X-Com 3 - Apocalypse
 

Feel free to comment and discuss this game here. Also, if you have any useful tips or tricks don't hesitate to share them with the others! Thanks!

Review and Download (if available)

Apocalypse is far from the perfect 5.

I noticed some screenshots are different from the Apocalypse I played. Even tough it was the cracked version I am about sure it was the DOS version... Is the one available for download the second version of it?

I think we might need some sort of a guide that will explain the basics of the game. I've played X-com 1&2 for a long time, but I can't understand a single thing of what's going on in this one... :blink:

Feel free to ask, I will be happy to be the first game specialist for Apocalypse.

I played it to the end more than once and beated it square easily. I can help you with whatever problems you might encounter.

Well here's my first question, did you enjoy Apocalypse more then the original? They look so different... (I absolutely LOVE Xcom - Enemy Unknown).

No, I tottaly hated Apocalypse VS the original. Like many other games too (like Heroes IV).

The trick to still play the game and still have fun with it is to try to play it as if it wasn't really a sequel to the original game but as if it was a new game in itself. Then the game begin to be interesting.

BTW, the real time mode is in every way superior to the turn by turn mode. It's simply the way they made it. If turn by turn was made like the original it would be way better... But still I remember the developpers putting turn by turn only because they really needed to. Some fans were giving them problems with that... :whistle:

Real time mode is not that bad anyways. You can still pause the game as you wish (with the spacebar if I remember well) and make the game feel like an RTS but with some real strategy involved (unlike Red Alert and the like).

Yes, another excellent add to this great site. :kosta:
But (there's always a 'but'), I can't figure out how I can get my agents out of a car for example anywhere else than a certain place (like a building) when I try to investigate a crashed ufo. Can I get them out elsewhere or do I have to take them out in a building and walk to get my agents where I want them? :blink:

No. This mean that you are really in trouble if an important organisation get taken away by the Aliens (such as Transtellar, Marsec, the police force, the governement or the other company which sells you arms).

On the other hand it is often an opportunity to get points and items to sell when you attack those fallen organisations (Like the cult for example, which is usually the first to fall). The trick is not to lose too much soldiers when raiding them. If it is done well and without casualties (personal shields helps a lot) then it is very profitable.

If you become at war with Transtellar you won't be able to use taxis and thus won't be able to recruit personnels. In fact you will be able to recruit them but they won't be able to get to your base so you will never be able to use them. I think you can still recruit Squaddies and to fetch them yourself but the research and engineering personnel will sit in their recrutment spot until they go away by themselves.

Thus having good terms with Transtellar is a must at all time, and if it is taken by the Aliens you're pretty much dead unless you are really at the endgame.

Is there a manual out there I could view?

The game seems pretty interesting, but it's as confusing as heck! :Titan:
Of course, for lack of a manual, all my questions will be dumped onto any of you who may read this.

Current issue: How do I equip agents into a vehicle, and once I have done that, how do I "land" at a UFO crash site? I figured I might get an idea by sending an empty car, but it just drives back and forth on the street next to the UFO. Would something have happned if there were agents in the car?

Sorry if I sound like a n00b. And thank you to anyone who has the patience to help me out.

This is a normal issue and it actually got me several tries to figure it out.

Thing is that there is a strange "lag" when you try to take personnel "on" vehicles. You need to go to the vehicle screen, select your squaddie then drag and leave them on the desired vehicle. You can move several squaddies at the same time by selecting them all then dragging one to the desired vehicle.

Then, you need to select the vehicle in particular in CityScape mode and either send the craft to the desired building or to the crashed UFO.

The smaller and lesser UFO's are unmanned and won't require a fight. You'll just recover them. I usually only capture one of each of the smaller UFO's and then don't bother and make them explode in the air when I encounter them.

From past experiences, I am pretty sure that it does make a difference when you actually destroy Alien Ufo's. It doesn't take them much time to build new ones (perhaps a month max for the bigger ones?) but it does seem to buy youself some time and change the way the AI act. If you are very successful at the beginning, you will encounter a lot of bigger and bigger Ufo's until your current technology can't fight them without stupidly high losses. But then again, when you grab their own technology it really give you a boost!

The best strategy I have found so far to fight those Alien crafts is to take something like 5 Hover Bikes and set them to fight at the highest elevation possible and as close as possible to the target. You can change the stance of each craft when you select them on the CityScape. The Hover Bikes are stupidly hard to hit for the Aliens because they are so small and so maneuverable, and most of the time the Hover Bike will simply dodge the beams which would have teared your biggest ships appart without a problem. This allow your bigger ships (like the Phoenix Hover Car for example, which is cheap but virtually armorless) to stay further the front line and throw missiles from a further distance. Most of the time they won't even come under fire unless you are really fighting lots of UFO's at once. Also make sure that your Troop Transport is far from the action and safe. It's easy to lose it to bad luck if several Alien Crafts decide to fire at it at the same time.

Usually, I always make crafts which are 50% to retreat and repair. Crafts cost a lot in this game and losing them only to down a Ufo is not worth it. You can still use a craft being repaired on an emergency mission later on, and if Air Superiority fail then send your squaddie and eliminate the Alien threat from the ground.

The strategy mentionned above (with Hover Bikes) works quite well against Metropolis crafts as well, but is less effective due to them almost always having aiming missiles equiped and due to the fact that they are more maneuverable than most UFO's. They also really pack less of a punch, so unless you are unlucky retreating at 50% health will usually save your crafts anyways.

Don't overlook the Hover Bikes power. Their seemingly powerless guns really add up when they team up. Have 10 of them and you'll see them tear into a bigger UFO shield in no time. Plus they are really hard to hit and are cheap to replace.

Random tip #2: Always upgrade the biggest engine available to each of your craft. If you buy a bunch of crafts at the same time (or at the beginning of the game), you can actually take the engine of one craft and put it in another knowing it's the most powerfull one they can bear (because of the size of the engine square). For example, if I remember well the Phoenix Hovercar engine is the biggest engine a Hover Bike can be equipped with, so don't sell those and use them on the Hover Bikes you'll purchase. I think the same thing happen to your troop transport VS your Phoenix Hovercar but I don't remember well. Anyways, reason for this is that you want power and speed, and since you will be placing aiming equipment on those crafts and that it add weight and lower your engine power and acceleration (slightly), you have no choice if you don't want to suck the UFO's exhaust vapor trail. It also greatly help in combat. Maneuvrability is really your friend until you build your own crafts later in the game since your craft armor is very weak against the Aliens weapons.

Random tip #3: always make your crafts to fly and fight at the highest altitude unless you have a really good reason to do otherwise. Until you actually fight with beam weapons yourself, the aliens have the bigger guns... And a stray fire from those babies if it hit the base of a random building will usually result in having the building flattened completely. This will irritate the leaders of that faction to no end, taking their strance VS Xcom down each time. Plus the Government (which fund you) always get angry when anything on the city is destroyed and this goes against your weekly score. If you fly high the UFO usually fire at your upward, and you can save friendly fire this way.

Of course, some members of the "Cult of Cyric" sometime accuse Xcom to fly around their buildings in purpose when fighting bigger Alien Crafts... Which always been soundly refuted by the Xcom Leaders. That's what war is about, you will have friendly fire sooner or later... ... ... Ahem... :whistle:


Happy hunting!

[Edited for grammar and syntax errors... One of my earliest post... :wall:]

I remember that several organizations fall into aliens hands. Well, I made war with them for a while but found out that it's useless. So as I become better, I kicked some alien butts and slowly ALL organizations were allied with me, even the ones that were taken by aliens. Except that Cult offcourse.

Any organisations could be taken over by the Aliens. Don't forget to check your charts and if an organisation goes above 50% and you know you probably won't have a warning mission message, go to their buildings and search for aliens. If you destroy all the Aliens the organisation will fall bellow 50% again and then will continue dropping unless the Aliens invade it again.

Apocalype manual, if anyone still wants it:
http://www.xcomufo.com/x3manual.pdf

this games the bomb

i still got the cd version and its great and eagle on fire i tryed making personal shealds but as soon as i make one another on is destroyed so is there any wa of making them faster apart from getting engineers with 100

:ok: great work with this good adition. :ok:

ps. the only other x com game im awear of is interceptor and i work in a game store so i dont think there is another one coming but ill check the comp for a release date if someone can tell me the name of the game.

Personnal shield is the best addition to your forces. The trick is not to make them, but to "steal" them from the Aliens. There is more than one way to take care of the Aliens without dropping their shields to zero. I'll let you discover those ways by yourself. :ok:

Cool. do you get any new research from it also you know those big yellow aliens can you capture one alive.

:cry: theres marsec and phsyke and both say while x com opposes our alien friends negotiations are imposibe but there alien infiltration is set to 0%. :cry:

luckely i dont need marsec cos i have heaps of alien weapons :evil: :rifle:

i need help here...

i have destroyed the objective in alien dimensian building (alien maintenance building, a mission to destroy some kind of pyramid-like building), but the game never say anything \bout building disabled...!

has anyone face the same problem? any1 know how to finish this mission ? need help here ppl, pleaseeeee..... :cry: :cry: :cry:

You need to destroy all the objects mentioned in the briefing. Then, you simply get out and the building crumble. You get to research the next building and raid it too etc. until you win.

You need to destroy the objects entirely or they won't count as destroyed. I only hope that you brought a lot of explosives with you because on some missions you might need a lot. Fortunatly the Aliens often carry grenades with them which are strong enough to destroy the installations.

thx for the quick reply.

the problem is, i have destroyed all 5 columns up to the ground with devastator canon. bt the game still doesnt trigger any winning condition..am i messed up somethin' or do i have to use vortex mine as the only firepower to blow up the thingy (i mean don;t use devastator or any other gun, except VM )? i'm little in short supply of VM here coz i have destroyed nearly all the alien transporter device (1 that make alien keep bugging).

I fear I can't help you much on the matter since I can't see it visually. I remember one mission in particular in which I was wandering around aimlessly, killing waves after waves of Alien trying to figure out what to do... If I remember well there was one last object hidden somewhere on a kind of "cliff" that I did not noticed until then.

Anyways, if you really can't find out just save your game and try to exit the building to see if you succeeded in destroying the building. If everything fail try the mission a second time after realoading/healing your troops, the map will most probably be different and you might just win it the second time without problems.

hi eagle,

i finally passed the alien maintenance building mission (apparently, i have to destroy all rounded shape column, and i found 4 'missing' collumn near teleporter).

quick tip for those face suckers... *those what takes your char under controll*

If you go prone, they cant jump to your head.

Sorry if this was old tip.

Those brain suckers are the reason why you should always carry a grenade on you. I myself always team my squaddies in pair in minimum for the same reason, so if someone get attacked from behind and he have one of those aliens on the head his teamate can shoot it for him.

If this fail or he can't do it for any reason, just take a grenade from the guy who is being brain sucked, prime it to 0 second and drop it. Your squaddie might be slightly bruised (having a full hp armor help not to) but the Brain Sucker will die from the explosion.

Note that the human weapon which fire really fast can kill one of those Suckers in one shot, and it is a very good reason to have some of those guns equipped in the early game. And it also train your rookies aim a lot in the process...

What I usually do is give those kind of usi to the rookies with poor aim, those with average aim I give them the big guns and those with incredible aim I give them the sniper gun. Then as they get better I simply drop the usi guns, since they tend to become obselete quite fast anyways. Fortunatly, since they train accuracy so much I still use them sometime, until the Aliens bring some personnal force fields to protect themselves. Then they really become useless, and you should have very highly trained squaddies by then who should be able to kill a fly at 50 metters easily anyways. ;)

Perhaps, but I never tryied it since it requires insane amount of money to make other organisations to get allied with you and that it's also extremely easy to lose that alied status. Just hitting a building owned by them might be enough to reconsider their stance, and you still lose the money you paid.

You certainly don't want to have organisations at war with you tough, especially Transtellar. Unless of course you like being attacked at your bases by those organisation and don't mind the extra challenge of needing to down all the organisation guards as well as the Aliens when you need to enter their buildings... :whistle:

As for Transtellar, if you get a war with them they refuse to allow you to use their transports or commuting system, effectively preventing you from getting new scientists, receiving new material and transfering material from base to base... Not something interesting to experience. :not_ok:

heheh... I LOVE invading those temples... :manic grin: MONEY!

It's strange though.. I can kill hundreds of those green guys and their religion seems to keep having new converts...

Plus, it doesn't matter how poor they get - they still have enough money to buy those drugs.

And, your approval rating doen't really go down.

BUT as soon as you blow their temple up, you get told off for causing damage to the city. Humph.

OK... erm...

Can a road vehicle go off-road, like to a crash or something? I couldn't get it to, so I got mad and sold all the road vehicles.

Are security stations invulnerable? The aliens & co. shoot their little bombs at it, but it just keeps ripping them into tiny pieces.

Why do the interceptors suck in this game? In EU, a few interceptors could take down a battleship even with Stingers or whatever those wimpy missles were called, or one could do it with a plasma beam. But in this game, an interceptor would use all my money and just get blown up! I only use them for transport now.

The answer is no, and I would say it was a good move to take the extra cash from the vehicles. I would suggest you not to sell the APC tough just in case your Skyranger get shooted down. It's still faster this way than to make your soldiers "walk" to the building.


Really depend of the Aliens weaponry VS your kind of security station. I've seen the default (first model available) version of the security station get destroyed so bad it actually destroyed the room and I had to rebuild it, so my answer to this question would be: they are not invulnerable.

<!--QuoteBegin-CMI Posted on Feb 1 2005@ 05:27 AM
Why do the interceptors suck in this game? In EU, a few interceptors could take down a battleship even with Stingers or whatever those wimpy missles were called, or one could do it with a plasma beam. But in this game, an interceptor would use all my money and just get blown up! I only use them for transport now. [/quote]
Because they are not interceptors. First of all, your Skyranger should not even engage the UFO's unless you want a deadly disaster to happen to your soldiers. Most of the time in my game that ship don't even lift off before the UFO's are retreating.

Second, you are fighting over a city, not a hundred miles over the sea or the ground. Supersonic planes would not be welcome and allow me to remind you that you been hired by the Government of that city to get rid of the Aliens, so it does make sense that you don't use them. What you can use is armored version of civil fying cars and ships which can (in theory but not in this game) fly as well in space than in the sky, so it makes sense that they are also slower than supersonic planes.

Even tough, your ships easily outmaneuver the medium to large UFO's and the Speeder Bike can easily outmaneuver the small ones. Since you can't count on either stealth, power or endurance (like in UFO), you'll have to gamble on speed and agility to survive in this kind of duel. All the ships comes with an engine which can be "upgraded", depending of the available engine space. As a rule of thumb, all engines can be "upgraded" at least "once", meaning that for example the Speeder Bikes can get a turbo engine which is slightly bigger than the original, but still fit in the little engine square. I would advise you to get better engine for all your crafts (I always do myself).

Here is a quote of an earlier post of mine in this thread which could be usefull for you:

Well, after three earlier failed attempts to capture a personal shield bearing alien alive I decided to go for broke and assembled a special strike team to assault a ufo and either succeed or perish to a man/woman.
It was going quite well and I decided to move in close after taking out the poppers. Then I noticed a green missile cruising towards me :help:
Ironically, this was the time I met my first entropy missile. I succeeded in the end, but I lost three brave soldiers (including armor) to those damn missiles - tactic suggestions anyone ?

For those of you who wonder why I slugged it out close and personal with heavily armored and shielded aliens, you must stun one of the aliens with a personal shield otherwise you will never get it and you're basically doomed. Personal shields are also the only thing that protect against entropy missiles as far as I know. And the silly sods refused to come out of the ufo so I had to go in and get them :rifle:

On a side note, contrary to earlier posts I advise your vehicles to fly low instead of high when intercepting ufos. When firing at ufos they generally aim high and when they miss your laser/plasma whatever beam stands a much lower chance of accidentally blowing a building to bits. It generally saves me around $40000,- on bribes to transstellar after each battle :ok: Even better, the aliens will be firing downward, ensuring lots of damage to the city which is good for your public relations :evil:

A final tip, when engaging ufos, always use a pair of hoverbikes to lead the attack. The ufos will tend to engage them and they are extremely hard to hit. While the ufos are levelling the city shooting at and missing your bikes (which is good :D for your public relations) your heavily armed hovercars can move in and blast away at them at their leisure.

Cheers,
Lodewijk

p.s Question : if I overclock my dosbox (say 20000 cycles), will this make the game run slower than if I run it at a lower rate ?

Entropy missiles are overated. As soon as you will equip your squaddies with personnal shield you will never fear those again. When they hit a shield they don't do progressive damage, only hit once and bring the shield to about 2/3 or so. Also entropy missiles are guided to their target and it's extremely easy to lure a missile in a wall, an object or even sometime another Alien.

For the shields, you can actually carry more than one shield at a time. I don't remember well but I think that only one work at a time. If it fails then it get destroyed so I remember dropping the shields to the ground when they were about to die. By doing so only a grenade or something with enough explosive power could destroy the shield when it's on the ground and if you win the mission the shield will return as loot just like any other equipment at the end of the mission. Plus shields regenerate over time so if you find yourself low on shield just return back where you left it and you should have it back on full strenght. Either that or keep rotating soldiers with low shield to the back row so they can regenerate and keep those with still strong shield to the front so they soak up the damage.

Shields are also overated. They are not that hard to overcome and you can easily kill Aliens without damaging the shield with bio-toxins guns. I hardly ever need to make some myself once I get those guns. Usually I always have many in reserve.

If you want a destroyed city it's up to you but I myself hate to see highways destroyed and waiting forever for them to be rebuilt and to be able to get those new recruits to my bases... I never really noticed if the UFO destroying the city bring organizations to your side but I do know that it goes against your weekly score so I always tryied to have the city damaged to a minimum. This include as well my crafts than the UFO's. It really depend on your style since I usually don't kill UFO's unless it's needed or easily downed. By the end of the game it's something else though and your strategy should change accordingly.

Answer: if you overcycle your DOSBox then it will begin to go slower after reaching your CPU max power peak. You might experience sound sluttering too if you do so.

you dont always have to go into the UFO to get the last of the aliens. what i do is sit outside each entrance to the UFO with my men and wait for them to come out. i wait till the flow of aliens charging out has stopped and then i send in 4 soldiers into to clear out the last few aliens.


by the way, how do you guys set up your squad at the very start of the game when you've got no alien technology at all? Personally, i get 11 humans and one sectoid/human. 4 of them get the Marsec Flying Suit Armour with the Laser Sniper Rifles, 4 get 2 machine guns each, 2 get dual mega-whatsit pistols, and the last 4 get auto cannons with 2 extra clips of AP, HE, and IE rounds.

and is it just me or is the mouse sensitivity in x-com crazy low?

I usually go with 4 teams of 3 or 3 teams of 4 so it really depend of the amount of available soldier... But I usually go with 4 robots and 8 humans. The 4 robots are because at the very beginning they are really superior to humans and can soak up damage well so I ideally want one per team. It's usually the crazy soldier who cover his teamates while they flee and I often use robots in situations where a walking bomb can't be avoided. Robots have a lot of health and usually survive a walking bomb hit while normal human squaddies can easily die at the beginning because they don't have enough health (yet).

When the flying Marsec armor get available then the whole setup change. I buy 3 Marsec elerium guns and 3 psy guns along with a set of 3 Marsec armor (the red one) and fit a Mutant squad of 3 as my last (fourth) team. Mutants have nice Psy powers but are really defficient when it comes to physical training so having them kill easy targets from a distance (after I used their Psy powers) usually bring aim and endurance up to an acceptable level after several missions. The real reason why I outfit them with the Marsec armor is because they can fly with it and it weight almost nothing. If I were to equip normal armour to rookie Mutants they would have trouble walking instead of running like the others, being able to fly counter this. If I could I guess I would only equip the Marsec torso armor so they fly but the weight of the normal armor really makes a difference so I usually end up giving them full suits. Also it doesn't make much difference once you get the personnal shield technology.

For the guns I usually try to take a balanced loadout of small guns and big guns. I never take rocket launcher and I never did in any Xcom game either. I never even considered once to take those clumsy and inneficient weapons, I always wondered why others would. Probably because they are "cool". Anyways, back to the point: at the beginning I give weapons to squaddies depending of their attributes. If I spot a squaddie with high strenght and aim then I give him a big gun. If he only have high aim then he gets a sniper riffle. If they are lacking aim then I give them the minigun (the gun which fire red bullets really fast) so they can take care of the Brainsuckers on close range and gain aim points this way. And it works, I often get guys who used a minigun since the beginning to take a sniper rifle once they get veteran. Then there is usually lots of rookies to take the minigun for him anyways. :D

Also I always equip my squaddies with a medpack and a grenade. Then it depend if they can take more weight without hurting their speed too much. If they can take more then I add a stun grenade, then a second grenade and then a second stun grenade. I also always place them in the shoulders, the stun grenades to the right and the normal grenades to the left, but that's just me. I do know that it was less costly in Xcom 1 and 2 in TU to take something from the shoulders than from the belt but I don't think it actually change something for Apocalypse if you play real time...

The grenade is essential because it's the last trench of defense for a squaddie if he is getting brainsucked and without anybody to help him around. Poping a grenade with the timer at 0 and immediatly dropping it to the squaddie feet will probably injure the squaddie but the Brainsucker will die from the explosion. I prefer an injured squaddie to a new ennemy in any rate.

I know this could be a noob question, but here it go:

How can I stop the Alien Infiltration in the Organizations? Like, Marsec has 17% infiltraded.
Turn them my allies will avoid the alien infiltration? I dunno really wha to do

For an organisation to be taken up by Aliens they need an unit somewhere in one of the organization buildings. Aliens can't go around this, it must be done. What I usually do is check the graphs a lot and moniter infiltration very closely. I usually do everytime I finish a mission but most often than not it only take a second or two since I'm only spotting for organization with infiltration near 50%. Bellow 50% an organization is still pretty safe, above 50% you're in trouble and need to find that nasty Alien(s) who escaped your grasp. The trick is to find out where exactly the Alien(s) might be hiding.

More often than not if you are only a half decent spotter you will be able to see where exactly the UFOs beam down their friends. Once this is done the Alien(s) will usually try to infiltrate the attacked building but not all the time. Other times they will send small teams to also infiltrate adjacent buildings and speed is really the key here. The sooner you'll arrive with your team, the smaller the map will be (also influenced by the number of squaddies and Aliens on the map) and the smaller chance you will have for Aliens to get away to other buildings. Also do not forget that Aliens can flee the battlefield just like your squaddies. Sometimes they get away that way and flee to adjacent buildings.

So, what I usually do is to get to the city map and point at the last building which got Aliens beamed down to it. Then I select the half infiltrated organization so their buildings are highlighted on the map. If a building is near that point then it's pretty much that building you need to storm.

As long as there is Aliens in the building you storm then the organization won't mind much that you get there and kill them. If there is not, however, their standing VS you will drop a little each time you do this. It is worth checking all the buildings until you find the right one tough even if you need to make that organization hate you. You are there to defend the city after all, and you can always increase standing with donation money later on. It usually cost way less to bring an ennemy organization to like you than to try to get allied with one.

Thnx for the exaplanation :D

So, I have to search for Aliens in the adjacents buildings from the mission? Ok, I'll do it, and before I will save.

But... can I decrease the percentage of the alien infiltration? like 20% to 5%?

This has got to be the best game i have played! I love X-COM games but this one is really the best of the UFO series. It marks a change from the world level to city level play . this basically means instead of controlling the world or planet you control the city. This is really fun as you can go and raid the building of the faction that hates you and watch them do a slow burn. Anyone got marshmellows?

This was horrible. HORRIBLE. Everything about it just screamed slipshod and money-grubbing. The city-level thing was such a crappy reason to limit the environment, and the characters were lacking in the original two game's originality, as limited as that actually was. It was trying to be Syndicate with aliens, and failed miserably.

It was worse than UFO: Aftermath, and that's saying something.

While Apocalypse is by far the worse Xcom game you are really far from reality by saying it was worse than Aftermath. Apocalypse is weak when related to Xcom but good enough a game in itself.

Anjinsan: the % will drop with time as long as there is no Alien trying to take the corporation over. With enough time it will go back to 0%.

Thnx again for the help

Well, I really think that Aftermath is worse than Apocalypse

and don't think the 3rf edition is limited... the environment is much better than Enemy Unknow, u have lot of Organizations to deal, 3 races of soldiers and a more organized staff for researchs...

I sugest Mentor more patience and more hour of play to be envolved by Apoc.

- Yes... X-COM 1 are the best

I played that game (Apocalypse) for six days, just to get it over with and beat it. Then I played a marathon of X-Com 1 and 2 and some Breach 3 for good measure to get the horrid taste out of my proverbial mouth.

IT SUCKED. SUCKED.

EDIT: And I just remembered, it isn't the worst of the X-Com games. Anyone remember X-Com: Interceptor? The flight sim? THAT was the worst X-Com game. Apocalypse comes in a close second.

