UFO - Enemy Unknown
 

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)

hehe... got my 20 man army beaten by ONE etherial once...
equiped a Lightning with laser-canon to be able to take down crafts unhamed... took down a small-scout, but forgott to chk the race... wen't... and the etherial mindcontroled my ONLY man with blaster-launcher...

*exit, then load saved game*

Later, as in when you have caught an etherial ALIVE or a Sectoid Leader/Commander... you get to research PSI-powers.. this is a turningpoint in the game...

priximity grenades
 

I use alot of proximity grenades, when im on missions. hehe thats fun, also if they are not killed, i know where a alien are when they make a mistake and walk on it :)

*L* Large scouts where sooooooo easy to over-run with Proxy-nades at the right door.. just place it 1 square outside... the second the alien steps throu the door, it blows up, and kills any other aliens also standing behind :)

Hmmm... odd... since i just tried arming a crysalis with a blaster just to try if i was wrong ;)

I works.. just place the Crys. ontop of a blaster, go to a random soldier, click his properties, select next char. util you come to the Crys, pick the blaster up from the ground, and BANZAI! perfect suecide-squad... usualy have 1 with Heavy plasma och one with blaster in backpack (no reaction-fire here ;) infront of my storm-squad when taking on bases..

Regarding heavy plasma... i also recall sometime the walls gave after to a hit, but it's not common.. Blaster is the prefered way...

It's not a new game, it's a remake of X-Com1 by fans all around the world. Most of them a full-time software engineers or full-time engineering Uni students.

Work is still underway, but the graphics are breathtaking. Just looking at the geoscope (the earth) you can see extreme 3D mountiain ridges interacting with the lighting effects, the weather changes and clouds, the bright lights of major cities at night ............

wanna see the clouds?
http://www.projectxenocide.com/images/artgeo10-800.jpg
or the lights?
http://www.projectxenocide.com/images/artgeo2-800.jpg
or a movie clip of gameplay?
http://www.projectxenocide.com/videos/xeno...0.4-640x480.wmv

:shock: :shock: :shock:

I was secretly dreaming of a remake of UFO-enemy unknown!
And now I see it has come through!! (How I love fans who dedicate their sparetime to improve games for the rest of us).

You say that work is still being done. Does that mean that the game is in progress, and not yet playable? Or is it a playable beta-version?

you've been playing it since 95 and never used a grenade? no wonder you don't get far.
ok here are some tips:
1. when you prime the grenade you prime it for 0 turns. that way it will explode at the end of turn. killing alien close to it. later on it's better to do research and dicsover more powerfull alien greandes.

2. psi enemies are a real trouble. well at least untuill you do enough research to develope psi laboratory where you soldiers can train to defend against those attacks. but what thes elabs actually do is that they give you a number that shows which soldier is a liability and which one will repulse the attack. so if you see soldiers that are often targeted by enemy then they are probably weak in psi defence. you can fire them
alos enemy usualyl cant use teh psi unless he sees you. since they have an eyesight bigger then humans you have to search for them and eliminate them soon.

to do that you have to save your game often and on different slots. that way you can return to previous turn after you already found the alien that is doing the scounting for psi attackers. and don't worry abotu it after a while oyu will reseach alien technology to the level when you could do psi atacks. oh one thing that might have stopped you in your effort: BE SURE TO GET LIVE ALIENS (at least one from each spieces) TO YOUR BASE!!! they will porvide you with much need info for psi defence.

3. lasers are nto enough. you will have to do research to get alien vessels. you will have to get a live alien commander and navigator (commonly found in colonies control centers). they will give you info so you can buld better and stronger ship. with it you will be able to knock down battle ships in no time. they will also provide you with torpedo weapon that is the most powerful and a couple of shots will tear the battleship appart. untill you do all the research i suggest you just follow the battleship and then attack the aliens when they land. if the build a colony even better. you can killeveryone in colony (though at first you will just want to get in and get out fast) and get high score like that and increase funding.

yes launchers are very good in start. however in X-com you can't use them outside of water (only grenades and STUN grenade launchers). also rocket launchers are useless against mayn aliens (like Tasoth in X-com). for those oyu need to develope new launchers from alien technology, but that takes time.
my advice would be use launcher as much as you can in begining but be also sure to develope alien weapons like ion cannon (in x-com)/plasma cannon (in UFO) which are more powerfull then earth based technology and are also more accurate. come to think of it there is no point in using scientists on earth based wepoan tech.

one more word about grenades (or better use alien pulse grenades which have much bigger power). in early part of the game they are vital in colony attack missions because colonies have aliens that are best killed with combination of grenade throw and a shot from weapon (i use explosive ammo only on early weapons).

don't foget to do aliebn reasearch to get new armour which will also help a lot (even the most common armour one can save a soldiers life)

later on with all tech developed the soldiers become a real one man army. i still have a savegame where i played and played the X-com because i didnt' know i need to click on Leviathan and select T'leth to go on final mission. i also for some reason wasn't able to research the mind control weapon (must have been some bug) because i didn't research in proper order ( did have molecular control labs for soldiers to train in so i could kick evryone that was weak). so the seamen have really buffed up. they had crazy accuracies and thowing range/accuracy. they just went out of the ship and killed everyone without moving away from the ship. the vehicle idd reconaiscense and men did the shooting. some had amn accuracy of almoust 200% whatever that means. in any case they never missed. it was simmilar with grenade throwing. the aliens panicked because i kiled a few on beginning and i just threw a few greandes in the movement area. BOOM! AAAAAAARGH! and they are history.

anyway the point is research research. and let the vehicles explore the map because if alien sees them they can't be taken under control.

good luck with the game. i know it's hard to play if you don't know at least a few tricks (like what to prioritize in research, or capturing live aliens in begining to do research on them, or how to find and deal with colony/terror site - thes eprovide the most points/money/technology in the game, or to have a really large number of scientists in beginning - 100 and more- to do the much needed research). oh and feel free to ask for any additional advice. this goes especially for "month32".

Firstly, I have to apologize because of my poor English, but I must say some word about this game.

I haven't played it for a lot of years now, but I remember that this was one of my favourite games. Somebody asked about in which difficulty level we play? In the beginning I played in the easiest of course, but later I tried the hardest and with my lot of experiences it wasn't really hard. Maybe it was beacause of the fact that in the original game (without any patch) there aren't difficulty levels, because all are the same.

My most frequent eguipments were laser rifle and medi-kit. After I developed psi-laboratory, I always brought some tools for psionic attack (I don't remember its name). Is used granade or other alien techs relative rarely.

The best armour is also very important for every squad-member, it can save their life in many situations! Usually I sent 8 XCOM-soldiers to every battle (except terrorized cities, where I sent 10 or 12 men). At the place my ship landed, I made 4 groups with 2-2 members - if it was possible, one experienced officer and one rookie or less experienced soldier - and with these mini-groups I tried to go far away from all the other groups as soon as possible - because of the alien grenades. Then the very important thing is to hide your soldiers at the end of all turn, because even a tree can save them against enemy shots. When one of my soldiers being controlled by aliens, I tried to hide my other teammembers from him/her - not to shoot him/her! After some time usually the enemy lost the control above him/her, at this moment I thrown all his/her weapons, from that time this soldier wasn't dangerous. Then I tried to go with this teammember back to the ship, where the aliens can't get the control above him/her.

Researching is very important thing, you never can't buy enough scientist. After succesful battles you can sell a lot of things you don't need, so you have money to buy important things (scientists and tech advances).

