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Let's Play X-Com: UFO Defense! (ironman, superhuman, starting tech & council funding only)
Fanda
Hang a shining starupon the highest boughRegistered User regular
Hang a shining starupon the highest boughRegistered User regular
When I learned as a child that television broadcasts were emanating from earth out into space, where they might some day be received by alien intelligences, two thoughts occurred to me. First, that we were embarrassing ourselves on a cosmic scale. And second, that embarrassment might not be the worst of it. What would those unknown intelligences do once they traced the signal to its source?
Then we dispatched the Arecibo message, which contained the following information:
- Where we are.
- How many of us there are.
- What we're made of.
You maniacs. You classy, classy maniacs. You finally did it. You built an edifice of charity and gentility that reached to the stars. And out there, in the chill void of space, something horrible took notice.
They're coming to steal our women. Also our men, our pets, our livestock, our houseplants, and anything else that might fall under the general rubric of bio-mass. They're not going to get it without a fight.
And as befits the gentility of the Penny Arcade community, we're going to make sure it's a fair fight. Stealing our enemy's weapons to use against him clearly violates the spirit of the Marquess of Queensberry rules. So we'll be using our starting technology only.
Furthermore, in keeping with the eleemosynary spirit of Child's Play, our budget will come exclusively from voluntary donations. No piracy or shady commercial enterprises are allowed. So we'll be restricted to council funding only.
No alien artifacts will be used in battle or sold for profit. Nothing we research will be manufactured except the ship needed for the final mission. It'll be gunpowder, cattle prods, and cold war surplus fighter planes against the worst the galaxy has to offer.
WHAT'S ALL THIS THEN?
X-Com: UFO Defense is objectively the greatest game ever made. I volunteered to LP it with onerous gameplay restrictions if the Steam thread could raise $9000 for Child's Play in December. They raised over $9200. Buncha lunatics.
HASN'T THIS BEEN DONE BEFORE?
Many times, and I won't pretend to have Fishman's narrative flair. On the other hand, I've tried to find an LP done on these particular terms and come up dry. Most challenge LPs seem to limit the strategic or the tactical side of the game, but not both. Perhaps we're breaking new ground here. Horrible, horrible ground.
A SMALL CONCESSION TO MODERNITY
We're going to use OpenXcom for this playthrough. It's an open source re-creation of the original engine that fixes all the bugs and provides an astonishing array of new options and quality of life features. If you've ever wanted to try this game, but were put off by the semi-scrutable interface, OpenXcom is for you.
SO, HOW DO I GET MY BRAINS BLOWN OUT FOR HUMANITY?
If you made a donation during the charity drive, your name is already in the pool; no further action required. Otherwise, !sign up in the thread below.
+24
Posts
To get started, we need to choose a location for our first base.
A European base would cover the largest number of funding nations and protect the largest portion of our budget. And while our first base is free, subsequent bases cost an amount of money to build that varies by location. Europe is the most expensive, so it makes financial sense to take this as our free base.
The United States usually provides far more funding than any other single nation. If we lose the USA from the council, we are boned beyond belief, and starting in North America mitigates that risk considerably. North America might be thought of as the conservative choice for this reason.
Asia's aggregate funding is usually greater than North America's, and Japan can sometimes rival the USA as top funding nation. Asian real estate is cheaply bought, however, making it more attractive as a secondary site.
My plan is to get a base up and running in each of these locations as soon as possible, giving us radar coverage of every funding nation save for Brazil, South Africa, and Australia.
However, it will take months of construction to bring the new facilities online. Our starting base will have to see us through to the spring. So, where should it be?
Also, we're going to need a name for our base.
Also, yes, we need more of these threads.
(Gettit? Because they hate illegal aliens! Oh, the wit!)
Spoilered for people who haven't played through this and don't know the tech tree
Steam profile - Twitch - YouTube
Switch: SM-6352-8553-6516
And for the love of science, !sign up.
Not putting the base on the North Pole?
