Let's Play: X-COM - UFO Defense

but you can't prnt screen with it or you can't play it windowed? I'm trying to figure out your problem with screen captures? There are a couple of free proframs out there that allow you to push prnt screen or another hot key multiple times and save all the screen captures to a clipboard to go over later or to file. Google screen capture free or go here and look at these: http://www.techsupportalert.com/best...ilities.htm#31

hope it helps!

This thread made me start a game myself, in lieu of studying for a final. I put a base in Michigan, ignored the first terror attack (in Belarus?) and salvaged as many small crash sites as I could. The happy US government upped my funding, which I promptly squandered by sending an Interceptor against a Very Large UFO. Oops.

In early March, I took down a Large UFO, and sent my squad into a crash site mission armed with Laser Rifles and Small Launchers. They were promptly slaughtered by a bunch of Cyberdiscs, who shrugged off the ineffectual Earth technology and melted their faces with plasma. Guess I should have waited to get Power Suits. You should talk a bit about the early-game tech tree, that's always fun.

What difficulty are you playing on? Cyberdiscs can be blown up by rocket launchers, as I recall. How many Cyberdiscs did you face? I've never seen more than 4 in any mission. Again though I never played on the harder difficulties so my experience could have been quite "watered - down"

Please remind me of the dif between small launchers and rocket launchers?

This is on Veteran.

Small Launchers launch nonlethal Stun Bombs, not rockets, and I was hoping to snag a live Navigator - I wasn't prepared for so many Cyberdiscs (3 outside the UFO, 2 inside, plus the Sectoids), though, so I didn't pack enough ammo for it. I quit out after my Captain's mind broke and her panicked exit from the UFO ended with her getting shot in the head by a lurking Sectoid. I might just let the crash site slide and wait for my tech tree to catch up.

Ahh, gotcha. I don't know how sven played it but I always had two troops in the beginning as heavy weapons platforms. One with the rocket launcher and the other with the heavy cannon. In the beginning I never worried about taking things alive, just about getting enough plasma guns and the alien rocket launcher (with waypoints) to research them and start using them. Funny thing is with regular guns and grenades you often only injur aliens so you get them alive anyhow... Don't you need a cointanment center in your base to keep them alive? Those are pricery in the beginning...

(Again just commenting from memory, plz excuse if I'm way off)

That's it - Gold was actually the Windows version, and the Collector's Edition bundled that up. I'm running Vista as well, and had no trouble running it by using the patched version.

Taking rocket launchers along on missions is incredibly inefficient.

Ah, the Navigator quest. This will be a key part of my LP, as it's probably the most important thing about a successful game.

I'm trying to figure out just what type of ship you stumbled across - it sounds like a Terror vessel, as I doubt you're capable of bringing down a Battleship at this point. Generally, even if I shoot those things down I leave them alone - you're asking for a massacre unless you get very lucky.

As you'll see, I'm a big proponent of a ten-member team that has a near-identical loadout of rifles and grenades. Granted, I'm usually underarmed, but I also have faster troops than the aliens. The big hurdle with that setup is the first few missions - once you have laser rifles, the game shifts significantly to your advantage. Before that, it's a lot of grenade work.

They're not that bad, but I'll go into that later today.

Cyberdiscs never gave me a lot of trouble. I embraced explosives from the beginning though, with all of my guys packing at least C-4 and preferably a launcher until Gauss or Plasma becomes available. One toss of those and it's lights out. I find most of my early game losses are either being massively outmanned or from one freaking Floater. If they get a good sniping position on the rural maps, it can take forever to flush them out.

But I could handle cyberdiscs and reapers (?) from the get go, also chyrsalids, who for some reason can take an insane amount of damage and then impregnate your troops just before dying...

But since you never took heavy weapons Sven, how'd you handle the big aliens? Before you worked up the tech tree. Or did you just work up the tech tree quickly and ignore some ships/missions (my guess is the latter, because you said you ignored terror missions in the beginning.)

Yup. Unless it was a terror mission in a major funding country, I tended to ignore it - terror missions just aren't economically efficient, and unless you want to run the risk of losing your best troops it's usually best to stay away. If there's, say, three in the same month then I'll think about doing the third... but even then, if I see a Chrysalid I'm generally saying "screw it" and heading for the hills.

What you want, preferably, in the early going are a steady stream of Floater missions. They're poorly armoured, seem to carry more Small Launchers than average, and are a little easier to stun with the cattle prods than most aliens.

I can always recover from a 300 point deduction (that's essentially what a blown terror mission costs you - it's easily recoverable by just shooting down a couple UFOs), but having a promising sniper taken out by a Floater with alien grenades is just not worth the risk most of the time.