In my book the Xcom serie stopped at Apocalypse just like the C&C serie stopped at the original. The others were only milking cows which borowed a name to boost sales and turned out to be awfull games.

yeah eagle i made two new folders called save and saves just in case before i asked, but that didnt seem to work either, what exactly is the name of the save folder you have in your directory?

if u dont mind.. il write few good tips for all u players...

if u want to be super player dont read this tips cause they are like cheats :D
if u really want to be better player at shorter time just read this



at the beginig 1st of all equip all ur agent to have both weapons and so on...
i have always at begining one squad of 6 units something like this:
1bomber (bombs and thins... light weapons)
2 psi (for capturing aliens, usaly whit some stun grenades and stun rifle)
1sniper (2 sniper guns whit good acc)
2 normal whit mixed weapons

about vehicles are 2 things:
1st: SELL ground units- maybe they are good but if u got super armored tank... if the road under him is detroyed, tank will be lost or any other units.. or traped
2nd: try to use as many pheonix and hoverbikes as u already say it cause of speed, later sell them and build hawks before u get something heavyer like retaliator or annihalator. us best weapons like:
dont use elerium powered weapons (they are really good, especxialy at begining but use a LOT of ammo and if u lose one ship whit 2 large elerium weapons whit 220 ammo togheter [cant remember name :crazy: ] they willl really drain ur reserves if u rebuild them) and try to use like weapons whit infinity ammo( laser), but never this one shoot rockets, they are good at ground targets only!!! not air, u will miss surly and hit a building cause of arc path and its hight possibilety to coalapse especlialy slums

About base :
NEVER use slums; they can be destroyed whit ONE hit and it will kill al agents and scienits in ur building.try to get warehouse whit biggest room (if u get slums at beggining just restart and it will be diferetn.. or same cause random function)
Plan base smart. u have to thing about later game when u egt big labs whit 2×2 room so u can have all in one warehouse at beging. They are very often attacking base if u have new one. NEVER forget to defend the base. not only whit securety station but whit some good equipt agents. be prepared for coult raids later in game and organizations taken over by alines!!

later in game ul have to get 2 seperate squads of agents on missions, especialy in alien dimension. i usally use 3 teams in alien but 2 well equipt are also enaught (1 team = 6 agents) i recomend always to have a "bomber" at dispose to use it to destroy like walls and thinigs. he is usaly unarmed so protect it. one way iss to use marces flying armor (if u use only marces torso, it will fly even if other armor is from x-com (blue one) or megapol)

Use toxic weapons as soon as posible and devestator canon (the strongest of all agains buldings cause toxic gun is for alines strongest [toxin C])
equip 2 shields in inventory and agents will survive much longer. later use invisibilety

AND never forget about med kits against major injurys!

i thing thats most of it and im sorry about bad spelling :whistle:

if here are any thing that arent true or something like that just say it and i will try to "prove ti"
have a nice day :ok: ... or night :D

I notice nobody mentioned the "strip-down" technique for victims of Entropy missiles...simple and easy, if you're in real-time and see an Entropy missile heading for you, hit the pause button strip off all your armor, gear and weapons and let your agent take the hit...it will take off some hitpoints but he can at least keep his armor.

If you're playing turn-based though you might not want to do this. :D

I always used to start out the same way - max out the engines in your hovercar and shuttle, dump the smaller things cos they're pants and find some better equipment for your agents (pistols? pah!) based on their attributes (f'rinstance, only give heavy weapons to the cyborgs - they can carry them and don't get brainsuckered either). then i usually go raid the Cult of Sirius' temples a few times to get money and experience while i wait for some aliens to show up. oh, and switch your scientists and engineers for the ones in the pool in order to maximise the total skill available. then get researching whatever you can, starting straightaway with Alien Containment. once you've got that, get a ground-based troop carrier with plenty of space for agents and aliens (and equipment) and put some more useful things on your flying ship (which you should put some better weaponry on straight off.)

oh, and don't use the snipy laser rifle things in turn-based mode unless you have a high accuracy - just use the machine gun. the rifles are better once you get better accuracy and in realtime (i always found, at least.)

While playing XPOC, I got to a point where I was researching a live brainsucker. When the research finishes, the game asks me to insert the APOC CD.

Anyone seen this and / or know how to get past it?

Random Technical Opinions:

Personal shields take a long time to manufacture, but they are worth it. Use more than one on each soldier for extra protection.
Very nice to have when those Entropies start flying from the mist.

Make sure you mop up all the aliens that land in the buildings of the city. Don't wait until the alarm goes off; observe where the UFO's deploy their mega-bowels and funnel the troops down.

Before a UFO attack, save your game. Then ultraspeed until the UFO's appear and note the time at which they do so.
Now load your game. This time, deploy your combat vehicles before-hand so that you are better prepared to face the threat. Don't do it too early - that will consume more fuel that you might need - and obviously not too late.

When the Brainsuckers come, put all your weapons into auto fire mode and focus fire on the suckers. Experienced agents can take'em in the air like a clay pigeon.

Raid the snot out of the cult buildings. Reap the rewards; among other things the coveted PsiClones - those things usually (initially) sell for over 4000 credits a piece. The cultists are numerous, but have weak armor.
However, sometimes you may face one or two who wield the rocket launcher. This is extremely dangerous - watch out.

Auto Cannon with explosive - or even better (but more dangerous) - incendiary rounds are super-efficient against Hyper Worms in auto fire mode.

If you're feeling lucky, you can hurl enemy grenades back at the enemy. It may explode in your hands, but then again, it might also land right at the enemy's feet. Can you say 0wned-D'oh!

After reading through this thread from start to finish it seems a lot of peeps are having un-necessary troubles running APOC in XP. Firstly although DosBox is a useful program it severely eats processor power, and I don't care how tough you think your machine is, it will still eat it. I use a 3.4GHz processor in an Alienware laptop and Dosbox is still using 65% of my processor resources just to tick over. So instead, for APOC anyway, I use XP to run it. Best method is to first install VDM sound if you haven't already, it can be found all over the net, just google it. Then open up your xcom folder and change the compatibility settings on xcomapoc.exe and on setup.exe to windows 95 compatibility, and 256 colours only. Then run setup.exe and choose a soundblaster card, settings as 220, IRQ 7, DMA 1. Save and exit, now to run the game, right click on the xcomapoc.exe file and select "run with VDMS". The intro video messes up but just hit enter or space to skip past it, and the rest of the game runs like a dream. The video's run in DosBox, but the rest of the game was very choppy to me, no matter how much I increased the cycles. :wall:

I hope this helps those who still aren't getting to experience this great game. I understand there are a lot of people better versed in X-Com than me as I've only ever played apocalypse, but from this stance, of playing the game as a unit in itself rather than a sequel to the previous games I feel it's a very good addictive game. :D

how can i get to research toxin C for toxiguns? i did it with A and B and i have researched everything that could possibly be researched (though i still havent visited alien dimension with squaddies, only the probe, could this be the problem?) and i still dont have it available for research. i have examined all the aliens, ufos and weapons that those slimes carry with them on trips to the city and still cant get to the C toxin
help me please!

Hummm, I don't know. In some of my games I never had access to toxin A while in others it seemed like I never got access to toxin C...

All in all, toxin B is powerfull enough for every needs as it is only slightly less powerfull and still have all the advantage of toxin A (and thus, C).

To get Toxin C you have to capture the alien Queen alive. Its really difficult, because it takes dozens gas Grenades to stun her. Also I think you need an empty cell to keep her. When you have her you also get gas-grenades and rockets.

yes and also one was is kill everything around it, than save!
after that u shuld try to shot it whit devestator cannon one or 2 times.. if u kill it, reload. than it will be ALOT easyer to capture it

after that, everybody in agency says: lets party :cheers:

The manual, along with hundres of other pc game manuals, can be found here:

http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.1133

Just click the little disk image to download

You better put aside a few hours tho, as this baby is 200 pages long!!!!

I myself have never played Apocalypse, but loved the 1st 2 games, so though I would give this a go.

For those that cant get it to run, try using the VDMS_Apoc.bat file to run the game and not xcomapoc.exe. Runs it fine me for me.

Anyhow, hope the link to the manual comes in handy. Have Fun :)

Got a question. I remember looking in the folders of my X-com apoc (original CD version, long ago ;) ) and finding a folder with a load of images and pictures in it. Among those pictures were a load of guns and utilities I never had / found. They all had the design style of the toxic pistol, just bigger and looked awsome.

So I wonder, I read in the posts that you guys say "toxic gunS", does this mean I missed out on these superior weapons? When I finshed the game, I had nothing left to research, and all I had was the toxic pistol...

I know what you mean :D

Yes, there are some really strange pictures, but they don't have any purpose (e.g. they aren't in the game)

I think that also picture for walls that are around city can be found there..

Ive used the hover bikes with the best engines and they set shoot + they die after an minute of fighting (game minute).They were flying at highest altitude. :ranting:
they got destroyed by 1 or 2 shots the same for armoredcars, tanks, hovercars, vakyries and Hawks.And one more thing WHY I CANT USE MY TANKS IN BUILDNINGS or in base defense.

I think you are just not following the right tactics. Don't blame the game as arcade if you do not pay more attention to your tactics.

I do not recommend sending the valkyrie for shooting down ufos. If you check the posts in the thread you will find some very good strategies and tactics that may help you if you follow them.

Try setting your vehicles to either Cautious or Evasive tactics. That way, they'll retreat once their constitution has been lowered a certain amount.

Stay at high altitude, and try to make use of the Justice/Retribution heavy missiles, or plasma weapons, if you've got elerium. I managed to fend off most alien attacks with a force mostly consisting of hoverbikes, until the battleships and motherships showed up.

I tried but when they used defensive they were still blasted to bits and when they were set to evasive hmm... well they were not shot so often but they (The hoverbikes) didnt shoot at the ufos.
Oh BTW i managed to force down an transport (standard tactic) but ive lost six bikes (out of ten).
And another thing, to reaserch toxin B you need many alive and dead aliens (anthro...somthing,spitter,skeletoid).
As for the tactics, the solidiers always duck or prone on the ground.
I use devastator cannons and any grenades xept the smokes witch my soldiers only carry one at a time and never use them coz there is nothing worse than a pooper running out of the smoke 2 meters before you.
Ive got 2 bases (slums, warehouse) the warehouse is my research center and i defend it by wrapinding the entrance with 4 guard stations (PLASMA) and 6 cyborgs armed with devastator cannons and nades.In every batle i use cover even the johny can be my guard post.
And fialy i stoped raiding the cult of sirius in the second week because they dont have (now :evil: ) mutch money.

You might wanna consider upgrading to Valkyries & War Hawks, equip them with Medium Beam weapons, Prophet or Janitor Missile Arrays & Disruptor Shields. If you don't have those, Lineage Plasma Cannons at the very least. Later on, advance to Disruptor Bombs and add on a Advanced System Control, if you can. If you're losing that many Hoverbikes just for one alien ship, you're wasting too much money.

Let's see, you need to have captured and autopsied all aliens up to Skeletoids (Spitters, Poppers, Anthropods, etc.) for Toxin B. For Toxin C, you'll need to research a living & dead Micronoid, Megaspawn, & Psimorph (the last 2 captures being fairly difficult tasks).

Try to research the Disruptor Bomb ASAP, that weapon can really change the tide in cityscape battles. The shields just enhance the survival rating of your craft.

Um, question. Does the motion scanner scan for movement at all levels? Or just the one the user is currently on?

With the introduction of the personal teleport, hunting down those last few aliens has went from difficult to hellish.

TIP.

last time I played this was some 18 months back.. no cheat and in superhuman level.

Heres how i got good soldiers at the very first day:

Since Serus cult will prove to be the constant pain in the behind, I immediately attack their quarters armed with whatever weapons i could use.

Naturarally, sniping weapons is the best to train your guys for marksmanship. So too is a light powered pistol and a stun grenade. stun the enemy, remove their weapon, enclose him so he wont escape, and once he comes to, shoot using pistol. you get to hit him more with the pistol to gain more marksmanship.

after the mission, i restock and went back in again and again till most of my soldiers are so high ranking, they are all very ready for the Final Push.

money wont even be a problem - each raid gives you lots of $$$ selling off those loots - but I suggest to hold on to those loots and sell off in one big batch so price wont go down at once

Whats the profit of being allied with an corporation?

If they are allied with you they are not with the aliens. Plus you get more and cheaper (I think) equipment than you would otherwise.

Also, supposedly they won't hate you as much if you happen to cause a lot of property damage or accidentally kill a civilian when you're clearing a building of aliens.

Its me again and i need :help: its the 4 or 5 week and the aliens are blasting my buildning with ufos they razed the slums and desintegrated half of the warehouse... :help: .:.::..::. :help:

Um, all I can say is I hope you have a Hawk Air Warrior or two. If you're desperate, outfit your remaining craft with Retribution or Justice Missile Launchers, and try to take down the strongest craft. With any luck, the missiles will be enough to take down that craft, and might convince the other crafts to retreat. Keep researching, your first goals should be to research the disruptor beams and shields. They'll help greatly.

I just wanted to say, that while I was downloading game on my slow conection, to make my time shorter, I have readed several forums abouth game and advices how to make it work on windows XP

But on my big supprise, after I installed game, it worked without any problems with all sound to, right from XP (didn`t used any other program)
just wanted to share my good fortune with you :)

I didn´t see it covered anywhere, so I´ll post my drop of wisdom: cleaning the city of bugs.

The aliens can obviously enter the city using ufos. They can be transported, or sometimes spread from a downed ufo. In the first case, a white... thing connects the ufo with the building, so make sure you monitor all the ufos and don´t miss those. After fighting the crafts, send your team(s) to that building and kill all the aliens.

After that, of after recovering a downed ufo, make the time advance somewhat and check the alien infiltration gaphs. Aliens don´t stay in one building, but they spread to nearby ones, so go to the map and check what buildings owned by those companies are near the building you just cleaned, or the downed ufos. Go to these buildings, check and clean them. Rince and repeat, and in no time you´ll have a city without a single alien egg, giving you plenty of time to raid sirius.

Yeah right but when i got the devastators and shealds its boring... the cultivists are defensles... and it never gives you mutch profit usualy 40 K.

Yeah Question the aliens recently captured the tehnocrats... they dont sell nothing and sutch... whats the diference :blink: .
They like to party with the ufo's or not :cheers:

The Technocrats doesn't make much of a difference in the game but they are still part of the government so you'd want to protect them as a priority. Still a pretty safe faction to lose to Aliens tough.

curiously, my cultists start getting alien tech (specially disruptor guns, devastator cannons, boomeroids and shields) just after a while I do. I think all those devastator cannons and shields I put in the matket found their way to their hands, or maybe they have a double agent in my labs :blink:

curiously, my cultists start getting alien tech (specially disruptor guns, devastator cannons, boomeroids and shields) just after a while I do. I think all those devastator cannons and shields I put in the matket found their way to their hands, or maybe they have a double agent in my labs :blink: [/b][/quote]
Some say the equipment of all enemies are really based on your current score. I'd have to say this is true, as I know I've never sold off one disruptor shield, and I found gang members & cultists in battle armed with those. If the score of 'Student' continues to advance, soon his cultists will be armed with alien equipment.

I suppose other organizations have their own research labs and workshops. Perhaps they scour areas where recent battles took place for any alien equipment that might've been left behind by you.

How many toxin shots a shield can take ?

Toxin shots goes totally thru Alien Shields and don't damage them. (Hint hint, nudge nudge)

This game was very laggy for me in the tactical combat.
Particularly when those alien used their smoke grenades.

But i dealt quite good with this problem and want to share my solution with you:

After some research I discovered that the dosbox setting "core=dynamic" can increase the performance. Unfortunately I the game crashes if i use this setting.
I further discovered that this can be solved by using dos32a .

Replacing the dos4gw.exe will not be enough. You have to set it internally, for each .exe file of the game.

I had success with the following actions:
Unpack the dos32a files (in my case "c:\progra~1\dosbox\dos32a\")
make backup of all .exe files and copy them to the \binw of dos32a (you need to run the sb.exe for each)
run command prompt
go to your binw folder and type the following commands:

set dos32a=c:\progra~1\dosbox\dos32a (but use your path;))
sb /r xcomapoc.exe
sb /r ufo2p.exe
sb /r smkp.exe
sb /r tacp.exe

Finished. The .exe files are now linked to the dos32a, copy them back to their origins.

Now there is a good chance that you can set cory=dynamic. Well, it worked for me and that means a lot :D

From 12000 cycles I could increase to 25000 with 1 frameskip. The tactical combat is a lot faster, hope it is good enough :)

Are there any other weapons that go thru the shields.
Am i anoying. :bye:

Stun grapples, stun granades. :)

I have a question...
I was playing then the new ufos appeared... One of then are like a medium pink disc, and the other is like a brown cake...
The problem is that my ships always got their behind kicked by those ships... :wall:
Someone has some tip :help:

Upgrade your aerial fleet? Hovercars and Hoverbikes won't last forever. Hawk Air Warriors armed with the best can hold off all but the Motherships and Battleships (trust me, you know'll those by their size). Keep your ships on Cautious tactics to increase their chances of retreat. Research the UFOs to gain better ships.

Okay but i didn't found anything bout the godzilla like alien who charged out of nowhere and is destroying the city.
Ive blasted the SOB atd my question comes up.
How can i get him alive.
I seen the screen in the file.

Is there something i need to do in the alien dimension ?

To have the big "Godzilla" Alien alive you must be very lucky. Second to that, you must have enough space in your Alien prison(s) to keep him alive. You can't do much to get him alive, all you have to do is hit him until he drops dead and if you are lucky it won't be a fatal wound. Killing him after the UFO's leave might help on this too.

The "Godzilla" might be a reall pain in the ... or might be a minor annoyance, depending of your luck at the time. Most of the time I encountered him he never had the chance to do anything more than destroy some of the outer walls of the city and the escorts were more the problem than him.

In almost all games, if you play a good games and deny the Aliens enough in your dimention then you should, in theory, never even meet the "Godzilla" Alien. You really need to allow the Aliens to get loose on your dimention to see him. I don't mean you play bad, but you should difinitly review your strategy and/or tactics if you see that guy often.

Well ive seen him once but ive blasted him to bits as i said.
Ive let them loose? Yer right from the begining i shot down only those ships.

X - probes(x)
X - scout(s)
2 - Fast atack ship(s)
2 - asault ship(s)
2 - Escort(s)

X = I don't remember.

Thats all (In 12 weeks)

Recently ive shot down an large UFO (Waiting to raid)
Overspawn (ALIVE)
GODZILLA [MEGASPAWN (dead)]

I only happened to fight the Overspawn once, but, like some others said, that was before I decided my ships needed a whole change of tactics and armament. If you see the mothership (or battleship, I'm not sure which ones drop it), let it be until it deploys the Overspawn. I think you need an entire alien containment facility to keep it's cadaver after you kill it.

I can say that the Overspawn is the only reason I used the Griffon Tank.

...Don't you need to do the autopsy on the Overspawn to unlock something, though?

The Megaspawn is droped from the batleship.

Ive got the large UFO it was the mothership ive sent the artefacts to my reasearch base but when it got there the base got flatened by ufos.
Next In response i shot down two batleships and two green ufos and captured one each (in the green one ive were atacked by an agresive pudle witc passed out when i used Fredy Krugers* PSI).

Whats that blue thing (SPORES?) droped from Motherships.
And what do i need to build an better combat ship.
+ How to defend my bases im equiped with 3 Hawks with Med Disruptors but i always loose at least one base AND alweys its the reasearch base full of artifacts :ranting: .


*It was his standard name !!! :butcher:

1 No only 60%

2 Yes tanks are useless against anything but i have 2 in every base so they can take some enemy fire instead the base
I dont use them on the overspawn coz the mutcha can walk of the road or eat your tank.
+ they are too slow to get to an disaster.

3 In my game it didnt unlock anything.

yes i know its bod of me 2 ask but are there any working cheat codes for the version of the game available on abandonia....as i have completed the game several times an would like some codes so that i can mess around in the game. All the codes i have found dont work so i'm at a loss...any help would be appreciated.

Great game by the way realt big fan of x-com series.

I red this thread from the beginning to the end. Lots of good tips and hints, thx for them. May I ask what i need to do to get those disruptor bombs and such... Im almoust completed researching that alien shield thing, and i have researched devastator cannon too... what else i need? And as a hint for the brainsucker problems, if a brainsucker pod is shot towards u, and it lands next to u ( in real time mode) stop the game when it hits ground and pick it up from the ground. the bs pod wont open. I should try the game on higher difficulty lvls, the first 5 or 6 weeks are so easy :roflol: im on 6th i believe. Im glad that i started to research the shield early, its 87% rdy and i encounter the enthropy missiles ( or w/e ) already.

I'm not entirely sure but I think the Fast Assault ships have disruptor bombs. The Bombers have Multi-bombs and the Escorts have Stasis bombs.

When you get the small aliens shields researched (the one for your ships) you can research the X-COM armor which will make your life a lot easier. It has superb defense and weighs like nothing. Get personal shields on top of that and your unstoppable.

And yes, the brainsucker pods can be de-activated by picking them up right before they crack open. I'm unsure though that right after you've picked them up, you can drop them and they still won't open.

I'm not entirely sure but I think the Fast Assault ships have disruptor bombs. The Bombers have Multi-bombs and the Escorts have Stasis bombs.

When you get the small aliens shields researched (the one for your ships) you can research the X-COM armor which will make your life a lot easier. It has superb defense and weighs like nothing. Get personal shields on top of that and your unstoppable.

And yes, the brainsucker pods can be de-activated by picking them up right before they crack open. I'm unsure though that right after you've picked them up, you can drop them and they still won't open. [/b][/quote]
That's call Destoryer.....Fast attack ship is arm with meduim disruptor beam
Here's a pretty good web site with the full UFopidea
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~xcom/

No worries :ok: now I have downloaded the patch to stop the SVGA graphic card error and now it all works fine but I was wondering if there was a Wordpad or Microsoft word version of the rookies guide because I don't have adobe reader, the game seems quite complex and which combat is better timed based combat or real time based combat ?

It depend, in real time base the game is much more faster and you can also do some fanscy move like jump off a sky bridage to dodage a popper and stuff. Your agents also improve faster in real-time base combat.

Everything is better in RT in Apocalypse. They added the turn by turn play only to satisfy the majority of the fans...

Oh, is it ok if I raid Cult of Sirus because they seem to be helping the aliens and it's getting on my nerves and they don't supply anything so I was thinking it would be alright ?

Raiding CoS is absolutely justified. These punks worship aliens as gods and deserve to die. Besides, they will always be hostile to X-Com so a raid or two won't change anything for worse.

i always raid the 2nd strongest gang (psyke i think) from the get go... they can be a great cash giver... you can sell those drug thingies that they have laying around thier bases for 4500 a pop. they WILL attack your bases though so be prepared... you can also get weapons from them that arnt being sold yet

mini rocket launchers
plasma pistols
mines

pretty cool. just have to be ready to fight them

I wonder if it's possible to use those effectively in CoS raids...

...Do they affect androids? I never bothered to figure that out.

AFAIK, not. Droids have awesome PSI-defence, BTW.

Huzzah! Robots! Very, very useful due to their enormous strength and better shooting accuracy (to begin with, anyway).

Yes. As stated somewhere in this thread way back, robots are extremely usefull at the beginning of the game. They are extremely sturdy and less prone to have fatal wounds. More importantly, they are also very likely to survive a walking bomb explosion from point zero, which make them extremely usefull to save the hide of the other human members around.

Usually I always take 3 squads of 4 in a mission. On each squad I always try to keep one robot for a minimum.

When you then manage to keep casualties low, robots slowly become obsolete because a human develop way further than any robots are built to be.

If they raid my base, do I fight a base defense mission?

If so, should I set up Security Stations all around my access lift?

Yes.

It's hard to describe a good base defense without pictures but let me tell it like this: enemies often start in your hangars or at your access lift so you'd probably want to build a few of those around there.

Are Security Stations any good?

The first security stations aren't THAT good. They provide some extra plasma fire but plasma don't do that much damage in Apoc. The advanced security stations (which you'll get later) uses disruptor tech which is much more useful. One note about security stations is that they don't aim to well, but they shoot very fast, so if an enemy gets close, he'll surely die.

Overall: adv. sec. stations are pretty good.

The first security stations aren't THAT good. They provide some extra plasma fire but plasma don't do that much damage in Apoc. The advanced security stations (which you'll get later) uses disruptor tech which is much more useful. One note about security stations is that they don't aim to well, but they shoot very fast, so if an enemy gets close, he'll surely die.

Overall: adv. sec. stations are pretty good. [/b][/quote]
er....without a security station you won't even get a chance to fight in your base
the whole base just disappear
and a single security stations can slow down the advancing aliens(or human) a lot
Sometime even wipe out the whole squard, it depend on the diffculty level you are playing

Just keep 2-6 soldiers in each base. Leave them there in combat training, arm them with toxiguns, devastator cannons, and the usual, since toxiguns are worthless against human raids. Surround the Access Lift & and Hangars with Advanced Security Stations. Unless the enemy is packing some serious explosives, they're not likely to survive devastator shots from ALL directions.

Before the attack, put your engineers/scientists in groups together, your base soldiers in one (or two) groups. When the battle starts, evac all the scientists/engineers to the farthest areas. Place your soldiers just behind the security stations, get into the prone or kneeling position, equip a weapon, and pick the invaders/raiders off from a safe distance. There's a good chance that the enemy will be too occupied dealing with the security stations to notice your soldiers.

You could even use Dimensional Launchers to bomb the access areas if you wanted to.

When i played on the easy lvl. those things didnt even shoot at the enemys and even when they did... they shot only one at a time with no amaizing ROF.
I placed them in many places but to no efect (around the lift and near the bay).

you dont need security stations to defend the base just troops.
you can have the whole base built up by those and you will still lose if you dont have any personel in your base.

It's probably because you didn't play the game in Real Time. The security stations fire very fast in Real Time.

Yeah, Devastator Cannons are your best friends when defending your basses. You don't want to blow up too much since you'll be paying for the repairs (at least I think so) and because of the fact that your scientists might die if you don't keep them far away.

Try to evacuate all your scientists as fast as you can by the access lift. If it's too far away, hide them in some living quarters or storage facility so that they can't be found. This can be made really fast if you're playing Real Time.

ya right, there's a time when I play in Easy level and my new base has no agents at all
just 1 ST, and that single ST wipe out all the alien (the aliens got force field by then) (I make all my scentist run for the access lift and control the last one to hide from the incoming alien....got a feeling of play some kind of RPG :bleh:)

Well, Scientists and Engineers count as squaddies for the base defense mission.

If you are lucky enough to get all the Aliens killed by your defense system, you successfully defended the base.

Even at the lower difficulty setting tough I would never risk doing that.

Guys,
dunno if this question was asked (it's lame to read about 20 pages :bleh: ):
Why doesn't Apoc load the saves? :yawn: (the saving process happens, but when i go to the loading list - it's empty)

P.S. I use VDMS

There are a few files in the Apoc directory where the path to the game dir is stored. If the one stored is different then the one you have, change it to match the current one.