I hope I could help for the guys who needed it.

Bye and have a good time playing UFO!

keeping men alive is simple. you have 10 save slots. here is how i use them by saving games:
1 - on surface

2 - touch down near the ship

3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 - saving each combat turn under different saveslot. if an alien kills my soldier i load the save game and because i know where the shot came from i look up for the alien or try to outflank him. example: lets say i am in turn 4 and everytime i move i get killed no matter what, i can always load previous turn (turn 3) and either move my men differently or dont' move them at all and rather make them duck and wait for the ailien to come out of cover.

9, 10 - these slots i use to save in the middle (not beggining of turn) - example i sucessfully killed an alien i immediatelly save gameunder one of these slots. that way when i move forward and if an alien suddely shoots one of my men i can always load previous position in the turn. if i can't resolve situation i can load begining of the turn from slots above and if that desent help i still have slots from previous turns and i can load one of them. important notice here is that aliens are like your men. they are set in their starting positions across the map and then move arround just like your squad. so if you knwo where the shot came from you can load previous turn and spam the area where alien might be with grenades.

if everyhting else fails you still have the save you made on surface (save slot 1) and you load that one and continue form there on. by avoiding getting you men killed you will train them into officers tha will do the job mostly on their own later in game (high accuracy and reaction time). you will need that as you can't save games in your last mission (in x-com it's consisted of 3 submissions and you can save in the last submission).

this tactics will help you make through the game no matter how crazy your other startegy is. just remember to have enough scientists (100 or more), start with one base and try not to loose any of your men (they bring negative points which will reduce the ending points resulting in funding decrease), and be sure to chek graphs for laien activities. if they show highactivity it means it's a big chance they have a colony near that country and it must be destroyed. to find a colony send ships on patrol arround the country area.

Since i see you had problems with large ship tell me what game you are playing? X-COM or UFO? there are places in those ships where almost always aliens are. like command centers (who have commanders - if you already captured live ones kill them to make others panic) or they also like engines a lot. the larger missions (lie big ships, terrorsites etc) usualyl have from 12-15 aliens. so my guess is in your case you had only one more kill to make. still it's was a bad mission since you lost all men.

If you have problem on the entrance to the ship post men at the entrance turning them towards the door. and just pass a turn or two before opening the door. that way the aliens waiting to snap you in ship (or house, room) will either move arround a bit or maybe they will even try to exit and your men will shoot them with reaction shot.

once you use the save tactics you should do fine. the biggest problem are colonies but with slow movement (reserve time units for snapshot) and using men to cover eachother you should also do fine.

ALL ships in UFO can be shot down with Plasma-cannon from an Interceptor w/o exposing the fighter to enemy fire... besides from the battle-shit..

2 different tactics regarding them...

either you "swarm" them with 3-4 interceptores, armed with plasma or even better, fusion-balls
OR
you only take on the ships when they have landed or attack them with Firestorm/Avenger-crafts armed with fussionballs/plasma..

nr 1 WILL ressult in many/all crafts are lost.
nr 2 often ressults in 1 or more craft beeing grounded for a looooong time repairing (we'r talking up to 20 days here)

Funnies thing ever done: Shooting down a Battle-shi with CANNON..
Was bored.. armed 6 Avengers with cannons, and sent em up..
After empteing over 2.000 shells into the poor Ufo, it crashed.. :)

Also.. if you'r beeing plauged by base-assult attempts.. here is a hint..
Arm the base to it's teeth with your best men, and JUST the equipment they need.. sell your Gravsheild and save 4 fussion-defences..
Next attack minght get throu.. kill them in the base..
Now.. for this to work, you should have a mind-shield in the base up and running..
After the attack, the aliens seems to "forgett" the location of the base..
They start over searching for it (small scout, large scout, battle-ships; all tagged Alien retalliation)
Take them down nice and calm.. this will keep the base clean, and free up space for better buildings then defence.. just keep minimal defence (5 fussion and 1 gravshield will repell 19 of 20 attacks).

I'M BACK!!!!
 

Wow, I'm back from my vacation, and see a lot of unread posts ^_^
I'll do my best to answer all your queries.

1. Someone asked if equipping two weapons (one on each hand) reduces firing accuracy. The answer is YES, from memory it's a -50% penalty so unless you have 90+ Firing Accuracy, don't give them two weapons. Note that this does not affect pistols of any kind.

2. Someone asked how to take on large UFOs once they're downed at the beginning of the game. The answer is you DON'T. If you have shit soldiers and shit weapons then here is the SOLUTION - bring your Skyranger over. Lift off on the first turn.
The reason being is that you get 0 score for the mission but the game does not consider this as IGNORING a downed UFO site.
Ignoring downed UFOs actually incur a huge penalty on your score.

3. Someone mentioned using fusion balls launchers. My advice is, don't bother. Plasma is far better at shooting down UFOs considering the costs of Fusion Ball ammos.

4. R Havell said, "One important tihng to remember during battles is that your troops are VERY expendable." Good call Havell!!! I couldn't have said better.

5. Another suggestion for Harcore players. I always have an Elite force of soldiers on an Avenger for emergencies. Their basic requirements are 90+ Firing Acc, 50+ Bravery and 80+ Psionic Defense. Besides grenades Medikits etc., each of them are armed with (Heavy Plasma+Heavy Cannon w/HE ammo) or (Heavy Laser+Autocannon w/Inc ammo). These two combinations are the most powerful and effective at taking out anything in the way.

6. Tanks are good for one thing, wasting valuable space on your crafts. They costs too much in terms of space and money. A soldier is always more cost efficient. E.g. a soldier with Rocket Launcher and Power Armour costs 1/5 of a Tank w/Rocket. A soldier with Flying Suit and Blaster Launcher costs 1/5 of a Hovertank w/Fusion.
Having said this, tanks are useful in base defenses and the final Cydonia mission.

some tactics i use.
 

In the start i try to research laser rifles, because they are cheap to research/manufacture, and have more accuracy then normal ammo rifles.

Then lots of grenades, and proximity grenades, i found them to be lot of fun. Grenades and proximity grenades are the best to use in the start of game since the soldiers cant hit for shit.

I usual dont use all the time points a soldier have, i try to hide behind building ect, so if a alien steps out infront of my soldier, my soldier have a chance to shoot and kill the alien before it can retalitate. And also use proximity grenades if i know a direction that the aliens come from. Even if the proximity grenades dont kill the alien its morale/health/accuracy is reduced, and i know exactly where the alien is. They might even panick/beserk next round.

If i have landed at a ufo with 2 entrances(ie supply ship/terror ship/ect) , i usual mine 1 of the entrances up with a proximity grenade, and hide one of my soldier around the corner, if the grenade goes off i can usual kill it with my soldier next run, or place a new proximity grenade. Some of this tactics also work inside ufo's, Large scout and up, just dont cut your own pathway with a proximity grenade :)

Aliens take control over a soldier inside our transport ship:
Well this had happend a few times for me, when i have soldiers i dont currently use, i found out that get the soldiers down on their knees help a good way, it rarely one of them get attacked by a mind attack.

OK, here are the most common advices that I can give you. I'll try not to give any spoiler, and if I do without realizing it I give permission to the admins to censor me.