Admittedly, X-Com is not a game for sentimental people, but I don't like excessive troop death.

Got that right. Any game in which suicide bombing is the best way to clear a room is definitely not going to reward emotional attachment to your personnel.

What I'm looking forward to are the bursts of lunatic insight your troops seem to get when they flip their shit. I once had a guy fall into a panic, open fire at random and kill or wound two or three Sectoids I couldn't even see. (He met his end during my first base mission ever, which lasted some three turns.)

Nope, X-Com is old-school DOS. Any screencaps just return a blank screen when dumped.

I haven't fooled around with it much but I think DOSbox can play things in a window if you force it (which would require learning all the term commands for it, but then the windows DOS prompt box can be forced to stay windowed as well. I'm sure you've already tried all this, but if not and you're willing it might be a way to get pics. Otherwise I'm sure there are plenty of sites with shots you can crib from...

P.S. not trying to be a jerk, just trying to help, I'm fine with the memos and discourse

I think Sven is going with his cellphone camera.

whatever works

Which brings up the next problem: the only version of the game freely available (Underdogs) runs under Windows (I have my DOS disks SOMEWHERE, but I've been using the Windows version for years now).

Actually, that might also explain your "never encountered many Cyberdiscs" issue - the Windows version is much, much tougher, as the number of aliens per mission is a random value (as opposed to a fixed 3 per medium scout, 6 per large scout, etc., etc. in the DOS version - there are, on average, twice as many aliens per mission under Windows). The Windows version also fixes the legendary bug with the Alien Base maps, although it also apparently fixes the beneficial glitch that once saw a college roommate end up with something like 30,000 E-115 after a base attack once crashed out after one turn due to what I can only assume was an overflow error.

Care to expound? I have the DOS version, but I never encountered this. ALSO: Have DOS version on CD ROM. PM if you think that would help.

Okay, time for some background information.

Okay, so when we go into action the first thing I have to think about is what my soliders are capable of carrying. Let’s look at his inventory screen:



(Ignore the fact that this soldier is armoured - my units won't be for a good long while. And that lethal-looking gun won't be in my general-use arsenal for a while, although I'll have access to it relatively soon).

As you can see, there’s a LOT of places to put stuff. X-Com is a traditional PC game in this aspect, and if you've played any Diablo you should recognise how these spaces work. The question is what fits where, and generally:

Grenades, flares, motion detectors, ammo clips: 1x1
Pistols, Medikits, Cannon Ammo: 1x2
Rifles, Cattle Prods, [CLASSIFIED], missiles: 1x3 (EG, only into the backpack)
Cannons, Missile Launchers: 2x3 (Again, backpack)

Pistols are the only (start) weapon that can be held in one hand - for rifles, you have to have both hands free to use them or else you'll suffer an accuracy penalty.

For me, a typical weapon load will be a rifle, a spare clip, and two regulation hand grenades. I'll explain these weapons in a bit. This gives me a weapon with a lot of stopping power that’s relatively light (which, remember, means more TUs to move), and a free hand to throw grenades with if need be. Not that you CAN’T go John Woo with two pistols at once, but X-Com isn’t programmed to give you style points.

The game model even on this inventory screen is surprisingly deep: each "slot" has a TU value assigned to it, which means that each time I take something out of a slot or put something back into a slot, I'll be wasting time. It's fairly logical - items in your belt take a paltry 2TUs to manipulate, while backpack items are about 12TUs. Since, as noted above, certain ammo can only be stored in the backpack, that occasionally makes it impossible to load (it also costs TUs to load a weapon) and fire a weapon in the same turn, and that's not a good thing.

Also important is that button under the arrows - it allows me to unload a clip from a weapon, as long as both my soldiers hands' are free. This is VERY important, as I'll demonstrate as we go along.

Now, what goodies are we going to be putting into all these slots? Well, let's start talking what weapons I'll have available to me....

While we’re discussing weapons, let’s see what the UN gave me to start off with:



Pistols: Standard one-handed weapon. Takes a 15-shot clip.



Rifles: Can be used in either one or three-shot burst mode. Takes a 20-shot clip.



Heavy Cannon: Can fire either armor piercing (AP), Incendiary (IN) or High Explosive (HE) rounds, six to a clip.



Auto Cannon: like the heavy cannon, but with an autofire mode that takes an astonishing 80% of TUs / turn. Still, firing off three HE rounds with this thing can not only clear a room, it can clear a well-populated street. Of course, since you only have 14 shots / clip, you don’t get to do it that often.



Rocket Launcher: As above, but fires missiles one at a time. I can't stand these things, as the Heavy Cannon does everything it does, with more versatility. Wouldn’t it be nice if we got some guided missiles instead…?

