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I love X-com but suck balls at it
Hotlead Junkie
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Rarley I'll come across a game that I really love playing but totally suck at, X-com is one of them. I think it's the joy of beating a mission in a really dramatic way, balanced out with starting a mission and your entire team getting blown up, laser-raped, sent screaming in terror into enemy gunfire and night terror missions that appear when all your team is armed with half empty rifles and hockey sticks because you just fought a string of tough battles, lost all your best guys and had to arm the chickenshit Caboose's of your squad with whatever you had left since you haven't had time to buy any more weapons.
Despite all that and the fact that micromanaging and RTS games are my gaming Kryptonite (just give the game some JRPG flavour and this would be the anti-game for me), I still love the game and repeatedly go back to it to get my squad killed over and over again in hopes of a sweet, sweet victory and another kickass battle story. When something goes well in X-com, it goes damn well (Patrick Stewart anyone?), if something goes wrong it goes very, very, horribly wrong.
Okay, give me a step by step walkthrough of how you usually beat this game. I'v read entire 'Let's play' threads based on this and I'm assuming the main goal of the game revolves around (endgame spoilers)
This thread has two main purposes. Run me through a specific, step by step walkthrough of how I can beat this game and also talk about games that you love but simply suck at. I know tons of tricks and stratergies for combat in X-com but can never make them all gel together into a sucsessful game.
Despite all that and the fact that micromanaging and RTS games are my gaming Kryptonite (just give the game some JRPG flavour and this would be the anti-game for me), I still love the game and repeatedly go back to it to get my squad killed over and over again in hopes of a sweet, sweet victory and another kickass battle story. When something goes well in X-com, it goes damn well (Patrick Stewart anyone?), if something goes wrong it goes very, very, horribly wrong.
Okay, give me a step by step walkthrough of how you usually beat this game. I'v read entire 'Let's play' threads based on this and I'm assuming the main goal of the game revolves around (endgame spoilers)
getting enough research done about everything, and the missions and other obstacles are simply a means to get more of this research done so you can go to mars and beat the head alien
This thread has two main purposes. Run me through a specific, step by step walkthrough of how I can beat this game and also talk about games that you love but simply suck at. I know tons of tricks and stratergies for combat in X-com but can never make them all gel together into a sucsessful game.
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Add Fallout 2 to my list. I love Fallout 1 and have finished it but have never beaten Fallout 2, I always come across random mutants and raiders in the desert armed with laser chainguns when all my team is armed with is knuckledusters and jerky.
Silent Storm I don't find difficult, just a little tedious and a very long, tricky game
PHASE 1: Preparing for the Storm
1. Place your initial base well. Northern Hemisphere is where the majority of your funding comes from. Iceland and Alaska are generally good: if you're near the North Pole, you can generally get decent coverage of the majority of Europe and decent coverage of the Americas.
2. Upgrade your facility: Living Quarters, General Storage, Alien Containment, and an additional radar are usually what I go for. Afterwards, I'll upgrade with a second laboratory, more workshops, an additional hangar, more living quarters as needed.
3. Go through your troops. Original X-Com made it a pain in the ass to see your character's stats at the initial load screen, so I usually get rid of their last name and add some info about their relevant stats and/or a descriptive title. (You no longer exist, Mister Freeman. From now on, you will be known as Gordon FA 65 Br 10 St 24. Welcome to X-Com).
4. Go through your aircraft. Remove the cannons from your interceptors and replace them with missiles. Immediately put in an order for three additional Avalanche launchers and as many missiles as you can get: around 21 or so. Avalanche missiles have the disadvantage in that they tend to annihilate small craft instead of shoot them down. They have the advantage in that they outrange all alien weapons short of a Very Large. When you get the technology, upgrade to Plasma Cannons, and stick with those, aside from a plane or two that you might equip with Fusion Ball Launchers for a change of pace.
5. Go through your equipment. Your Heavy Cannon is basically useless, as are your pistols. Sell off the pistols and put in an order for a second Autocannon: use the Heavy Cannon in the meantime, then sell it off when your replacement gear arrives. Sell any AP ammo you've got and replace them mostly with HE and a few Incendiary for good measure. Keep your single rocket launcher and put in an order for some bigger rockets. Put in an order for some satchel charges, proximity grenades, flares, and stunrods. Buy a tank: I prefer the Cannon Tank, some swear by the Rocket Tank.
6. Begin research. Start with laser weapons: motion sensors are shit, and medikits aren't useful when your troops tend to die in one hit. Wait on those until you research personal armor. Hire as many more scientists as you can: about 10 to start with, until your second living quarters is established.
7. Ignore engineers for now. You don't have anything worth manufacturing yet.
PHASE 2: On the Defensive.
1. For the first year or so, your mission is simple: stay alive while you research better gear. Don't try to do anything too fancy yet.