First, you need to build your base. That's the first thing you do in this game, and thus you need to do it from the start even before thinking about battles. The thing is, the first base supplied to you is a big free base, and is kind of nice for the eye. However, it would be more than a pain in the ... to defend would the Aliens decide to attack it, because it has hangars from both the bottom and the top of the base and the access lift if in the middle with other adjacent rooms.

In the best of worlds, all your base layout should generally be the same: your hangars at the very top or the very bottom of the base, then the access lift completely alone somewhere on the third line (the one directly above or under your hangars) then you begin to build your base on the fourth line after the access lift. That way, if the base get attacked, you will be able to defend it with ease with only a handfull of squaddies and a lot of grenades since the Aliens always come in the base from the access lift and the hangars. The third "free" line will act as a "chokepoint" preventing Aliens to invade the base too fast. If one or two aliens managed to get out from the access lift before you get there, kill them. You can be sure all the others will be ahead.

Battle and squaddies: obviously, you need to always try to keep your men alive. Moreover, you need to give your squaddies the best chances to overcome their target. The key points on this in tactical battle is visibility, speed and protection.

Visibility: I personnaly always go out with 12 squaddies and then break them down in three squads of four. The purpose of the squads is to always have at least two squaddies at "key" point when they advance in the black area so you have a good chance of seeing the alien before he do (or most of the time, at the same time he do so he don't have time to fire at will on your men) while the other two squad members advance faster (always keep enough time for a snap shot) and then they switch turn. Once an Alien is spotted, turn your four squaddie attention to it but do not forget to "scout" around for other Aliens, be in front, on the flanks or even in the back if that particular squad did not clear out the area behind them.
In night missions, you will have a very hard time trying to spot the Aliens because it's dark, while the Aliens will have a easy time spotting you because they have a way better vision at night. In that case, you need to use flares. I always bring in my Skyranger at least one flare per squaddie, just in case I run into a night mission. When you send your Skyranger, follow it and look at the map when it lands. If the map is at night (dark), then you'll need to equip the flares to your men. Would you forget, it is very important that you make them all take one flare before exiting the Skyranger (all the weapon you don't assign to your men before a mission are stockpilled at the entrance of the Skyranger).
To use a flare efficiently you only need to throw them far enough so the fartest visible spots are light. That way you will be able to spot aliens around the light just like if it was a day mission.
Use the flares liberally. They will save a lot of your men lives. And don't forget they can be reused; pick them back up and throw them away again.

Speed: never ever overload your men! It seems to be a very common newbie mistake. Your men need all the time units they can spare! I personnaly think that any squaddie under 60 TU is in danger because they lack mobility should they fall into an unexpected trap or need to clear out from an area quickly instead of keeping TU for their snap shot reaction time (like when spotting two aliens near him at end of his movement). If you start a mission and you notice one of your squaddie with less than 100% of his TU, then he's overloaded. Remove as much equipment from his inventory as you can spare, and you'll notice that next turn he'll have more TU to spare (if he did not recover them all). I also advise you to only take riffles (and/or handgun if you feel suicidal or want a challenge) in the first few missions until one of your men have enough strenght to take the bigger weapons without losing any or not too much TU. Most of the Aliens are easy to kill with a riffle anyways.

Endurance: research armors ASAP! I won't spoil the tech route to the first armor, but I'll tell you it's very easy to produce them by the end of the second month, should you know what you are doing. Once you have some armor, research the MediKit tech ASAP. The MediKits will allow the men who did not fall in one hit but are grievely wounded to survive the day and become stronger with time. It's always utterly annoying as a Commander (you) to lose men only because he had a fatal wound of 3 and dyied from blood loss after X turns because you had no medical support on the field... Especially if the man in question is your best soldier! <_< Before having all your men outfitted with armor, the chance of having a squaddie alive after he get hit will be extremely short, but with armor this will happen most of the time. I always equip all of my soldiers with one MediKit at the start of every battle but can part with one if the soldier is not strong enough to carry one and his equipment without TU loss.


I feel this is the biggest lines of the game. If you follow this to the letter you should have an easy time defeating Aliens... But it probably doesn't follow every style of play. I know some people love grenades, other use only Alien technology... I'll leave all those details and the leading of your squaddies to you. :)

Yes, I also use Commandos by the end of the game. At the start I feel like casualties can't be brought down to zero and then if I need to select a frech recruit to fill the ranks they can't keep up with the older men. My style of play being mainly based on teamwork, this often lead to even more deaths... :angry: So I keep the squad full at 12.
Another thing is that Psy Aliens are a pain in the late game. It's always a hard blow when you realise your star soldiers are not Psy resistant and turn around on your men at the wrong moment... <_< Thus the reason I try to get a broad army at the beginning and keep only the PSI resistant men by the end. At the beginning they are still usefull, when they begin to turn on me (and survive) I sack them.

I also do the same; sell any Alien tech (but not alloys and Elerium, for obvious reasons) and keep one for future reseach of each item. My post may be misleading, but I only use the riffles by the very start of the game..! As soon as stronger weapons get out from research, I use them. :ok:

I did know that a lot of people would have different oppinions and strategy than me, so those few points were very general. If you notice, I never got into a very specific point unless it has an obvious tactical advantage.

Home of the Underdogs carries the fixed version of the game (and the sequel). It's a fanmade patch that makes UFO work on Windows ME, 2000, and XP. I tried it on my XP-ridden laptop and it worked fine. Have a look.

Keep in mind you'll have to run XCOM1FIX.EXE to apply the patch.

Sure thing. You could always try Laser Squad Nemesis which is in the same style, but multiplayer.

If you need help devising strategy or tactics for UFO, just ask. I'm here for that. :angel:

Actually, the aliens see in the dark as well as your own men do, it's just that the aliens are cleverer than your men, here's what they do (shown from the side):

Key

@ - Alien
% - Your soldier
{ - Your line of sight
> - Alien's movement
_ - Ground surface
* - Plasma beam

It starts off like this:

@_{_______%

Then the alien moves into your line of sight, sees you and shoots at you:

__>{>@*****%

Then the alien moves just out of your line of sight:

@<{<_______%

Here the turn ends, with your being shot at but never seeing the alien.

(It took me ages to do this :D)

Sonicfish: yes you should research heavy plasma as well because new research options will become available when you have researched everything in that branch.

For the Plasma Rifles, I beleive they are the best workaround weapon in the game. They pack quite a punch and their aiming and TU pourcentage are good too. Heavy plasma is only usefull when you need that little extra firepower... But it's way too costly on the TU usage to consider equiping it on all your soldiers.

Does any1 know what to do? I played this game in the past, but I came to the point where I have everything I researched everything an so on. Sometimes a UFO passes me and I destroy it. I destroyed a couple of them bases on earth, and I heard thet there is one on mars. How can I reach it? PLZ HELP :help:

You need to research the Alien Origins and build an Avenger. The mission to Mars will become available after that.

did you capture live aliens?

the research tree shouldn't have been empty if you didn't have all the technology. not capturing live aliens is the only thing that i can think of that might have caused that...

There are worse things than snipers. Mind control's been mentioned, but I've been sniped iinside my skyranger before disembarking, with blasters. That sux. Big time.
I think the proximity of the aliens to your landing zone may have something to do with your difficulty level. So if you keep getting wasted, try starting a new game on gumby mode.
Other advice just boils down to keeping your men in little groups that allow each group to cover different areas and moving slowly with the "reserve snap-shot" (or autoshot, or whatever) button selected.
Two to three teams of four work well. And if everyone has an auto-shot of time spare, when them nasties leap out from behind the shrubbery, four guys unloading autofire into the sucker will probably make the sucker think twice before doing it again.