Well, Eagle of Fire was right, the game is good if you pretend it has nothing to do with UFO: Enemy Unknown. It is a bit stupid though, to be honest youd expect Marsec or Megapol to deal with the alien threat, seeing as they have more weapons and money and probably have better and more scientists. Also stupid as how your supposed to be a secret organisation, yet after start up if you buy lots of stuff like me you get the funny sight of having a flotilla of auto-trans going right to the base (but never coming out again :ph34r: )

"Hmm lots of auto-trans going into a slum, must be another secret base getting set up"

Fun tactics are using lots, i mean lots of hoverbikes.

Also, im not too sure why the game even bothered implementing ground vehicles, all they do are die, quickly, generally to the road being destroyed underneath them more then anything else.

Also, Valks are only useful against the first two UFO types you get, I only use the Valk really to stop the scouts from deploying troops right at the start.

First thing you do in the game, put your scientists into research. Equip all your soldiers with guns more related to thier attributes, then use your Wolfhound to raid your nearest Cult of Sirius building. Oh and dont forget to sell your Stormdog, its completly useless and money better used for better equipment.

One thing I found out the hard way, is that you need a vehicle with a cargo bay to get equipment from tactical zones, not much good sending in two pheonix's when neither of em had a cargo hold. Only way to get loot when using a vehicle with no cargo hold or if its just soldiers and no vehicles (talk about desperate) then you have to manually pick up items, big movement loss for soldiers which isnt good mid-battle (except for androids which you should weigh down just to slow em so they dont go to fast then the rest of the squad).

A good tactic when raiding cult of sirius, you only need 8 people, two squads of 4. Generally at the start of the raid the cultists will be above ground and most mainly in one or two rooms. Hopefully the squads should start nearby each other, clear out the first room you see, then get one squad to be in prone position nearby the door, not to close though. This creates a really good killzone, then get your second squad to go through the other doors (usually two doors in one room) and clear out that room, then send both squads to clear out the final room (there are usually 4 rooms i think) First time i raided though my squad who were in prone just got rid of all the cultists.

Now I dont know if anyone else was stupid as me, after my first few raids I thought the gravlifts in the temples were just for show, mabye some weird ceremony of sorts, after spending around 10mins clearing out one temple on the top floor searching for the last damned cultists I found out that the gravlifts actually lead to a basesment (even more stupid as I already found they do that in other buildings when trying to find aliens) anyway, there may be some skulking round there, but they tend to be in the top floor first.

When they were in the basement though they were just in one corridor right in the corner, there were around 4 of em which is why they werent retreating like what normally happens, however a good ol android (Matilda :bleh: , big ugle face as well but dont tell her I said that) armed with an autocannon and HE ammo made short work of em, nice narrow space and all clumped togther, one of em was the rocket launcher one as well, luckily he didnt fire and i got a free launcher and ammo :Brain:

Oh, one thing that i do disagree with Eagle here, the rocket launcher does kick behind, kills aliens and cultists in seconds (well early aliens anyway), however I found out on the recieving end, one of those damned cultists fired two rockets at Robbie (Robbie the Robot :cry: my favourite android) and managed to finally fell him.

Now, I used to use a lil cheatish trick on Apoc when I first played it, whenver aliens attacked or I saw an organisation which had any level of infiltration I then saved the game and sent hoverbikes with a single agent or a pehonix with 4 to every base the infiltrated organisation owns and see which one has the aliens in em, (sometimes trying to complete the mission with lone/team of agents sent if it it was the first base checked) means you dont lose rep if it was the wrong base, however it is a bit of a low tactic.

Now a fun thing to do is raid some of the major corps early on, one favourite of mine is Marsec, they have really really nice equipment, not good to war with megapol, thier fleet of cop cars can kick behind. And if you attack thier bases they send SkyHawks after you.

Ive found an easy way to solve all elerium troubles, just go and raid Solmine, just keep on raiding em til you get the desired amount, then feel free to put plasma weapons on all your vehicles. Solmine dont do a lot to retaliate.

Also for fun you can try and go raid Transtellar, and they have lots and lots of cargo, all the real corps are much better for loot then Cult of Sirius, even the criminals have loads more, though I dont like raiding slums that much, quite tricky and lots of places to flush out.

Raiding Marsec is good as well, you get all the advanced weps and armour as well. Although Marsec armour isnt too useful (except the torso's but those are rarer in raids)

One thing ive yet too try is raiding corps like SuperDynamics, il probably try it by the time anyone awnsers but do you get anything from them like fusion powerfuel or engines, if so there probably worth raiding as well.

Its quite good turning the city into one big warzone, a warzone which aliens like to frequent often but a warzone nonetheless.

The problem with raiding TransStellar is, unless I am mistaken, they also control the transit system of the city. This mean that if you are in war with them they'll refuse to let you use the mass transit system, which mean that you'll have to manually go get each of your recruit squaddies and that you will never receive your new scientists/engineers.

If you are at war with Trans stellar you cant transfer goods between bases and that can be anoying if you have the large lab in x and the : captured alien, superweapon etc. in base y.

X-COM Apoc is an good game even if you put it between the other games from the UFO saga...it just changed.
This change was needed.
It's still UFO but it was not an copy of Enemy unknown like Tftd.
Tftd looks like an MOD witch only changes some graphics and names.

Sectoid-aquatoid

snakeman-cillman

chrisliss-deep one

Laser rifle- Gauss rifle

and so on.

the biggest modification gave some new tech and that some water weapons can't be used on the surface and surface weaps can't be used underwater.

Microprose was trying to grind more money from the same game with minimum cost.

:D I love this game! :D

I even own the original but unfortunately the CD got scratched and I couldn't play it anymore. Thanks a lot guys, it's great to be able to play it again because this is my alltime favourite game. I know that other xcom addicts consider it the weakest of the series (ignoring the entirely non-xcomish spin off games which were dire) but this one really was the one that got me hooked. The graphics weren't anything amazing when it came out but they are still serviceable and you can quite easily tell what everything is, no ragged pixels the size of a fist here. The enclosed city location isn't quite as fun as the slowly spinning globe of the first two games but it's still a great setting and makes for some unique and interesting battlescapes! I'd have to say that this is one of the best games I've ever played and nothing has swallowed so much of my time other than maybe the various versions of Civ. Battles become incredibly tense as your squads face ever increasing alien forces as well as traitor human forces. I can't resist adding an anecdote just to demonstrate how utterly fantastic this game is, hope nobody will mind.

3am, I should have gone to bed four hours ago but I just can't stop playing. I've nearly researched everything I need to know to turn the fight back against the aliens and take the fight to them. All of a sudden Marsec and the police subvert to alien control. I guess I missed a few of those alien incursions! The next thing I know there's virtually no way to buy new equipment worth having and cops are shooting at anything that leaves my base. All of a sudden I'm sending squads of rookies into police stations and hurling incendry grenades everywhere while my tougher squads raid Marsec and face some pretty tough security guards. Fantastic, it wasn't scripted, it wasn't level 10 or anything rubbish like that. I'd just missed too many alien invasions and all of a sudden the city was as lethal as the aliens themselves. I was forced to battle the deluded or brainsuckered remains of humanity whilst scrambling to build sufficient forces to launch a counteroffensive. Needless to say, by the time I had turned the fight around the birds were chirping outside.

If you've never played it, or you've downloade crap versions in the past that don't work correctly rest assured this one is definitely worth a download, works perfectly. Thanks again guys, this is one piece of gaming nostalgia that will be remaining on my HD forever!

:Brain: First of all I wanna thank Abandonia.com Founder!!!
It has been 8 to 9 years since I been looking for this Dos game. Last time I was so regretted in lending my friend my cd as he said he lost it.....Any way I am from Singapore I thanking you from bottom of my heart u uploading it. Thanks a millon for All Time Favourite.

For those who using Dos box.. I figuring out that if u use a XP + Pet 4 Processor it would be slow and fast for some weird reasons after I optimize its performance.

I would recommend u to create an win98 OS in your PC/ (or you have more than one PC in your storeroom). It works just like 8 to 9 years ago when i playing after high school.

As for Regards of saveing games.. under the folder 'Xcom3' after unzip. Create a new folder call 'Savegame'.

Have fun. Cheers :ok:
God Bless Earth
And Lets kick some aliens behind.

First of all i wanna thank everyone involved in providing downloadable version of this amazing game :kosta: (i accidentally throwed away my orig ver. during spring cleaning).
I've read this thread up to page 21 and havent found the answer to my problem. I always played the tact game in TB, i found it more managable and ammo friendly (tips: reserve some TU before ending the turn so you can kill those brainsuckers and poppers during alien turn and use aggressive stance). Now my problem is that the computer crashed/running real slow during alien turn only in alien dimension building. :cry: I was wondering if any of you have the same problem or might have solutions or possible solutions. Thx for the help. :ok:

oh btw i ran the game in xp and it ran smoothly (missing those amazing in game music :whistle: ) and if any of you having trouble with research / advance strategy try gamefaqs

This is a version thats older slightly than its retail version, or perharps the creator remove the music to play some mp3s while playing.

"link" your faq is kinda disable....

if you have enquires of playing this game;

Cheat. Under research for bio storage to be manufacture by engineers. click the back button, and press enter, click the back button and press enter, u will see the $$ doubling itself. and you can also keep press the enter button consistently if u are only using PC and not laptop...

Runaway from your unit brainsucked. press the button lie down and furious mode. humans are quite weak in getting into battles. In your later games have your so-called robo cop(Arnoid), you will find them superheros not in killing aliens but not easily mind controlled.

Prevention to Aliens Incursion to city+ less alien infiltration+ less aliens to kill in your homeland. Use only Valkyrie, Hovercar, Tank + equipped with some weapon controls accuarcy. Plant them in the buildings that surrounds the prism. Once they came, Kaboom... the aliens are so *dirty word* shock you are holding an ambush against them.

Organization you dont wanna offend, transteller; noone will transfer your goods and x-com will so unoperational. Government, whois paying your wages. cult of suris, dont bother to rail their base so soon, make use of the later alien tech to destroy their buildings, keep doing that 20x and they will turn unfriendly to neutral.

If u do not want to end the game sooner, i suggesting your hold an attack using your new developed X-com aircraft to rail their home land's aircraft. So whois the alien now. hehehe :max:

Dear friends there will be extra items/weapons if you play Superhuman.

Cheers

As said somewhere earlier on this thread by me, fighting against brainsuckers is easy; when your unit is being brainsucked, quickly stop the game and go in another soldier inventory and switch to the soldier being brainsucked. Then give him a a small human grenade in his hand and prime it to 0 before droping it to the ground. All this will take no time and will happen miraculously in an instant.

Since your soldier is in armor, the grenade might injure him slightly but it will never kill him. The brainsucker won't have that chance tough, and this work even if you have a shield (in that case you take all damage to shield).

If you have a soldier which will get brainsucked no matter what, make sure you use the 3-5 seconds left to throw everything away which could arm your teamates. Either that or order him to remove his armor and shoot him.

I love the ability to wield dual weapons, started a new game and after doing the initial buying/selling and equipping malarky I sent two agents to kill some Cultists and grab some loot.

The two agents were equipped with two law pistols and had a clip each spare, one set of grenades, and a medikit. I decided to make it sort of secret agent style so I had the agents in seperate groups, wasnt the greatest of ideas as all the enemies started in one room, and there were only two rooms, one with an agent each.

So in the first room my agent is just blasting away with dual weapons, its a 1 vs 5, but hardly any shots hit as the cultists are fairly crap shots, also seeing as there were so many targets for my agent it wasnt hard to hit one of em.

In the meanwhile my other agent is entering the battle room and all hell is breaking loose, smoke grenades everywhere (courtesy of cultists of course) one unlucky cultist happened to be by the doorway facing the wrong way and my other agent filled him with lots of bullets at short range.

Luckily the said cultist was also wielding a plasma pistol, so my agent puts away one law pistol and grabs the plasma pistol and starts giving out hot plasma death to the other cultists.

Though the other angry cultists were shooting a lot of shots at that agent, they also started chucking 3 grenades simultaneously which lead to my greatest scene in the battle, there was a hole blown from the wall in the top floor my agent jumped down just missing the deadly grenade blast.

Meanwhile my dual lawpistol wielding agent was running out of ammo as she was firing for a helluva long time, so my agent on the bottom floor graciously chucked a spare lawpistol with a fully loaded clip to my agent.

Unfortunately the agent on the bottom floor fell vitim to two well placed stun grenades, however due to all the stun and smoke grenades being chucked around the room most of the other cultists fell unconcious, this just left my one agent facing off 3 cultists.

However she then ran out of ammo for both weapons, running to the nearest dead cultists though she picked up one machine gun, then another machine gun and some spare clips, she then was dealing out lots of bullets very very inaccurately, however having two machinguns firing full auto, although not going to win the marksman award did lead to the agent to spraying hot metal slugs around the room, fortunately hitting the two remaining cultists, the last cultist standing did as all cultists do when getting thier behind whooped and started panicking, my sole concious agent then ran up to the panicking agent and pumped the doomed cultist with a helluva lot of bullets.


So the moral of the story, dual wielding is fun, as well as sending out few agents when raiding, this doesnt work well against alien raids as you dont want any aliens to flee and you usually have to search a huge area. Also, just remember when raiding to send a vehicle which can store cargo instead of a hoverbike so you only get what you pickup from the battle.

If you use two weapons at a time (carry) then your accuracy should fall very much. I prefer to have one weapon and in rare cases also one grenade. It is fun wielding two but at what cost?

It may be costly ammo-wise, although that won't be a problem once you research devastator weaponry, since it's ammo self-regenerates.

It's quite fun to see a bunch of ammo streaks fly in the enemy's direction, as well.

Besides, auto-fire was used quite a lot in the original X-COM, due to general crappy accuracy regarding the use of aimed shots.

However, once you get ahold of those disruptor shields, chances are you'll stop using dual wielding.

I miss this game. I can play it on my computer, but, later on, the game freezes randomly in battles, both in buildings and in the air. Perhaps due to the introduction of a sound effect, a lot of things running at once, or a graphic, who knows, but, I'm forced to completely reboot my computer afterwards. It gets annoying, especially if it happens every 5 minutes.

As far as I know dual-wielding pistols isnt actually that bad for accuracy, my agents were doing devestatingly well against the cultists, however it is very ammo consuming but it is really cool to do.

All i wish for now is that you can run and shoot when wielding pistols, that would look awesome.

Disruptor guns are good as they have no ammo, but they are terribly inaccurate if you dual wield them, however hold two together and go behind an unsuspecting enemy and it acts very much like a power sword in killing in a hit, also power sword kicks behind as well, useful for the lone agent, but unless your raiding MarSec early on then you wont get it for a few weeks, and against aliens at that time its quite useless, not to mention cultists will be rocket launchering you all the time. (Once youve got cloaking though, the weapon becomes very uesful again)

Also vehicles dont kill themselves, however you can set the altitude vehicles fly at, to do so select the vehicle and i believe it is on the middle in the vehicles tab button, next to the behaviour. High altitude stops debris from killing vehicles and allows makes aliens shoot up in the sky instead of blowing up the city shooting at the floor and damaging any roads.

Also later in the game you should not use the Valkyrie for combat, it will die really easily as it cannot manoevre well and gets shot easily, by later in the game i mean after the first week where you get new types of UFO's with more deadly weapons.

Also when launching vehicles if a hostile is nearby they tend to try and shoot through any buildings, this can cause nearby buildings to destroy your vehicle, especially if you have vehicles armed with say the retribution missile. To avoid cases like these, on launching select the ship that has the desructive weapon and tell it not to fire that weapon, to do this on the vehicles tab when selecting your ship just simply click on the weapon icon near the bottom left.

I play the battle turn based. So far I have yet to be out of ammo for any of my troops. I will always have an extra clip but apart from some rocket launchers kind of weapons I don't remember ever having to reload a gun.
I don't know the % regarding drop in accuracy but since I can't use them at the same time I see no point in that. :blink:

Great game.

Thanks for the advice, sharp. I already experimented with the altitude control but the Skyranger stubbornly ignored me. I could swear that on the one or the other occasion the thing actually followed the roads intentionally :blink:

Anyway, I'm a poor chap so my fleet consists of rather primitive fighters:
1 APC Wolfhound (0 Kills apart from the occasional passing Sirius Taxi)
1 Stormdog (I really should sell the thing)
5 Hovercars (They are cheap and useful, also so far they have managed not to get killed (with 1 exception))
2 Valkyries (Number 2 was bought before the Hawks became available, I couldn't wait any longer for additional firepower)
3 Hawks, all armed with retribution, 1 with janitor and the small alien weapon and two with a lineage plasma cannon.

Still I had a hard time downing the ufo I'm just boarding; I suspect its type 6 or 7 and probably the first one with the green psiglobs lurking around. (Description: It's got at least two doors which are one storey high, the walls are radioactive green and there are 12 agents sitting / proning / standing in front of them waiting for something non-human to emerge :evil: )


Efthimios: The sole reason while you never had to reload is because the soldiers do it themselves :D
Anyway I only use one weapon (devestator at the moment, I'm just working at the biological warfare) since my soldiers fit in one of two categories:
A) Born marksman: Ridiculously accurate even when using automatic, also extremely strong and fast and thus packed with tons of explosives if the necessity for a ground zero should arise (I just drop loads of explosives from the top level since it costs nothing tu wise)

B) A complete behind: Can still miss the target when standing right next to it - preferably when it is vital to kill it - can only carry small amounts of extra equipment and would be unable to move if he / she / it wasn't wearing a complete marsec armour. Is also unable to throw explosives of any kind, grenades tend to get stuck in the agents nostrils blowing him and his squad to very tiny bits or, should the armour hold, they stay in one bleeding bruised dying bit which spends some time patching itself up and then leaving the combat area pretty damn quickly. Or, alternatively, they go sniff a stun grenade and spend the rest of the mission fast asleep while the other squad does all the fighting (I usually operate in 2 big squads to stop the B-class trooper from getting killed)

Thats the one bad thing in the ammo consumption, the ammo you can buy is limited. Possible ways to solve the problems are, raiding Marsec (cant buy any more wepons or vehicles, cept Turbo Bike) or raid MegaPol (also, cannot buy some weapons) but the best way to get ammo is to raid the cultists.

When raiding cultists its better to use a squad of 4, that way you really only have two rooms to search and depending on the map there is only one room with gravlifts.

And guest (you should register, or at least put some name), im quite surprised youve managed to buy two valkryies to use in combat, when I use them, they tend to get shot a lot and if they dont die they take ages to repair. Also, a stormdog, thats just crazy, waste of ammo and fuel and it will die as well (not to mention getting roads destroyed so you wont be able to take your APC anywhere).

Apart from landing/taking off the valkyrie should conform with the altitude you put, just make sure your not mixing them around with the behaviour one, aggresive vehicles tend to be wreckless.

Also you should really get hoverbikes, armed with a rendor plasma gun and possibly a small accuracy unit, they do quite well en masse.

Also good to see you use the same tactics as me, camp outside the doors and wait for them to come out. Good way to avoid getting poppered as they usually come out first.

Nice to see you have born marksmen, just make sure thier psi-def is high as green blobs are scary psi powerful. They get taken out by androids quite easily though at close combat with full auto weapons.

Ok, I'm the ominous guest. I did enter my name the first time but I don't think it did any good...

Anyway, I personally keep from raiding Marsec and Megapol. I never had them as enemies but it was annoying enough to have psyke around raiding my base every two days when they were infiltrated. I can't begin to imagine if all those police cars - excellent decoys - would start shooting at me when I engage ufos. Also I think it would be quite a nuisance if every police car coming down the road past your base would take a few pot shots at it.

Besides Megapol has enough problems already, I just saw how Psyke levelled a hospital with 2 hovercars ... the whole hospital was gone before even the first police car arrived on the crime scene...

About the flyers:
There are several possible reasons for the survival of the fleet
- they are all set on 2nd lowest altitude and 2nd highest caution-thingie so they keep well away from the ufos
- I'm playing on medium since I never actually finished this game and since it has been a long time since I was last able to play it. All I remembered when starting again was "raid sirius" and "grenades! take plenty of grenades with you"

Apart from that, I always recall flyers as soon as they are moderately damaged or when they get themselves in trouble (i.e. they get surrounded by several alien craft) Also, I have too few vessels to attack multiple enemy craft at once, the whole fleet engages one target, if its downed and the other ufos decide to stick around in my town they get a walloping as well :evil:

Infantry tactics:
Well staying outside is the best way of removing poppers from the fray. I always want to go inside just for the feeling of it but then I have to wait outside as wave after wave of aliens crashes against the x-com cliffs :wall:



Edit:

I seem to need some advice on the real time missions. I just tried it and floated around with a squad of 4 soldiers (the other 10 are wounded). The effect wasn't too amazing, I just told them where to go, tried to throw grenades (which went off too early or too late) and designated primary targets.
The result:
An entire apartment needs refurbishment and new windows
I almost lost one of my only two shield generators (still producing them like mad but it takes too long)
One of my soldiers will spend quite a while in the hospital
A civilian was incinerated when a vortex mine went off having travelled only a quarter of its route
And a panicked (!) anthropod made a viable attempt on the live of one of my Catergory A soldiers (which he regretted once the whole squad was right on top of him (literally) set to agressive auotmatic fire...)

Can you give me any hints how to reduce casualties and how to get organised more effecitvely... I doubt I'll be able to handle more than a single squad the way I do things now...

OK. Here's a hint. When you first start a mission (it doesn't matter if real-time or turn-based) don't (I mean DON'T) enter a room. Just stay outside and wait at the door. After the aliens stopped coming advance very fast through the level to kill every alien. I usually enter in rooms with 4 or 5 guys while the other wait at the door. That's what I'm doing right now in a hospital. I don't know where the last alien hides, but I'll find him hahaha :evil:

NOTE: half of the hospital is destroyed due to my amunition (HE and IN). :evil: and I've still got three grenades for the last alien.

-Come out, come out where ever you are, slimy alien.
-Graah !
-Where did that sound come from ? Hmm... I know: the second floor. Everybody go there ASAP. Do I make myself clear ?
-Sir, yes sir !

Pause, pause frequently in real-time, you can still give commands to all your troops while paused. One thing which can be good or bad depending on situations is that agents take initiative unlike turnbased where its very much you have control over all the agents.

Also for grenades, im pretty sure you can set them to explode on landing, I usually set them for around 1.75 seconds as thats enough time to tell my soldiers to get out of there if its a mis-throw.

Pausing is the way to make your squad survive. The good thing about real-time is that you can do more effective squad tactics such as pincer movements, and you clear rooms far more quickly.

Just run it on slow time and you should be fine. One good thing about real-time is that you dont have to be there for the battle either. I can remember when doing a mission against a crashed UFO I had four squads guarding the only exit, had a sniper team at the far back, a machine gun team nearby and a heavy weapons (Autocannons) team close by and my raid team (just incase any aliens decide to stay in the craft)

I saved when they were all in position and then put it on fastest and left to do some....erm....stuff.

End result as I came back, lots and lots of dead aliens, no casualties on my part, a good mission finish. :ok:

Another tip in real-time combat, when facing brain suckers, go into prone and they cant suck your brains, if you do it when they go-mid jump they fall unconcious on landing.

Use a medikit on him to stop the bleeding, or leave the combat area to stop him dying - that's one of my favourite little tricks in fact.

@Abi - I changed my mind, and reckon it might be good fun. Those two threads have made me want to play XCom again :D

Only takes a few seconds to heal crit wounds using a medkit, just make sure you have the medkit selected and you click on the body part that is red. I was confused for quite a while when first playing Apocalypse as i kept trying to get other agents to heal my injured agents.

Agents can only heal themselves. When it shows green on the bodypart on the box in the top-right when you have a medkit selected then it means that the agent is healing that area currently, keep the agent inactive as in not moving and not shooting and in realtime a few seconds later you'll have an uninjured agent again.

The main reason why your agent didnt heal is as you said, he was hovering so im assuming you had him hovering in mid-air, ever tried to heal yourself in midair, it wont turn out pretty, soon he will drop to the floor, cept he will be dead.

I find its best to treat agents like vehicles, when they get moderatly damaged you should send them to the exits so they dont die or take ages to heal.

--

I hate searching for those last aliens, though I use motion scanners more now, except for its terrible on the maps which have like 8 floors.

Sarge: Ok where's that last Alien SOB then
Pvt. Peters: *whips out motion scanner*
Motion Scanner shows 3 dots advancing Aliens style
Pvt. Peters: erm Sarge, there coming right towards us.
Sarge: Ok you Alien bitches, time to go UFO:Enemy Unknown on your raggedy-behind (damn you forums for turning @ss into behind)
Sarge starts blasting at the roof with AP Autocannon
Popper lands through the ceiling
Sarge: ........ oooohhhhh Fuuuu**
Pvt. Peters: ... I love you Sarge

My midair-guy was actually healing (the body part was green) himself but he wouldn't stop / finish. Anyway, I think I'm getting the hang of realtime though it is draining my small amounts of toxine B rather quickly (So far I managed to make 3 Tguns, 9 Bclips which are gone already). Still, I lost one shield and was able to replace it thanks to a bit of marksmanship, a brilliant engineer and man's ingenuity when it comes to killing.

Mapwise my favourite are slums; especially the one with the bridge. Thanks to a hint I read earlier in this forum I now watch UFOs to see where they beam down troops and engage those ASAP, so ive got nice and small maps. Still, sometimes rather heated battles erupt if there are too many aliens in a small space so Diablo got rather pissed of when I tore down a bridge with the exception of half a stairway. Well, at least most of the anthropods literally dropped dead when most of the structure collapsed after taking several vortex mines. Tough luck, though, for those civillians (crowds of them) that were running around below the bridge.

Well, real time makes the camouflage-thingie a real necessity so I'm working on that now; in the meantime I'm still taking hits from everywhere while I can't see the (camouflaged) enemy. Well, onto battle :Titan:

Yeah, also watch ufos (on slowest time) once you have unleashed your fleet. You can see where aliens are beamed down and - once you recovered any downed ufos - you can clear them out before they spread or cause problems.
However, make sure you send enough soldiers. I just had a nightmarish mission with 3 soldiers (1 with shields) in the slum forest landscape. Entropy missiles melted the equipment of one soldier, the next got wounded and the third fell victim to a strange bug: His devestator was convinced it suddenly had 34 rounds and refused to fire... I had to abort, I'm trying again now, the same 3 soldiers but this time its the big building with a helipad and stairway further up on either side of it.

