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[Eagle of Fire]

Why not use Toxiguns all the time instead of heavier guns and such?

Because the ammo for the Toxiguns is time consuming to mass produce and you'll need more time for other stuff, like building your own ships for instance.

Second to that, if you end up in a building with agressive humans like in the Slums or against an agressive corporation, you won't do any harm if you don't have the big guns on you. I don't like bothering myself spotting such places, then switching weapons before going there everytime so since having a all around issue equipment is easily possible I jumped on the occasion.

[Lt. Razak]

As I said, blow up the lot of 'em if they happen to be human. And if push comes to shove, its "mount bayonets"... or in this case: draw powerswords. Especially with those extremely stupid cultists ("oh look, 6 x-com agents with powerswords just vanished around that corner" - "oh yeah, let's go have a look...") its great fun. Also they're very useful (not as good as the disruptor cannon, though) to cut through walls. Nothing pisses a sentry more of than the enemy just cutting through the wall right behind you while he's watching a doorway...


I personally prefer boomeroids since I started with realtime because I rarely get the timings right. If I know somebody is there I usually throw boomeroids with max range and 0.25 delay. If I suspect somebody is near a corner or up a lift (somewhere I can't see without going there and getting shot) I throw a boomeroid over there with followed by a vortex mine set to 7.5 secs to increase the explosive yield... if somebody triggers the boomeroid without luring it too far away (never happened) he'll loose his shields to the boomeroid, the vortex mine will finish him off.

This is what I do most of the time now since my elite assault squad is still travelling back from the other dimension. I have to use a 10 man squad with rather bad equipment in a wolfhound to deal with all the infiltrations. While my only retaliator and the biotrans were busy in the other dimension, the city was hit big time by the aliens...

Concerning the production of Toxiclips: I found it hard to keep up in the beginning as well. By now I've got 2 small workshops in my mainbase. If I run low on ammo, both mass produce C clips, otherwise the 2nd workshop builds disruptor armours. Still, there is always one workshop at least working on clips and that seems to do the trick. Anyway, I usually don't need more than 1 clip / agent / mission and since I've got very effective UFO/Infiltration control missions are very rare.


Oh yes, about manual control of vehicles: I didn't even know that was possible. But it works fine for me:
right click: set course to these coords
left click: all weapons (except those deactivated) fire
pg up: faster
pg dn: slower
home: higher
end: lower

Its great fun, I used the retaliator to smash lots of probes in the other dimension before they just overpowered it and I had to fall back. But I noticed that after a while the disrupor beams (2x medium) refused to fire... is there a kind of ammo restriction to it, so it has to regenerate for a bit?
And can you order groups of ships about like that? I'm building an annihilator right now. My intention is to make annihilators to gun boats (3 heavy disruptors if they fit, otherwise the biggest disruptors possible) while using retaliators as missile boats (3 missile launchers)

Talking about aircraft: Is it possible that the large disruptor shield is pretty useless for hawks and retaliators? Twice the shield capacity, yes, but I can't put fit any more heavy targeting systems in there if I use it..

[Sharp]

Originally posted by Lt.Razak
I personally prefer boomeroids since I started with realtime because I rarely get the timings right. If I know somebody is there I usually throw boomeroids with max range and 0.25 delay. If I suspect somebody is near a corner or up a lift (somewhere I can't see without going there and getting shot) I throw a boomeroid over there with followed by a vortex mine set to 7.5 secs to increase the explosive yield... if somebody triggers the boomeroid without luring it too far away (never happened) he'll loose his shields to the boomeroid, the vortex mine will finish him off.

You can just throw a vortex mine and not need to put a timer as the explosion from the boomeroid will set of the vortex mine, on the other hand if the boomeroid doesnt detect any aliens, it basically means the moment you agents move they will be getting a boomeroid flying towards them, the vortex mine would be able to detonate it instead, bit of a waste though.

Whats fun when assaulting UFO's is just laying explosives at the entrance. Plop a few unprimed AP grenades and High Explosive packs, the odd vortex mine, and then either lay a proximity mine, or if you are good with timings and want more control over the time of explosion get a agent to throw a primed AP grenade to set em all off. So much explosives can also blow holes into UFO's. I think you can get an agent to set off the explosives if you force fire on the explosive, but you need a pretty accurate shot, unless you use HE autocannon shells.