Ufo: Ennemy Unknown Aliens AI is not that good, so if you actually managed to get a grenade thrown at you by them... Well, you so extremely obviously packed up that even the AI managed to see that you could be hit by a grenade..! :blink:

I don't remember having a single casualty due to grenade in all... Around 25 campains... (My own grenades excluded :whistle:)

I would say that if you have a problem with grenades, you need to rethink your squad strategy... Especially if you were planning to play TFTD after ending UFO! You'll see what a really good grenade AI can do... I still feel the pain of my first TFTD campain 10 years ago... :ranting:

Also, I really don't understand what the race of the Alien change. Would it be a mutant, a big tank or whatever... You'll get hit if you stay in the way. Yes, I lost at least two or three Squaddie still in the Skyranger in every game too, but then I never lost as much as you guys seems to be talking about. Being creamed? Never happened to me, at least not inside my own ship! I guess equiping the first squaddies with armor help with that...

I also don't recall losing more than half my own team in any given mission, and last time that happened it was in one of my first campains ever and I was retreating back to base... Having bad equipment and be low on ammo usually don't help much on the winning part... :whistle:

All in all, I would say that you need to expect a very high death ratio in your first two games, then it will settle up for good and you'll wonder how you managed to get the money to get all those new fresh recruits in the first place... Happened to me, happened to about every Xcom veteran, will happen to you too. ;)

Purchase tanks, you can use them to clear out the way for your squad believe me, this will make the game a lot easier!

Hey fellas.

I downloaded XCOMUTIL, but I'm having troubles installing it. First, when I run xcusetup for the first time, it only gets to the question whether I want to enable fodder's loader. After that it tells me to create a shortcut for runxcom, but the other questions (as stated in the readme) are not asked.

And when I try to run it again, it says "Version 1.0 detected" but then "read failure on geoscape.exe".

I am using the UFO-Version I downloaded here on Abandonia. What is the problem? I'd really love to play a more advanced difficulty level; not to mention random ships etc.

Help would really be appreciated!

The version on abadonnia is the "new" Windows version. It may not be compatible with a cheat program which is most probably designed to work with the DOS version of the game.

Have you captured the commander of an enemy base on earth? From what I hear, that is the way to get to Mars and complete the game... :bannana:

Seeing as we are talking about bugs.

How does one fix the bug where the game will crash if you click on a fighter tab (thats following a space ship)
i found if i went back to a previous mission, and completed it, the bug was still there.

infact the only way i found to get around this was to reload the game before any craft were chasing any UFOs but that sucks cause i usually am tight by keeping 3 save games but i dont wanna reverse 28 days, or more again.

anyone know how to fix this. I dont care if i have to edit the x-com craft out of the game, i just want the game to contunue.

I never encountered this kind of bug, and I run the original version supposedly full of bugs.

So sorry, I can't help you much here.

@Guest

*shrug*

Maybe backup savegames, reinstall XCOM and make sure you have the latest version of DOSbox or Windows drivers or whatever.

But, I dunno. XCOM has a funny way of crashing in weird places. One reason why the game has so many posts. Why don't you scroll through the pages and find how other people have resolved their issues.

Its wierd that you all have not experienced it. Years ago i brought it when it was first released and i played it on my 486 and got the bug but back then the earth would zoom out then i would see a heap of code come up and the pc would reboot.

now in XP it just says the program has crashed but same thing.

just annoying.

Well, I seem to remember a weird bug right now. If you entered a mission while one of your fighter was still chasing an UFO, the game would crash.

Answer to this bug was easy: never chase UFO when you are about to enter a mission. Either disengage and go back to base or just fly near them until you finish the mission.

Another idea would be to send the Skyranger next to the mission without selecting it, down the UFO (or get killed) and then enter the mission.

Anyways, I never experimented such a bug because I never entered a battle with crafts still engaged in battle. I usually tend to wait for all UFO's to be downed before sending my team so I go get the biggest fish. I also tend to change my squaddies equipment depending of the type of mission before sending them to fight, especially when I'm currently building a new kind of set of armor for my troops and I want them to be equiped with the latest stuff, so waiting is a must.

Yeah i found a small solution which was to sell the plane (while it was chasing the ship) just DO NOT touch the plane button. it will stay in the earth screen for a while like a month i think then it just dissapeard.

I always have a Skyranger with crew at my first 3 bases. I make sure i can get every UFO that Preferably lands :)

ahh well finished it again now. Maybe i will go complete Fallout... again.

You can use this site (on the left menu select what interest you) to get more answers.

http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~xcom/x1u8.shtml

After you done with all research, you don't need scientist any more.

To get position of Mars base, you need to capture one of aliens’ officers, and again, they are in big ships.

Smoke grenades work well to knock out aliens and when you get the small launchers and stun bombs later then it gets much easier.

First, there is only one way to get elerium 115 - UFOs. It's much better with those very large ships to follow them with a team of soldiers, but not attack. Eventually it will land or terrorise a city. Either way, you will need a team to kill em. (You should get over 1000 points per mission for a Battleship)

The best way to get aliens is to use their Small Launcher. It fires very powerful stun grenades.

If you haven't researched it yet, then you will have to use the stun rod. The stun rod doesn't always work frist time. So if you find yourself wanting to attack an alien with a weapon, be very sneeky.

This may pay dividends however. Usually the aliens at the end are just medics or soldiers, it will be unlikely that you can capture a commander this way.

If anyone disagrees with what I have said, please correct me! I always like to learn different ways of getting the job done.

Grenades are easy, especially proximity grenades.

The TU thing is easy, it's the green bar at the bottom of the screen. If it's full, your TUs are at 100%.

If you set the timer on a grenade (haven't tested proximity grenades) to Zero, and then keep a hold of it, it will not explode. I use grenades to kill aliens hiding behind corners. I get one of my soldiers in the rear to get a grenade primed on one turn. On the next, I make sure that the "Save TUs for Autoshot" is on. Then just go for a walk, and throw the grenade.

In regards to the aliens' reaction shooting, I have stopped throwing a grenades at aliens I can see unless I am behind a wall or something. When there are a group of soldiers who can see the alien, all except one fires upon the enemy. If the alien is not dead by the last soldier, then I use a grenade.

Proximity grenades are an excellent tool. If you know an alien is behind a door, I much prefer lobbing a grenade outside it and waiting for the alien to come out. Quite often you can surround the door with 4 soliders, and as soon as the alien pops out of thedoor and walks a step, the alien is blasted with explosive and 12 rounds (4 x autoshot) on the enemy turn. Fun fun fun.

The reason I like to make sure everyone in my team fires their weapon, is simply for the improvent in skill that it brings. One time I relied heavily on four soldiers to do pretty much all the work for me. When one got killed and the other two turned out to have useless psi resistance, the game was pretty much over..

Another nifty trick is the ability to rename your squaddies. I always rename mine based on their rank and I add, in brackets, their accuracy rating.

So it would go like this: Rookie (59), 2nd Class (57), Captain (67), etc.

Pretty usefull when you want to know if the selected squaddie stands a chance at hitting his target, depending on range... :ok:

I like to keep the names the same, just for the sake of humanity. I think it's neat having people with names of people from all over the world. I get to know my team members pretty well anyway, so I teand to know who will hit and who will miss.

