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Its probably been said hundreds of times but i couldnt find it, read alot of all the 44 pages, but no luck....

I've downloaded the game and it works, except for the sound... I got the game here so I have the vdm sound thing, I've also tried different sound card setups including the one people have said would work ; soundblaster 220 - 7 - 1

If anyone could tell me what to do now, I would appreciate it alot

[punch999]

Is sound included in the game. Wouldn't that make it Gigantic.... Sorry cant help you on that

I tought the 2 folders SOUND and RAWSOUND was for sounds or ?

If not I got cd version too so maybe i could just copy paste something from it, or at least install sounds only from the cd, I have not tried too becouse im not very experienced in such thing and i dont want to ruin anything....

[Flowbar]

The music and background sound effects don't seem to be included in the cracked version, but basic sound effects like guns, grenades and stuff are (all important ones), so I put on the radio for music and think it's ok. The background music does add some feeling in the beginning, but as always, after a few hours you kinda know it.

What I wonder is what the fastest way in RL time is to play Apocalypse? Raiding CoS really lowers the in-game time, but then raids on turn based take like one hour for me to finish each (I try to lose no men and almost always succeed). Not downing all UFOs seem to keep UFO tech down a little, but as soon as Assault ships come, I tend to get involved in zillions of ground fights which raise my score by thousands per week. Shooting buildings in geoscape doesn't seem to do the trick for me, got total score of -47 and still aliens showed up with shields and devastator cannons. Any ideas?

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.

Heh. Sorry, that was me.

The Thing is I cant get the sounds to work, I knew music was not included but its okey, a little boring but.... Any way got my old laptop working so i now got both music and sound

For gameplay i have just two things to say;

Against UFO's : Hooverbikes

Tactical turnbased : Marsec's launcher and Marsec's M4000

Having aboute 15 hooverbikes and the hoovercars in the second week i usually manage to down the UFO's, ofcourse is can be tricky if/when they send more then 2 fast attack UFO's.... i've probably playd trough the game 20-25 times and this is what has worked best for me, at least the first weeks....

My point was really, if you down all the UFO's you actually dont have to do any tactical missions, as llong as you can keep up the research....

[Flowbar]

I noticed that if you shoot down a lot of UFOs the first week, for second week you'll be facing transports and fast attack ships with shields, so just downing a single scout and a single proble can actually help you keeping tech advancement down. The down side is of course that you'll have to do a lot of missions vs non-equipment aliens (worms, spitters, brainsuckers), so you don't get cash from the tactical battles.

I tried to use lasers and autocannons against fast attack ships with shields and I say it takes AGES to down them that way. The shields go down fairly quickly, but they are too well armoured, so the guns don't do enough damage. My next try will be using rendors and janitors, from what I remember that combo takes the FASs down much quicker. On the other hand, there is hardly any damage done to the city if I use lasers/guns.

I find the trickiest part being the tech research order. I usually go for disruptor gun, devastator cannon, personal shield and finally transporter with the highest priority, then if I have spare scientist I go for UFOs, power/control/engines, ship shields, ship guns, new craft, launchers in roughly that order and save boomeriods, vortex mines, cloaking devices and ship teleporters for last. This makes sure my foot soldiers get nice protection (shields and cloaking) as soon as possible, but I get well behind in the air combat. Is it worthwhile to shift focus to get medium disruptor beams ASAP?

(Edit: I only play on Superhuman, never even tried another level, this is because I thought I was so good with XCOM 1 on Superhuman, never knew at that time that the game played on Beginner whatever I chose)

[Sharp]

Originally posted by Guest@Jan 11 2006, 07:27 PM
Justice missiles fit on cars and bikes. They are smaller than the Retribution missiles. TRY it.

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.

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.

Wow, didn't really ever use justice's that much to notice, the only advantage when it comes to justice and retribution over other missiles are there devestatingly long range, the high damage, and the relative cheapness per launcher and missile. However if you are a cheapskate then you would be better spending money on lasers or plasma instead. The only way I can see justices doing really good is if you equip around 5 hoverbikes and fire off the round then go back to base (im not too sure how long it takes to reload but i doubt the UFO will still be there once you do).

Although ground vehicles are slow, UFO's seem to rarely miss them and when they do they dont do that much damage to the corp building, also when UFO's shoot buildings, its much better when you do, the more buildings the UFO's shoot the better the rep you get as the rep system has an invisible corp of Alien, and the rep system works in the whole, an enemy of my enemy is my friend, best way to make friends by getting aliens to blow em up. Also the ground anti-air weapons are suprisingly effective, especially the Griffon AFV's choices, the amazing armour it has means it can take a lot of fire as well.

On the whole scoring points, its good to score high points, however when you do the whole raid cult of sirius 500 times in one hour, you tend to get aliens turning up with devestators and shields sharpish as well as scouts and probes being equipped with shields. Alien craft once they escape back to alien dimension just stay there hanging around until the next invasion, the more ships the alien build and have in thier dimension the more often they attack I think, however I believe there is a limit on how many types of ships they will produce so dont worry you won't see 5 motherships when you enter the alien dimension for the first time if you are that bad at shooting them down. A good tactic in the alien dimension is to send a strike fleet, attack the nearest UFO(s) then before all the UFO's can reach to destroy you fleet you just escape out again.

If you keep your score down, it gives you time to research while aliens still use the same weapons. You can really level the playing field like this.

The best craft weapon in my opinion is the lineage plasma cannon (not inc. alien tech that is), although expensive and rare to get, elerium isnt so expensive for using these weapons, equip two in a hovercar along with a shield and you have an extremly powerful agile flying weapons platform which can run away if it looks in danger.