Let's Play: X-COM - UFO Defense

Grenades are such gleeful kills in these games, aren't they?

Tonight's post will be "how to deal with these situations" as I suspect you had a large scout UFO to deal with, and these are paradoxically much harder to storm than one of the larger UFOs unless you're very careful. In particular, if the interior of the UFO is intact there's one door that's inevitably a deathtrap for anyone who walks through it.

More strategy stuff - note that this is more high-level than where I am with the LP feature, but for those of you who are understandably going through the game faster than my measured pace:

WHAT TO DO WHEN I SEE A UFO

Okay, so thus far you've seen me play two types of UFO missions: recovery (first) and ambush (second). Although the first wasn't a true recovery - for reasons I'll go into below - there's distinct differences between the two.

Recovery occurs when the UFO is shot down prior to your Skyranger's arrival. In this situation, the UFO will often be damaged (you'll see telltale signs, such as smoke visible from outside the UFO or a hole in the roof), and you'll have a smaller number of aliens to deal with. However, the first thing to blow on any UFO in this situation is the power supply, which contains the ship's Elerium-115 (think trilithium). This stuff is GOLD in the X-Com universe, as you can use it to power ships, create explosives, and craft armor and HWPs. But unlike literally everything else in the game, you can't manufacture it from scratch - it has to be salvaged from UFOs.

Which leads to the problem with most recoveries: even though you may have one or two fewer aliens to deal with (I've had a couple end in the original DOS version after the first turn - the final alien just passed out), you're not getting access to the most valuable salvage out there and will return with a couple of guns, corpses, and not much else to show for your effort.

(Yes, in case that "sale" screen I posted after my first mission wasn't clear, you can SELL ALIEN BODY PARTS. To whom? No idea. Construct your own disturbing Xenophillic Necrophiliac slashfics.)

One fun edge of a recovery is the Death Star Shot. Namely, tossing something (grenade, high explosive) through that hole in the roof. Why is it so fun? Because if that hole's there, that means the power supply has already blown up, so you're not going to hit anything vital.

So how do we ensure we get the Elerium? Simple. Send our your Skyranger WITHOUT a prior Interceptor. Your Skyranger is slow as molasses, but that doesn't matter - all you want is to be close to the UFO. If you DO get into an intercept situation, simply click on that upper left corner I mentioned earlier and the Skyranger will tail the UFO for a good long while.

(Skyrangers have enough fuel to operate independently for two to three days - later in the game, they're worth the expense to keep around simply as scouts).

Eventually, the UFO will land, and you'll IMMEDIATELY get the option to land next to it. At this point, your only question is whether or not you want to do the mission at this time - EG, are you comfortable fighting at night if this is the case (night mission protocol will be covered later - I think my fourth and last mission of my first month was at night). If so, when you click yes you enter a different type of mission, in this case cleaning all the aliens out from an *intact* UFO. This is what I did on the second mission you see screenshots of above. The disadvantage is that you'll have a couple more aliens to kill off, but the E-115 you're guaranteed to get far outweighs any issues.

Now, what alien ships should you do this against? Basically anything that's not an "Extra Large" (those are Battleships, and they can kill your Skyranger even at standoff range... heck, they can kill ANYTHING at standoff range, as they're apparently armed with the citybuster from Independence Day). Small UFOs we've already covered. Of the "Medium" UFOs in the game, both are essentially larger versions of the small UFOs (two levels), so they're possibilities. The catch is apparently with the "Large" UFOs (if you even see them). One type is a supply ship, a massive three-level machine with about 20 aliens on board, the dreaded Sectoid Leader (translation: get ready to be mindzapped) coming into play, and a massive play field that you have to clear out before even stepping inside. Of course, these UFOs have a staggering three power sources... so if you can recover them, they're worth it.

The other large UFOs are the terror ships described above. If they land, it'll become a terror site and you can just click "no" and run away unless you're desperate for a positive score on a mission.

Going by the stats tha your recruits usually have, I imagine that X-Com recruits their soldiers from only the finest mall security companies.

Mightyblue, you've discovered the beauty of the Small Launcher. That stun gun is the last, best hope for capturing live samples unless your idea of a good time is giving an Ethereal Commander the bum's rush with a bunch of cattle prods. (PROTIP: Don't. He will shoot his Blaster Launcher and kill everyone in the time zone.)

