Anyone who wants to talk about "1830 Railroads & RB" or UFO?

[Skanky Burns]

Yeah, exploring the alien environment really became boring after a while. But with my standard stubborness, I finished the game. It was rather sad how differerent the final battle planned out compared to the cutscene afterwards. In the battle, I killed all aliens within two turns. I also destroyed all reinforcement orange squares before they could be used. To put it bluntly, the aliens had no chance. Yet, the cutscene saw some of my agents dying, and the rest barely making it out alive.

Bakalov: The patch was useless if you couldn't get it.

[da_hal]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns

Are you kidding? It was a blatant rip-off!
Bugs were not only present in overwhelming numbers, but they were hugely crippling to gameplay! The tech-tree couldn't have been made less realistic if they rolled dice to determine research order.

yep this is exactly why i decided not to get it...pretty much all the xcom fans hated the 2nd one. i didn't hear anything about the 3rd though, other than it takes place in a single city rather than a whole world now, which even then removes something special the original had.

i like my Antarctic labs, Greenwich base, and Eerie base.

"blatant rip-off?" hehe since when was a sequel _not_ a rip off?

[Grumbold]

Xcom 2 was basically Xcom 1 with more monsters, bigger maps and an underwater theme, but put together a bit sloppily so the patch was needed to sort out some screw ups. I enjoyed it precisely because I wanted to play Xcom 1 again, but with a different scenario. In that respect Xcom 2 didn't disappoint. These days we would expect that much from an expansion pack (probably with just as many bugs, too.)

[Skanky Burns]

XCom 2 didn't add anything original. It was basically a graphics mod. Rather than destroying ufo's over land, the ocean became the "land" and the land was now the no-go zone. Aliens from each could be readily compared on a 1 to 1 ratio. "Ok, these sectiods become aquanoids in XCom2"...

I must say that annoying bugs influenced my feelings towards the game, however.

[da_hal]

hey lets get back to the topic!

how do you guys build up new recruits?

common sense says send them out with some of the vets to protect them, but usually the vets end up dead as the recruit keeps missing and something jumps you from behind.

edit: had to stop typing because my nephew wanted to use mame.

the best way, imho, to build them up was to send out 2 regulars and 6 recruits in your 2nd ship, and give them some cheap weps (i usually used laser rifles when i started using plasma on my good guys because they don't take many pts to use and are cheap to make.) fan out the recruits and if anybody scores a kill, get his butt back to the ship asap and hide there. if all 6 get slaughtered, it's not big deal.

have the 2 regulars finish the mission, and bring whatever surviving recruits back to the base for the instant 1-kill promotion. if your regulars get a promotion, i usually send them up to my "good" crew.

by the late game, i have 3 troop ships. one in the western hemisphere, one in the eastern hemisphere, and one somewhere else for training. all bases are stocked with 4+ soldiers and a bunch of laser rifles. everybody is regular or better, led by a sargent or better.

sometimes, i used one of these crews rather than grouping my best soldiers together because i felt these guys "worked well" together and by separating them, i hurt the chemistry of the team.

[bakalov]

I have finished UFO on superhuman difficulty but I used lot of saving. I probably will have to try it without the saving. It should be quite more difficult I suppose ... Then I will have to use some similar tactics :-)

[da_hal]

i restore often too because the wrong soldiers got killed...but i have done it a few times without because terror missions are too tedious to keep doing over and over again. once i finished with like only 1 officer or something.

the key, to me, is alien base missions. easy kills, lots of stuff, and no shadows. if you capture leaders/engineers or a plasma gun, you are pretty much set. sometimes i would just down all the ships in the ocean and just wait for bases to appear.

[Skanky Burns]

I normally did the save/reload dance. If anyone of my soldiers got killed, it was loading time. Otherwise, I would save, do my turn, save again and then let the enemy do their turn. Even back then though I didn't play too badly, and would rarely get soldiers killed. After the first few missions though it got easier, because all my soldiers were vets.

[bakalov]

I suppose that without saving and reloading it will be quite different game. Of course the save will not be absolutely forbidden but if it is restricted only on exit and you should load that game only once. Then you'll have to change your tactics a lot - you should find yourself using items like medikits and a lot of other stuff which you wold not use otherwise.

I had a friend of mine that told me he tried this. On superhuman difficulty on the first missions he only had the courage to leave the transport craft with two primed grenades in both hands :-)

[da_hal]

heh i just make recruits or regulars be the fodder.

once i got used to the idea that in war, you have casualties, i made sure the "right" soldiers were the casulaties. I tended to name them after old high school bullies and such.

[bakalov]

There is another problem with the soldiers. There always was chance a good soldier to be weak mentally so he/she could easily be MC'ed. I usually drop the mentally weak soldiers too. The alliens seems to attack them with MC first ....

[Skanky Burns]

I always fired soldiers that got MC attacked. They were useless as end-game soldier material anyway, so off they went. I let them live until the end of the mission however.

[Grumbold]

Yep anyone who got mind controlled was left back at camp. The infuriating thing was finding that 70% of your early picks were mental walkovers halfway through the game and needing to pick many more fights just to train up replacements. I forget which version made it possible to get the telepathy research earlier on (apocalypse?) but it did make life a little more bearable.

[bakalov]

On apocalypse you know your mental stats from the beginning, and the mind bender was available from the start. Though your soldiers needed some training first to start using it effectively. Anyway I think that the mind control had much lesser role in Apocalypse. I rarely met the mind controllers there and that was late in the game ... In UFO 1&2 you should be very careful with it, especially if playing with "no save/load".

[da_hal]

iirc, mc was only a problem in certain types of missions, usually the most dangerous and very late in the game, maybe large/huge ships, bases, and terror missions. i usually sent MM's (mental midgets) on other types of missions.

there was a trick too, that if one of your guys got mind controlled, to keep them from being a danger to other people...i think it was keeping your gun unloaded or something. if they are mc'd, they won't load, pick up, or get the gun from the backpack.

also, towards the end, i would only have 1-2 soldiers using guns, the rest would have stun guns and stuff. makes capturing chryssalids really interesting.