Sir I must state my extreme dissatisfaction. How, exactly, do you propose we deliver Christmas cheer (in the form of lead) to these unwashed aliens if we aren't going to try as hard as we can to be Santa?
oh also !sign up for Interceptor-1. @Brogey got all the fun toys in Fishman's runth--
wait I'm not getting any fancy toys this time around am I?
Europe for base.
Ah, hell. !sign up for ground forces. I will try not to be the worst this time.
Edit: I should probably add my character choice to here. Male 2.
Base in Europe, in the Alps, so we can go skiing on our downtime
Destiny Profile : http://www.bungie.net/en/Profile/254/7028016
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
What's our policy on lasers?
Why I fear the ocean.
!Sign up
Edit: Male 4 if the choice is still open.
Also, as a donator during the Wintereenmas sale, I was supposed to buy powerups or something? I kinda forgot about that ...
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Neo-ChongQing will work without the Old. Wish I could give you guys a character count, but it's dependent on the width of the letters.
Regarding lasers and decoders and other such things: if it's not in the UFOpedia at the start of the game, it's off-limits.
The Avenger is the only exception, and only for the final mission, and only then because I have no way to vacuum-proof the Skyranger and accelerate it to near-relativistic speed.
Indeed! Your menu of perks is right here.
Also, for the folks who didn't donate, you can still choose your soldier's appearance if you like:
!sign up! male 2 ofc, as cannonfodder. I can only imagine how much of a meatgrinder this will be once you hit larger UFOs.
We will die.
!Sign Up female 4 will do.
I don't know what for yet, but xcom and sign ups must be done.
edit** male 1 cannon fodder.
I feel sorry for the rest of you not living through the war.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
I love it!
!sign up as meat for the grinder. An autocannon with HE would be lots of fun (especially during a panic) if that can be swung.
!Sign up, female #2 please
"Guy who gets murdered first in the base defense", check.
Nah, I'm seeing death due to massive heart attack from a steady diet of Cheetos, ranch dressing and Mt. Dew.
*hides in a locker*
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
...and I probably just got myself added to a watch list for writing that so make sure my boom takes out a cyberdisc...
Law and Order ≠ Justice
(!sign up male 2)
--Mark Twain
We are the gleaming sapphire in the crown of this tiny world. Let's do the species proud.
Nothing terribly surprising here.
Onward to the Trappenschloss! The default starting base layout is completely indefensible, but OpenXcom gives you the option to customize it. You place your access lift first.
Then you chain other facilities off the existing ones, until you've placed them all. The process is just like building a new base.
There are a lot of different approaches to base design, but the general strategy is to use your access lift as a chokepoint between the hangars and the rest of the base. That way, invaders can only approach from one direction.
Perfect. Let's visit those immaculately placed hangars.
Lieutenant EvmaAlsar's Interceptor has twin-linked Stingrays. Lieutenant MechMantis gets our only Avalanche launcher, with a cannon as a secondary weapon. (Mudzgut has dibs on Interceptor-3, as soon as we purchase it. Interceptor-4 and subsequent warbirds remain unclaimed.)
I sell off our excess cannons and half the cannon ammunition. Our engineers also receive their pink slips, since we won't be building anything for quite a long time.
That done, it's time for purchases. I hire another 8 soldiers (bringing us to 16 total) and order a Tank/Rocket Launcher, plus the following sundries:
We're bumping right up against our current storage capacity. When the expansion to our General Stores finishes construction, I'll build up a proper cache of munitions.
Finally, we need to assign a research project.
Nothing on the critical path can be researched until we recover a UFO, so the science team can daydream about laser weapons until then. We'll just have to hope for a radar contact before -
... what on earth ...?
Oh no.
No no no. We are having none of this. How did you even get in here?
I see. Excuse me for a moment.
Sorry, you were saying?
Look, I'm building an Alien Containment facility. Is that sciencey enough for you?
Me too. I have an idea who the first occupant can be.
Amazingly depressing.
Depressingly amazing?
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!