I've got my knuckledraggers hammering on Laser Rifles and North Africa has a listening post. Depending on how the next few missions go, I could be global by April. (I'm sure I'll be singing a different tune when the Terror ships and Battleships start scything my Interceptors like wheat.)

Oddly, their stats are actually GOOD compared to the aliens' - for example, most aliens shooting accuracy isn't above 40.

The catch? Their plasma weapons are much more accurate than your rifles.

You can probably push the timeline up to March by using a neat little salary-avoidance trick that I'll talk about later.

Ooooh. Men in black, secret funding and now slave labor. I love being the good guys.

Listing of my promotions after the first couple of missions. Promotions are based on the number of soldiers you have on the payroll: so, for example, someone won't be bumped up to Commander (the highest rank) until you have 40 soliders on staff. You'll receive another commander when you have another 40 soldiers. I think Sargeants are one per five rookies or something similar.

Next mission is a week or so later. Procedure is simple, with the twist of tossing out a few electro-flares to make it easier to pick up on moving aliens. The key point to remember when using electro-flares: they illuminate areas around you, but realistically you're still shrouded in darkness. So throw them WAY THE HELL AWAY from you and the aliens won't be able to see you, but you'll be able to see them. Sure, the game does cheat this a bit, but overall it plays fair.



The amusing thing happens as I do the breach: there's one alien behind the door who dies easily, but a second one has a stun bomb. Whoops.



DOn't worry, all those agents are just unconscious. I walk up to the alien and pop his bulbous head with a rifle shot, which ends the mission before I can start debating which of the two doors to the bridge is safer. For future reference: the bottom one. You're more shielded, whereas the top door has an open shot from anywhere on the bridge of the UFO. That way in is a crapshoot.




Back at base, my Alien Containment is done, so now I can start interrogating. The Motion Scanners are done - I sell the 20 scanners for a $11000 profit per unit. The engineers are now tasked with building laser pistols (useful, and profitable), but the scientists come back with good news: I can now build laser rifles! The engineers are quickly re-assigned (in a nice touch, re-assigning the engineers does not waste work - the unfinished laser pistols will sit there until I have a chance to come back to them), which will give me weapons more on par with the aliens, especially in terms of accuracy.



I also buy another long-range radar, which will increase my chances of picking up a UFO in my coverage area to 10%.

Unfortunately, my fourth mission doesn't have the rifles yet, as an alien lands close to my base. I go in, but while breaching a door inside the ship I suffer my first casualty. Nothing I could do about it: the alien shot first. There's actually a bunch of aliens inside the control centre, but I get lucky and one of them is dumb enough to fire off a stun bomb, knocking a couple of crew members unconscious. By checking on the research list back at base, I find out that I've captured a Sectoid Soldier and Sectoid Engineer.

(Aside: FUCK! No Navigator. I'll explain why later... but if you're playing through for the first time, let me emphasize that capturing a Navigator should be your absolute top priority. Getting a Sectoid leader is priority #2, but that can wait.)

The lack of a navigator means no reason to change my research path for the moment. When I go back outside,

... yeah, I'm not going to fly halfway around the world for a non-funding country. Sorry, people of Casablanca, but at least you'll be remembered by the movie.

Brutal, but it's the truth. Novosibirsk is turning into a regular stop for alien terrorists, but so long as the Russkies are happy with me, they can keep on keepin' on.

Current highlights:

• New Captain every mission. Join X-Com and take advantage of unlimited advancement potential!
• I turned my North African base into a factory that spits out 30 laser cannons every three days or so. The wealth has gone straight to my head and X-Com Rio should be up and running within the month.
• A team of 14 rookies versus three Snakemen. When all else fails, line up the whole squad and spit laser death until someone hits.
• Bringing down a Terror Ship full of Floaters. Sure, the Captain bought it, but dumb luck nabbed us a Navigator.

Things are going too well. Now I'm counting down until Ethereals are kicking in my door and feeding my boys blaster bombs for a midnight snack.

Holy shit, what are those four legged doom thingies? I mean, I killed most of them through judicious use of HWP cannon fire and lasery death. In one case, a hail mary high explosives toss that was quite amusing as well. Also, hearing an alien grunt his death from friendly fire. 'Twas hilarious.