The best thing is that if you can get a group of aliens to get caught in the explosion, they all drop more explosives which can then be used to blow up even more aliens.

Well some of the manual control works, except for im left-clicking everywhere and its not shooting anything, mabye if I run it in Dosbox or get the mousepatch thingy.

[Lt. Razak]

Oh yeeeah the marsec heavy explosives.... I used them in the beginning before I had vortex mines and marsec body armour for everybody. I used to have great fun with them (turn-based); I gave them to my hovertroopers and if the squad got pinned down my hovertroopers set out to solve the problem.
Imagine you are a soldier putting down suppressing fire on a hedgerow (or something) knowing that the enemy is in there. You don't notice the shadow crawling towards you from behind, much less the trooper hovering 8 stories above you until you hear a distinct *clunk*. You turn around and there is a small suitcase, which seems to have appeared out of nowhere. On closer examination, the suitcase turns out to be a bomb... suddenly it goes *bleep* and *booom* and sends you off to blightey...

I also remember a mission (still turn-based) in a marsec arms factory where the aliens were about one screen away from my spawn point. My soldiers spotted them at once: a big clump of aliens (about 5x5 fields), everything up to anthropods and about 15 aliens alltogether.
I had 3 hovertroopers and although they were wounded due to reaction shots, they managed to drop a LOT of explosives:
6 AP nades
6 Marsec proxymines
4 suitcases aka heavy explosives
+ about a dozend AP nades from other soldiers.
The amazing thing is: When all that stuff went up, there were still survivors (those anthropods didn't have any vortex mines at that stage). However, above the alien position there 2 levels of solid concrete which then started raining down on the poor devils. In the end only 2 hyperworms survived, convieniently trapped in the resultant crater. They died shortly afterwards of natural causes... well, I think they were natural considering they had just taken a ton explosive yield plus several tons of rubble


About manual control: I can fire in 180 degree arcs, there or thereabouts and I guess thats the way it should be. However, I'm still prone to make mistakes. The aliens have taken a fancy of invading my city with class 1 and 2 probes once more so I sent out a few craft to every UFO except one so I could test my annihilator (2 medium, 1 heavy disruptor) on it. I knew at once that the test was successful when the UFO just said *poof* and vaporised :evil: and went on to the next UFO. However when that was downed by the other craft, I switched to the grid map to set a new course for another UFO... unfortunately, I left clicked instead of right clicking and so the damn thing fired...
and took about 600metres of highway and 300 metres of people tube down... (had that not happened then this would have been one of the few missions where no roads got smashed up... needless to say, transtellar is permanently pissed and most of its income these days consist of X-COM bribes... :whistle: )

[Christian]

Originally posted by Eagle of Fire@Sep 17 2005, 03:34 AM
Because the ammo for the Toxiguns is time consuming to mass produce and you'll need more time for other stuff, like building your own ships for instance.

Second to that, if you end up in a building with agressive humans like in the Slums or against an agressive corporation, you won't do any harm if you don't have the big guns on you. I don't like bothering myself spotting such places, then switching weapons before going there everytime so since having a all around issue equipment is easily possible I jumped on the occasion.

Well, I can admit to the fact that your engineers should be doing something else than making B-clips but I have a small workshop in every base I got now where the 5 engineers makes clips. That way I have lots of ammo.

And well, if you don't like re-equip your men before every mission then that is your thing. I see no problem with it.

[AntarcticTiger]

Originally posted by Christian@Sep 20 2005, 02:38 PM
I know that the question has been answered already but I couldn't find the answer... is there ANY way to get a live Overspawn? (The huge Alien in the cityscape which the Mothership UFO drops)

Somehow I doubt that. You'll need a full alien container room for the corpse, though.

Uh the old UFO Tactical map generator was great. The weirdest map I ever had (enemy unknown) was a cityscape (terrorsite) with 0 civillians as there were no houses. It was just 2 streets crossing with lots 'n lots of flowers. So I went out into the night and started plucking floaters... great stuff, especially since the government got very keen on paying me more money as no civies died.