I don't have any problems when using the XP patch from this site to play UFO, but I can get kicked out a few times. There is a patch for TFTD to that can be found at www.xcomufo.com (nice adress btw), but I haven't taken me the time to try and get it to work since I think that UFO is better than TFTD.


///MJ

For my troops I keep their original names and add letters on the end for strengths/weaknesses.

S: Sniper
G: Grenadier
P: Strong psi
p: Weak psi
B: Very brave
b: Decent bravery
c: Coward
H: High strength
R: Reactions

So my optimal super soldiers in late game would have PBRSGH on their names for easy reference. :Titan:

P.S. - As for sorting your troops: there is a program called X-com Utilities that allows your troops to be sorted (never really played enough with that feature enabled though to see exactly how it works). It also allows for the intercept craft to be used as small transports and comes with the the f0dder display patch if you have a really squished display.

If you find yourself faced with those chrisalids, make sure all you soldiers have a PRIMED (alien) grenade in their hand. If they get attacked by a chrisalid they drop it and it thewn explodes, thus killing the first chrisalid. Be carefull though since this might cause some friendly-fire.

From my experience with them, I'd say the best defense against them would be to get as many troops as possible in flying suits. They can't attack what they cannot reach. As for the primed grenade, if the zombie drops it, it will likely hatch the Chrysalid and mearly wound the other one, leaving you with two of them to deal with.

Note: The zombies only actually start to hatch if they are "injured". Leave them alone until you wipe the Snakemen and Chrysalids out before you go after them.

What about the Chrysalids then, they are about the easiest of them all to kill? :blink:

I usually get them with long range shots... If I'm on close quarters I move next to him and I autoshot until he's dead. I don't remember having a Chrysalid one hit kill one of my soldiers, so even if he reacts and "spit" at you just retreat the squaddie after you killed the Chrysalid... At blank range you really need an extremely poor squaddie to miss an autoshot, and if he miss I say he deserves to die! :P

Don't forget that they are also vulnerable to fire. Fire them a fire bullet and watch them catch fire. ;)

You may be thinking of the Cetalid...the gaint kidney that spits acid. A Chrysalid is the black crablike terror unit that comes with Snakemen and can impregnate your entire squad Xenomorph style. :cry: They have uber stats and a hand to hand attack that can take you in one hit and turn you into a zombie. I believe they have around 120 time units, 90 reactions, and around 100 health. Quite a mean customer if you are on the ground with them. Heavy plasmas are almost a must on higher difficulties.

No, I was talking about the black terror unit. I always considered that unit as a kind of Ninja. :D

As said earlier, never got much problem with them. The AI is usually very dumb with that unit anyways unless you really get in his way.

A lot of times the things will walk up, fail their attack a few times then run away. Other times they just stand there and do nothing before running back. What is scary is when you are leaving the ship and have about 4 guys sitting by the ramp and end up with low reaction scores against them and they attack unapposed killing half your squad. I think the AI may be programed to go after the low reaction troopers (reaction score taking TU% into consideration too). Move a lot or have a low reaction stat, and you get ambushed.

This could be an explanation because I very hardly ever have squaddies with less TU than required to snap shot at end of turn. And they kneel most of the time too.

Hi all,

just for anybody´s information. After some work into troubleshooting (including several downloads from different sites with and without fixes, trying each combination of options in different compatibility settings and developing a new strategy to avoid the problem ingame), here is something nice to know for all us gamers enjoying this great game in german language:

Using different systems (P4m 2,4GHz system, onboard graphics as well as a standard P4 3.0 GHz Northwood with card) under WINXP, it´s always the same.
If you encounter the game crashing while leaving the Transfer-Screen, the only working solution until now is playing it in English (haven´t tried French as this would be some kind of "Memory"-game for me). Besides it´s comparable stable in both, so you might increase your vocabulary along the way using this alternative (might be helpful to know what a "Fusion Missile Launcher" is standing in front of this attracting red button :D) or just switch to this in the case of transfering.

Hope, this avoids some work for somebody.

The Windows version of X-com does not work with DOSBox. If you have have the Windows version it should run on 95/98 with no problems, and 2000/xp with a video patch called f0dder if you have display problems. Also with this version, get a slow down program if it runs too fast.

If you have the DOS version and are running Win2k/XP, Mac, or Linux get DOSBox to emulate DOS. A 1Ghz or so machine should run at around the 486 speeds that the game is designed for. If you have DOS/95/98 you can run it from the DOS prompt.

The game works fine after being downloaded from here just in my XP. My only problem is that it runs too fast. (Like leaving it in 5min setting on my 486 when set at 5sec, and 1day setting gets ridiculous.) What is a good slowdown program to use for this, as I tried moslo, which didn't work as it runs dos while the X-Com is windows, so I need some sort of windows based slowdown program. Thanks ahead of time.

The problem with the version from this site is that it's a Windows version. If you get the original DOS version you could use DOSBox like me, and it works fine then.

HELP!
I am trying to run the DOS version on windows XP using Dosbox but when I hit the Dosbox button combo to maximize it I have the following problem:
My monitor clicks, the screen goes black for a split second, and then I am back at my desktop and everythign is minized. If I click on X-com nothing happens. If I right click on the X-com box and select Restore or Maximize it just does the process again (montior clicks, goes black for a second, back at desktop w/everything minimized)

It does it no matter when I try to go to full screen - either before the game starts or after I start the game.

I actually have the same problem with Madden 2004 - but I was able to right click on the madden button and choose restore and it would work [/b][/quote]
I found the solution on another site. If anyone else is having the same problem I was just hold ALT & TAB down when you first start the program and keep them held down for the 1st few seconds and the screen will stay maximized.

YES I CAN PLAY X-COM ONCE AGAIN ! :D :D :D :D

Also Pressing

ALT + SPACE + X right after switching to full screen will keep it maximized too !

:rifle: The secret to this game is to conserve some of your TUs so you will reaction fire, and to have your rear units act as :sniper: when your forward units spot an enemy. Also, USE THE CROUCH FUNCTION! This will make a big difference as it not only improves you accuracy considerably, but makes you a smaller target and allows you to have one soldier supporting your crouched one. Crouching then auto firing will give you by far the best odds to hit your target, and the laser rifle's unlimited ammo makes this no problem even in long battles or if you feel the need to blind-fire into the darkness [this actually works rather well, you just need to find a solid object, like a tree or wall, to fire at]. Also, to help negate the inaccuracy of the blaster launcher, have the bombs drop down on the aliens from above. That's about everything I have to share, and I can beat the game on Superhuman without much difficulty :whistle: . I absolutely love this game and think it is certainly one of the 10 or so best games ever made. Try Bubble Bobble.

Catch an commander from an battleship (stun him) and let the sientists talk with him for a while.

General rank for your squaddies is only a rank based on how many squaddies total you have in your command. It doesn't add anything to your squaddie other than tell your how good he his in comparison to the others.

If you were going to make an incredibly important attack as a Commander of your army force, you would probably wish to attack only with skilled officers instead of fresh recruit even tough you very well know that most of them won't return. The result of the battle is what count, not who goes and die there...

You won't know for sure on the battlefield but as soon as you captured a live one (live is the key word here) it will show on your scientific research list. :)

I always equip 4 stun rods to my squad of 12 squaddies (I always attack with 12 squaddies) just in case get the opportunity to stun an alien once in a while. The 4 squaddies equiped with the stun rods are usually the "crack team" who enter and storm the ship first. This way I always have a nice chance to get a live Alien on every mission, and live Aliens are worth more in points if I remember well.