Less hilarious was the clusterfuck that shortly ensued when a bunch of heavily armed Floaters wielding small launchers turned me into meat.

Ah well, that's why I saved beforehand.

Floaters are a pain right in the balls. They hover out of range of your grenades, don't make noise when they move and they tend to use a lot of explosives on your tightly packed squaddies.

Those big beasties they take with them on terror missions are called Reapers and they're pretty much the weakest of the big aliens you'll run into. Laser rifles, as you've seen, do a number on them.

You'll start running into Chrysalids soon. Those things are nightmares made flesh. They can zombify you with a single attack. When a zombie takes damage, it turns into a Chrysalid. You will weep.

Yeah, the lack of ranged fire makes them quite easy (I've got an actual terror mission coming up, so I'll explain more.

The Sectopod is a nasty little surprise, too, especially if you were a bit too hasty in upgrading.

Yeah, after watching one run up from a distance away and eating reaction laser fire, I saw that, but it doesn't help when you spawn in the middle and in the open. The floaters opened up with a salvo of small launcher fire which killed one guy it hit directly and stunned/wounded six of the rest. It drove my eighth guy, a medic, berserk, and he sprayed laser pistol fire all over the place killing a couple Floaters until he woke back up. Then the freaking Reapers swarmed out of nowhere and make kibble out of the unconscious guys while my cannon tank and the medic picked a few off.

By that point, I knew I was screwed with a single medic w/no health left and a cannon tank, so I picked up a thing of HE explosives and tossed it at a Reaper who was standing next to the warehouse. It blew up, collapsing the front of the place and killing a Floater who'd been sniping me from inside along with the Reaper.

My final tally was seven aliens toast, eight XCOM's KIA, fourteen civvies fricasseed and my pride in tatters.

That's the bleakest "win" I've ever heard of in X-Com. I would have been tempted to load my last save, no matter how far back it went.

I was reading the X-Com wiki and it seems that there's a way to win by going on two missions: one battleship mission and Cydonia. I can't even imagine beating a battleship mission with 14 rookies armed with lasers.

Uh, who said I won?

Anyway, I reloaded my last save and skipped that terror mission to assault a landed and intact supply ship instead. It was a nightie, which wasn't so bad except for two noobs biting it from reaction fire after the tank rolled off the ship. This was also my first mission using at least some armor, and it made quite the difference. After learning that which direction your team's facing is essential, I cleaned up outside and inside fairly easily with one wounded, and that was that.

Next up was a terror mission in the middle of Russia in that Nov-whatever place. I was sorely disappointed because my team all had personal armor and laser rifles and we mopped up the measly eight floaters almost entirely without incident. Incident in this case being some wiseass plinking my tank with a heavy plasma, and another wiseass hiding in the shadows in an alleyway taking out two of my team with another heavy plasma. That was when I learned that even if you can't see an enemy in confined spaces you can still hit them with concentrated laser fire. Also, I immolated some poor Floater who kept dodging in and out of a house by tossing a pack of HE on the other side of the wall he was hiding behind and let it rip. Wasn't much of the house left, but there wasn't much of him left either.

Very nice! Personal Armour is the first step towards taking the aliens on your own terms. Toss in heavy plasma and X-Com starts to shift from squad-based survival horror into Green Berets Versus the Moon People. It's a blast.

Having just denigrated the chances of a Skyranger full of Rookies taking on an intact Battleship (at NIGHT oh dear oh dear,) I am now in the middle of precisely that mission. Wish I'd thought to bring a tank. :C

The aliens launched a terror attack on Lagos, and feeling exceedingly confident in my squad's abilities (and armament), I touched down in the dead of night with a ten-man troop and a rocket tank. The first man off the Skyranger behind the tank was killed by a lurking Snakeman sniper, but was promptly avenged. A glistening, chitinous creature lurked behind a picket fence right next to the touchdown point, but collateral damage is nothing to X-Com - a well-placed rocket from the tank destroyed the fence and half of the house next to it, and the suddenly-exposed monstrosity ate a faceful of plasma, courtesy of Sgt. Andrei.