Wish me luck :sniper:


Edit: I finally did it. Turn out you were correct, sharp... he my trooper pretendet to be healing himself for a full 2 minutes before I lost patience and - ignoring the brainsuckers (the launchers seem to be in again in the alien community) - land. Ironically he was hovering right above a grave but once hel landed, it took him about 5 secs to get sorted and rejoin the fray... good thing, too because before that I was operating with one trooper...
Still the operation was costly enough; my last shield was destroyed and I have only one healthy soldier left (ignoring the 10 soldiers guarding base number 2, I hesitate to send them anywhere because they have 0 experience, inadequate equipment (i.e. no marsec body armour) and .. well .. I can't be asked to work with idiots again..)

I think so, yes... but sometimes its worth it :sneaky:


Edit: About real time:
Do you ever split up? So far I only sent in 1 squad of 6 (3 toxiguns, 3 devestators) so that my soldiers spawned together and then split them into 2 squads (1 per weapon type) and found a nice place to fortify my position. I'm wondering if there is another way, something more effective and safe. Turn based seems to be a lot safer in some respects, if it wasn't for those disruptor shield I captured thanks to the toxigun I'd have a lot of casualties during every mission.

Ever get annoyed of having to clear out every UFO when it crashes? Sure you get lots of loot so its worth it, but sometimes you just dont have enough soldiers, a very simple solution I have devised.

When the UFO you dont want to investigate is low on health, by low I mean a little bit before it starts to crash, have a vehicle armed with a retribution or justice (make sure you have the weapon as off at the start) activate the missile. Then even if the UFO is crashing the missile will track (and the UFO wont be able to evade or shoot down the missile) and obliterate the target.

Also destroying Temple's of Sirius will lower your score, unless you are getting frequently attacked by them then you should really leave the Temples alone, heck Cultists are my main source of income, not good to destroy them.

Hmm what happens if you just ignore the crash site? I mean, the UFO wreck is destroyed by the crew (they proably eat it :D [Captain, I'm sick of the navigational array! - Oh shut up and eat faster!] ) and thats it for them. Or does that affect the score or infiltration in any way?

Mentioning infiltration: Is it possible that not only those organisations where you actually see aliens being beamed down but also a few random ones can get infiltrated with each UFO invasion? I'm just tearing down a synthemesh construction yard (for the good of the people of course :angel: ) although no UFO ever came near it.

About the temples: sure you get less loot if you ruin those freaks but where's the fun in it if you've just got a calendar telling you that every friday at 1500 hrs its time to raid sirius to earn some money? I'm actually thinking of buying some griffon armours to burn down a temple when I feel like it. Of course I have to wait until my quantum phyisicists get SOMETHING done; i.e. until i've got Annihilators.
By the way: Can anybody tell me what I need to research for the big quantum physics lab? I'm still stuck with the small one and my folks have been working on the cloaking device for days now and are just at 50 %

Big quantum physics lab ? I didn't even know that something like that exists. :D

Now to my question: Energen got infiltrated by aliens 16%. I discovered which building was infiltrated (Corporate HQ) and went over there. I stunned every alien (I'm that good :Brain: ) and after I won I returned to base, but the infiltration level is still 16%. Why ?

Might take a while for infiltration level to go down, if its still high then do another investigation.

And yes, if you leave a wrecked UFO then the aliens can still infiltrate, though on a smaller scale. They destroy the UFO and then attempt to go the the nearest building(s). Also if aliens do beam down to a building and you take a long while to get there, then they can go and ifiltrate other buildings, they will also attempt to infiltrate other buildings if they manage to retreat from a battle.

However just because aliens enter some buildings doesnt mean they manage to infiltrate it, some aliens just seem to die, once had a small scout beaming down on a corporate HQ, after getting some other UFO wrecks and battling I came back and investigated, no aliens there, investigated all buildings nearby, no aliens. Also on the alien infiltration graph there were no aliens, so I think that mabye the building security force managed to subdue the aliens. (Or possibly no-one was actually in the scout, or mabye there were beaming somebody up???)

Cant remember the tech for large quantum lab, i think its Alien Engines, Energy and Navigation, possibly some UFO's as well. Dont know how youve managed to get to cloaking before getting the lab, you must have some really bad pyhscists.

Infiltration level going down. Yepeee.

*After 2 days*

-What ? THe infiltration level is going up ? Argh, I knew I should have intercepted that UFO first. Send some people over there now !
-We can't. They are all wounded since we raided that temple.
- :hairpull:


I think we should make a X-Com - Abandonian Apocalypse tread LOL

I finally finished the cloaking device and already fieldtested it in one of the local temples. Worked pretty well, now I'm engaging some aliens infiltrating S.E.L.F. or the Mutant alliance... can't remember. Anyway, they just appeared out of nowhere since the graph shows nothing and the city as been clean for days.
My new tactics are to fly to infiltrated buildings immediatly after the battle, then unload cargo / pick up ammo and fly to the downed ufo (I usually get only one). That way infiltration is at an all-time low and since there are less aliens to kill I actually managed to produce enough toxine B for permanent use... another dream comes true :evil:

Anyway, I've got the best scientists (total skill of 497 in a small lab) but there's too few of them. I'm working on the Ufo types again and I'm already recruiting more geeks and soon my second small lab should be finished. I want to get into that other dimension again.

Oh yes, about alien structures (I dimly remember some): When I destroy the UFO factory there won't be any new UFOs in the game right? So no more invasions in my city, no more giant fleets of UFOs cruising in the other dimension (provided Í shoot them down first :sneaky: ), correct? Right now I feel like giant dogfights and I'd hate it if the enemy ran out of craft before I've had enough fun...

To get a large quantum physics lab you need to reseach alien energy sources. Quite suprised you havent got to it yet, especially seeing as most of the tech you will be getting needs a lage research facility.

If you get the cloaking device, you should arm one agent with it, have the agent equipped with a power sword and some High Explosives, then simply cloak, ambush some cultists, stab the lone ones, and the ones in groups just lay down an Explosive and run away.

Trust me, by the time you get to the UFO Factory, you will be wishing you wont get any more UFO's, Battleships are not very friendly.

I haven't met battleships yet :) Anyway, I'm getting very suspicious of the medium difficulty, the aliens seem to conveniently wait until the day after all the damaged x-com craft have been repaired. And since Valkyrie 2 was almost destroyed - the health bar was 1 pixel high - during the last encounter, I had a quiet and scientific week.
I'm working on the propulsion system at the moment, another wrong guess I suppose. I'll start on the energy source next, thanks for the hint.

After being able to use the cloaking field (I had a mere 100 pcfs in store by the time my scientists finally figured those things out) my real time tactics made the final transition towards the 'fat bastard'-mode; my 2 squads of 6 (now all with toxigun, pcf, disruptor shield and something for pyro effects) just find a nice tower or corner to sit on / around and wait. Then I switch of all the pause messages, set on double time and play a browser game on another computer. That usually sorts those aliens out :whistle:

Anyway, I don't ambush people, I just brutally gun them down with vastly superior firepower. Also, there is one Sectoid-Hybrid with a mind bender tied to her leg. When I need a scout I send her. She has been able to convince some aliens to drop all their stuff (explosives all armed) and run towards the rest of her squad.
Still, the psi control lasts less than a second, guess she needs more practice (Power 40, strenght 32, defence 38; she spent a lot of time in combat training so she could defend herself and keep up with the rest, now she's assigned to the psigym)



Edit: About battleships: What do they look like? Is it, by any chance, a purple disc (usual meaty texture) with a dome on top? By sheer coincidence I just have two of those and two green ones (with 2 domes) flying around my 2nd base burning it to the ground. So far I've lost the garrison of 10 soldiers (died when they tried to run to another building) and a few scientists (biologists) were killed when the building collapsed over their taxis (I transferred most of them to the main base, but quarters are full). Miraculously, those few scientists which had to stay behind in the building are still alive. After using almost all my heavy ordinance (including 2 retribution and 2 justice missiles) and heavy casualties (fortunately on megapols side, the attack was staged near a megapol arms factory and now there is a dozend (or was a dozend) police hovercars taking part) I've downed one purple UFO... now fire's being concentrated on a green one...
I'm just glad I have some financial reserves, I never really wanted to know how expensive repairs to a base are :ranting:
And there's nothing more depressing than loosing points for damage to the city and knowing that that was your base... :cry:

Now then, I have some alien invaders to repel :Titan:

....gits...morons... mongs....arghh :pissed:

Edit 2:
Final result:
One purple and one green UFO downed
A few Kilotons of alien equipment captured
A Megaspawn being gently encouraged to give me information as I write :whip:
10 dead soldiers - zero practical experience but they'd spent weeks in the training area...they couldn't have been that bad to deserve to die like that...
6 dead biochemists (4 got away via Taxi)
- 534 points for 'damage to city', that's a bloody third of the damage penalties I have accumulated so far :omg:

At least they didn't infiltrate anything, they were too busy burning down my base....

Edit 3:
My god! My god! My god! My god! The aliens are REALLY determined to flatten my base! Not 50m away from two really fat UFOs and one of the purple ones came out of a portal. How do I get rid of those fat bastards? (Description: Really fat, orangy-brown colour, have a big (!) red spot as a symbol on the static map). How on earth am I supposed to shoot them down? I just gave one of them all I had in store in terms of firepower (after a brave police car had downed their shields before being vaporised :eeeeeh: ) but I barely scratched them. After a while the aliens seemed to decide that they wouldn't want to risk the paintjob on their mothershipthingie and retreated :Brain: What am I supposed to do...? (5 days 'til I've got the big Qphysics lab, provided the base lasts that long :help: )

Simple: just buy A LOT of vehicles which can shoot retribution and justice missiles (assuming you've got money). Also buy some ground vehicles and give them anti-air missiles. Also also ( LOL ) if you have many air vehicles tell them to go to that big space port thingy in the center or north of the town and when the UFOs come launch them from there.

EDIT: And next time play on novice, like me. It's strange, but aliens have stopped coming. I wonder why ? :evil:

EDIT EDIT: Ten to fifteen pink UFOs are heading towards my base. Scramble all vehicles.

Don't try to tackle the biggest Alien ships until you are ready. And this usually mean when you have your own Xcom made crafts with Alien plasma tech to back you up. And don't forget the shields.

Until then, buying a lot of Hover Bikes to keep that big floater busy (and of course flying at highest altitude to get the shots from the Alien ships to the sky instead of the ground) might help you somewhat.

I just hope they don't want to level your base(s) right on because if it's the case and you can't defend yourself, you're pretty screwed. No base mean gameover.

P.S.: Don't use ground vehicles unless you really want to waste your money. I tryied them once and I don't see how they could even hit a barn in a corridor lost in the middle of nowhere while they are running straight at it. :rolleyes:

Battleships, they are big and red and can kill most of your vehicles in seconds. The big purple one with a dome I believe is the Alien Escort Ship, it doesnt actually have any proper firepower except for a very annoying missile which disables your vehicles which make them easy pickings for any other UFO's in the area.

Also, 10 to 15 UFO's ???? You must be really bad at killing them then, UFO's which manage to retreat will just come back to haunt you with more buddies.

The only ground vehicle I use is the Wolfhound APC, and thats only for raids as it can hold a lot of equipment, its more efficent fuelwise then the valkyrie.

And I dont know how youve managed to make your valkyries survive in battle, they dont have a lot of armour and hitpoints and they get shot at easily, I suppose you could arm them with duel retributions and tell them to return to base after firing thier shots. Leaves more space for your skyhawks with more conventional weapons.

After I deployed my Hover Bikes (~20) and my flying cars many of the UFOs retreated :huh: and only 2 brown UFOs and 3 pink UFOs remained. I downed the 2 brown UFOs and 2 pink UFOs, the other retreating. Now I'm attacking a downed brown UFO. Wish me luck.

BTW, they were trying to destroy my base. Every UFO was heading towards it, but their luck ran out.

@Sharp: I'm not bad at killing them, but I haven't been attacked 1 and a half week(s ?). (and I counted them again; there were only 9 UFOs; I looked on the minimap and saw ~15 because there were some Cult of Sirius vehicles around the city; I gotta attack them more often)

I couldn't agree more... play it, play it, play it :D

Anyway, THOSE are the battleships then, nice to have finally met them. My Valkyries had the occasional brush with death, still they were lucky so far.
Against the battleship I used
6 Hawks, weapons:
2 Retribution
2 Justice
6 Prophet
2 Lineage
5 small disruptor beams
1 rendor
2 Valkyries, weapons
Lancer 7000, Janitor
3 Hovercars, weapons
Bolter 4000, Janitor (Janitor has been replaced by rendor)
Well, thats my fleet. And I can't afford any more ships right now, I'm desperately working on alien UFO-tech and I'm still building the big Qlab. 4 days left.


P.S.: Stationing my fleet at the starport might be a good idea actually. However, once some UFO flew over it (a type looking not particularly dangerous) and leveled a quarter (2 Landing pads + road, launch sites an perimeter wall) of the starport. It took 5 days to rebuild and transtellar was pissed . And I still don't know what happened. The UFO just flew by while my fleet was still in the process of launching...

Well, I played the game a fair bit through the weekend. Go VDMSound!

Right now, I am on third week (second difficulty level) with a couple of killer soldiers and a lot of hardware, but all of the sudden a horde of UFO's is coming out. And more advanced ones too... ouch. I just hope my 23 soldiers will stand to the task (one psi-mutant freshly recruited, abour 14 humans - some with killer stats - and the rest androids).

The trick earlier described with the stun grapple raids on allied organizations did really work. It takes some time to do right, but... I did it a few times on Psyke. Lots of goodies.

Also, raid Sirius with four soldiers only with Medikits/Stun Grapples. They do really well, if you don't go right in the line of fire. CoS got really busted on the very beginning, these morons... And don't forget the "dirty" full-scale assaults on their temple... lots of kills, explosions and incendiaries... :evil:

I'm just finishing the 8th week. So far I have about 20 to 25 dead soldiers. The only recent casualties were those 10 poor soldiering souls hit by the collapsing northeast tower of my base during the alien attack. I can't decide who was worse off, those soldiers or the 4 top scientists sitting in their taxis trying to evacuate while the garage caved in. :cry:

I've just started researching the inter-dimensional probe, hopefully soon I will need neither valkyrie nor hawk, neither lineage nor retribution but all alien stuff mounted on an annihilator.
:boxing: bring it on, alien scum :karate:


Oh yes, if you want nice cityscape fights with lots of explosions, just watch the "illegal vehicles"; the raids staged by the criminal syndicates. Great fun without getting penalized for it.

Oh be quiet, you :D

Anyway, I have to report another Fat-Bastard-class UFO. Represented by a big red spot (on the tactical map) as well, but its a very flat cone or dome with kind of scales. Also there are things that look almost like lava flows on top of it... I wonder what that might be...

I've engaged it now, it appears to have good armour and unusally strong shields. And I can't decide, either either its wobbling up and down at a very high frequency or its... pulsating :eeeeeh:

Well, so far it doesn't seem to care about my base. A battle ship hovered over a school for a while - I was half expecting some independence day laser show flattening the entire building - but retreated to the other dimension.
Above the city, battle rages, brave warriors fight in merciless combat the enemy, the alien intruder from the 5th dimension :D


Victory! I took the SuperUFO down to 50 % before they were able to retreat. Just a little more firepower and I might be able to down one of those gargantuan craft :Brain:

:kosta: <Lt. Razak> :kosta:

I decided after I captured those two UFOs to recruit more brave soldiers and to destroy those aliens infiltrating Energen. The aliens just keep coming and coming like they have no tommorow (which they actually don't :evil: , but that's another problem)

EDIT: I read somewhere that if you'll increase the difficulty you'll get more items. Is that true ?

Having troubles with nasty aliens??? getting hassled by the odd cultist?? Being the victim of criminal attacks???

We have the anwser to all your problems. Buy the new MiniLauncher from Marsec. Its the lightweight gun which deals with multiple situations.

Not the most best shot in the firing range??

With the new Marsec MiniLauncher each missile homes into the target using advanced computer guidance chips meaning you dont need a lot of accuracy to kill with this baby.

Difficulty hitting moving objects???

The Marsec MiniLauncher has an incredible turnrate to chase your target round corners, those cultists have nowhere to hide.

Want to make those criminals suffer???

Buy the new IN missile from Marsec and make those criminals burn.

Aliens terrorising your hallways??? Citizens in peril nearby who shouldnt be shot at??

The Marsec MiniLauncher comes with upgradable missile types, use the new AG Missile and deal out biological warfare at those alien scumbags while keeping civillian casulaties at an all time low.

This mesage was brought to you buy Mars Security .Marsec do not garuntee that missiles will hit specified targets, also Marsec do not sell AG Missiles, those will have to be researched and produced seperately. Batteries not included

Well I'm only on my second run into the game (never finished the 1st one as the computer...died :cry: ) and I'm playing on medium difficulty. Knowing myself I won't have played that 'high' the first time but I wasn't missing any items back then as far as I know. I had X-Com-manufactured armour, toxiguns with c toxins, cloaking fields, disruptor shields, loads of insane flyer-weapons... I really doubt that there'd be fewer items in lower difficulty levels. If there was a rule like that, it would work the other way around, anyway... and I'm still missing the C-toxin... now you've got me really worried :crazy:




P.S.: Just realised something: Do you mean that with a lower difficulty level you get less loot? That might be possible if only because there'd be fewer aliens / mission and they'd have 'lighter' equipment. (Take my last psicontrol-victim for example: He had a devestator and 4 (!) Boomeroids on him. Well, 0.25 Seconds later he and 3 of his colleagues went out with an amazing quadruple-explosion but that's beside the point. Maybe on your difficulty level he would have had only 2 boomeroids and would have to be satisfied with a mere big explosion to perish in instead of very ugly and nasty explosion like I could offer. So you see, aliens, if you want to die properly come to me and I guarantee you the death of a lifetime! No refunds! :D

I like those ads LOL.

I have a question, since the city in Apoc is the last one (I think) does this mean that there are no more habitable places left on earth? Is sea available? (not in the game of course but the "world" of xcom at this time frame)

Anyone got any hints on base defence? My 2nd base was just "infiltrated" by one of the volcano-UFOs... the dogfight is still continuing but I had to fight of the invaders. Lost 6 Scientistss which were hiding in the ablutions in one of the quarters, they were overrunned by 6 - 8 skeletoids. :cry:

I'd also like to comemorate that brave soldier who after going the wrong way assaulted the 9 humanoid aliens from the rear and dropped a vortex mine seconds before being killed by enemy as well as friendly fire. The explosion set of a chain reaction (whoever said poppers weren't good for anything, just as the mine went off, one entered the fray ) which killed all the aliens in that area and took down quite a few brainsuckers as well. :tnx: :bye:


Well, Volcanoclass-UFO has retreated, again I brought it down to 50 %. At least I've got people working on bigger weapons now... well I had people working on those new weapons but they had a little freak accident involving a small washroom, a toilet, 5 other colleagues and half a dozend skeletoids. Yes, a science career with X-COM certainly isn't boring... or lasting. :bye:



....and I spend weeks collecting such top scientists in anticipation of a bigger lab...

I'm not 100% sure, but the "unlocked items" are probably the teleporters and some minor items you don't have an absolute use for. Nice to have them anyways.

Defense rooms next to the lift usually help a lot. Keeping your repair bay together help a lot also, since the Aliens always come in the base from those two points.

The problem with defending a base is that you don't have the soldiers and the equipment you choose yourself, you have to do with what you've got. If you have a lot of scientists/engineers in the base, this could leave you with only two or maybe even a lone team of soldiers to defend the rest. You do, however, have a limited power on how to deploy them in the base.

Basically, you have two choices; you either sort the teams so all the engineers/scientists are in the last teams all together without any soldiers, or you assing a soldier to each team to defend the scientists/engineers and concentrate the rest in a "defense team" which roam the base. I myself prefer the first way.

By sorting the scientists/engineers in the last teams, they usually get deployed in secluded areas of the base like the restrooms or inventory rooms, which limit the danger they have to face. While keeping them "hidden", you can at the same time rush your team(s) of soldiers to the access lift to secure the area. Once this is done, secure the area your scientists/engineers need to cover to get to the lift (and to safety) and escort them out of the base. When completed, you can concentrate on killing the opposition like any other missions.

If you end up with very few soldiers in the base, intelligent use of boomarang will probably save your hide better than trying to 007 your way around the base. If you already have access to personnal shielding, you could 007 your way around the base anyways, taken you take your time and don't waste your shield(s).

I went on a couple _BIG_ raids to Psyke (raiding them gives most Psiclones of all gangs, see), and ended up with enough cash to buy out all Hawks avaible (_AND_ equip them with the best guns money can buy for them too). Well, that was enough to (after a couple reloads) send most of the UFO's crashing. One of those "bubble" thingies has managed to escape, but the other few were totally downed.

Security Stations automatically target and fire on hostiles. If you have no agents in the base though you will not reach the battlescape, you will just lose the base.

I use a tactic where I dont have to worry about scientists or engineers, I haul em all in a base (with all the advanced laboratories and gizmos) and keep the acess lift surrounded by security stations (advanced when researched) and the base will not have a vehicle repair bay. All you have to do is send the skeleton staff to the security stations and barricade the entrance with mines and firepower.

Also Bases which dont activley attack dont seem to get attacked like in Enemy Unknown. However I do have a base which has the sole purpose of launching and repairing vehicles, 5 Repair Bays, 1 Adv. Security Station, 1 Living Quarters, 1 Store for weapons, ammo and fuel and two heavily armed androids as security. Now two soldiers as base defense might seem very weak, especially for a base which launches a fleet of vehicles actively. However the only way opposing forces can win is to defeat my lone squad of androids. These androids thanks to android super strength carry enough armaments between them to level Mega-Primus. And thanks to android superhealth they practically count as 8 soldiers by themselves. By heavy armaments I mean HE's, Grenades, Prox Mines, MiniLaunchers (available from your nearest Arms Factory), Boomeroids , Devestator Cannons, Heavy Launchers and once Tech increases, Dimension Missiles and Vortex Mines. Who needs Toxiguns when you can blow hostile forces into pieces.

Other hints for base defence, protect scientists by sending them to the nearest security station and telling them to crawl so they cant get spotted or shot at, leave one soldier crawling and looking at the entrance just incase. Try to keep active combat soldiers away from techies, if you have a security station which has soldiers on top shooting away but also has techies crawling then you may be met with the odd boomeroid or two which doesnt fare to well with scientists who have no armour.

Well I haven't got the advanced sec. stations yet - never had the time to put some research into those - but I though the scientists would always spawn in their labs (it always seemed to be that way in my last game) so when i built the big labs I left a gap between the main complex and all the scientists to be filled with sec stations. (Last time those stations didn't do any real damage, they just became a target for explosives, however, they kept the enemy occupied until they had an accident involving 2 X-COM squads and a heavy disruptor-barrage)

Well thanks anyway... I won't be able to play for a couple of days so I will put your theories to good use some time later... bye :bye:

I think scientists spawn in squads in the laboratories and/or the living quarters. Agents spawn pretty much anywhere except for the repair bays and security stations i believe.

I dont like raiding Psyke much, as I hate slums, i do raid the odd Osiron warehouse time to time netting me some good armaments, and as another plus they tend to reciprocate and get mauled by my security stations while giving me lots of loot.

The trick is... I've allied with Psyke and equipped all my agents with Stun Grapples. This means about 23 or so people, some of them really crack stat ones. No ammo expenditure, Psyke doesn't get hostile or retaliate, and their dumb sentries just run around like headless chickens. When you nail down the correct "chock points" to move your troops, stunning all of the Psyke fools is just a matter of time. These raids net me a lot of weapons (in fact I have to sell some of the guns - but NOT ammo), AP grenades (I sell most, again), Psiclones (always sell) and an occasional part for Marsec armor too. A raid like that can easily crank out 20-30 k of cash.

Is that so?

I remembered being raided once, having only scientists and engineers in that base, with the entrance surrounded by the advanced security stations.

Mabye it will still work then in bases which have staff in them. Its rare for any one of my bases to be void of any xcom agents.

I dont think psiclones do anything, except for to be sold. To be honest ive never tried equipping one to an agent and using one. Who knows it might improve psi-skills or give a morale boost.

So Horseman, this stunning trick on allies, allied securtiy wont shoot at you? And they wont decrease in hostilities??? If so raiding Marsec's and MegaPol's arms factories should be fun, especially when they have weapons that may not be available to xcom yet.

They have weapons that are not available to X-Com yet :w00t: I'm starting a raid right now :evil:

Depends how far you are in the game.

For example in the first week you dont have access to Plasma Pistols, however raid cultists and you get them, raid MegaPol and you get even more.

Raid Marsec and you can get Heavy Launchers, MiniLaunchers and can even find the odd Marsec armour laying about. However one drawback with raiding is that the advanced weapons are usually being fired against you. Also you wont be able to buy ammo for your newfound guns and can only get ammo from raiding as well.

If you raid Marsec you get really cool weapons but having Marsec as an enemy is not a wise choice.

Exactly. I did that several dozen times.

A little question - can the androids be brainsucked? Logic dictates no, but then they shouldn't be vulnerable to sleeping gas either (and they are)

Ive never had androids brain sucked. I also havent ever had androids requiring medi-kits. Either they dont need medkits or for some strange reason they never receive critical damage and can be killed without it.

Also androids are useful no matter where you are in the game. Early on they are easily your best agents against both aliens and raiding, midgame they make great sentries for research/manufacture/storage/vehicle bases, mid-game and end-game they are easily your best Heavy Weapons Agents as they can be fully loaded with heavy items yet still run faster then your human agents and when I mean heavy weapons im talking about missile launchers which dont require a great deal of accuracy.

Also Solmine give a lot of elerium :D

Honestly instead of corps you can be hostile with there is really a shorter list of corps you cant be hostile with. These corps are....