2. When you detect a UFO, intercept with both your Skyranger and your Interceptor. If you can, try and catch the UFO when it lands so you can capture it intact. If you can't (it touches down and takes off before your Skyranger catches up with it), or if you're not certain of your abilities to fight on the ground, shoot it down and pick up the pieces. Your goal is to capture as much alien tech as possible, but it won't do you any good if you lose too many men in the process.
3. Research Laser Weapons up to laser rifles, then hire some engineers and start cranking them out. Immediately replace your rifles with laser rifles. Keep them even when you get plasma weapons: laser rifles have an advantage in that they don't need ammo, so you can blaze away with them like mad and never worry about reloading. Also upgrade your tanks to laser tanks to free up equipment space for more guns and bombs.
4. Research Alien Alloys right after Laser weapons. Develop personal armor and have your engineers build one for every guy on your squad. From that point forward, NEVER send a guy out unarmored. At this point, research medikits and distribute them to your squad. When a guy is injured, heal his Fatal Wounds, give him a dose of happy juice to keep him in the fight, and push on.
5. Try to fight in the daylight: Terror Missions and landed UFOs may force you to fight at night, in which case bring flares and incendiary ammo and light up the darkness. When in doubt, burn it out: it's better to burn a house to the ground to kill a single Sectoid than to lose a trooper trying to assault a heavily defended house with rifles.
6. When all else fails, be a jackass: keep a save file at the beginning of the mission, and if things go too badly, dust off and reload.
Phase 3: Saddle Up
1. Switch to attacking the aliens about when you master plasma weapons and have set up a decent force of interceptors.
2. Get Psionics. Research Small Launchers and Stun Bombs and capture yourself a Sectoid Leader/Commander or any Ethereal. Build a Psi Lab and put your guys through Psi training. Psi also gives youa decent defense against those damn Chryssalids: take over your zombified teammate with Mind Control and shoot him dead. You'll get a Chryssalid with 0 FA and shittons of strength that you can use for the rest of the fight. When he gets back home, he'll revert to being human again.
3. Neat trick: you normally can't reach an alien's inventory, but if you mind control him, choose another squad member, and use the arrow buttons to cycle through, you can eventually reach the alien's inventory screen. Have him drop all his guns and walk away, or prime two alien grenades and drop them at his feet, or however you please.
4. Start culling the weak: anyone with low bravery or Psi Potential gets sacked. I'd rather have a guy who can't shoot worth a damn but'll grit his teeth and keep fighting than a sharpshooter who'll freak out or worse, shoot his friend in the back.
5. Research up better vehicles. Skip over the Lightning, it's shit. Firestorms are decent, but they burn up Elerium like mad, so keep your Interceptors. The Avenger is the perfect ship, but you only need one. Use it for assaulting alien bases and such.
6. If you start running out of money: build a base with a whole bunch of defenses and workshops and start cranking out Laser Cannons (the aircraft weapon), then selling them off. Laser Cannons have the highest profit ratio that DOESN'T require Elerium to manufacture. For the record: three Fusion Ball Defenses (Research Blaster Launchers) and a Grav Shield (I forget the Research Tree here) will repel any alien attack.
7. Get Hyperwave Decoders: capture an alien Navigator alive and equip all your bases with one. BEST radar unit in the game, you'll never need more than one per base, IMO.
8. In a pinch, you can do surprisingly well using a squad of howling newbies armed with grenades and stunrods running at the enemy.
More to come.
-Research laser rifles ASAP. They have the highest profit margin of any item you can make. As soon as you can afford it, set up a manufacturing base and just churn these the fuck out. Around mid-game, the funding you get from various nations won't matter because you make 4 or 5 times as much selling rifles.
-In the very early game, capturing aliens isn't as important. You get enough things to research just from the corpses and equipment they leave behind, and it's less risky to just kill them outright.
-I've never had any good experiences with the 'heavy' weapons (heavy laser, etc), the rifles always seemed better to me. YMMV.
-Don't ever, ever, ever let a terror mission go unanswered.
-Your first base should either be in the U.S. near Canada, or somewhere around Germany. The second one should be in the other location, and the third one should be in China. These are the three biggest funding locations.
-Keep an eye on alien activity on a month-by-month basis, if you see alien activity spike in an area send an empty transport to that area on a patrol. (Empty transports have a really long flight time) There may be an alien base there, if you let it stay for too long they will convert that country to your side.
Man I haven't played this game in so fucking long... Now to go see if I can find my copy.