Amazingly, that was the only casualty on my side for that mission. It came incredibly close, though, when another one popped out of the shadows and infected a civilian standing behind the front door of a house while the rest of the troop was clearing the area. The thing with infected humans is they don't just die - they become what bit them... so here I am with my Captain out of TUs and trapped outside facing two of these things. Fortunately, feeble Earth construction can't stand up to plasma. All four of the units inside the house concentrated their fire on that wall, opening up enough of a gap to shoot through and slaying them both. After that it was just mop-up. It was crazy, though.

That's about as well as a terror mission can go. Well done.

My boys and girls managed to take the Battleship! I lucked out; it was a Snakeman ship with only one Chrysalid (which I managed to take out with massed laser fire.) I am now flush with cash, Elerium and Heavy Plasma.

But I seem to be dealing with a flotilla of Terror and Battleships converging on Iran... I guess I'll just push my luck till it breaks.

Okay, I'm starting to branch out. I've got a listening post cum-soon to be local launch site in the works in North Africa, and another listening post going up in China, since the Chinese are apparently getting mobbed. Beyond that, a few more daring night raids on a Harvester and grounded Terror Ship went pretty swimmingly, save for the Harvester one. I've got Power Suits now, and they're great at a distance and against Alien Nades, but man, going toe to toe with a freaking Floater Cmdr. and Navi with Heavy Plasmas is not fun. Lost three due to a close bottleneck up top before I finally punched their tickets. I was going to try to capture them, but eh, next time I guess.

Now I've finally got Heavy Plasma's of my own, and I'm researching Plasma Cannons, and all just in time for my fourth Terror attack, this time on Casablanca. I lost one replacement newb in Personal Armor to counterattack fire from a Floater with a Heavy Plasma but the Power Suits I had my vets in kept em pretty safe, and I managed to cap a Floater Medic and a Reaper Terrorist for my troubles. One Floater got smart and chucked a nade underneath the Skyranger where most of my group was sitting, but it didn't kill anyone.

Unfortunately that meant that most of my team needed some recupe time, so I had to sit out an attack I wanted to make on a supply ship that keeps landing in Baja.

Luck pushed! Luck broken.

The invaders have begun packing Blaster Launchers, and now no one is safe. My guys were sweeping through the top floor of a Battleship (Ankara, infiltration mission) when I heard the telltale roar of a missile launch followed by the appearance of a big purple rocket bouncing from waypoint to waypoint. One kaboom later half my team was dead. Of the remaining five, I lost one in a human wave attack on the Commander.

I'm starting to see flaws in my early game. I've overexpanded and am now relying totally on Laser Cannon production to keep my head above water (Sven or anyone: is this normal? I've never gotten this far without editing my cash supplies.) Hopefully after I develop new fighter tech I can send my Interceptors back to the UN and save a little overhead. However! my research base is shaky; I only have 50 scientists working at any given time. That puts me close to the end of the year before I can field Avengers with Plasma Cannons, which are the only craft that can go toe-to-toe with the Ethereal Battleships which are about to light up my radar screens.

Things keep picking up and I might start getting nostalgic for those first Sectoid Scouts.

if this is a hit (and it seems headed that way) would this LP lead into one of TFTD? I know it is very close to the same game, but all the references to the Cthulu mythos would be fun to point out and such... I just love both of the game so much, and seeing someone who has put a lot of thought into the play through of them is really awesome...

though it might be repetitive as all the things that work in Xcom work in TFTD right?

This was a game that come out ages before I ever had a computer to play it on, but I had been intrigued by the occasional mention of it I would see it on lists of greatest games of all time and the like. So when I saw this thread pop up I headed I availed myself of the excuse to head on over to home of the underdogs and downloaded a copy.

I started out playing on easy, thinking that I would play on that level just long enough to get my feet wet and then start over on a respectable difficulty level. After my first terror mission, which I entered with a squad consisting of an HWP, a trio of officers, and cadre of rookies and finished with only a sergeant and two rookies, I quickly realized that I will be holding off for a while before starting over on a higher difficulty setting.

I made it to August earlier today and with the development of power armor and plasma weapons I finally feel like I can attack a large UFO without having to lose half of my painstakingly trained squad in the process. The preservation of these soldeiers is absolutely necessary, I fear, as the ranks of my soldiers is still largely filled with squaddies and rookies and I expect that those damn aliens will have some sort of curveball to throw at my sooner rather than later. I've taken to reloading missions in an effort to preserve my officer corps. Even so, I've only managed to keep 3 soldiers alive long enough for them to get past the 10 kill mark.