Once you have stun bombs then I advise you to use them since they are extremely effective on physically weak Aliens and they can be lauched safely from a distance.

Smoke can stun Aliens as well as your squaddies, and here's why: neither does your squaddies or the Aliens have breathing equipment, so if you enter a smoke heavy square the unit will be forced to breath the smoke. Just like smoke can disable someone in a building fire and render him/her uncouncious, a white line will begin to appear and grow higher and higher on the HP bar of the unit each turn. If the white bar manage for a reason or another to go beyong the current HP of the unit then he/she/it will become disabled (or stunned) until the white bar get lower than the HP again.

This is why sometimes you can see your squaddies get stunned by a very weak hit and stand up again one or two turns later if the white bar is near the max HP of the squaddies.

Stunning Aliens works exactly the same with stun rods and stun bombs. When hit, the weapon will bring the white bar up by a certain amount and the unit will be stunned when the white bar go higher than the current HP of said unit. This is also why wounded units are way easier to stun this way.

Wow, didn't know that.

But i cant seem to stun robotics (obviously I guess) - so how do you get live speciments of the cyberdisk and that reaper-looking robot? Since the scientist talk about needing a undamaged speciement to look at.

And have I understood right, that the only way to go on from where I am, is to locate a large or very large ufo and stun left and right at the control center? :)

You got it BugMeNot. You need live specimens to complete the game.

I don't remember about the "robotics" Aliens, but I do know that sometimes an heavy hit can stun ennemies. If you are lucky you could hit an ennemy and not kill him but manage to stun him. If he's one of the last Aliens downed in the mission then he won't have time to wake up and he'll show up as a live specimen in your mission debriefing.

Don't worry about it tough, you don't need all the tech to finish the mission. And most of the autopsy and live Aliens study add more flavour to the game than anything else. Only a few actually get the game forward and are critical.

I´ve got the same problem and I really don´t know what it could be. For example there are two exe files, but only one working properly.
Is there a possibility to get the dos-version so thst I could play this fantastic one again?
Or any suggestions on how to solve the crashing prob?

I´m running ufo on WinXP AMD Duron 750

MFG

Don

You shouldn't have two .exe's in the WIndows version unless you are using Xcomutil. If you've used that on the game, you have to use runxcomw.bat to start it. Geoscape.exe and Tactical.exe are files that you shouldn't use to start the game. Either use xcom.bat or the .exe with the alien head icon if you have not modified the game with xcomutil.

For some weired reason HOTU`s version runs fine, although there are still problems with several missions.
So everytime there is a mission in Africa´s "green-lands" the game breaks up. Does anyone know of some tweaking progs fitting to this prob?

A problem in the map files perhaps?

Where exactly does it crash? Does it repeat if you try it again from a reboot?

It crashe after I equipped my marines and confirmed by pushing "ok". Then the screen turns black. And that´s it.
And yes he did it several times. You mean a system reboot could do?

All your troops are standing in a black void? Reboot, and if that doesn't work, try a reinstall (get the game_xx directories out before deleting of course).

Pardon me, the screen turns black and returns to desktop. No troops, no aliens, anything ;) .
But I think I will try the re-installation you adviced...

Nah,

reinstalling didn´t make anything. Which version are you using? I had the idea that it might have something to do to with the language selection. My native language is German. So I chose this of course.
Is it possible that there are diifferences in interpreting in the program?

Personally, I already solved the problem (the guest with the strage situation was me). I wasn't able to locate the fault, so I just downloaded another version from another Retro-DOS-Game-Site. Works fine for me now. Am not quite sure if I infringe upon some kind of Codex if I'd post the URL right here, so better send me a PN if you want to know ;)

PS: Am German as well.

were is the download button
:wall:

Just underneath the extras secrion and to the right of the rating buttons, where it says "Get it!" ;)

I agree, PSI weapons aren't thaaat good...

Just blow em up with rocket tanks, blaster launchers, and heavy plasma =)

And flying suits...

For me it doesn't, though I'm maybe using a different version than the one available here.

I solved my problem by using Win95 compatiblity mode :whistle:
Sometimes it´s easier than one would think...

Heya, Im in Mission 125 and January 2000 with all researchs done and I wonder... When the game ends??

I already did the Moscow mission, killed a lot of allien, I have 5 bases and deal with ALL meneaces...

ahhaa I just want to know where is the over

know some cheats for this game?
(becouse i don't don't get enough weapons)

I found a save game editor, that worked for chesting, I made myself 8 huge bases and an army of perfect soldiers :whistle:

Have you gotta alien leaders and commanders yet? and do you have 3 advanced craft types? (Firestorm, Lightning, Avenger)

How far have you gotten with weapons research? The alien guns that you start getting from missions in the first few months can cut down about anything in a couple of shots.

Well, I have all the three Aircrafts... but hey... didn't got the Commanders...

I read here that I have to stun them... whow... lot of work to do

Just take small launchers into the command center at a base and stun everything that even so much as moves. Should get all the aliens you need to finish the game. ^^

Edit: Provided they aren't Mutons of course (no leadership in that race)
Edit2: And the Commander is the one packing a plasma in most cases, the Leaders have blaster launchers.

Ahhh.. thnx a lot! :D

Well, in Moscow (command center) mission, I've killed every single life that I encoutered... I'll have more oportunitys to stun them?

Provided you use the small launcher, yes. Go for the one up top with the heavy plasma and try to duck in and out of the room to avoid the ones with blasters until you can take them down. With luck they'll be panicing and you'll have an easier time going in.

Yes, I generally move on the interior of the command center last, until I clear the rest of the base. Usually at least one leader/commander will panic.

There's a huge list of cheats, you can alter virtually anything you have in stock.
If you still need any in a week time, post again (I have such a list typed out at home, haven't got it with me here)

About the commanders & leaders: in most cases -though not always- they'll be at the second floor of a specific room. I'll try to describe it: it's "encased" by walls and a narrow passage around it, accessible by a broad door (at least 3 squares wide, it might even be more as far as I remember). The entrance to the room itself is at the opposite side of the broad door you've first went through. In the center of the room there's a large "elevator". Mind you, they're not always there, but usually I've encountered them there.
If you need to find more alien bases to get a second chance of stunning a commander, you can spot some by flying and patrolling for some hours over the right area. The bases are always on the same locations, every game, there's no random factor included.
The ones I remember: north pole; north africa, somewhere about Tunis I believe, maybe a little more southeast; there's another one somewhere near the Russian-Chinese border. But given enough time, you'll automatically find them all, as the game will provide you with an alien base location every now and then. And you don't need to find all of them to complete the game.

Oh, and before I forget, once you've researched the subject of "Cydonia or bust", your Avengers will be capable of flying to a different location than just anywhere on earth, you'll see this choice when you want to send an Avenger to a certain location; that extra-terrestrial location is called Cydonia.

Hey... how can I research this "Cydonia or burst"?

You need to capture and research a live sectoid, which will give you research for Alien Origins, then you research another live sectoid leader to unlock The Martian Solution.

After you research that, you need to capture a sectiod commander from a base, and finally you can research Cydonia or Bust.

WRONG

You need to capture an ethereal, or any other race's leader to research "the Martian Solution" and you need to capture a commander after that to research "Cydonia or Bust."

Can anyone tell me how the drop button in the soldier equip menu works?
Doesn´t seem to work in my version...
And how to unload a weapon?