Also grab the mod out there that removes some of the annoying things like having to rearm your doods every during every loadout. Forget what it's called but it seriously improved this game from simply amazing to :!!:
The new X-COM style games for the most part aren't nearly as: fun, strategic, tactical, or sensible.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Agreed. Your heavy weapons guys (High strength, and decent accuracy so they can at least hit the far side of a barn) should be carrying big explodey weapons. Oh yes: and if they've got high Reactions, you may want to have them do pushups (hit the kneel button many many times) if they're in line of sight of guys about to breach a door. Remember that Demotivators pic of guys trying to assault a house using RPGs: nothing makes you scream in frustration more than an alien walking into a squad of guys ready to riddle him with laser, and then a trigger-happy Heavy deciding to fire a rocket at him and kill your entire squad :P
If it helps I'm all for the 'efficiency' way of playing things, for example, if I know a rocket launcher will take down a single alien, I'll use it without question and get the definate kill rather than risking using a weaker, less expensive method and getting someone killed if he misses or the alien doesn't die.
Holy shit I never knew about this.
Oh how I wish I did...
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Afraid of those stairs in the barns that you can't really see up?
1) Prime a HE.
2) Toss it in the middle of the ground floor.
3) Run outside.
4) Watch the whole fucking barn go up and everything inside die.
5) ???
6) Profit.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
So if you ever see an alien walk in, and walk out, make sure you move your squad on the next turn. (Ideally you'll be moving at all times, but sometimes you want to have someone on overwatch)
Laser rifles are awesome. You can essentially use "cover fire" because they have no ammo. See an alien pop out and run back into hiding? Blast the crap out of his cover and move your guys in for the kill with a grenade or something. Even when better weapons become available, I still have my squaddies carry some laser rifles for just this purpose.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Also the flying aliens don't seem to react well to people directly under them.
Only 99% true. I did have a battleship land at my base once and make it through the defenses. My jaw dropped, but I swear it happened.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
I say if they got through three rounds of "FUSION BALL DEFENSES, FIRING. . . HIT!" and a round of "GRAV SHIELD REPELS ATTACKER" then three more rounds of "FUSION BALL DEFENSES FIRING. . . HIT!" they DESERVE to wipe out your base O.o
It's an exploit, and one that can be horribly abused, but on Superhuman, you need all the help you can get.
Quoted for great justice.
TFTD is good, but not lime'd.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Oh My God. There was this one terror mission where they killed my mother. I blew up the entire map in revenge.
EDIT: I bought the gold pack for this game and it was the best money I ever spent.
1) Better interface. Seriously.
2) Better weapon balance.
3) More consequences for your actions (sell a bunch of weapons? Well shit, now you've got a crazy alien-worshipping cult armed with laser rifles)
4) Focus on black-ops: the whole thing is secret, so you're trying to keep a lid on these aliens flying about. So you've gotta make choices like: take out the wreck now, at night, or deal with more witnesses.
I am a freaking nerd.
Use grenades, lots and lots and lots of grenades, of all types. Don't underestimate Dye and Phosphor grenades.
Especially when landing in hostile areas, your first act should be to create a perimeter of destruction. If you manage to nail a few enemies while doing this, it will weaken the morale of the entire enemy force.
At the very least, the smoke/dust will force opponents to get up close, which, if you are up to high level armor, it exactly what you want. Nothing is lamer than being rocket sniped by Tasoth's.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
It's a good idea to avoid night missions if you can. As long as a ship (any ship) is en route to a mission, it will never disappear. If aliens start to terrorize a city but it's at night and you're not ready, send an interceptor or something over there to keep it in play until it's daylight.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
I can barely play all the songs from GH2 on hard, and I mean BARELY.
That's fine until tentaculats come along.
There is no valid reason to open the doors with anything but a tank in the mid-late game.
Also, tanks help block some of the splash damage from
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Also, I always have 2-4 Snipers on my squads, armed with nothing but Laser Rifle/Heavy Plasma weapons sitting at the base of the Ranger/Avenger, and if someone sees something, these guys take the shot. They normally have 95%ish accuracy near the beginning of the game with an aimed shot, and pretty much never miss at the end. If I have 4 I'll send two off to roofs to snipe from there(Those are the only 2 people that ever get flying suits BTW).
Also the first thing I do is rename my soldiers with what I want them to do. It's nice to know exactly what "Scout" will be doing, or "Heavy" or "Sniper".
Also, KNEEL. KNEEL KNEEL KNEEL. KNEEL WHEN SHOOTING. It raises your accuracy.
Oh, and I save to alternating slots every turn and every once in a while on the Geoscape. It's cheap. So what.
.... sorry I kinda phased out there for a moment thinking of a crossover of X-Com with Team Fortress 2.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Bookmarked'
You are either cheating and have played X-COM 3 or you made a couple of great guesses, cuz that game has both of those things. Not very well implemented, but they are in there. Plus germ warfare. Ya gotta love a computer game where your best weapons are based on germ warfare. Sadly, I have never been able to get X-COM 3 to run on this PC.
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Can I get a "Hell Yes !" from the congregation ? Load your weaklings down with primed grenades and walk them right up to that door. The aliens will zap them and then KABOOM.
Minute to learn... lifetime to master...
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