Anyway, all this is to say that even as someone who had never played X-Com before last week I find an enjoyable game that still holds up today. I doubt there are many 15 year old pc games that can boast that.

Now guys, seriously, what the hell is up with Chrysallids? It's like the designers way of letting you build up a little and think you're starting to hold your own and then suddenly kick you in the balls. Those fuckers came to Novisibirsk and I had to concede the city to alien rule. Sorry Russia, it's not worth what you're paying me if I wind up getting everyone killed.

I sure hope not. TFTD improved the atmospherics and graphics of X-Com and took big backward steps everywhere else. Terror missions are harder for the sake of... Well, shit; I can't think of a single justification for making them harder. Every weapon the game is strictly worse than the X-Com equivalent (this ties into the above; about half your heavy weapons don't work on dry land.) If you research the wrong alien, you lose the ability to win the game. Also: Lobstermen.

I played X-Com nonstop for almost a year before my buddy got TFTD. I played that for one week and happily returned it.

/nerd rage

Well, not everything in TFTD was bad.

The best tactic I've seen for preserving your officers is to keep them in the transport. This way you get the morale bonus of having the officers come along without risking mass panic. That is, unless the aliens get explosives into your craft.

Sorry for the lack of updates, guys - a flag football tournament, and associated recovery / drinking time took up most of my weekend. On the positive side, I FINALLY got the cable from Monoprice, so now I can take shitty cellphone pictures of the home theater playing X-Com while taking notes on the laptop as opposed to shitty cellphone pictures of the laptop playing X-Com.

(A 46" 1080p television playing X-Com is an amusing sight, even if it took me a good three hours to bring the old Win2K box that's going to be hooked up to the TV up to speed.)

The downside is that my game on THAT version isn't the most fun one, as I'm not getting any UFOs. I've got a second game that's MUCH more fun, as it's a race to see if I can get my troops buffed up enough vs. the aliens picking off one country per month (I've lost UK, France, Brazil and will lose Germany when the current month ends - they've been landing two battleships per month on Infiltration missions, and I've only had one team ready to go. NOW I've got a second team prepped, and I've captured a Sectoid Leader so I have The Great Equalizer on my side).

The era this was in was basically the one where you'll see a lot that do - CDs weren't quite in vogue yet, so the PC's horrible three-year experiment with FMV wasn't fully implemented. No Win95 goofing with everyone's abilities to play games. And 3D cards were still a ways off. So you had a lot of really good 2D games come out that are still playable to this day - Master of Orion hit around the same time, for instance, as did Doom and Sam & Max. All would probably be comfortably in the top twenty PC games ever made, and stuff like Ultima VII and X-Wing would probably be in the discussion if not overshadowed by their more famous relatives.

Just about everything in the Micropose / EA CD Classics series from that era was an incredible game (ignore stuff like, say, Phantom of the Opera). I used to get one $9.99 game per week from a store a bike ride away and still have quite a few of the discs.

I promised a doorbreaching seminar, so here's as good as I can get.

Okay, so I'm assuming you've got a squad armed with lasers and grenades per my usual instructions - as a result, you should have a fair number of TUs. Here's what I recommend for each type of UFO you will encounter:

Small Scout - HA! Odds are good you'll never get one of these - my first one was a fluke. No breach necessary, just track down the lone alien and kill him.

Medium Scout - these are the square-shaped, single-room UFOs. They're actually a little bit tougher than their bigger brother, as odds are good you're going to have at least one alien get off a reaction shot. My advice would be to send a rookie or the least-important member of your squad through the door, and have someone with a primed grenade waiting outside, as well as a couple of riflemen (we'll refer to this as Basic Door Breach, or BDB). If there's an alien waiting within FACING the rookie, shoot it. If not, get the rookie the hell out of there and throw in the grenade. The UFO Power Source shouldn't blow up, but you should kill the alien(s) inside. Repeat as necessary, with the continual reminder to check behind the Power Source.