MegaPol - Police Cars shooting at your vehicles constantly is not good when trying to fight aliens. Also not being able to procure vehicle equipment.
Goverment - Unless you somehow are able to fund yourself the goverment should not be made hostile with or you will lose a lot of funding.
Marsec - Cant buy thier guns, armour and ammo, more importantly you cannot buy thier vehicles or equipment and you cannot get the latter two from raiding unlike the former three.
Transtellar - Cant transfer anything except vehicles between bases, also cannot get scientists/engineers to bases, although the Space Port is a goldmine for raiders.
Super Dynamics - You cant buy or loot fuel or engines which can force you to have to use the people tubes to get to aliens, and the only equipment you can get as loot is the equipment your agents manually pick up from the battlescene.

Some of the other corps are pointless to raid, although Solmine are a great way of getting elerium, and nanotech if for some reason medkits are becoming scarce.

Is there a quick way to disable that damn blue creature that smokes from its behind and explodes when get next to your troops or when shot?

Armor-piercing and explosive ammunition detonates the Poppers explosives when firing on him, so use laser weapons or toxic ammunition. (or stun him, of course)

Lasers, Plasma, Disruptor, Stun or Anti-Alien works against poppers without exploding them, of course when there in the doorway of a UFO and theres a bunch of other aliens nearby its always fun to try and blow em up.

As you should know, launchers dont actually require any accurcy at all, and most androids have extremly high stregnth, also when chucking grenades and HE's and other explosives they can launch it further.

Of course you can get troops near the end with really good stats, except for youll want them with devestator cannons to use with thier really good accuracy, also they probably wont have as much health, androids on the other hand start with near max health, meaning they can get into big firefights, launch big weapons and end the big firefights with a big bang without dying or suffering too much.

Dont bother equipping a conventional weapon to an android (unless it does have fairly good accuracy) and you can have a walking weapons platform, to me they replace the tanks in UFO: Enemy unknown, except for they are more agile, more accurate, and have far more firepower.

Also androids are immensly cool when duel wielding two heavy devestator cannons, although accurate veteran humans are much better as long as they have the stregnth to carry them.

When you have a squad selected, right-clicking on an Alien will make the squad target that Alien in particular in priority.

The best way to keep Poppers down is Toxigun. Before that, kill it before it reach you. If it is impossible, select an Android and make it run toward the poper while the rest of the squad run away. This will hopefully keep everyone in your squad alive, tough most of them will be hurt. The Androids usually easily survive such a blast.

Also when you press shift and click on an alien thats called force firing which seems to be quicker then reactions, though it might mean soldiers reactions dont train up as much. Its also good to use force firing when aliens start using smoke grenades to cover assaults, get 3 men armed with disruptors to force fire the entrance/where shooting is occuring from and you will hopefully get a lucky shot.

Force firing is also good if you wanna blast walls or natural objects. This is best done with a Devastator Cannon, due to ammo recharging capability.

Useful in areas with thin walls, as you can make multiple entrances into a room and do pincer attacks.

Also good if you're uncomfortable about having your squad members entering a room 1 person at a time.

Note that you can also fire into the ground to blow a hole under you (provided there is another floor under you), or blow holes through the floor in the upper levels.

Or just blow up whole slums to kill off all of the aliens, although the Government doesn't like this.

Just throw a couple of demo charges around on the ground floor (and pray that there aren't any civilians around the corner) and job's a good 'un, really.

A good x-com agent does not need high stats for his killing physical stats, in later part of game leadership and psi control makes the game more fun to play with.


PSI Advance theory - there are 3 kinds of psi humans possess. Strength, power, defense.

Strength refers to how long u can control the alien/enemy.

Power refers to how much sucessful % penetration you can achieve to succeed in mind bending.

Defense refers to mind defense control, example androids do get panic easily and mind control by brain suck is diffcult to achieve.

PSI = mind bender comes in 4 functions: mind control, Stun unit, panic unit, probe unit.

mind control- works succesfully with panic units.

stun unit- works pretty like stun grapple withour close combat to collect live specimens.

panic unit- the kind of panic you give can uncon and disable the unit. collect his weapon and stand on top of it.

probe unit- check out this stats and weapons, cool

Mind Shield can be raid in Marsec

works 100% defense against all attacks dealing PSI. 0% effect dud



Next topic shall be Tracer motion scan of units. TATA :cheers:

Erm I thought it was Psi-Energy, Psi-Attack and Psi-Def, Psi-Energy being how long you can do your psychic attacks, Psi-Attack being the effectivness and Psi-Def being defensive against Psi-Attacks.

Apart from that looks good :ok:

Awaiting the next topic eagerly.

And now I have the same number of posts as Abi79 :D

hmm, this looks too much like spam, not lets see what Apocalypse related stuff are hanging around in my head......

Ah here's one.

Pressing Shift+M when you have one of your vehicles selected will put the vehicle in manual, however apart from finding out that page up and page down increase and decrease speed, im a bit stumped on how to fly me vehicles.

Any expert pilots here???

OOOOkkkkayyyy!!!!!

Really great game. I loved UFO and spent many long hours and sleepless nights playing it. Not so keen on Terror from the deep.

I'm running this game on a pentIII 98SE machine and have had not problems with it apart from one major annoyance...... it won't save games!!! :cry:

I've tried in missions, I've tried on the main screen and it just won't save. Sure the screen pops up with all those empty spaces so I click on one do the enter and......

NOTHING!!!!!!! :ranting:

I look and see if it is maybe on the load game screen and..........

Yep NOTHING!!

Can anybody help me please as I can't have my computer running 24/7 just for a game.

Thanx

Yeah you need to create the SAVEGAME folder in the Apoc directory. For whatever reason we tend not to put the cunning blank text files to create those folders in the zips.

Seriously, anyone know how to fly vehicles in manual (fly well I mean).

I know all you have to do is select the vehicle and press ctrl+m but all i seem to do is make by hoverbike go in circles, though it works well for making vehicles go loads faster by pressing pdg up, really useful when making vehicles go to UFO's or alerts or something.

The best way to deal with incoming UFO's is to camp outside the dimension gates, once you get the funds, sort out 3 fleets (prefferably with thier own base just for ease later in the game), have each fleet at each dimension gate (not directly next to the dimension gate as both aliens and your ships have a tendancy of blowing up buildings and managing to kill all other vehicles).

Check every few hours or so to make sure the gates are nearby your fleets and the gates havent moved, then once the aliens strike just launch out your fleets at the UFO's, generally the UFO's only come out of one gate so get your spare fleet to either split and assist both other gates, or go for the highest priority target first.

Your highest priority should be infiltrating capable ships such as the early scout, the transport, assault transporter etc...

Then secondary objectives of the escorts i.e. alien probe, alien escort ship etc..

Check infiltration graphs and try and deduce buildings aliens have infiltrated by looking at previous infiltrations of buildings and see if the suspected corps are nearby, aliens move from building to building.

Greetz! Great Site!

I am having some problems running Xcom3 in XP SP1.

I've tried DosBox 0.63 but it runs very poorly, even at 9000 cycles, more cycles don't help and the frameskip makes the mouse cursor choppy.

On win95 compatibility mode I can see the intro logos well and not choppy at all, but when the titles end, my monitor turns black and says "Frequency over range".

Please help me dudes. :help:

EDIT: I did check those other posts, there are different problems than mine.

SECOND EDIT: Problem solved with patch from Settlers 2 forum on Abandonia!

YOU DON'T NEED DOSBOX!

Just get the file winxpfix.exe from here http://www.jonsguides.com/dosgames/settler2.html and follow the instructions.

It's a Settlers 2 page but works for Xcom3. This game is cool, BTW. :max:

Don't forget to set the 5 executables in the folder to windows 95 compatibility and maybe 256 colors and 640x480 resolution, depending on your configuration.

Ahhh I'm back and I played on for a bit.

The results:
My taskforce consists now of 24 X-Com agents (highest rank captain, some stupid android who spent most of his time at basecamp replacing wounded soldiers... got no clue why he of all was promoted) and tours 2 dimensions in a biotransport
I briefly had a dimension probe, however it went K.I.A. when engaging a battleship over the city. (A last effort by the aliens, type 9 and 10 UFO together, both downed before they could beam anybody down :Brain: . When I briefly visited the other dimension there were a lot of probes around but nothing bigger than class 6 (or there about) was left)
Also I'm using partial disruptor armours by now (legs, primarily for the 10 new recruits I used for the biotransport since they are so light) and I've got a single retaliator cruising about. During the Class9/10 attack it took several potshots but it did its job very well although its only equipped with a notoriously empty disruptor inversion bomb launcher and 2 small disruptor beams... I'm building new weaps as fast as I can but my engineers can't cope with the immense workload they face.

By the way, I found some teleporters (by now 80) on "medium", disproving the theory that they are only available in superhuman. Still, I never heard of the "mind shield" before and its not available on the market. Could somebody give a description of it before I send an entire marsec security force to bed.

About androids: Later in the game they're just a nuisance, they stay comparatively slow and soon humans overtake them provided they live long enough. My casualties are at zero by now so I'm considering to kick out all those andros replacing them with humans and psihybrids.
About psi: I still got my single brave psitrooper, by now she's fairly capable although she can't keep the enemy under control for very long (all psis just above 50). What I always do with my psibuddies is make them look around and drop everything they have. Explosives are activated with 0.25 secs delay and I tried to fire a dimension rocket once. However I don't know whether I can keep control of people long enough to do that... the only attempt so far ended when the victim was shot by 4 aliens at the same time. :D Well, those 4 aliens spontaneously combusted .1 seconds later when about 8 boomeroids jumped at them at exploded with the enthusiams one usually can expect from them. :evil:

Nevertheless, the battle continues, the loot is big, the 3rd base under construction and the retaliator is planning an excursion to the other dimension... basically a worst case scenario, fully equipped it shall fight through 3 dozends of probes and other small ships boosting my morale while shattering that of the aliens... also, I expect quite a lot of loot when my biotransport cruises around and just collects all the debris (even if I have to fight, my agents are theoretically able to fight through 5 big ufos before running out of ammo... and then I still have explosives and any weapons I recover during those earlier missions. I could keep going forever or until the cargo hold is full :Titan: )

Is there actually anyone here that uses Marsec body armor in the latter parts of the game? In my opinion the X-COM armor makes the whole thing obsolete but same people might enjoy the flying part.

Yes, the Marsed body armor is the only armor which allows you to fly. Basically, just keep the body part of the Marsec armor, fill everything else with Xcom blue Armor and make sure you have 2 shields in your backpack and you should not have a problem.

Those who wear those suits are usually my crackshot PSY mobile attack and retaliation squad. In resume, it's an all around purpose squad which can also attack with PSY. ;)
They usually carry plasma guns, at least at the beginning of the game.

Mindshields are available from raiding marsec, though i think you have to be on superhuman or something. Basically the mindshield gives you super psi-defence making it an invaluable tool when facing psimorphs and micronoids, dont know the effect on brainsuckers though (dont think it has any).

Marsec Flying Suits are absolutely amazing, ive got a 4-man(machine) android squad with heavy weapons all with flying suits, they get around anywhere amazingly quick and can blow holes into most places making new and inventive points of entry.

The flying suits are amazing on levels such as the slums and the hydrofarms, however in most buildings raids its near useless as most are indoors, and on alien UFO levels its only really good for crossing trenches quickly, unless of course you blow a few holes in the UFO's armour :sneaky: .

Overall though they are quite useful but not really for a bulk amount of troops, they are also very good at escaping from brainsuckers and poppers (note brainsuckers can actually jump the whole height of the map, but i think they can only attatch onto a agents head if they are less then 3 height tiles away from the agents, also if there is a ceilng they cannot brainsuck agents (if they agents are just under the ceiling that is).

Androids may be outclassed eventually but they still have super stregnth and health and are the easiest way of dealing with psi-morphs and micronoids as well as being able to bring enough firepower to flatten a building solo while moving the same speed or faster then regular agents.

Well, I just equip my guys with X-COM armor and toxiguns (and LOTS of ammo) and that pretty much makes me unstoppable on alien missions.

The Marsec armor usually only comes when raiding other organisations since it lets you get around very easily, making it possible to surround your enemies.

"Mind shields"? Never heard of those, and I've played Superhuman multiple times. (But I haven't raided Marsec though)

What's interesting in the Toxigun is it's size. Basically, all my soldiers carry, in addition to their own normal guns and ammo and grenades, a toxigun with several clips in their belt. They use the normal Alien guns to fight and when they happen to fall on tough Aliens or Aliens with personnal shields, I switch to the Toxigun. That's a pretty easy and safe way to get personnal shields if you ask me. ;)

I do that as well. Ever since the toxigun with toxine B (and now C) became standard issue, I have hardly used any explosives. I don't carry any sidearms (Hmm.... devestator cannon, now THATs one helluva sidearm :D ). Only few exceptions:
When Marsec turned hostile (briefly) and I had to cleanse a weapsfactory (that was why they were hostile in the first place, on one mission some missile went of laying waste to most of the factory-equipment) and all these martians were running around. So I used fearsome stungrenades on those.
And of course sirian soldiers which were caught in the crossfire when I cleaned out an infiltrated temple (2 actually). There I used a lot of vortex mines and boomeroids. I considered letting the aliens have Sirius so I could get both psiclones and expensive equipment in one raid but they'd infiltrate other organisations from there, wouldn't they?

Anyway, here is my standard assault trooper:

Marsec body armour, rest all disruptor (I'm still building all the parts, I have 44 soldiers now, 20 of those are defenders, though)
Power sword (Not everyone has got one yet)
Boomeroid
Vortex mine
Toxigun
4 Toxi C clips
2 Megapol AP 'nades
2 Stun 'nades
2 Smoke 'nades
1 Disruptor shield
Medikit
That's it for 21 soliders
No. 22 has no alien explosives but a 2nd disruptor shield and a mind bender
No. 23 and 24 have no vortex mine but a stun grapple instead

I'm thinking since I've got 24 assault troopers I might leave some of them airborne (I put them in 6 4-man squads) and give others a full disruptor armour and teleporters for use as shocktroops and close combat (Now if I was a sirian cultist, a teleporting, camouflaged trooper with a powersword and 2 disruptorshield would REALLY scare the muck out of me ... just a thought, not sure if I'll put that plan into action. :evil:

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.

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..

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.

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 :D


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: )

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.

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. :D

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 :tomato:

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.

This time I actually remembered to log in.


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 :D ).
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: ) ...

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

how do you run it?

By running the game executable.

If you have any problems in launching the game on your system, please:
A. Read the previous posts in this thread. There is a good possibility that someone had a similar problem and managed to get a solution.
B. If that didn't help, run a search on Apocalypse in Troubleshooting section.
C. If you still have not found a solution, then post a new thread in Troubleshooting and describe your problem in a _detailed_ manner. The more exact is your description, the easier it will be to find a solution, as well as faster.

i have a very important question. a friend of mine figured out that i downloadet x-com apokalypse here. he also wants this game but he is not able to speak english or even to understand. he would appreciate it if anyone knows where i can get the german version. its not possible to change the language with the version which is available on this awesome site.

A couple pages ago somebody said that hoverbikes en masse are quite good. In my current game my fleet consists out of a valkyrie, a wolfhound, a stormdog, 6 hovercars and about a dozend high end hoverbikes using the best engine, a light targeting system and a rendor or a lineage cannon. Now my hoverbike count peaked at fifteen but during the last attack I lost two bikes and several just made it... I'm wondering if you can really get through the dogfights using clouds of hoverbikes as at the beginning of the week I have to choose between five or six bikes plus equipment or a hawk air warrior. So far the bikes have proven that they are able to cream enemy UFOs quite efficiently, but... well, they're so fragile.. I can't begin to imagine the losses if I had to battle a mothership or a battleship.

Apart from that: What settings do you suggest for hoverbikes?
For all my craft I currently use the cautious mode (not the extreme one but the 2nd) and fly on the 2nd altitude setting so that my craft shoot up in the sky instead of shooting down on the city. I'm not sure whether hoverbikes are easier to hit (for UFOs) if they're right on top of them or if they keep their distance.

I always use them setted on agressive, with the default gun plus a small aiming box in the equipment square with the best engine it can take. Plus to that, I always make them fly at higher height than the UFO's so the UFO's don't fire on the ground.

The trick with the Hoverbikes is that they are very fast but very weak. Only one hit can destroy one easily, so I always set them to retreat to base as soon as they are damaged. They are so small they are repaired very quickly, so having a lot of them damaged is usually not a problem. You also must not use them single handely because they don't really pack a punch, use other ships to finish the job.

The Hoverbikes have a certain timeline in which they are not as usefull because they are more vulnerable when there is more ships around, but as soon as the Aliens begin to send UFO's equipped with shields they are extremely usefull because they can take the shield down very fast. If you are concerned about losses at that point, hit and runs is what I'd suggest first.

I dont like giving hoverbikes lineage plasma cannons, too expensive equipement for too fragile a ship. I was shocked though when i found out that the big huge lineage cannon actually fits on a titch hoverbike, more useful once you have explorers as then you use alien diruptor weapons instead of plasma tech so you can equip hoverbikes with the cannons then.

You should watch out for alien bombers though, they are evil on hoverbikes as they fire the dreaded multibomb, can easily kill a few hoverbikes on its own, although it sucks more when it uses the multibomb to down your hawk, for bombers i use hovercars, they combine firepower with constitution, can dodge more easily then hawk air warriors, and they are much more cheaper.

Smaller UFO's can be dealt with hoverbikes, troop-transports gets hovercars and air warriors while hoverbikes deal with escorts, and the mothership gets the whole armada on it, escort ships are laughable without anything escorting them.

Once you get shield tech though, then hovercars really shine, just send out fleets of em with shields and watch the UFO's hit the floor hard, and get your best ship fully equipped with shields and it can take a lot of hits, one manual controlled retaliator equipped with med disruptor beams and full shields (well, one matrix missile evasion) managed to wipe out 3/4 of the UFO's in the alien dimension, including a pesky mothership, (got to watch out for statis missiles though, in the alien dimension the escort ships get my full attention).

Also... one last thing.... a stormdog....really????

I found the only good thing a stormdog does is help the UFO destroy the road outside the cultists temples, stop whatever nasty deeds there up to.

Thanks for the advice, next time my hoverbikes will go right on top of those UFOs.
But I still prefer flying lower than the UFO... all those hoverbikes firing and missing can do a lot more damage to the city than the UFO they are pursuing.
Also, I have only 3 lineages between the (surviving) 12 HBs, the chance that they are taken down is reasonably low so I just deal with it.
I don't have any problems with bombers just yet simply because the aliens aren't that worried just yet.

About the cheap alien transporters: during the 3rd invasion, when they first appeared, my entire fleet was occupied taking down one transport plus two escort ships (not actual escorts but whatever it was they send along for protection)... the second transport (didn't know it was unarmed) was taken on - and downed - by a single megapol police car on the other side of city... lucky policecar ... the aliens didn't think of ramming it :bleh:

Ground vehicles / Stormdog:
I didn't have the heart to sell the stormdog.. maybe as a financial reserve one day or I might deploy it for base defence, since I'm going to avoid a second base for a while... I might actually be able to cram everything I need including advanced labs into my home base. Also I'm considering field tests of griffons, then deploying ground forces, parking them near dimension gates... hell, those things have to be good for something (And by that I mean something other than pissing sirius off :evil: )

Oh yeah, diplomacy:
Recently I spotted an illegal vehicle (aka 2 phoenix hovercars, dispatched by diablo) which attacked some corporation which disliked me after a civilian got killed by aliens in the crossfire while I was weeding them out...
I paused, gave the matter some consideration and came to the conclusion that I would be better off with Diablo hostile and other companies happy, especially since the worst diablo could do was bring some equipment along for sale (and give my agents the opportunity for some.. adventure training in the process).
So I dispatched a few hoverbikes; one enemy was destroyed by megapol and I got the other one.
But when I checked my diplomacythingie the result was rather shocking:
4 more corps had started to dislike me
The attacked corps couldn't care less what I did for them
Diablo didn't care either
Now don't tell me Diablo has alliances with corps such as the recyclingfolks... It just doesn't make any sense...

Generally, if you attack anything or anyone, intentionally or otherwise, besides the alien forces on the cityscape map, everyone's opinion of you will go down.

I have finnaly finnished the game (hard).... I can just say that X-com Apocalypse is the funniest game i ever played. The game and the sound works perfekt in XP if u have dosbox.. (not musik sound)



*thanks God for Dosbox*

Try using VDMSound, then the game will work even better.

Later on i used 6 or so Dogs with rockets to defend the senate (parked it inside the buildings nearby and the senate itself) from an mother ship beleve me or not but the bastard turned back.
Griffons are not good cos they can take the same amount of damage (street)
usualy a single hit destroys it.

For downing UFO's 3 hawks with med Disruptors and Lineage's can take down an battleship.

is there any way to put the music from the demo in the game?

if i knew the original music filenames and location i might try it.

I made the mistake to lend the cd to my cousin who lives 200 km away. :wall:

I've managed to convert the demo music to wav and i now have them playing in the background, its still not perfect but oh well... unless someone is willing to send me the music files it'll have to do.

I converted with Goldwave, the original sampling rate is 22050 if anyone is interested in doing the same.

[quote]Originally posted by AntarcticTiger@Oct 8 2005, 05:43 AM

Quote:

Recently I spotted an illegal vehicle (aka 2 phoenix hovercars, dispatched by diablo) which attacked some corporation which disliked me after a civilian got killed by aliens in the crossfire while I was weeding them out... I paused, gave the matter some consideration and came to the conclusion that I would be better off with Diablo hostile and other companies happy, especially since the worst diablo could do was bring some equipment along for sale (and give my agents the opportunity for some.. adventure training in the process). So I dispatched a few hoverbikes; one enemy was destroyed by megapol and I got the other one. But when I checked my diplomacythingie the result was rather shocking: 4 more corps had started to dislike me The attacked corps couldn't care less what I did for them Diablo didn't care either Now don't tell me Diablo has alliances with corps such as the recyclingfolks... It just doesn't make any sense...

Maybe you damaged their buildings in the process.

Is there a safe way to raid alien buildings without loosing too many craft while getting to them.
Coz i always loose at least one fighter to the dreaded stasis rocket and freands.
i tried to use Plasma defense arrays but they were 0% efficient (every rocket hit my craft).

Best way to raid alien buildings is to have decoys with lots of shields who escort the Biotrans (which should have some shields) to the building, a much more suitable choice if you have it though is to simply use alien cloacking fields to transport your troops.

Decoys work well against stasis missiles, and if your having trouble, bring your own and stasis the aliens.

Plasma Defence Array is only more useful then Laser Defence Array as it has a longer range, both arent very good, get a matrix missile evasion thingy (only one, they dont increase jamming by having more).

:help: i recently got xp and almost cried when i couldn't get xcomapoc to work. is there a simple patch i can download, as i don't speak techno babble?

In short; no.

If you still want to run Apoc, head to the troubleshooting forum and we'll help you. :)

That's odd. I went into the dimension first, with my 5 Annihiliators, armed with the best stuff, and took out all enemy aircraft in one skirmish. Then, I retreated, came back with the biotrans. You could just do that, as it takes quite a while for the aliens to construct more UFOs.

First of all, thanks to all whose posts have provided me with priceless advice and tips, both on getting the VDMSound and the mouse to work well.

Thanks also to Abbandonia for providing me with the opportunity to finally play Apoc again (my CD vanished some many years back).

Someone mentioned that the hoverbikes are no good against larger (battleship class) UFOs...but my latest (and first) fight with one of them seemed to indicate that bikes are the thing to counter a battleship (probably not more than one though).

I had 15 bikes and 2 hawks focus fire on a single battleship, ignoring the 2 bombers escorting it. The main damage was done when it stopped to beam down troops on a recycle plant. All my bikes have Lineage Plasma Cannons, my Hawks have the light disruptors and prophets. The battleship went down as it tried to get back to the dimensional portal. As it fell, I turned to the bombers and finished them quick. All I lost were 2 hoverbikes and that's because they got crushed during launch. One stray projectile from the mothership hit my base side where the launch bays are.

However, I do not doubt that the bikes will become obsolete very soon. Do I sell them all away, or keep some for distraction purposes?

MY GOD I found my X-Com 3 CD!!!!!!!!!

Music at last!

@ Antartic: I did thew same raiding strategy*, and out of curiosity, saved the game, set the speed to fastest and let many days go by, and still didn't see any respawning of ships (before I destroyed the ship-building structure, that is). You mentioned they "take a while" to respawn, did you see them respawn at all eventually? If so, at what difficulty level?


* = Only I found 3 Annihilators packing Heavy Disruptor Beams and Disruptor launchers, with a double load of X-Com targetting systems and large shields each, did the job, at the second-to-last difficulty level. ;)

@ Sy: I haven't tried the hoverbike thing you suggested (I always go for the state-of-the-art equipment myself :P), so I'll take your word for it, but it might become costly due to losing a couple of units each time (and, more importantly, the weapons they pack). Retaliators and then Annihilators are the thing to go, both because they are the only ones capable of packing the heavier weapons and equipment (Annihilator specifically is the only one that can fit a heavy disruptor beam) and because they are the only (fighting) units able to go to the Alien Dimention, and that's where you're bound to take the fighting to.

When you figure out the research tree, try to build only 1, at most 2, Retaliators as you rush to complete research on the Annihilator: one doesn't quite make the other obsolete, but almost. :P

I personally have never seen an UFO actually spawn. However, new ones are occasionally spawned / built. Sometimes, when I started another raid on the other dimension, new UFOs were up and about, though it usually was only one (most frequently an escort ship, which is probably not the best craft to build if you have nothing to do damage ;) ). Incidentally, I prefer to fight through the alien dimension before letting biotrans anywhere near it. I first went in there with one Annihilator and a Retaliator and the biotrans... the biotrans decided to arrive first and limped back home while the other craft were still arriving. The fighters took a heavy beating, too, and it took several runs to get some breathing space around the portals. (Battle of Britain SciFi edition...)


Ships: I first played on medium and used heavy armament most of the time, i.e. I used plenty of Hawks and then switched to Retaliators (Missileboats with one stasis launcher) and Annihilators (Gunboats).