Still, the random maps on xcomapoc are really unimpressive, I know one building by heart from the first time I played the game 5 years ago! It's the office one where with about 5 or 6 stories of a big stairway followed by an entrance hall connecting to a meeting room, an elevator and a library... I went there sooo often and I got sooo sick of that map.... I almost aborted when I saw it again in the last game...

Anyway, I finished my medium game... moderately impressed by the dimension gate chamber, the first 20 seconds were spend massacering skeletoids... wave after wave...
I also discovered that about a dozend of the big disruptor/missilethingies were up and about... well actually, the 5th section discovered this shortly before being vaporised in a hail of dimension missiles... anyway, they lived through it as the dosbox went belly up under the stress - this proves that you actually CAN use too much firepower

Still, I started a new game and the "superhuman" button had this kind of dark aura... so I play on hard now... lovely city, much denser, far less slums and useless stuff, a big 4in1-sirius temple which fell victim to my plundering troops within the first 5 minutes (although these sirians were SMART, I lost 6 people to stungrenades, 3 to critical wounds (retreat) and some of the sleeping folks would have bled to death if it wasn't for my mad dual-stunner trooper rampaging through the enemy ranks :guns: ... great fun).

The game is now 2 hours old and I've spotted the first alien... with half the platoon out of comission, I'm not sure how anybody is going to survive, but hey... I'll find out soon enough.

[Lt. Razak]

This time I actually remembered to log in.

QUOTE (Guest @ Sep 25 2005, 08:13 PM)
Transtellar is a bugger... I have problems with them all the time, too. Their main income source in my last game was me since during almost every UFO-raid, a big motorway ( basically 2 motorways next to each other, spanning half the city and resting on 2 lousy pillars) got chipped an collapsed as a result... probably a several kilometers long as well... so Transtellar would get pissed of and then, on the next morning when I hired new scientists the daily bribe would come in...

I must have paid more money for transtellar than I paid for the actual personell I hired**


"Oh, we're so sorry we destroyed the city yesterday... AGAIN... please accept this as token for our clumsiness with superior weapons"*

Aaaach...be quiet! :whistle:
After all its not my fault that them aliens use camouflage (which, with 10 % jamming effect is somewhat useless, at least when used in X-Com craft...?!) and that the best pilots with the best systems (50 % accuracy on average) seem to be unable to hit anything provided it is moving and that they are actually SUPPOSED to hit it... (say no more...)

By the way, just remembered something from my medium game... in the alien dimension I encountered a .. hm... class 8 ship (something like that) which seemed to be able to teleport itself a couple of times (nothing fancy, just about a screen's height) before being gutted by my ridiculously powerful transdimensional fleet (*brag*)... is there actually a teleporter for craft in this game?


Incidentally, I tried that "raid-your-ally-with-stunners"-strategy suggested earlier in this thread. I send my 2 dual-stun troopers to a megapol arms factory (literally next door, they could walk if they wanted to... [well ok, being soldiers under my command they could walk anywhere and would even if they didn't want to :evil: ]). It was a small map, about 4 "rooms slightly bigger than 1 screen, but there were plenty of megapolians running around like mad chicken. Unfortunately they kept waking up again so it took me ages to herd them together so that one of the 2 agents could keep watch (my people are still fresh meat and have the remarkable ability to screw up any attempt to throw a (stun)grenade unless you just drop it...).
What surprised me is that although no lethal shot was fired, no lethal explosives deployed, my two people were injured... occasionally a megapolian just chucked a random ammo clip around (not even at me) but thats about all they did... and still, my people were slowly drained of health... in fact, one of them is half dead (or half alive for the optimists among you ).
How is that possible? The only thing they had to do was a LOT of running , then walking...then running again..... now I admit that might have killed me but then I'm not a regular soldier (just a cadet who enjoys the occasional outburst of pure violence :angel: ) ...

[Lt. Razak]

Originally posted by the_fifth_horseman@Sep 28 2005, 11:24 AM
You don't get a corp out of alien control by killing them. You go to the corp's facilities, and begin Investigating for Alien Activity, one by one until all are clear. Comprende?

Exactly... and during these investigations the security personell usually perished in the crossfire... not my fault :angel:

how do you run it?