Large Scout - this is the one with the two doors on either side of the bridge. The "upper" door has a clear path to the bridge, but aliens probably kill you 75% of the time you walk through this door on Veteran. Take the "bottom" door instead - it first opens into a small antechamber that it's not uncommon to find aliens in, but you're at such close range that if you don't die immediately you'll be able to kill them very quickly. The second door opens into a side-corridor running up to the main bridge room - this can't be seen from most of the bridge, and as a result you can duck into it, throw a grenade, then wait to hear screams from the bridge. The Power Source room can either be accessed by BDB or using a Heavy Plasma to try to knock down the walls. DO NOT use the Blaster Launcher - it'll work, but you'll blow up the Power Source as well and we don't want that.

Supply Ship - I'm skipping over the Mediums because, well, you don't see them as often as these babies. Supply Ships should be your bread and butter - they carry 150 Elerium, you know where they'll show up (your local alien base) and they stay on the ground for a reasonable length of time, allowing for a daytime assault. However, the problem can be that they're rather intimidating to take down the first time you see them.

The key to a Supply Ship - once you finish with your BDB on both doors simultaneously (usually four X-Com units per door is sufficient) is that you can exploit splash damage. The procedure:

(1) Secure the hallway between the entrances. Aliens love to hide out here, so send someone from the team on the "right" door to make sure there's no one home.

(2) Cluster everyone at the corner of the hallway within sight of the entrance, with the wall protecting you.

(3) With your highest-TU unit, duck into the hallway. If clear, duck into the engine room via the interior door. Try to clear everything inside, but if there's an alien visible at the far end, note its position and leave it to the troops on the opposite side of the ship to perform the exact same maneuver.

(4) Once the engine room is clear, use that as your new gather point. Using a grenade, step across the hallway against the exterior wall of the ship and attempt to get a grenade as close to the back of the UFO as possible. Do this sumultaneously on both sides. With Alien Grenades, this is enough to clear out the space around the two elevators.

(5) Again, check the hallway connecting the elevators. Or just throw a grenade in there, your call.

(6) The left elevator is the problem spot. Try walking into it and then turning a full 360. You can shoot upwards, but aliens don't like to shoot down. Use this technique to clear out the elevator room.

(7) Once everyone is into the second-floor elevator room, keep one trooper watching the lower door and deploy everyone else out the back door. Establish fields of fire down the entire chamber, with an optional grenade into the food chambers to flush out any sneaky aliens hiding amongst them.

(8) Take the remaining troopers out the front door, with one checking inside the small closed chamber across from the elevator, and the other heading to the nearby corner preparing to move down that hallway.

(9) Move one of the soldiers you placed at the back door of the elevator into a similar position (tough because of the way the exterior walls work) on the top side.

(10) Two more grenades, as far as you can throw them, then back into cover.

(11) Last real trick is to check the examination room in the middle of the floor - you can cut through the walls or use BDB.

(12) Onto the other team, who'll take the bridge. Rest everyone at the bottom of the elevator shaft while the second floor team does its dirty work unless you have an injured soldier who looks as though they might die quickly. Then send everyone up the elevator at once, and fan out to guard the door of the small room you're in.

(13) If the second-floor team has Heavy Plasma, you can cut through the elevator shaft and have them follow the third-floor team upstairs.

(14) If you survive your first step outside the elevator room, send one trooper through the door in front of you to sweep that corridor. Two more go left, towards the bridge. And one more sweeps the nooks and crannies near the elevator room.

(15) Use a grenade from the corner of the bridge to the other side - the splash damage will likely kill any nearby aliens.

(16) At this point, cutting through a bridge wall is possible.

(17) If no Heavy Plasma, walk your sweeping agent through all the doors and throw a second grenade at the other side while pincering in with the other two agents. Basic BDB on the bridge door, but the aliens in there are usually passive.

Phew. If done right - and this'll eventually be automatic - you shouldn't get many casualties, especially after you armour up. Anyway, the massive return on investment is worth the two rookies risking their lives doing BDB on the ground floor (which is the most dangerous part of these ships).

Of course, The Great Equalizer changes this, but that's a ways off.

I never encountered this research problem you're talking about, care to enlighten me? I never found the ramped up difficulty too much of a problem, or maybe I just don't recall, I also have fond memories of Ikaruga (RAGE). I thought the difficulty ramp up was on the request of hardcore fans who found the original "too easy" ( I generally hate these people on principle). I guess I need to play it some and see if it's as bad as some here are saying...

