tho.



Yimothy makes the slow advance into the Battleship. This is always the scariest part; one Blaster Bomb will really ruin your day, but we got at least two aliens who were packing the ultimate weapon.



Yimothy starts checking the unconscious Sectoids; this is kind of a cheat but you can see their "rank" by examining them in this screen.



YES! We find what we're looking for between the two fallen Cyberdiscs. Any Commander will allow us to win the game, here's ours.



I put him in Yimothy II's backpack. Strange as this sounds, explosions can destroy "items" (including corpses and unconscious people), so he's safest in here.



StriderDL marks his third "kill" (although noting his "four with one blow" Stun bomb shot).



And Falselogic backs him up. At this point, I'm taking a risk by ending the turn with a weapon, but I think I've knocked out all of the leaders.





Olli T II gets hurt, but his armor lets him live to knock out that Sectoid who shot him in the back.