In my current game (second hardest difficulty) I command a fleet of bikes and some phoenixes mixed in between, one Hawk for ... eh .. demolitions tasks and the one and only Valkyrie one as a backup skyranger (usually my soldiers drive around in a wolfhound but since I get loads of missions at once most of the time the wolfhound just drives to the nearest one. The valkyrie then picks up the soldiers from there to move to the next hostile site provided the survivors are up to another mission)
Anyway, I'm very happy with those bikes, also I loose one or two during most of the heavier alien assaults they're cheap and easy to replace, the only problem is the enormous amout of elerium 10 - 15 lineage bikes use when they're berserking through the city.

This community provides too much love for me not to join... I'm finally a member now.

I'm now at the stage where my dimensional probe got back with data for the first alien building. I'm now rushing to complete research on all the alien weapons and the biotrans so that I can start taking the fight to the aliens' home turf. It seems like the aliens are getting fed up with using smaller craft and are sending in mothership/battleship/bombers now.

@ Rorschach:
Thanks for the advice. Yeah I'm getting a little fed up with replacing the bikes though my funds are fat through mass selling Toxigun B clips and Personal Cloaks. At this point I've stopped replacing bikes in anticipation of replacing my fleet with the transdimensional ships. Perhaps I'll keep about 8 just to help draw UFO fire and help deplete their shields.

@ Lt. Razak:
Your posts have been truly entertaining to read! You make them sound like exciting war stories that really adds meaning to the game. I've always thought your fleet sound amazingly large.

Qn: How many vehicles can a base hold?

Illimited. Tough if you only have one repair bay it will take ages before it is completed because they are all repaired at the same time...

Thanks for the reply :D

Previous Fleet:
15 Hoverbikes
2 Hawks :yawn:

Current Fleet:
2 Retaliators
2 Annihilators
8 Hoverbikes
3 Biotrans :Brain:

Now motherships and battleships take about the same time to fall as my previous fleet took to destroy an UFO scout. :max:

Qn: What is the optimal configuration for retaliators and annihilators?
My current loadout....
Each retaliator:
2 medium disruption beams
1 disruption bomb

Each annihilator:
1 heavy disruption beam
1 disruption bomb
1 disruption multi-bomb

I'm thinking of outfitting each annihilator with a statis instead of disruption bomb. How effective are those? I'm still starting to make stasis bombs at the moment.

EDIT:
Another thing, something wierd happened today. Diablo suddenly said something like "If you continue to attack our UFO friends we will stay hostile with you, blah blah" and remained permanently hostile. Following which they consistently raided my second base as if they were born to do it. I checked Diablo's infiltration level and it was at 0%. What just happened? Is the only way to regain their cooporation be to pound them into submission?

Hmm possibly their allies are infiltrated, not them.

You could just annihilate them though...

I frequently check the graphs and no organisations were infiltrated at all, except for bloody Sirius which is already on their side. However, at least Sirius doesn't lay a finger on my stuff. Diablo, on the other hand, has raided me multiple times already. I am so tempted to just go raze their building to the ground.

That is odd if Diablo are not infilitrated at all and give that message.

Are you sure you selected Diablo instead of checking the top 10 infiltrated, checking the top 10 will only give you the ones which are under 50% (and can still be saved).

Also if you were hostile with Diablo then when you try and bribe them they may reject the bribe saying until you stop attacking our alien friends we will continue hostilities, then that is perfectly normal, however you shouldnt get a random message saying that unless they are infiltrated.

I luv war :D

Anyway, some possible solutions to the Diablo problem:
- bribe them (if still possible)
- build lots of security stations around the base entrances and watch diablo-soldiers die a very very horrible and pointless, yet entertaining death
- send them a formal message: "Ok, get some" ... engrave it on a bomb and drop it over one of their buildings just to get their attention. Then you either go for the scorched earth strategy which involves random destruction of city blocks where anything diablolike is present, which might ... annoy the senate. Alternatively you can go for plastic surgery, selectively removing Diablo's buildings from the cityscape. The Senate still won't be too pleased but, hey... good fun isn't always for free...


Fleet:
How on earth did you produce so many high-tech craft so quickly. It took me ages to manufacture even one wing for trans-dimensional excursions (I.e. murder and mayhem)
My configuration (one wing):
One Annihilator (Gunboat):
- Weapons: Heavy Disruptor, 2 Medium Disruptors
- Equipment: Shields, X-Com and heavy target computers
- Mode: 2nd-aggressive as Annihilators can take a punch and since disruptors are easily evaded...

One Retaliator (Missileboat):
- Weapons: Dis. Inversion bomb, Multibomb, Stasis bomb
- Equipment: Light shields, 2 x-com targeting scanners
- Mode: 2nd-cautious as they rets are too fragile and since alien missiles are very very very effective no matter what range you're at. Also I control the stasis bombs manually, i.e. only one wing is allowed to deploy its stasis launcher at any given time so I don't run out in midbattle having wasted most of the missiles.

One Explorer (Decoy, Reinforcements, Artillery)
- Weapons: Medium Disruptor, 2 big missiles
- Equipment: light shield and all the targeting scanners you can cram in there
- Mode: 2nd-cautious as explorers are made of rice-paper. The sole reason I ever built an Explorer was to see whether I could fit the stasis-launchers on there. The big missiles ™ are those big human missile launchers with a single shot (I can't remember their name). I usually have them turned off as well to save them for motherships and the likes, should any turn up. Even then the missiles are only deployed if the battle is going badly or the shields of the target have been..eh deactivated. Also, the Explorer can be send in to close combat just to distract the UFOs while a more expensive / important craft retreats.

And possibly:
Biotrans 1 (the one and only)
- Weapons: Light disruptor, 24 underpaid, overequipped soldiers with a distinct lack of sanity
- Equipment: light shields, plenty of extra seats, some cargo holds and a containment unit
- Mode: Veeeery cautious, veeery low. Spends most of its in-flight time during battles either in manual-control mode or on a high-burn high-gee escape trajectory, meaning it flies in the direction with zero UFOs or a very promising opportunity for escape (a launch site or a dimension gate (provided it leads home, otherwise I'll take my chances with one measly invasion force...pff). The launch site-escape may have lasting consequences, though... the record holder is when the building where I landed including its only launch site were trashed; the biotrans was stuck for a day or two and the agents had to walk home due to the fact that the building in question belonged to transtellar and I couldn't be bothered to bribe them into happiness again)


That is the composition of my fleet, or at least it was at the height of the last game. It consisted of two wings and I still had my pre-dimensonal-fleet, i.e. 6 phoenixes, 2 hoverbikes, 2 valkyries and 8 hawks just to spice the home-matches up a wee bit.

And I don't mean to brag, but my fleet as described above had real problems shooting down motherships and battleships... they usually just were vaporised :bye:


Oh yes, one more thing about craft-equipment: I had to build a third base and specialise it on item-manufacture. Alltogether I had 2 small workshops mass-producing Toxi-clips / other small usefuls and three or four large ones continuously producing missiles and disruptor beams (med and heavy) and - when my ammo-supplies allowed it - a new craft. And I still had shortages! (Especially since I apparently reached the max. amount of engineers in the whole bloody city.) So maintaining a murderous high-tech fleet might be difficult at times unless you use a lot more disruptors than I did (lets face it, they're not THAT good after all... unless it comes to creaming X-com craft...now that's something they're good at) or just deal with them in the old-fashioned way :D [UFO spotted, what do we do now, sir? - Uhmm... first, fire an avalanche right into the engines and then... hmmm (*studying-the-menue-tone-of-voice*) ... oh yeah, melt them with some plasma... - Very well, sir.]

Ah I see...what I meant was exactly what you've described. They were hostile with me for sometime already (I wonder why, I didn't do anything to them) and then when I wanted to bribe them back they gave me this "our alien friends" philosophy.

Now what I don't get is, if they're not infiltrated, how come they would refer to the aliens as friends. It's not like Diablo has the same ideas as Sirius... :blink:

Lt. Razak:
I took a pretty long time to produce my fleet too. Many days of 0 score went by as my engineers worked overtime.

The disruptors are indeed easily evaded. More so for my fleet since I didn't put as many targetting computers as you did. Most of the beams were off target to begin with, and wouldn't hit even if the UFO were stationary LOL

As for ship equipment. Both my retaliators and annihilators use the large shields. My annihilators are outfitted with cloaks and this makes space for only 1 targetting computer. Are the cloaks any good? I've only battle tested them once and didn't know if they actually make any difference. It's quite a large space wasted if they're useless.

As for Diablo, I'm gonna just pound them into submission!

Keep raiding Diablo. If their networth is negative, they won't be able to fund a retaliation strike against you.

Pounding into submission sounds good. Very good, in fact... me-wanna-have-piece-too *cry*

Anyway: I've always been suspect of equipment that has the chance that you can divert enemy projectiles. Chances are that your computer doesn't like you and, by pure chance the deflection of enemy weapons never works. Pure [/i]chance ... :ranting:

Still, this is my experience with cloaks on ships:
First impression: Brilliant, my smegging fleet doesn't hit the enemy AT ALL until the close combat stage begins. As a result, the city takes quite a beating but hey, who cares. I'm rich, I'm fat, I'm a smegging bastard and don't care about some weird government.
So I make all efforts to capture one of these magic devices and huzah! soon enough, a Transtellar transport lifts of and transfers a prototype to my main research base (Note that the Transtellar Mogul had a big smile on his face.. a smegging expensive smile as I have to keep bribing those chaps).
Next my sciencetists (overall skill 994) bash their heads against that cloak for a couple of days. The result, however was very disappointing: (for me anyway)
The cloak takes up ridiculous amounts of space and has a jamming effect lower[i] than that of the "lowly earthican" missile jamming thingie which you can get for an apple and an egg in any good pawn shop in the city. So personally I was never too impressed with that thing, my Annihilators were equipped with the human version at some stage and it always did SOME good, but hey... these things don't work too well against computers. (Same thing with the personal cloak, where in THEORY I can camp wherever I want to and see any cloaked enemy as soon as he spots me. A barrage of dimension missiles hailing down on me quickly taught me otherwise... God bless two sets of shields and a full disruptor armour. [ 'Corporal...' - 'Seargant?' - '... what's those purple slivers comin' towards us over there.. are they...?' - 'Yes, Seargent' - 'Do you think we should ...' - 'Yes, Sergeant' - 'Right, Corporal, give the order to move... hey... come back!' ]



Oh yeah: One question: What were the best firefights you ever had (I.e. who vs who, equipment, situation, etc...)
Just curious because I got some really funny ones and some really good ones like realistic etc.

Hi, there!

The problem occured when I've try to raid landed "bomber" - game can't find some files. (I don't know excatly the names - system didn't show them) Did you had these problems with game downloaded from Abandonia?

Can anybody help?

Thanks in advance.

Hmm... I downloaded the game from Abandonia, too, but I rarely have any problems (I run it with DOS-Box).

The only two problems I ever had:

1) I start a mission and suddenly the game decides to ask for the cd-rom
Solution: Restart DOS-Box and try again

2) The game freezes, DOS-Box starts mass-producing some errormessages in the 2nd DOS-Box window (the one with the cycles and everything)
Solution: Quite surprisingly, restart DOS-Box and try again :angel:


Anyway, I suspect you tried that anyway ... I never had any other problems with the game (at least none of technical nature ;) ).
I don't know how you run the game, if you don't use it already, try to use DOS-Box
Otherwise, make a backup copy of your savegames and unzip the X-Com apocalypse archive again to make sure everything is there and in one piece.

I hope this sorts your problem out... and don't kill the messenger, even if he has problems with shutting up and just keeps on talking...talking...talking :tomato:

Looks like x-com apoc can't be downloaded from site.
My CD-version does not run properly on dos-box + Win2k (no sound).
:(

2 Lt. Razak: Thanks for the help. I use VDMSound to run XCOM Apocalypce. Yesterday try to change some file names (just added micros.pcx made by renaming of micro-.pcx) and changed directory name to XCOMA - game halted and asked me to insert CD.

2 werkon: Holder imformed that downloading problem has host technical background and will be solved soon.

Jacal: Sorry, can't help you then...

werkon: I have the same problem with my own CD version, the abandonia version works fine in dos-box though... I dunno what exactly has been changed apart from the fact that I don't get any music (game freezes when you try to turn it on... don't try it) and that (999 out of 1000 times) the game does not ask for a CD but hey... if I can play it, I'm happy... no question asked.

Ok I downloaded DOSBox and i'm trying to play this game through windows XP.

I can't mount my c drive in DOS box though. i type mount c c:\dosprog like the info says but no matter what directory I put down the program says the directory doesn't exist!

Help please!

Well, have you actually created that folder on your HDD? If so, you need to change the drive in the emulator to C: by typing c:\ after mounting, otherwise it's not in a drive so it won't find anything.

There are two ways of using dosbox:

1) (This way any changes you make to dosbox config will be loaded and used)

Start dosbox
Command

Mount D: C:\games\dosgames\Xcom3

The folder C:\games\dosgames\Xcom3 would then be mounted as D:
then just change to D: (type "D: ") and start the game ("xcomapoc")

2) (This way is foolproof (i.e. my favourite :) but any changes you have made to the dosbox config are disregarded for some reason)

Open the folder with the game
Open the folder with DOS-Box in a second window
Drag the executable from the game onto the DOS-box.exe file. Windows will then try to start the game using dosbox; the gamedirectory will be mounted as C: automatically and the game starts.. huzah! :Brain:

Ah I see. Then this means WAR!!!! Can't say it's my fault. I do my best trying to save the world from aliens and this is the reward I get from Diablo. Their raids are extremely annoying.

I have to credit their bravery though; knowing that they'll be eating facefuls of disruption beams the moment they enter my base, they still come to face death.

---

So cloaks are useless? Then it's time for me to take them off my ships. Yes, they take up an awful lot of space indeed. I think I'll be better off installing targetting computers and extra shields.

---

As for those who have problems running apoc in dos box, please try VDMSound. It is way better in terms of performance.

Hey, can someone tell me how to save your game in DOSBox? Everytime I start the game there are no saved games, it keep reseting the saved files.

Please help someone! I like making progress in games!

As I said, raid them in return. You'll also get some gear & Psiclones that way, so it's well worth the effort.

Already asked and answered, as I recall. Check the printable version of this thread or search through Troubleshooting.

look in your xcom directory there should be a directory called "SAVEGAME" without the "", if that dosent exist, create a directory called "SAVEGAME"

Ummm... check if you have a "savegame" folder in Apoc's directory?

can the hawk beat the medium sized perple ufo. you know the 3rd type of ufo you meet? (poenix and interseptor get plasted :wall: )

"When fighting the real evil you have to cheat to win" :sneaky:

Yes he can but i advise to use pheanxes (defensive) and hoverbikes (standard) that could swarm him without being hit to often.

In a group - they definitely can.

On medium level I finished the game before 7th week ... How about you?

BTW: Best attack force against aliens is by my opinion 1 annihilator, 2 retaliators and if you want, some explorers. They are all fully wielded with shields (anni has 2x big and 3x small, or missile evasion matrix is usefull as well). The explorers are more than phoenixes and valkyries, even the hawk isn't that good I think. And they are far cheaper. Even without the annihilator you are able to down every UFO. And with the Annihilator, you mostly don't have problem to clean up the alien dimension, leaving no surviving UFOs.

BTW: on w2k the game runs fine with VDMSound, MouseFix(mouse2kv) and crack.

For rookies:
Very good idea to start is to just after the game starts (and you equip your soldiers well enough) :Titan: raid the Cult of Sirius, using incendiary ammo to put their money low enough - and from the things you found there (plasma, psiclones, weapons) you can get a lot money (10 mins after the game starts(game time) you can actually have more than 300 thousans and plasma pistols to replace these baaad lawpistols)
Don't loose anyone to the aliens - it is very bad idea (except for siriuses). Almost every organization gives you bonus when allied and for example loosing Transtellar means you can no more transport between your bases and any agents or scientists have to move by feet - without taxis... Too bad! Loosing SELF means you loose ability to hire androids (good to have one per squad [against psionics]) and Mutant Alliance has the same with hybrids (though I always had just one or two as the "supermen").
As long as you don't have enough firepower to down the UFOs - use hoverbikes, use everything - and attack in one swarm, one UFO by other.
When ground attacking UFOs, let your agents lie before the doors - it means winning the battle almost without loses.
Use real-time! Turn based is almost useless in Apocalypse...
Don't use ground vehicles! They look good, but when you destroy the road, they go as well. Sell these you have on gamestart, you get some money, better than loosing them in battle they can't win.
In the Alien Dimension you don't have to kill everyone (if you don't need to get any captured/dead alien from the mission - pointing to Queenspawn, which researched both dead and alive gives you anti-alien gas - very useful!), just fulfill the mission (it will write "building out of order" or something like) and run away, if you could have losses.
Use personal shields! They can stop the entropy. If you get hit by the entropy launcher and you don't have shields, drop all of your armor and run to the exit of the building.
Never send anyone anywhere without armor. Unarmored need just one shot of disruptor gun to die and the armor is great against explosions. Disruptor armor is really great - if you don't stand against entropy launchers. My best soldier got 3 popper blasts, 2 vortexes without shield and managed to survive without being severely wounded (without the armor she would die after the first popper).
Hyperworms are really nasty. They can fairly quick cut even through shields.
As soon as you get Toxin B, use toxiguns - they can shoot through shields without damaging them and they only harm aliens. And they have very good firerate and damage. But they need a lot of ammo, so... Also, for the alien dimension you should also take some disruptors, because you have to destroy the objectives.
In alien buildings there are some orange pads, from where the aliens keep comming. One vortex bomb is enough to destroy one of them, sometimes even four at time.
As soon as you can, use teleporters - when popper or bomb hits your men, even after the explosion shows up, they aren't hit - that's time to teleport out of the range of the blast. Saving many shield points!
Personal cloaking is very good, ship cloaking is useless.
Guidance systems are useless - because the UFOs move. It doesn't matter how close you miss... if the UFOs are small, they can run even with 100% accuracy, while with 0% you rarely miss the bigger ones. So, only wasting space for shields.
Build security stations around vehicle repair bays and entrance lifts - if you block the attackers well enough, you just have to look on how they die blasted by the towers of securities. Sometimes 4 are enough, sometimes you have to build more extensive system of defense.
Don't let your men die too easily! (well, to be honest, when I finished the last game I only had one "real" veteran [the oldest one] and she wasn't there from the game start... My second best died in alien dimension and I let him to...)
First play it on the lowest difficulty. Superhuman is very difficult even for experienced players.

And - this game rocks!

Oh my god. My version of this game has over 500MB. You have taken out all the sounds or what?

movies, yes. Music aswell.

The movies hardly take up anything, though the music is about 300MB :w00t:

Ermh. Heya, all. I've browsed through the Troubleshooting thread on running games on DosBox, but I'm still experiencing some trouble. Here's the detail:

- Game runs, sound effects and all.
- Every time I enter a 9-stories high map or someone starts blasting away at my troopers with a rocket launcher, the game begins to lag very much. Can't move my soldiers or tactic at all. The lag is considerably lesser around the edges of the combat area. Don't know why.

I've currently altered DosBox to use 500 megabytes of memory and cycles are at 20k and my resolution in dosbox is 800 by 600 and the game is running under VGA setting. Still, every time there's a map with many floors or someone goes around shooting with a rocket launcher, the game almost freezes and it's impossible to play. Any tips or suggestions on how to fix this? Should I post my system specs?

Addition to the last post: I've tried downloading DOS32A v7.33 from the link provided on this thread, but I just get a page telling me that "This page cannot be displayed" and couldn't try that one out.

Hey, I just found this game and I've been having trouble. The game works fine without DosBox, but I don't get sounds and my mouse is moving in slow motion. How can I fix these two? :help:

To get sound you have to use either VDMSound or DOSBox.

Don't know about the sluggish mouse though.

:w00t:

It worked! Thank you so much! The sluggish mouse isn't really a problem either (remembered that the screen can be moved with keys, so I pretty much keep the mouse centered on the middle of the screen). Just like old times...Thanks, SupSuper.

Use VDMSound, the game will work better then in DosBox.

Man I need some help here. I'm a great fan of the x-com series. I maybe the only one who favours apocalypse the most.

I have a laptop which runs intel display drivers and it doesn't seem to want me to run apoc at all. I really need a wirehead to help me work this out. I can't play using dosbox without overheating this damn machine and while the program runs fine in xp, I can't get a true display. I get that weird "built in lines of static" deal that xp seems to make of old games.

So, anyone want some praise for their technical abilities or am I just sunk?

Mike

Have you tried disabling DirectDraw before running it? (sometimes it causes that problem)

Start > Run > dxdiag > Display > DirectDraw Acceleration > Disable > OK.

Don't forget to enable it again afterwards.

VDMSound should also help.

I used Dosbox to run apocalypse.
I tried as explained in dosbox
and also the drag-in method.

it comes as following (in dosbox)

c:\xcompoc.exe

but nothing happens.

I really want to try this game. Any reply will be appreciated, thanks.

sorry i mistyped

C:\xcomapoc.exe

nothing happens and come back as

C:\ _

thanks

I'd suggest to avoid the drag & drop method. Instead read the DosBox readme and adjust the settings. You might want to use one of the avaible DosBox frontends to have it all nice and clean.

What is the path to the game directory? Dosbox cannot use paths longer then 8 characters.
What I do myself is that I put all the games in C:\Dosgames directory, and put an appropriate MOUNT command in the DosBox autoexec, followed by a C: command. This way, the directory is authomatically mounted every time I launch DosBox.
What is the sound card emulation set to? I'd advise using "sb1" (Sound Blaster 1).
Have you set the game configuration accordingly? In the past (ie before DirectX), you had to configure the soundcard setting manually in most cases.

What are the cycles set to? Default cycle setting is abysmally slow.

In general, VDMSound is much, much better then DosBox for protected mode games - Apocalypse among them.


PS. Register yourself an account on the forum. It will come useful - trust me.

Thanks you for fast and precise response!

Ok I will try to if I get right I will write again. thanks

err... Im so confused now.
I dont see what should I configure.
It seems setup works just clicking exe directly not using dosbox.
But it says non of choice matches to my sound card... :cry:

I have no clue what to do.
I will read more on dosbox...

Run Dosbox first, then from it run the setup. That's because this game's setup has an autodetect function - which is both good and bad.

Still, using VDMSound will be a better choice - altough it's not really much easier then DosBox, it doesn't consume that much raw CPU power and thus the game runs better.

Hey I really need some help

I downloaded and extracted everything. But when I try and run Xcomapoc.exe nothing happens. It just goes to a black screen and stops. Ive tried dosbox but that dosnt work either. Any ideas?

Man, hadn't played this one for years. It's pretty sweet. I haven't read through the whole thread but a few tips on the game I don't typically hear from years of excessive play.

I actually like turn based and never play real time, so keep this in mind when looking at my evaluation of things.

Yes, raid the cultists. In medium difficulty, I hit every building at least three times a week. If you don't need the money right away, sit on the psiclone for a while and then just dump it all at the end of the week. Wait until it goes back up in price or you won't get nearly as much for it. This is a good approach for all highly valuable items, especially alien artifacts.

Starting Base

I like to set up my first base with two additional physics labs and one additional bio. Finish the first availabe bio transport research ASAP. The physics labs won't really be that useful until the following week unless you're playing on superhuman and they start showing up with the larger UFOs sooner. With two bio labs, You'll have everythign you need for Toxigun Bs before you've even started researching bio warfare in the advanced lab which you should research at the first opportunity (after researching any live alien IIRC). Hit the live and autopsy versions of Eggs, Multiworms, Hyperworms, and Chrysallises before moving on to other aliens. To get hyperworms just kill a multi from far away and then drop stun grenades in a wide area around them. Avoid killing multiworms close up as the offending agent isn't likely to suffer the resulting acid shower from these nasty little things.
The advantage of having three physics labs is that you can research all three alien ship components at once so you can get to the X-Com ships sooner and you'll quickly be able to identify less useful early alien weapons so you can sell them for a lot of cash. Be sure and research at least one of the components as soon as they become available since this will give you access to the advanced physics lab research. Once you start researching useful stuff in an advanced lab, you can still do UFO research and research any trinkets you have with the smaller ones.

General Strategy

Watch the allien ships carefully. At first, they will only send one class of transporter and one class of escort ship that drops aliens into buildings (you can see a little energy column when transporter ships stop to hover over a building). Of the first wave ships, the round ones are the transporters and the weird ovoid ones are the defenders. Try to take out two of the transporters before they drop aliens off so you don't have to clear three seperate buildings out. You'll want them to drop in at least one place so you can get your hands on some of the earlier tech. In medium difficulty, the aliens will only occupy one building when dropped from the smallest ships. I think in harder difficulties they'll occupy surrounding buildings even if you investigate immediately after a dropoff. All larger transports will tend to drop aliens in more than one building, so after you've investigated the one you know they dropped in, save the game and hit all nearby buildings just in case. You can reload to avoid needlessy pissing of the corporations
Once the larger ships show up, you can get all the tech you need from the shot down UFOs themselves since you actually have to kill all the survivors to recover them. For this reason, you should try to waste the transports before they get a chance to drop aliens off since it will likely mean multiple missions where you have to worry about property and civilians. I've had games where I did a lot of tweaking, saving and reloading. If you consistently prevent them from dropping aliens off and take out the majority of their ships, it will seriously slow the aliens down giving you time to get a leg up on bioweapons research.
The first manned UFOs that show up are the Transporter and the Fast Attack ship and in my games they tend to hit in the second week. The fast attackers can be deadly but taking one down early on can be a coup since they have Medium Disrupters which will give your Hawk Air Warriors the power you need to start dominating the aliens. The light disrupters for vehicles are kind of like the first personal disrupter. Nice for low ammo cost but not as good as Earth tech for damage. Once the aliens show up with shields, research this ASAP. With these, the Air Warriors can actually hold off just about anything if you stack a couple of them.
In the first week you should be able to get by just fine with hovercars, but I recommend raiding the cultists to get enough jink to buy every Hawk Air Warrior you can as the weeks go by. Don't buy more interceptors, in fact I tend to sell the first one I have so I can get better stuff in a lot of games. They don't have more firepower than air cars and they cost almost as much as the warriors. Once the bigger ships show up, I tend to phase the interceptor, cars, and any bikes I have out in favor of air warriors. Nothing else can handle the punishment that the Fast Attack ships dish out.
To take those transports out before they get a chance to land troops, park your vehicles in non X-Com buildings between alien attacks so that you can spread them out a bit more and always have some ships close to the action. Put each one in a seperate building so they can all take off faster.