To drop something put it on the huge grid below your soldier in the inventory screen.
-Or just put it in your hand and throw it.

To unload a weapon, click a weapon to hold it with the cursor in the inventory screen, and then click on the eject magazine button at the top right of the screen near the left and right arrow buttons.

Yes, the race doesn't really matter, only the rank does.
The "hardest" part is to capture such a commander alive as these are quite limited in numbers, only one per alien base.

As for dropping weapons: if the space at the soldier's feet is too full (the large grid mentioned is filled with equipment), try clicking the scroll button at the right, just above the grid. Sometimes it's a bit tricky when clicking that button doesn't work, then you might need to shove some grenades or other small equipment around to make space for whatever you want to get rid of.

Yes, the race doesn't really matter, only the rank does.
The "hardest" part is to capture such a commander alive as these are quite limited in numbers, only one per alien base. [/b][/quote]
WRONG

ANY Ethereal, OR a leader for the martian solution.
ANY commander for cydonia or bust.

There can also be two leaders in an alien base, and I think there can be two in a battleship as well.

Heheh,

I said only one COMMANDER, I didn't say anything about the possible number of leaders. There are plenty of those indeed.

I didn't know though that any ethereal would do :ok:

Uhhm, did anyone recognize that the Ufo version offered here doesn´t and won´t work?
This is for a simple reason: the archive MISSDAT is missing. Without mission data, no game. Or am I wrong :bye:

BTW the button to unload weapon doesn´t work with version from hotu or with abandonia´s fixed version(by me ;) )

My copy (from here) does and will work, including the missions. I don't know about the unload button though, never used it.

Hmm ridiculous... :blink:
My copy definately has a loss of this folder and therefore crashes when starting a mission...
I´ll check out again. Sry so far... thought that might be the solution.

Heya, Here again.

And SO SORRY to discuss this, but I really need help

I have some problems in X-COM Apocalypse - in the Apoc's forum they take too long to reply, so...
Ah! Well... I just give up to play in DOsBOx cause it really slow my machine... and I downloaded the VSDM driver and a lot of other things... but the game can't get sound!

How can I fix it?

Hi guys. I owned this game since when it came out. When the old games stopped working on new machines :ranting: I threw out my copy. However, a few years back, PC Gamer did a revival. But all of this was before abandonia! Now I can play on my new machine. My favorite weapon :evil: has to be the blaster launcher. That baby can fly! :rifle:

hehe... at the start, i really like the autocannon.. i just load that baby up with HE and INC ammo and let everything die!

(a little sadistic, but it's fun nevertheless)

It seems there is a problem with the game (or mine at least) I can't start any missions in Northen Europe.

*Downloads again*

Can´t pass first terror camp :blink:
I remember that it was hard when I played this for the first time years ago. But I´m playing the beginner level and at the camp is nearly no chance getting out of the plane to take position at strategic points. They will shoot at once. Thought I should leave that first camp out and spend more money in science to get stronger weapons and shields. But I think I want to kill em all :evil: in that first one. Possible?

BTW @ ravel: had problems with abandonia´s version, too. Try using the win95 compatiblity mode and turn off visual designs in the same window. If this doesn´t work either try the same with HOTU´s version. Works fine on my system ( with just small failures) ;)

What guns do you have? You don't have much chance with conventional earth weapons but laser rifles are quite adaquate for terror missions (provided it isn't a night mission or anything) if you can throw grenades at or shoot all the aliens outside of your craft then you should be alright at the start, it might take a bit of saving and reloading. After you're out the best thing you can be is cautious, moving in groups (get your men to watch each other backs) but don't travel too close together (grenades...) and be careful around corners (aliens are good at reflex shots). Also, don't make the mistake I used to make and only send a few of your men out, try to get as many of your men out of the craft as possible, the more ground you can cover the better and they don't gain any stats just hanging around in the craft.

Just have eart weapons with HE ammo thought that would do. So I have to do some science before kicking some alien behind out of Paris :sneaky:

I shot all that were in sight. But some UFO-like aliens are next to my plane where I cna´t see them. And if I got marines out though, they took control of the others in the plane and shot all men down.... so I think leaving that out wouldn´t be that bad? :tomato:

BTW:Did you try the tweakin I mentioned above?

I'd like to try this...but I don't know how. :help:

Press with right mouse button on the ufo.exe. Choose last point in menu ( Thin that´s "properties"). After that choose the tab "compatbility". and there you make the modifications I mentioned above....

Ah. Thanks much. :ok:

You´re welcome :D

Use a smoke grenade at the base of the ramp the first turn and don't move out. Not only does this give you cover, it also allows the aliens to move during their turn so they aren't all at max TUs to mow you down with reaction fire. As for weapons; HE rounds and laser rifles are your best bet for anything up to Snakemen.

Laser rifles kill anything except mutons and terrorists in one hit unless you get unlucky.

I play on superhuman, so it's different. ;)

No it's not ;)

Superhuman... yikes :blink:

Anyway, if anyone else would follow your advice on using smoke grenades, don't leave your soldiers in the smoke for too long, you'll see their health decreasing soon enough... I always prefered those HE grenades (the red and white ones, however they were called) to anything smoky, but then again I have no experience with superhuman level :D

Superhuman is exactly the same as beginner, and all the other levels, it's a bug. Read the rest of the thread if you like, it's mentioned many times ;)

It was fixed. Windows versions and using Xcomutil on the DOS version fixes it.

Yep.
I haven't had the chance to beat superhuman once it was fixed. (yet)

:wall:

There's no "Compatability" tab when I go to the Properties menu of the UFO.exe icon. And YES, I know I'm doing everything the way you told me.

Grrr....

THX @Jman :D
Helped much although I didn´t have laser weapons, yet.

I love laser weapons, especially laser rifles since I prefer auto shots.
In most cases I even use them partially when I have access to plasma weapons, because I tend to run out of elerium to make ammo for those plasma guns.
I never cared much for heavy lasers though.

Nooo! I can´t understand. It seems that there is really a problem with the maps of South Africa in my copy of EU. Thought I solved the problem with that win95 compatibility thing. Does anyone know how to solve this disturbing prob?
I´m taking advance in science and weapon development for the first time. Step by step. And now this again.... :angry:

Download from HotU and try their's?

Laser rifles are statistically better than heavy lasers.

Hey I wanna editor that will prove so much useful in gameplay esspecially an armor and exp trainer will be useful by the way I can't research any good flying units just Interceptors but in your screenshots a saw one that looks powerful in one base I keep 100 Scientists and researches are going always good or excellent I need to know whether I need to research for a good Interceptor

dudes... i just found this game... i was so uber happy, but like everytime i enter a battle scene or whatever, the game tells me the mission objectives and it crashes

im running it from windows xp, i tried dosbox but it wont run from there...

HELP ME PLEASE! ur all speaking about the game i love so, i crave to take down some alien scum, but please... dont make me play terror from the deep

hey is xenocide out yet if not when will it be out

I believe they have had a geoscape demo out for about a year now. Not sure when the next release will be.

ACK! I'm having a big issue in X-Com. :( :( :(

Can anyone help me?

The first time I played, I did terrible, scored negative monthly ratings every time, and eventually lost the USA to the aliens.

Second time around, complete opposite, 1000+ monthly ratings every month, taking down every sighted UFO and/or defeating their forces at land.

