Justice missiles fit on cars and bikes. They are smaller than the Retribution missiles. TRY it.
In the first week you don't need an interceptor since you don't do ground missions on the smaller UFOs and as far as I can tell, the larger UFOs never show up until week 2. You can split up your cargo, bio trans and crew modules between multiple cars, send them all to a building that's been invaded and investigate from multiple vehicles. I always buy Hawk Air Warriors when they become available in week 2 so if all I have is cars, it's not a big deal.
I've been messing around with different weapons and lots of trial runs and have come to this conclusion:
Missiles are not more powerful than guns by a longshot when you take ROF into account. They also, tend to be more, not less likely to do damage to friendly buildings. They are also hideously expensive compared to guns, especially guns that don't use ammo like the lasers. Seriously, lasers take ships out much faster, have equally good range, don't seem to do as much damage with stray shots, and you can buy a lot more vehicles if you sell all those janitors you start off with.
The only advantage of missiles is that they are more easily fired while evading. On medium difficulty you can really stretch the usage of those hovercars out to the third week or so by setting them all on cautious and giving them missiles with longer range. 2nd week, I give them prophets. Eight rounds are still sufficient and they get a lot more survivability off of that extra 100 meter range. Late third week and onward, I tend to go for justice missiles until I've started building my own ships or have enough money to field 5 or more Hawk Air Warriors.
On heavier vehicles that can't really evade effectively, you're better off sticking with guns and setting the vehicles on aggressive. Hawks don't dodge missiles and guns. Their defense is strictly health. Autocannons actually do damage comparable to the Rendors when you take ROF into account, but their range is shorter and the projectiles move a lot slower making it harder to hit the smaller scouts and probes. I like to get these on the second week to conserve elerium. Hawk Air Warriors with two 40 mils and a plasma multisystem do just fine until week 3 when you finally get Lineage Plasma. The game never gives you enough ammo for the autocannons at first, so the best approach is to buy bikes, strip the cannons off (they come fully loaded), and then sell the bikes back.
Targeting computers are still worth it IMO. Since you're usually chasing the UFOs, there isn't a lot of lateral movement. I also prefer the accuracy for avoiding damage to friendly structures and vehicles. If you're shots are just barely missing UFOs, it's not the same as them going wild, hitting the worst possible support structure of a slum and bringing the whole thing down. I don't think they do anything for missiles though.
In superhuman, just ditch the cars on the second week. The UFOs are too accurate at that difficulty and your cars will get pounded by the fast attack ships in no time. Bikes might still work but I hate all the additional micro involved in moving 8-12 bikes around. Also the buildings are too high to avoid running into constant trouble with missiles smacking into friendly targets to be worth the long range Justice approach.
Ground vehicles are still slow and they draw fire to wear you don't want it, the foundations of any nearby buildings. Too expensive and too slow even if you mod the streets to be indestructable.
Don't bother with Disruptors for vehicles until you get the mediums. The small disruptors are lousy weapons. The benefit you get from the range and ROF of lasers is far superior to the small disruptor and neither will cost you any ammo.
On the scoring more points and confronting higher tech sooner rather than later issue, that's the way I prefer it. Even when the aliens have all the tech they don't all necessarily equip it and I've never run into personal shields before I got Toxiguns going (got them at the beginning of week 3 in my current game). When you have toxiguns and shields the advantage to the aliens has been completely flipflopped since Toxiguns ignore the shields.
Shooting down more ships does appear to weaken the number of ships they send. For instance, if you shoot every single UFO from week 1 down, you'll be attacked by 2 transports and 2 fast attack ships rather than 3 fast attack ships at the beginning of week 2. I then shot all of those down in my last game and was attacked by a single transport and some scouts the next time. Then they left me alone for the rest of the week and came at me with an Assault Ship (the big long one), a transport, and three scouts. I think when there are 2 or more infiltration ships accompanied by scouts, the scouts just act as escorts and don't try to infiltrate. They do upgrade tech faster when you're really kicking their behind, but that's fine by me. The vehicle shields are a pain until you get that first advanced physics lab up, so you can research medium disruptors and then vehicle shields, but the nice thing is that you'll have plenty of shields in storage when you finally get the tech.
Some research tips:
Once you get bio transport modules, make sure you grab at least one intact brainsucker pod from your next mission if you can find one. They research much faster than any other live alien and you'll be able to start on advanced labs much sooner.
If you have 3 quantum physics labs and manage to fill them up with physicists by week 2, you'll have a much easier time researching ship tech to get advanced physics labs and manufacturing facilities sooner. In my current game, I expect to be building my first Bio Transporters at the beginning of week 4.
People Guns
I've been messing around with the different personal weapons (I play turn based primarily) and I gotta say, Marsec M4000s are the best choice if you use them properly as close range weapons. I don't think they're ideal for RTS though since you need to get in really close and your enemies will be firing on you as you do so.
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