My opinion on weapons:

Lawpistol - Short of putting on an agent as backup in case they run out of ammo for a launcher of some sort, I nevere saw a use for these. Mighty cool looking though.

Autocannon - These guys punch through armor nicely, but they have the same heavy weight, crappy accuracy/low ammo issues of the past. The explosive and incendiary rounds tend do more damage to the stuff I want to keep around than the enemies themselves, so I skip these. Careful with fire and explosives. It will set off ammo and destroy gear on the ground and that can hurt your profit/research options. I tend to watch the reaction fire of cultists with these a bit more carefully since even one shot can punch through Megapol armor and cause injury.

Incendiaries of all kinds - Fun but not practical if you want to preserve gear for tech and profit. Also, lighting things on fire can block your vision and make corridors impassable. I don't use them.

Marsec M4000 - Most consistently underrated weapon in all the strategy guides I've ever seen. The rate of fire on these things is insane. Accuracy is lousy and they don't penetrate armor without a lot of shots, but early on in the game shots at full auto only cost 1 TU. If you place your troops in positions where enemies are likely to come around corners the ROF really kicks in. I've seen guys get like 15 shots in reaction fire before. At close range, the Marsec is murder. I'll frequently run an agent right up to 2-3 enemies and just have him hose them all down with lead. Even if they have some TUs left for reaction fire, they're frequently dead before they get a chance to fire a single shot (you can see them raise their arm to shoot but never get a shot off). When fighting armored enemies the bullets will get blocked at first but they deplete armor rapidly. A good backup against brainsuckers is to keep one man at full auto close behind an exposed agent. I give all my guys Marsecs at the start of the game.

Laser Sniper Rifle - No power, lousy penetration in my experience, and takes too much time to fire. I was psyched when I first saw these things but they're not worth it, IMO. Cultists with these are probably the most negligible threat in the game. Maybe they're good for zapping poppers safely, but I prefer finding and blowing poppers while they're still next to their buddies.

Plasma - These are pretty nice if you want to play a more traditional game of X-Com where reaction fire and spotting enemies with one agent and shooting them with another that the enemy can't see (and consequently can't shoot back at) is your preferred strategy. They also cut through armor a lot faster than the Marsec does. Also, I think energy based weapons are less likely to cause poppers to explode. Not sure if this is the case with plasma, but when you hit them with alien disrupters they never seem to explode. I still find the Marsec to be more fun and effective in the early game though, since your agents tend to have lousy aim at first anyway.

Stun Grenades - Always buy every stun grenade available and never sell the ones you get from the cultists. These things are the secret weapon of Apocalypse. Normal grenades simply aren't powerful enough to kill quickly whereas stun grenades can drop 8 cultists if they're packed into a room, do no collateral damage, and can be dropped at key choke points to take out a lot of enemies. I wiped out all but 2 of an entire crew of aliens on the first Fast Attack Ship I took out the other night by throwing one of these up to the second level. All that was left was a half conscious anthropod and a spitter panicking upstairs. All the rest ran right into the cloud to try and get to my guys and it was over. They're also essential for multiworms, since you generally want to avoid killing those guys, especially if you're a close range Marsec assassin player like myself. Just dose the worms and pump them full of lead on the next round.

Regular Grenades - Great for splatting Brain Suckers and setting off poppers. These are my preferred weapon of choice for long range attacks early in the game since the Marsec can't hit the broad side of a mother ship from 5 squares away. I also use loads of these on clusters of enemies when I don't think I'll need to waste a stun grenade on them.

Proximity Mine - Not quite the super weapon they were in the original X-Com but they still have their uses for blocking of corridors and do considerably more damage than regular grenades for tougher enemies. Enemies almost always move when you've been spotted so you're guaranteed these will go off next turn if dropped at an enemy's feet. They're also handy when you suspect a popper will be coming through a choke point.

High Explosives - Haven't messed with these much. They seem too heavy to me, but I'll have to give 'em a closer look.

Smoke Grenades - Once every five hundred battles or so, I wished I'd held onto these, but if you play the game right you'll almost never wish you had one. Still, they can be handy for blinding that popper long enough to get an agent to safety.

Plasma Sword - You'll probably already have your hands on Devastator Cannons by the time you get enough of these to equip on all your agents, but they pack quite a mean punch and will cut through most walls for convenient shortcuts. If you've been using Marsecs well, the same close range strategies apply.

Disruptor Gun - It took me a while to realize just how bad these things suck. The only advantage is no ammo consumption. Stockpile these and sell them for a nice profit, but I'd rather stick with Earth gear than use these. They have lousy accuracy don't actually do all that much damage and take way too long to shoot.

Devastator Cannon - These are very nice, although usually short lived since I typically have Level B Toxiguns on the back burner by the time I get enough of them to equip everybody. They punch through walls like nobody's business and are more accurate than most weapons. Once you get these, you won't have to get in close anymore.

Toxigun - This is the ultimate alien killer until you get gas. It doesn't take long to get to level B clips so I usually wait for these before I start using them. Very accurate for a pistol, deadlier than the Devastator Cannon, and they shoot about as fast as the Marsec. The only disadvantage is that they can't punch through obstacles. The huge advantage is that they don't hurt humans in the event of friendly fire. Hold on to those cannons for the cultists, but these should be your permanent upgrade for taking out the aliens. You can work on getting these things ASAP the second you start capturing live aliens.

Heavy Launcher - These things do catastrophic amounts of collateral damage and while the blast radius will tend to evaporate all gear on the ground it seems to lose a lot of punch against enemies farther out. Since you don't want to be blowing the crap out of places you're protecting, and you don't want to be vaporizing all that psiclone on cultist raids, it really only comes in handy when defending your base or raiding alilen ships. I generally find that these things are more trouble than their worth. When I see cultists walking around with these I prefer to stun grenade them rather than risk a close range reaction shot.

Mini Launcher - Much less damage, same issues. I never bothered with these.

Vortex Launcher - This actually will kill large cluster of softer aliens, but the collateral damage issue is even worse. I usually only use these on particularly large UFOs, the alien dimension, or when I have plenty of money and want to have some fun with the cultists.

Boomeroid - More trouble than they're worth, IMO. They don't do a ton of damage and if you're not careful, you'll find them running down your own guys.

Vortex Mine - The ultimate grenade. I still keep stuns on all my guys for preemptive purposes and bypassing shields but I think these things have the most powerful explosion in the game for the purpose of destroying structures, and they can be extremely potent against tightly packed aliens. They're also the best weapon for destroying those orange floor panel gates that aliens get reinforcements through in the alien dimension.

Gas weapons - You can get gas weapons if you capture the alien queen and research her, so this is only a late game weapon but this is where you'll want to pull out those Heavy Launchers since the gas basically works about as well as stun grenades on cultists, only it kills all aliens outright and the Heavy Launcher version will create a huge cloud of the stuff, giving you massive visual cover while elimating anything that tries to come near. This stuff is even bettter than the Toxigun and once again, totally safe for humans.

Vehicle Weapons:

Lasers and Guns - Forget about it. Missiles and plasma are way better. If you don't believe me, watch the cops try to kill gangsters with these. It's pathetic. If money is in short supply the heavier lasers work decent on the first week but after that try to upgrade.

Janitor Missiles - These launchers are nice because they hold a ton of missiles. They work fine for the first week and I recommend using them exclusively until tougher ships start showing up since you start out with so much ammo for them.

Prophet Missiles - Much lower ammo capacity and only slightly more power than Janitors, but they get a nice range boost. If you're going to use bikes after the second week, this isn't a bad choice since they can stay farther back. Make sure you set the bikes to defensive. They'll die fast otherwise.

Rendor Plasma - Buy these and all elerium every chance you get. You won't need them for the first week, so don't waste the elerium, but they're nice to have on your air warriors once the bigger ships start to show up.

Plasma Multisystem - A great choice for the front slot of air warriors until better weapons become available. Their ROF dishes out damage faster than the Rendors and they keep firing even when you're not directly facing an alien ship to keep the heat on while turning.

Lineage Plasma - Until you have enough new X-Com ships, you'll want to buy these for all your air warriors since they can't fit alien weapons on the wing slots. These are a drastic improvement over the Rendor and will go a long way in taking out those first big ships.

The Heavy Missiles - I haven't really messed with these. The stats on them don't seem to impressive although I think the smaller ones might fit on hoverbikes which could make for a handy swarm strategy in a pinch since the range is so extreme. since the ammo cap is only 1 their potential damage is pretty lousy compared to most weapons, but might be worth it for cheap bike geurilla tactics. I don't the larger missiles will even fit on the hover cars so I don't know what the heck you would use those for.

Weapons Control - I buy these at every opportunity since they are always in short supply. I'm not sure if they help missiles at all but they definitely have a noticeable effect on beam weapons. You still miss the faster ships a lot but there are fewer stray shots leading to nasty collateral damage.

Light Disrupter - Look at the damage and the ROF. It's really not a very powerful weapon.

Medium Disrupter - This is the first alien weapon worth using and completely outclasses anything else you could but in the Hawk Air Warrior's front slot.

Heavy Disrupters - They only fit on Avengers but these things are incredible.

Alien Missiles - If you've got some brilliant financial scheme for affording all the ammo, I recommend not using these at all. Avengers with nothing but disrupters do just fine. The stasis missiles can be cool but are also very expensive, whereas a well armed and shielded Avenger can handle most situations with ease. Be extremely wary of alien ships that shoot stasis missiles though.

Dohickeys:

Motion Detector - I like giving these to all my agents for tracking down stragglers or just getting a good idea of where aliens are camped out on ship recovery missions.

Personal and Vehicle Shields - Having more than one of these on a unit will cause them to stack, and yes, personal shields work even when inside your backpack. Stun grenades are a great way to load up on extra shields and the Toxigun goes straight through them IIRC.

Personal Stealth Field - Use it. Even if you're using two handed weapons it's worth the tradeoff in accuracy since it will drastically reduce alien accuracy in a much bigger way. If I had to pick between these and shields, I'd pick these if I didn't like the fact that doubled up shields allowed me to be so careless with my men. If you're a careful player the Stealth Field is probably one of the most powerful items in the game.

Teleporter - Not a great item in turn based. I saw a FAQ saying you can get these things by researching shield tech. The only way I ever got them was by taking them from the aliens in the very last alien dimension mission and retreating to research them. Fun for playing pranks on the cultists but I don't think it would be that great since it takes so many TUs to use anyway.

Psionics - Psionics are weak against so many aliens in this game and they're so much more limited than in previous games, I don't really bother with them, although I haven't tried a team really focused on psi use yet.

Eh... oops. I guess that wasn't a short post was it?

:help: I don't know, as I was strucked exactly with the same behaviour.

But from other games I think that it is memory error. (ie something with himem and emm386 or bad path), would be anyone so kind and send here the lines with emm386 - from config.sys and content of Xcom3.cfg, if he has something diferent here than the drive letter?

Of course, from running DOS installation of this game :)

Any other advice is welcomed too ;-)
:wall:

To answer some earlier questions if anyone is still paying attention. The game's creator, Julian Gollop didn't feel that they had enough time to really make it the game they wanted it to be. The corporations were supposed to have a lot more personality and would make specific demands and treaties with you aside from just getting pissed when you blew up or stole their stuff. That would explain the ground vehicles sucking. Oddly enough, he said the same thing about the original X-Com, which is still one of my alltime favorites.

I think in the backstory, the military corps were too busy dealing with galactic strife with their fellow humans to handle the alien threat properly since humanity had moved on to outerspace and was mining elerium, etc...

I think I may have hit some sleeper element of the AI at one point in regards to this. In one game I was playing a mothership showed up after a long dry spell (I'd really been handing it to them). It approached the corporate headquarters of a nonmilitary corporation IIRC, but the corp suddenly launched an unbelievable number of small craft. Between them and my ships, we took it down right before it get to the gate, I cleared the aliens from their HQ and their status went from neutral to allied. I've never seen something like that happen before outside of Megapol helping you out.

For some reason, Julian or Mythos doesn't seem to want to release the original to abandonware status, but you can still find copies of it for the PlayStation fairly easily. It's in some ways better than apoc, but I love both for different reasons. Psionics were awesome in the original. You could leave your top psionicists in the back of the ship and mind control any unit that any of your other units could see. No line of sight necessary. You could actually finish a mission just by mindcontrolling every alien. Also, the lower level ships were much smaller and convenient if you just wanted to make a quick raid for the basics of ship tech or some Elerium (which could only be found on intact alien ships).

Didn't know about the mindshields. Guess I just enjoyed raiding the cultists too much to consider making new enemies. Do you have to be on Superhuman for that? One thing you guys didn't mention was the personal teleporters. I don't know if this "unlockable" or if you simply have to take it off corpses in the last of the alien dimension missions and then retreat to research it. That's how I found it for the first time after a solid year of play.

I think the cultists will actually raid you if you don't keep them down with regular raids. I seem to remember this happening like once. Once I start raking in the Devastator cannons and shields for sale I tend to leave them alone on Superhuman since their temples can be pretty huge and time consuming for a turn based player.

It's game is COOOOOOL!!!!! :ok: :Brain: But my game HAVEN'T MUSIC !!!!! :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :wall:

It's game is COOOOOOL!!!!! :ok: :Brain: But my game HAVEN'T GOT MUSIC !!!!! :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :wall:

The download on Abandonia does not include music or movies. Deal with that.

See twice
Apocalypse Music

Any ideas for the black screen problem?

Not yet. But I advance.

I was able to see an intro and x com welcome screen and then, hmm "please put your CD-ROM back", which was the end.

It looks like you are supposed to emulate CD, so no any other files on the same partition with xcom, so I will do it completely and then will see

btw I found this file:
no cd crack

from here:
another forum - only for xcom

and I use cutemouse as my
mouse driver, it's better.

OMG-disrupto weapons are great! :ok:
hmm-where did my laser rifle go? :cry:
snipers suck :sniper: :crazy:
Missles cost too much! :ranting:
end....

OK. This will possibly fix the problem and moreover allow you to watch all videos when you will wish (all 3) no cd solution

Is there a place where I can download the CD version? Becuase I bought it on CD a while ago and cant find it anymore. I think that if I had the cd version I could make it work.

Hey every1

just started using this game, loved the previous 2

i had the same problem with the black screen, but i just waited for about a minute then hit enter, waited another minute and it worked.

might hav just been my one, but good luck

This music cannot be used in the game, though. So my point still stands.
P2P.

No, it cannot - but it's music from the game :) I think that originally, at least part of music, was on game CD audio tracks.

Therefore it may be recreated and possilbly played again with the last no-cd patch which I mentioned. It wlll however require to know the structure of original game CD.

**or much easier, you may play this music outta emulator when you play the game.

And wrong. I have the CD version - the music is NOT in Audio-CD format, but locked up inside a pretty large data file on the CD itself.

That's bad, but no one will do the patch which allows this if here was not any version on what it could be applied.

The question is, which one is on abandonia and if could be paired with this solution.

Anyway, do you have any idea why the game instead of showing the classic start menu says this?

or do the black screen?

* I tried to emualte only C drive, but it's not help either...

If you are using DosBox, then check the readme on how to mount CD-rom drives - it's a little different then normal mounting.

Thanks, but I don't.

I use qemu as it's much faster and capable to emulate true DOS. Sometimes however too authentically.

Then check on the additional parameters you can use for Qemu's drive mounting - especially low-level CD support.

Ok solved the problem with the black screen, its just black because theres no opening movie, hitting enter to skip it will bring you to the menu screen.

I'm happy that it now works for you. But here IS intro movie :bleh:

It's located in directory smk and supposed to be played through /ufoexe/smkp.exe

if you wish to omit the ESC hitting simply write or do a bat file with xcomapoc.exe skip

: Yes, this looks like right way, but here are no more parametrs to be set in qemu. Perhaps in later releases (tested with qemu 8.0, released yesterday)

or I may start long way to achive an "expert on low level DOS drivers" status :cheers:

Actually, I extracted the music by opening up the MUSIC file on Adobe Audition and splitting it up into several mp3, so you should be able to reverse the process (put it all back together in one big raw sound file) :)

OK lets make it short.
Music-NO
Intro-YES

Ok i know im duble posting but ive reacently played the first UFO EU and i saw that i can't buy any HWP in apoc how sad the game would be much more fun if i could cend a hwp on a megaspawn the new tactical options (Troopers hiding behind tanks) and destruction you could make with a toy like that. :evil:
I always liked to rush aliens with them watching the desperate aliens running away in disorder.

Why cant i build things availble on the market copy rights or what. :blink:

Kind of. But you can get more of these through raiding other corps. There is a raiding bug that has been discussed several pages back in this thread - allows for some really great loot, no hostility gain, and no ammo use as well.

As far as gear concerned though, you can get everything you want for your agents by hitting the Cult of Sirius who will go hostile on you the second you start destroying UFOs anyway.

In a 4 temple raid, I usually expect to get over a dozen psiclone dohickeys and you frequently get gear that won't be available for the first week or two. I just wish you could raid for better vehicle stuff.

I've been playing the original on PlayStation recently, and I just don't dig the HWPs like I used too. They're way too pricey (you can build a lot of workshops for cranking out the laser cannons with half a mil), they have a big come shoot me profile, and the starting tanks can get wiped out by a single shot of Heavy Plasma. They're good for getting your troops out of the transport initially if you're not into reloading games when they go awry, but agents are much more cost effective and ultimately much more deadly with indirect fire attacks (grenades) and a gun that is every bit as powerful as a tank's (heavy plasma).

About raids: Is there anything you can get from organizations other than the Cult that actually work? I thought I read somewhere that the elerium pods and mind defense devices don't actually do anything.

That was me in the last post. I've been messing around with vehicles a lot. I've really been liking the hover car approach in the first couple weeks. At first you don't need anything but Janitors against the scouts and probes but buy up all the Prophet missiles since these will run out fast when you start using them exclusively. I also buy all the elerium and Rendor plasma guns I can get my hands on but save these for the next week.

Always set cars and bikes to cautious. They seem to do just fine at launching missiles while dodging and cautious makes them a lot less likely to get killed. The interceptor is convenient as a troop transport but aside from taking more hits and having more space, it offers no advantages over hovercars and costs over six times as much. I usually sell mine to get more cars. A single car with two janitors focused on a probe will always destroy it, so if you want one for research, be sure and turn off one of the missile systems after it takes the first shot and make sure you only have that car focusing on the probe (probes are the pill shaped UFOs that don't drop aliens). Be sure and raid all the temples at least three times in the first week so you can get enough money to buy Warhawks when they become available. I try and get 5 cars right off the bat and 6 by the end of the week.

My reasoning on cars vs. bikes is this: Cars only cost slightly more than two bikes, offer twice the weapon hardpoints, and have a 2x2 equipment space that can equip a shield or other useful system. AFAIK, targetting systems don't help missiles at all but putting a shield or missile evasion matrix in there could be a nice precaution. Also, Micromanaging 6 cars is a heck of a lot less hassle than 12 bikes. While bikes are noticeably better at evading alien attacks, a single hit from just about anything will kill it.

As far as general equipment is concerned, I alway put the best possible engines in all my vehicles. Also, I like to purchase any and all targetting systems until the X-Com ones become available. I don't think these effect the performance of homing missiles though, so if you have vehicles with guns, put all your targetting computers in these.

At week 2 in normal difficulty, your cars will start getting shot up by the transports and fast attack ships. Fortunately, a couple Warhawks are usually available at this point and they can soak a lot of damage. Warhawks turn like a pig and can't evade for crap, so just set them to aggressive. I think it might increase their ROF and they seem to get to the target a lot faster. To keep your cars alive, switch up to Prophet missiles which have considerably more range and better damage and sell all the janitors. You won't need them anymore. Set the cars to Cautious and they'll almost never get hit due to the superior range of the Prophet missiles and the maneuvering ability of the cars. Trust me on this one. Janitor vs. Prophet means the difference between dead cars and untouched cars once the first manned UFOs start showing up. I usually equip the Warhawks with Rendor and Multibeam plasma and then upgrade all the Rendors to Lineage as it becomes availabel.

At week 3 the prophets may start running out, but you should hopefully be moving up to 4 Warhawks at this point anyway. If the prophet missiles start getting too low, start equipping your cars with Justice missile systems. These are one shot missiles that do a great deal of damage and can be shot from an absurd range. While they won't get as much punch in the long haul, the damage your cars can do by launching one shot and then flying home is still considerable and much safer than engaging with closer range missiles. I have no idea what the UFOpaedia is talking about with the ground target thing. They work just fine against UFOs. In fact it's a lot of fun to watch six justice missiles melt the shields off of an alien bomber class ship while the cars that launched them are already on their way home.

In my current game, I had 4 Warhawks and 6 Hovercars in week 3 and through judicious saving and reloading, I was able to down every UFO up to that point with only a handful of successful alien dropoffs and most of the reloads were due to a ship getting away rather than actually losing a car.

The most dangerous ships vs. cars and bikes are ones with missile systems. As these start becoming more common, you'll want to be careful to only attack at long range with your supporting vehicles and keep these ships occupied with your warhawks and X-Com craft (I wouldn't recommend anything below Retaliator for attacking UFOs although the Bio trans does make a nice troop carrier). I haven't experimented with missile evasion matrixes yet but loading one of these in might make a prophet equipped hovercar viable vs. missile equipped UFOs. I've heard really good things about these.

The one shot mistles you are talking bout dont fit on the car.

Oh, really? I checked and they do. JANITOR and PROPHET launchers.

Better - thirty. And I've been there, done that... :P

Im talking bout THOSE mistles not the janitor or prophet (they fit even on the bike)

Yup, Justice and Retribution Missiles which do a heck load of damage wont fit on cars or bikes, they will fit on airships though, what is interesting is that the hoverbike can become lethal to enemies in week 2(I think) once you get the Lineage Plasma Cannon, such a heavy devastating weapon can actually fit on a hoverbike quite suprisingly, however it is a costly investment as it can be easily destroyed.

Once good tactic to use once you seem to start running out of Prophets is to use ground missiles, in the game after week 2 you wont really be short of cash, splurge out on buying all those nice ground vehicles which can actually do a fair amount of damage to UFO's, however I know what your all thinking, roads can be destroyed which instantly kills vehicles, however if you go :bye: HERE :bye: (Roadwar Mod not needed but is quite cool) and download j'ordos citymap file then roads become invincible :Brain: , meaning that Griffons actually become very powerful (they have same HP as Annhiliator).

Just park some vehicles in areas near Dimension Gates or important buildings such as Senate, or anywhere in a circle so the whole city is covered against the UFO threat.

@ Pherdnut - What are you thinking??? Selling your Valkryie Interceptor to buy more cars???? How do you plan to take on crashed UFO's?? With a 4/8 team in a hovercar? Only flying vehicles can recover UFO's so you wont be able to get an APC on the crash site even if it is on the road.

Targeting Computers are terrible, great you can fire more accurately where the UFO was 5 seconds ago before it moved. Sure it does save embarrising moments when you miss against a stationory UFO which is invading a building but it makes fighting against moving UFO's much harder, the only UFO's you will be able to hit are the slow ones with a targeting computer, but those slow ones are huge and you cant miss anyway.

Also the more you raid the bigger the score you get, the bigger the score you get the quicker the aliens get the better weapons, the quicker the aliens get better weapons the more men you lose etc... not to mention that your research will still be slow so you wont be able to keep up with thier weapons, and you still dont get all the best weapons from all the organisations yet so your stuck with mediocore weapons against very very heavily armed aliens.

Stun Raids are a technique where you attack a non-hostile organisation but you only use stun guns, now there are two paths you can go from this, one is to stun all the guards and get all the loot and no negative relations with the organisation, the other is to manually take the loot (stun a person if needed to take there guns) then drop your own obsolete weapons and escape, this means that you get the new advanced guns but you dont gain as much score as you dump your obsolete stuff so the aliens dont increase thier armament so quickly while you do.

When attacking UFO's you should be careful not to use too many of your vehicles, you might be wondering why use less when you can use more and decimate the UFO quickly, however when say you attack a single UFO with 12 hoverbikes, 6 cars and 2 Hawk Air Warriors (not Warhawks) all armed to the teeth, there tends to be a little bit of friendly fire so don't be suprised to see Hawk Air Warrior 1 destroyed Hoverbike 7. If you use the invincible roads download then you can use more ground vehicles which can soak up more UFO fire and have less chance of hitting your own guys if your using just missiles. One shot missiles work best at a medium range, short-range it tends to miss the UFO, circle round and hit the nearest MegaPol station, long range the UFO might even just escape by then or hide behind a building, at medium range it gets the tracking and the UFO doesnt have time to evade, always deactivate one-shot missiles until you actually want to fire them then and there, when UFO's attack your base you do a lot more damage to yourself when your Hawk blows up half your base with a mis-timed retribution as it is taking off.

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 ;)

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....

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.... :)

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)

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.

Actually, the game adapts to your score. If you play a lot of Raids and get a high score before the first UFO appears, you can encounter Personal Shields and Devastator Cannons in your first mission.

the funniest and my most favourite thing to do is attack the cult of cyrius and bring many high explosives, and do as much damage as possible :D

how do you get sound working?

I have WinME and I know it sucks, but it has one advantage - X-com works on it without any magic or special software... I just click on the .exe button and there it is, with sounds and music ! Thats why I still use ME. :kosta:

i think you can use Vdm to have sound. :cheers:

I cannot download the game from this link:
http://206.51.238.2/gamesyms/f2a7c5e2b9d51...0Apocalypse.zip
How come everyone else doesn't have this problem? I keep getting a 504 gateway timeout message.

Try This one.

hey my x-com doesn't seem to work. I can get through the first video sequence but then it screws up and has random lines across the screen. Any ideas of how to fix this?

Check the previous posts in this thread and in Troubleshooting. I remember this has been discussed before.

Alright, I finally forced myself to try this game and i found it's not nearly as bad as I thought. Sure, it may not be as good as x-com 1 but I sure enjoy playing it.