Grenades: Early in the game, these are your bread and butter. Your incompetent soldiers can’t shoot straight, but they CAN throw reasonably well. Sure, the downside is that you tend to blow apart alien corpses as well (which are worth $20,000), but it’s a small sacrifice to make.



Smoke Grenades: Not much use to you, since the aliens can always see you. PROTIP: On the other hand, toss one into an enclosed space and it’s a very weak knockout gas.



Proximity Grenade: Knock on door. Drop on ground. Run away. Wait for BOOM. Unfortunately, not as useful as it appears, and clever squad tactics make it redundant.



High Explosive: If I could throw these further, they’d be perfect. If you think you need to take out, say, a tank, this will do the job and then some. That may be necessary later, but for the most part I’ll just be sticking to grenades.

(Sorry, no picture on this one)

Stun Rods: Basically, a cattle prod that serves as a non-lethal weapon. Our Canadian soldiers seem to enjoy them greatly for whatever reason, and have a habit of yelling “I YAM DA MOUNTIE!” when used. For the moment, this is our most practical option for capturing aliens alive.



Electro-Flares: Not a weapon, but a chemically-powered flare that can be thrown to illuminate dark areas. Crucial if we want to conduct night operations.

There’s also craft weapons, which for the moment we can only load on Interceptor-1 and -2. They’re currently equipped with a Stingray Launcher (short range, six shots) and a cannon (VERY short range, 200 rapid fire shots). If, I don’t know, we manage to slide up to an alien ship while it’s not looking, these are appropriate. But as soon as possible, I’m going to change those Stingrays out for Avalanche missiles. Sure, the last time we put more than three of those onto the wing of an Interceptor it fell off, but if an alien ship takes more than three shots you might as well run away.


\

EDIT: Yes, that's pretty much everything you can buy at the start of the game.

You need to conduct research for the small launcher? I always had it so early in the game... is it available on your research tree at the beginning or do you have to capture something? Also are you goign to talk about R&E next?

I never really bothered with laser weapons just bought a bunch of scientists quickly researched plasma then layed them all off...

The small launcher and the stun bombs are alien tech and have to be salvaged and researched first. Usually they're in a loot pile at a smaller crash site, but it's never an issue early on, considering you need to have built an AC facility before you can use them for their intended purpose, anyway.

This is correct. Floaters seem especially prone to dragging them around for no good reason.

On the laser rifles: they're the most economical rifles, since you don't have to pack clips - it allows you a better explosive loadout when you start using 24 troops / ship later in the game (with clips, that means you're already at 48 out of your 80-item allotment, assuming you're not packing any extra clips).

Doing night landings with plasma weapons really strains your ability to spray electro-flares around... and, frankly, I'd rather be able to see than have the extra damage most of the time. There are, of course, other, less obvious situations where Heavy Plasma comes very much in handy, but we'll get to those in due course.

Cutting holes in walls? I prefer the blaster launcher. (Oh damn you DosBox why won't you run XCOM?)

Geez, Talking Time is much less about the precision than usual with this game.

Talking Time: "SLAM IT IN!"

Que?

EDIT: Getting X-COM to run under DosBox is a bitch kitty. I've gotten as far as the opening cinema, then DosBox goes unresponsive. Does anyone have experience with this sort of issue? I've googled up some threads, but those are full of "OMG OMG XCOM dose not run!!!! plz help okies1!!" bullshit.

I need my daily dose of X-com knowledge and clever fake government documents!

So stoked to see how a pro plays this game, I always just stumbled/forced my way through it.

Plasma is all about brining a lot of power to a single point. Blaster Launchers are about dispersing a vast amount of power over a very wide area and not really caring about what you blow up in the process.

(Kenobi) It's such an... inelegant... weapon. (/Kenobi)

I'll have something up later - just a bit more background to get anyone reading up to speed on the vocabulary, as I'm not going to be stopping for much in the way of explanation when things get hairy. I *did* play through the first month of a game on veteran yesterday and things look to be going well, aside from one screenshot with no less than SIX X-Com bodies lying on the ground. That's an amusing story.

Man, so much of the starting equipment is worthless.
Rifles, grenades, high explosives and one or two heavy cannons is all I see of worth up there. how are you going to be outfitting your squad? Everyone with the same equipment or designate a heavy gunner (high str), demo man (high throw), etc.
To the folks having trouble getting it running, if you're really desperate you can pick it up for the PS1. That was how I got introduced to the series. It's obviously not as elegant as the PC version, but you can get your fix. And if you want TftD, steam has it up for the princely sum of 5 bucks.