I'm perfectly willing to chalk up my reaction to TFTD to fanboyism. X-Com has a truckload of crippling bugs, but it was such a unique game that I'm fairly blind to its flaws. You can read up on the research bug over on the UFOpaedia. This was a real tempest in a teapot back in my AOL days.

One thing about TFTD's difficulty: Challenge I don't mind; I like Last Resort, for Pete's sake. If Microprose had decided to make the aliens smarter or add in more multistep missions, I'd have been down for that. The problem was that they replaced half the guns with their Super Soaker equivalents and made the aliens bulletproof. That sort of thing leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Sweet! I've just discovered a Sectoid base in the Arctic, so I should have plenty of opportunities to put this to use.

EDIT: Anyone in the late/endgame: I'm researching Plasma Cannons right now. Should I drop them and start on the Avenger research path (Personal Armour -> Power Armour -> Flying Suit and so on?)

NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Plasma Cannons are the first X-Com Threshold Research Moment of the game. Getting them ASAP means your Interceptors go from terrified weaklings to deadly, if slow, fighters. Soldiers are replaceable (and, realistically, you'll be replacing half these bums anyway when you hit the third and final Threshold Research Moment). An Avenger isn't much use if it's still firing Laser Cannons and Avalanches.

And, yeah, the original X-Com is loaded with bugs and exploits (the salary bug I'll be talking about tonight, the free manufacturing bug, etc.). It's so good that everyone just ignores them.


There's actually only a couple of doors you have to go through in any base... and, frankly, if you're smart the aliens often just kill themselves because they're too dumb to use a blaster launcher down an elevator.

Terror From the Deep made it near impossible to actually kill aliens until you had done a lot of research (and even then it was no picnic). And the terror and base missions were just so long (and frequent) that you were bound to suffer a ton of casualties and get tired of the whole thing. And then the research had a few bugs that made it easy to miss technologies without realizing you had done so.

Terror mission in Novosibirsk. Guys at the front of the Skyranger are clad in Power Suits, so they're hardly worried when two flashing icons appear at the side of the screen upon touchdown. The first Sectoid, staring bemusedly at the wacky Heavy Plasma-wielding humans, is cut down in a swift swath of gunfire from my Captain. The second Sectoid observes this from behind a picket fence no higher than four feet tall.

Easy pickings, says I.

All the auto-shots from the second soldier miss, which is annoying, but surmountable. I move him off the ramp, and the third soldier charges out and unleashes her own burst of Heavy Plasma at the Sectoid. Every shot goes wild. Ugh. Okay, fourth guy, take a crack at it. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. This is ridiculous.

There's barely any space on the ramp at this point, but the fifth guy appears to have a clear shot from his vantage point inside the Skyranger, so I decide "screw this!" and aim very precisely for this bastard. The shot hits the fence. Okay, calm down, fellas. This is just the worst luck ever. Sixth guy readies himself. He breathes and closes his eyes as the Force flows through him. He opens his eyes, and squeezes the trigger. Bullseye.

Well played, young Jurgen... but man. I hope nothing happens to my soldiers while they're bunched in this awkward cluster at the ramp with no reaction points left, especially since no one behind them can see anything outside. End turn.

A humming alien grenade drops into their midst like a goose riddled with buckshot. I've just been fucked by math.

I abandon the game.

You do know that explosions don't travel up or down, right? (Is that right?) So only the guys on that same level would be blown up, and even if it landed under a power suited guy, it probably wouldn't kill him.

Auto Shot is a equal parts lies and calumny. There's no bipedal enemy who can take more than two solid hits with a Heavy Plasma, so at best all you've done is waste ammo.

EXCEPTION: Burst fire with the minigun packing HE rounds. It sweeps streets like it was a surly immigrant.

I think explosions do happen in three dimensions, but I've never tested it out. Maybe one of us could do an experiment with a saved game.

EDIT: Now my Interceptors are packing Plasma Cannons, and the hunting is easy.

Auto Shots are, however, better than Snap Shots if you do the math (especially with Laser Rifles). But statistics are annoying sometimes, and, yeah, that's a bad one.

Should have an update later today, but the pictures are trapped on a cell phone that doesn't want to recharge. Aaargh.