However, seeing this game is quite different in many respects to the first two, I'd apprecite it if someone could help me with any of these questions:

1. How many soldiers do I need in each base? I've found that six soldiers is the optimum for most missions, but I often suffer injuries.

2. Research is way different. How many scientists/engineers do you suggest I should hire?

3. Do androids gain experience? It says they improve "very slowly". However, my most senior officer is an android and hasn't improved even 1 point in any skill!

4. Are mutants and psychic powers worth it? It seems almost all aliens have very high resistance or immunity to psionics.

5. How do I IMPROVE relations with organizations without bribery? Is there any benefit to being allied with an organization?

I tend to use large numbers of troops, usually as many as I can pack onto the mission.

As many as you can stuff in your labs. If one much better then your worst one appears, sack the worst one and hire the new. You might want to keep some more skilled (90+ skill level) ones, for future labs.

They don't improve. They do, however, score kills and missions - that's on what their promotions are based.

Nope. It all depends on the species - some just aren't conscious enough to be affected.

Fight with their enemies. The relations will slowly rise. There are some benefits, but none too obvious.

Thank you for the help! Just one more thing - how do I see who are an organization's enemies?

On a side note - just had a ufo incursion that almost blasted both of my hovercars and my valkyrie out of the sky! What a change from the first two games - in this one the UFOs can really fight back!

There is no way to tell the enemies of an organisation other then the ones that really hate each other will raid and attack buildings of each other.

Also some organisations start out unfriendly with each other, for example MegaPol and the gangs are unfriendly/hostile, MarSec and MegaPol are slightly unfriendly due to selling similar products, Psyke seems to be unfriendly with Diablos and Technocrats and Extropians are also unfriendly to each other I think.

You should never use valkyries to intercept UFO's once you get the Type 3 Purple transporter UFO's, Valkyries are great for troop transport but thier limited in combat as they are not manouverable so get shot easily, hovercars and hoverbikes are best initially for taking out UFO's, only use Valkyries as support (engage with bikes and cars first or have Valk use one-shot missiles and then retreat)

This game looks pretty good. I know someone's probably said this, but... you have to go to REALLY high cycles just to make it playable! It's still jerky, though. Same with TFTD...

Thanks for the advice about intercepting UFOs - it goes much better now that I have a swarm of hoverbikes and a few hovercars plus a valkyrie acting as support. Those escort ships sure are tough, though.

About raiding the organizations, if I raid an organization's building and steal lots of equipment, can I raid it again the next day and find stuff again or will there be significantly less booty? (I enjoy raiding the Cult's temples as a pastime :evil: ).

@blue123:

The game works much better with VDMSound.

You can raid a corp as many times as you want and get lots of loot, loot is a bit random, sometimes there will be lots sometimes there will be little, also cargo modules work weird in the game, as long as a ship has one cargo module it can get any number of cargo from a battle, this effectivly means that you can just park your Valk at CoS and just keep raiding them again and again and again.

However beware, the more you raid, the more your score increases, the more your score increases, the better the equipment the aliens get, the better the equipment the aliens get the more you die. It is really bad when you have managed to get a disrutor gun from loot but before you finish researching aliens are coming in with dimension missile launchers due to you raiding so much.

Wait, happy. I'm running the program "VDMS_apoc" under dosbox. What do you mean?

Don't run it under dosbox. I meant the VDMSound emulation program available for download on this site. Even if you don't have VDMSound you can run the game through "VDMS_apoc.bat" straight from windows, but there won't be any sound.

P.S. Note that the version of the game on this site doesn't have music and some sounds (to make the download smaller).

Ok, I did that. Only problem now is, my agents don't seem to get on a vehicle when I select both them and the vehicle and click on the investigate button. Help?

To put agents in a vehicle, go to the assign screen (one which shows agents and vehicles). Then highlight your agents by clicking on them, then drag one of the highlighted to a chosen vehicle, they will be assigned to the vehicles, then make sure the vehicle is highlighted when you click the alien investigation button. Try and make sure the vehicle has cargo or it can be a bit of a waste.

Or - if two or more vehicles are used - one has a cargo hold and the other a bio-transport module. You need one of each alien species to research.

:help: I get creamed when fighting skeletoids with cloaking devices and entropy launchers - I cant even see them, and they fill me full of those @!*$ missiles in no time. It's especially bad if they're supported by lots of grenade-throwing anthropoids. Any suggestions on how to beat them? In enclosed areas waithing behing a corner with devastator cannons set on auto works well, but in open areas I have great difficulties.

Pretty simple - DON'T FIGHT THEM IN OPEN AREAS. Use smoke grenades for cover, then AP grenades, Hi-explosives and Proximity Mines to nuke them sky-high.

Hi all - I'm downloading a demo from Gamespot to try and get music files. Anyone want to clue me in to where I should put them when I'm ready? Sound or rawsound, or somewhere else? Thanks.

Uhh... if I click on one of the agents it either selects or deselects them. How do I drag? (Strange, I could put agents in at the start of the game)

You have to click on the agent's picture (not his name) to be able to "drag" him.

I found a bug that lets you reload one shot mistles in a second.
After your flyer lands in your base manualy strip of the launcher and place it back again and its fully armed (if you have some mistles in stock that is).
This way you can rearm all weapons dont do it with shields coz it levels them to 1.

Wow, thats a pretty handy trick, sounds very useful for those potential long-scale battles, or just equipping a load of hoverbikes with justice's and getting them to re-arm every so often.

Note to self:
Even if battleship miss all of your 20 hoverbikes-your score won't be positive any time soon.(The thing destroyed literaly1/3 of the city while figthin hoverbikes.)

Pull on your flying suit(u know - the second avalible armor),Fly up,And let your HE autocannnons lose! :evil: :guns: :rifle: :Brain: :monkey_dance:

If they have shields and enthropy they will spit you out of the sky in no time.
It would be best if you just send them a barrage of vortexes and long range devastator fire.

Hey, I found the answer to those damned skeletoids - a taste of their own medicine! Cloaking device + personal deflector shield (the deflector is really, really cool!).

Psychic powers are great vs. the Anthropods (and hostile organizations) and since my soldiers have improved their psychics even the Skeletoids are easy prey.

I've found the Flying suit works best with the hybrids - it's light (making their low strength less of a problem) and the shooting penalty because of flying makes no difference for psychic attacks.

But I still got 2 more questions:
1. When will the aliens start to send in bigger UFOs? For the last 3 weeks no new UFO types have appeared (my score is quite high)?

2. Do hybrids ever gain increases in strength?

P.S. I don't like using explosive ammo or missiles much - they usually destroy equipment I could otherwise capture and/or sell.

when i click to donwload the game there is only a reload of the current site. so i cant download the game. does anyone knows what i have to do?

You can download if from here - http://www.abandonia.com/games/307/X-Com-A...mApocalypse.htm

Click on the red 'Get It' sign.

:ok:

sorry but the problem persists. Is only a reload of the same page one time and another.

is this game really not as good as the first? the screenshots in the review looked awesome...im contemplating whether to download it or not (its gonna take a few hours)...i played 10mins of the second one and did not like it whatsoever (the whole underwater sea thing seemed too far fetched...and the graphics werent as good for some reason)

It is indeed clearly inferior to the original. The best way to play this game is to play it without thinking it's part of the Xcom triology. It's a pretty slightly above average game if not played as one of the successors to one of the best game of all time...

"Guest" is right. The download/"Get It" link seems to be broken. It just loads the review site again. Please have a look into this.

It's... different. At first I thougt it was a cheap attempt to get more money by sticking "X-com" into the title, but I soon changed my mind. You'll either love it or hate it - just don't expect it to be like x-com 1 or 2. And don't play it in turn-based mode, as real-time is far better and in fact easier (you can pause the game to give orders etc.).

Bottom line is you can't really be sure of it until you've tried it. I find it a very entertaining and interesting game (although not as good as x-com 1).

Hi everyone,

I'm a newbie on this site. I can't dowload XCOM Apocalypse. I have still the original CD but it don't work with XP.

Could you please, make the dowload available.

See you

The download is available. You are probably trying to use a multi-download program, which is why you can't download. Disable that and download it normally and it should work fine.

For all having problems following the download link for this game: it is operational again.

I confirm that the dowload is available. Thanks and enjoy the game !

Oh, noes. I just redownloaded the game and started a new campaign on the medium difficulty setting. Diablo has just been taken over, and my sources confirm me that they will attack me at 17:05 hours. (it's 14:00 hours) Is there a way to regain Diablo's trust?

No, it been taken over by the Aliens. There is not much to fear from them anyways.

Sorry if Im repeating an already solved issue but I worked through the first 14 pages of this thread + searched the troubleshooting section without results.

I start the game via the VDMS batch file and everything works fine. Except the fact that the music is disabled by the game. Attention: sounds are running! It is just after I activated the music in the options screen revisiting this screen shows the music option disabled again. Now my question: is this version here on Abandonia a RIPed version without music? You know it is quite... boring to look at the cityscape without any music!

I played for a couple of hours reading the UFOpedia and watching the equipment screens a lot learning as much as I could. Driven by their unfriendly attitude to me I launched two hovercars equipped with two Janitor Missile Launchers each towards the Temple of this evil cult and flattened it. :w00t: The Metro got unfriendly afterwards cause I hit one of their stations in the process but I immediatly bribed them back to being neutral again. :whistle: Now my question: I know that destroying buildings is not good for relationships to Government and stuff but what else does it do? I mean did I erradicate the cult now? Without any HQ operations will become hard, no?

There's no music on AB's X-Com Apocalypse version...I wonder if one can find X-Com Apocalypse' ISO on the net...

Oh man megapol was allied with the aliens :angry: (allied not taken over) and they are hostile and send me that dont shoot our alien frends thing. Raided them a few times razed their buildings (Anihilator with disruptors :D ) Reduced their income to -14.000 and there my frends again :bye:

Is there a way to make the cluster mistle alien weap split ?

You cannot "eradicate" an organization. The destruction of their buildings will lower their money and income, though, making the organization's agents less well equipped and far less likely to launch raids on your bases. All buildings are rebuilt at the end of the day (i.e. the city completely regenerates when the score screen for that day comes up). At the beginning of the game make raids rather than demolition, as raids bring you equipment (which you can keep for yourself or sell for cash).

Good move with Metro - this is one of the few organizations which you must maintain good relations with until very near the end of the game. Lose them and it's no more transporting goods and newly hired scientists cannot get to you bases!

Well I better start this over, hehe. After receiving the first weekly (or was it daily? It came after I hit "ridiculous fast") report the big fat -1400 for decorating the city anew was something undesirable. And if I cant erradicate them I better leave their buildings untouched. Clearing them is more like it :D

Is it possible to assign the staff of two laboratories to the same research project cummulating the research efforts? Like 2 biolabs of 5 scientists towards bio-containment-module?

Is there a chance to differ between messages about foreign vehicles and my own? Its just that I'd like to know if one of my vehicles is destroyed - but I dont care if any punk-driven ordinary car is destroyed by some police patrol.

Oh and about the Metro - didnt Eagle already mention the problem of newly recruited staff not able to use taxies after loosing Transandsoon? I wondered - if one of your bases is connected to those people tubes - why dont they use them instead?

No. Later in the game, however, you'll gain access to large labolatory facilities. They occupy 4 squares, accommodate 10 scientists and can research projects that the normal (small) labs cannot.

I find the time modes are useless. The only options that are useful are Pause and insanely fast. The other modes are just too slow. I mean comon at the second most fast mode you still can count the seconds running by! The problem with the fastest mode is if you run into an alert you dont know whats it about. (Alien sight, Ufo or what?)

:ph34r: Delete this :ph34r:

It's frustrating that one can't set the time when the time compression should stop. For example, one time I saved the game and used the fastest time compression. At 17:05 hours I was attacked by Diablo. Since I saved at 14:00 hours, I needed to wait and wait and wait... 'till the time would have been ~16:55 hours, as I think that every group needs to get a car with soldiers to another group to attack it, no? (and I would have liked to kill the damn Diablo's before they made the attack) After some time I got nervous and started a new game :ranting:

...but I got a lesson from all this: never ever select the normal difficulty setting :D

The point in equipping Justice Missiles on cars and bikes is to keep them viable so they can fire from really far away, while your Air Warriors or self-built ships take on the bigger badder alien ships. You shouldn't be attacking anything that has missiles with cars or bikes exclusively. They'll get plowed. For medium Difficulty, this works for me:

First Week: Lasers

Second Week (or when the first fast attack and transporter ships show up): Prophets against the fast attack ships.

Third Week (or when the first Destroyer makes an appearance: Justice Missiles from far away while Air Warriors engage close range

Just a note: Valkyries are faster than any of the other human ships with the best engines, so they can be nice for running down those smaller ships. I like keeping one around until the first Air Warrior becomes available.

I just read that thing about the Aliens showing up with better gear sooner if you raid the crap out of people enough times. Was just wondering: The Cult of Sirius seems to have less stuff if you raid them frequently. Does it ever get to the point where they only have like one guy with a pistol or can you always expect at least six Cultists?

The class of alien ships that show up doesn't seem to be a reaction to your score so much as how well you're doing at shooting them down. I've noticed that if you don't shoot down a lot of the ships in the first week, the first alien invasion the second week is typically 2 Transports and 3 Fast Attack Ships. In my games where I've shot down every single ship in the first week it was 2 Transports and 2 Fast Attack Ships. Then if I shot all of those down, it would be like a mix of tranports and scouts Until the aliens finally got peeved and sent in something bigger a week later.

Anyway, for research advice, the biggest limitation to research is the advanced labs. All you need for Adv. Bio Labs is to research a single Brainsucker Pod (much faster research than any other living alien). For Adv. Q. Physics, you have to research one of the UFO parts from anything bigger than the UFOs you see in week 1. I think one of the three researches faster but I forget which. Easy enough to find out by saving/reloading. To get the Adv. Workshops, just research the probe after you've finished the other two UFO parts (navigation, propulsion, power source). I usually build an extra bio lab and two extra Q. Physics labs. Check for scientists at the beginning of each day, especially Q. Physics guys as it can sometimes be hard to get enough for the three labs by week 2, which is when you'll want them.

Personally, I don't really think Devastator Cannons are all that. Shortly after they come into play, the aliens will have personal shields so you'll want to be using stun weapons on them until you can get the Toxigun anyway. Although they do show up faster in Superhuman, I guess.

Lots of people losing organizations to infiltration. If you watch the alien ships carefully, you can see exactly where they are dropping off troops whenever they show up. They hover over the top of the building for a while and drop this little smoky/zappy white column thing. As long as you clear out the buildings after they show up, nobody should be getting infiltrated. Not all UFOs drop off troops.

UFO 1 - Probe: Acts strictly as an escort.

UFO 2 - Scout: Drops off troops, sometimes doesn't when with transports. One of the smallest ships, shaped more like a hubcap.

UFO 3 - Transport: Large purple UFO. Pancake shaped. Drops off infiltrators but not particularly dangerous. All infiltrator dropoff ships drop aliens off in the building they hover over and one of the buildings near it, so if you really want to be a perfectionist, save the game and investigate all the buildings near the initial site to figure out which one the extras are in.

UFO 4 - Fast Attack: Typically shows up with the Transport the first time. Looks like a larger, nastier scout. Very dangerous to your smaller vehicles at this time. Try to bag at least one when you first get the chance as these guys have Medium Disruptors.

I don't remember the numbers on the rest. The next is typically the assault ship. It's the one that's really long up and down. Not very dangerous, but a lot harder to kill and drops a lot of aliens off for its size.

Next is usually the Destroyer, which is the first ship to have missiles and it too can drop troops off. Great ships to raid since they mostly have humanoid aliens (lots of gear).

Then it's bombers which don't drop troops off. They have the multimissile which never does seem to split up and hit multiple targets but I'm guessing does a smidge more damage. If they show up by themselves it typically means they're just there to do damage to the city.

Then comes the Battleships and Motherships. Both are huge and can drop off infiltrators. Sometimes the mothership just shows up to wreck the city or drop off that Overspawn thing, which I've only seen once and am still trying to figure how to knock out without killing.

You are in a tough spot in the game. Basically, you kind of have to tough it out until you can fight fire with fire, i.e. use those personal shields yourself. Here are a few tips that might help.

If you find yourself trapped by multiple incoming enemies, sometimes what I would do (before I got shields) was drop a few smokes to block their view. The enemy won't fire unless they can see you and so will wander into the smoke, until they are adjacent to your units. If you are lucky, you will gun them down before they know what hits them (may take a few reloads to achieve this). Don't sweat losing armors and equipment to entropy missiles. You will be producing your own x-com armor in a few days.

I saw alot of good tips in this thread but I just want to reiterate, you must race as fast as you can to get toxiguns and toxin level B as quickly as you can. The devastator cannons simply don't cut it after awhile. On the flipside, after you get toxiguns and personal shield generators will full x-com armor and marsec bodies, the game becomes kinda boring.

More tips to help y'all get started, in no particular order at all.

1. When raiding the Cult of Sirius, take special care not to over-use explosives (AP nade). Stun and smokes are okay. This is because those explosions will destroy the equipment on the ground, which is the whole reason you are raiding in the first place! Their heavy rocket launchers will cause you much pain early on, both due to their effects on your units and their destructive effects on the "loot".

2. I'm not sure about easier difficulty levels, but on medium: trust me, you'll need to do a fair bit of cult raiding to boost your funds. Early on, the prized item is this drug that initially sells for 4500, which you will find as many as 8 or as few as 0 in a single run. After selling all the weapons as well, I'd get about 5000 to 25000 per run.

3. Try to avoid standing on dead cultist bodies when in a firefight (or for that matter, when you are fighting aliens as well). Cultists in particular, tend to be heavy launcher/HE autocannon/AP grenade happy and any explosion in your vicinity will ignite all the munitions on the ground, with disasterous effects on your units.

4. What did I use my money on? Probably aircraft, bribing organizations back to neutral level after collateral damage during UFO runs, base purchases and upgrades, then lastly everything else. The first is a good investment because you can always sell your aircraft for the same price if you need quick cash for some reason (it's just like money in the bank). The second is a terrible waste and avoid it if possible (don't bother attacking fast moving UFOs with too many missles.

5. You can manufacture items for cash, but don't expect it to be as profitable as it was in UFO1/2. Most of your cash will come from recovering motherships. After I finished researching personal cloaking devices, I sold all the ones I had in my base inventory for a sweet 1/2 million. Don't sell the personal shields, they are essential and time consuming to make yourself (they look like handheld mirrors).

6. On the topic of aircraft (we all know ground vehicles are trash), I decided not to use bikes because they are simply too fragile for me. I started with valks with a couple hovercars, then upgraded to all valks, and so on.

7. Unlike UFO1/2, you can let a few (theoreticall, all) UFOs do whatever the hell they want and not lose any support if you keep tract of where aliens were inserted and raid those buildilngs. Make use of the UFO influence graph and check it often. You don't want the level of influence to exceed that middle line in the graph.

No, you can always expect a certain minimum number and equipment.
Also, how many cultists you will encounter (and how large will the map be), is dependant on how many soldiers you send in.

I wonder - why do those cultists drive around in vehicles and enter buildings? Are they preparing the ground for alien arrivals? Do entering cultists indicate next alien targets? What if I keep my ground vehicles and station them near temples so that they intercept all leaving cultist vehicles?

Well, the cult of Sirius is a religion by itself. So they go around trying to "spread the word". ;)

The problem is, they have a right to beleive in whatever they wish. However, nothing tell you that they may be trying to work for the Alien cause even when they are not taken over by the Aliens.

That's usually my first faction taken over by the Aliens tough, so I often end up attacking them on sight afterward. And if I don't raid them and give them enough time when they are taken, they always end up attacking one of my bases.

I don't think they ever attack your bases if you don't let the aliens infiltrate them regardless of how many times you've raided the crap out of them.

Any faction which is at war with you will eventually raid one of your base if you give them the time. Raiding them remove them the ressources to do so, so they don't attack you.

Hi - still curious where I should put the music files from the X-Com Apoc demo to wed it to the version from Abandonia. I figure someone here took them out so they know where they should go back...

Thanks,
Holly

Yeah, but usually by the fifth week, I'm making enough cash from missions and selling bio transports that I can totally leave them alone. I've left them alone for several weeks at this point and never been attacked. The only time I've actually been raided by the cultists was when they'd been infiltrated by aliens. I think the gangs and corporate orgs are just a lot more aggressive than the cultists are.

The multimissile will split up if you attack with several vehicles.

Lost 4 hoverbikes to one of them :cry: (overall, killed 2 pairs with 2 missiles)

@Holly

I don't think anyone knows where to put them, however if you download the Apoc Demo and see what file the sounds are stored then plom em in there.

Failing that stick em in the Sound Folder mabye.

For the manual and a strategy guide (no idea if it's any good), try here:

http://www.xcomufo.com/x3dl.html

wow, i think im gonna try this game. i could never get iunto the first x-com back when i had a 486 because my brother's friend let me borrow it without a manual and i was like wtf dude

Good luck. :bye:
Read the Manual or the rookie guide (preferably both).

A tip. You can always raid friendlies for loot and you won't loose any faction, and they won't shoot back, only as long as you stun them and not kill.

So equip a team with grapplers only and go get that gear. The friendly 'enemy' will run up to you and fall unconscious. Collect their gear then... all you can carry, If they come around your guys will stun them again, and gain experience from it.

Eventually abort the mission, and you keep whatever you are carrying.

The only problem is that stun grapples are hard to come by at the start of the game, but you can fix that by raiding their supplier. You can also pick up the occasional armor from Marsec, and their mini-launchers.

Be careful not to arm yourself with the stuff you pick up or you'll likely kill someone.

Actually, that tip has long since been posted here already.

OK here's a trick yet unposted.
Colect enemy vortex mines on the batlescape and use them with mines to get supermines how set a mine and throw it where you want then throw a deactivated vortex mine on it and wait for a sucker to step on it.
great for ambushing UFO's and catching aliens just replace the alien bomb with a stun nade and your combo stuner mine is ready.
This way you can use unreasearched alien bombs this way (But ye have to colect them during batle)

Hi

I installed apocalypse and it starts off fine, but after the starts microprose screen the graphics go all twisted... I installed the svga graphics patch, which had the two .exes, but that did not help. So, now what? I tried to find an answer here andon other forums, but it seems that the patch has solved the problem for everyone else but m... :(

Thanks for any help :)

What OS to do have? Do you use DOSBox?

You should try posting here.

I have XP as OS, and I don't use DOSbox. Maybe I should give it a try?

Try VDMSound first, then DosBox. Apocalypse works better with VDMS - that is, if it will work on your machine that way.

DosBox is nearly guaranteed to work properly, but it is much slower then VDMS.

Hi im very happy i found this game had it on cd like... mmmm... 6 or 7 years ago and never found it on internet cuz i wrote Xcom apocalipsys instead of xcom apocalipse.... crappy ah?? :wall:

well i got it now the 86,059kb version and installed the VMDSound2 and it all work just fine :ok:

i only got 1 question. this game got music??? cuz i read ppl saying it has no music no video, but i got video and works just fine.

It would be nice to have music i still remember it and it was nice to play it with it :D

well i wait for someone response, and if it doenst have music anyone know how to put music to the game??? like downloading a music patch or something.

well have fun playing it btw i think is one of the best strategic games ever :ok:

You'd have to download the full CD version from some P2P network. That's how I got mine.

I just downloaded the game and started play it.
Maybe u already awnsered the same question many times but here i go:
-How do you load the vehicles with your people? How i take an X-com trooper and made him passanger of an APC or any another transport?

-How many cicles in DosBox? I found it inside this forum but i am not going to burn my eyes again. LOL

1) Just drag and dop. You are going to slam your forehead into a nearby wall when you realise how easy it is to do.

2) Cycles are computer dependant, so anyone who give you such an information either don't know what he is talking about or is an idiot trying to play games with you.

Thanks :D
Now more rookies questionions:
-How works Medi Kit in real time combat?

Place the Medikit into one of the wounded agent's hands (by dragging & dropping it into the hand slot in the inventory), click on it, then a small screen will show of the agent. One particular section of the body will be red. Click on the red section, and the medikit will start working automatically. Try to keep the agent out of harm, otherwise the medikit won't finish healing the wounded area.

The Senate is pleased with the preformance of X-COM and has increased funding accordingly.
Funding Adjustment > +48233
Unfortunately the Senate has to limit X-COM funding due to the poor state of government finances.
Funding Adjustment > -160366

Hahaha, maybe you damage to many city space.

More questions:
- How i should deal with an infiltrated organisation?
- Why make a raid?
- If an organization is economically broken, what happens to them?
- I can destroy buildings? I can build new ones?
- Androids goes to medical bay but doesnt seems to heal, why?
- Do you hear of "La Nueva Luna"?

thanks in advance and ll of you who awnsered me or tryed to do it. :tnx: :D

The same way you deal with the Cult of Sirius.
Same as above
Never happened to me
No and no. The worse you can do is flatten buildings, and the city will build them back slowly.
A medical bay can take care efficiently of 10 squaddies at the same time. Androids have a lot of HP, so they seems to stay there forever if you don't have an adequate number of medical bays.
I have no idea whatsoever about what you might be talking about.

Thanks again and dont worry about la nueva luna.
But now i am sure that androids dont heal or at least no as humans. I see three heavy wounded humans and mutans to heal completly more than 30 HP before the android heals a single HP.
1- How i should deal with the cult?
I got psyke infiltrated so they also launch attacks against me even they tryed to raid a base. I raided and razed them and left their econo ballance soen to 100K.
2- I can recover them?
3- Did Papa Noel or St Nicolas or St Claus exist?

I have no idea what you are talking about for Androids. My own Androids always healed faster than normal humans. As I said, make sure you have enough facilities.
Anyways, Androids can still fight very well even injured. Just check their stats to make sure their aim is not too impaired, and if it's not the case then you can use it just like a normal squaddy... Just that it doesn't have full HP.

1- Like you want. But don't waste your time trying to get diplomaticaly in touch with them, that's wasted time and money. And you'll need your money.

2- No. They are gone for good, so make sure the Government never get infiltrated. They are easy to save anyways, there is only one real Government building in the city and it's the Senate.