April 1999 comes around...suddenly the USA is buzzing with UFOs. I take down 2 larges and various smalls, but allow two very larges to conduct their business in Canada and USA untouched, big mistake. An infiltration mission succeeds and I lose USA. So I reload my save and redo April, this time I take out both battleships as soon as I can (after they land on the USA), and a large abductor as well. Another large ship manages to slip away before I can get it. This is on the 14th. So I fast forward to the end of the month to see what happens, skipping through completed research notifications and spottings of small craft (no terrorism site comes up, though it does if I don't fast forward). At the end of the month...

USA STILL GOES TO THE ALIENS.

What the hell is up? If I play too poorly I lose them? If I play too well I lose them? This wouldn't be such an issue if my base wasn't /IN/ USA.

...what do I do? =(

Are you sure it's only because of what happened in April? Usually a country/territory is only gradually won over by the aliens, at least that's been my experience. Usually the ratings you got by a particular government started dropping, and after 3 or more months like that, they changed sides.
Mind you, I'm not sure whether this is always the case, but couldn't that be the reason?
Because from your description it looks like you couldn't do much more -except also cleaning up the small landing sites at the end of April.

I tried finishing off the month. Got a rating of 3,000 and still lost USA.

How implausible would it be to sack my base and move over to the radar base in Eurasia?

By the way...on my April save, I found a base in the USA on the 20th, it could of been there longer ... it could of been there in January. However I had still been kicking a lot of behind and the USA had been raising my funds every month until April when they suddenly left me.

I checked the graphis, it shows alien activity in the USA spiked in April, but X-Com activity in the USA also spiked in April accordingly.

All in all I just don't see what I was doing wrong.

Oh and destroying the base on the 20th did not stop them alien loving Americans from converting...

Sometimes this game does that to you, bad things happen and there's nothing you can do but carry on and try to do the best you can (just like real life). Remember that funding from countries isn't the only way to get money (selling alien weapons/equipment will get you rich very fast).
The alien base is the most likely cause of their infiltration. When you invade it make sure you bring stun rods/small launchers to stun the alien commander (everyone in the command centre) and don't interrogate him until you need to.

I destroyed all the battleships...albeit not until after they landed. Shouldn't that prevent the success of the infiltration? :-/

Also, it's not about the funds. It's about the fact that my base is in the USA. It's a huge waste of opportunity to have your base in a country that doesn't support you. And I'm only 4 months into the game.

That said I really don't want to restart, again, because of something silly like this that probably shouldn't have happened.

But it looks like I might have to.

Something also handy to remember, what you could do is totally fill the command room with smoke from smoke grenades - I captured not only a sectoid commander doing this, but a medic and navigator too - and I got info on Etherials! Woohoo - M.C labs!

So don't forget the smoke (from grenades or explosions) can also stun aliens. Just remember that it might take a while.

Hey guys this is my first post in these forums so please be nice LOL...

I have just brought a copy of X-Com UFO Enemy unknown off e-bay for ?15 :wall: PC Rom version "DONT SAY A WORD!" and when i try to run it the Graphics are over sizes in a big way.

I am working off Windows XP, i think i need some sort of patch but cant seem to find it :cry:.

Can any of you kind people please point me in some sort of direction for this patch to make this beautiful and legendary game work on my L-Top.

I used to play this on the Playstation and loved it to bits when i was a lot younger and have been looking for it ever since...

So Please Help!!! LOL

Thanks Guys

Talon AkA N00B!

:blink: Xcom :blink: Playstation :eeeeeh:

oh hell yeah man, i used to play it for days on end.

Didn't even know you could get it for PC till a couple of years ago LOL...

check it out bud...

http://i1.ebayimg.com/03/i/03/6b/ae/01_1_b.JPG

And my question still stands does anyone know of a Windows XP patch coz the graphics are still way to big to play the game :cry:

:help: :help: :help: :help: :help: :help: :help: :help: :help: :help: :help:

Did you try downloading it from this site coz i have XP and 0 problem running the game?

I did i have tried both and still am having no luck :cry: and i was so , i have no idea what the problem could be its just not the correct size on the screen for some reason and the pictures that i do get like the intro and the Micro Probe logo look blocky to say the least, :wall:

hi,
this is probably a really stupid question but i am not great with computers.
i have downloaded ufo but don't know how to unzip and play it. please could someone tell me the process to go through step by step. I would be eternally grateful

Do you have an unzipping program (pkunzip,winrar winzip...)?

Not a problem bud its quite simple, just double click on the icon on your desk top 'UFO - Enemy unknown' once you are in the unzip files left click the mouse and you'll get a window with 'Extract All' second from bottom click that and you will start the extraction process and just follow what it says bro...

Right. But as far as I´m concerned this only works with winXP...
So if you own another windows version just do a google search on winrar or winzip...

Hi there guys, i have a question,

I was well on a roll with 4 basses, 2 big ones in europe and usa, small ones in indonesia and africa.

Problem is : Ethereals.
Now, i remembered from the old days that certain sectiod aliens can activate the psy research option as well. i looked it up in the famous staregy guide bij kasey, and found out this was only the case with the leader/commander

is it true? as for the leader i mean.

And the second question: Where do i find sectiod leaders ? are they in large scouts ? cuz thats the biggest thing with sectoids ive seen flying around in quite some time

XIthTalon: you probably need the f0dder patch get it here along with the the difficulty patch and a few mods to make it harder if you get bored... :D

Guest's USA pact problem: If they land they can take the counrty. Just cut your loses and take the battleships on the ground to get 200 elerium each. Killing on the ground doesn't stop the pacts.

I came to learn of this game from the web comic sluggy freelance, it's great but I have a problem the game crashes every time I'm about to start a mission, I have Win98

I had that problem too on XP but i really forgot how i fixed it
sorry no help here!!!

You guys should know that not everyone would enjoy X-COM. I have just posted a message on the Jagged Alliance forum:

Of course we realize there will be people that like X-com and the few dumbasses like that guy that don't.:)

"people who hated X-COM (like myself) would have never tried Jagged Alliance because, well, if we already hated X-COM, why would we even bother with some game that was "just like X-COM"?"

Sometimes, for things involving taste or opinion, it doesn't hurt to think for yourself :bye:

If you don't like a game then just don't play it. I am personally completely against your opinion of the game and I do find Jagged Alliance to be like X-Com. The only real difference is the theme and you don't need to do research in Jagged Alliance.

As for the graphics I don't consider them outdated right now for X-Com. I like isometric graphic games and I never had a problem with graphics being "pixelated". In fact if I have a choice I often turn down auto-aliasing on my graphic card because I find it to "blurr" the graphics way too much. I like sharp graphics.

To anyone, like me, who has problems beginning missions, download the f0dder patch from the link that Jman posted, and launch X-Com from the "geoscape.exe" icon. Works like a charm.

in english? ok .-)

i played UFO a while an i noticed, that i cant transfer item from one base to another. i can klick the button "transfer", it shows me the cost, i accept and then iam on the first screen where i only can escape when i press "exit" (dont know the english word, exit, break up, something like this... the right button).

BUT then the games closed and all is away.

so i never can send units or items to other bases and now ich just found out, that the avenger takes elerium 115 as fuel and my storage of nearly 400 is down to 9 :-)

is there a patch to fix the problem with the transfer between bases?

That's plain weird :blink:
Are you sure there's enough space in the base you're transferring to? Not that the game hangs up if there isn't enough room, but I can't think of another reason.
Also, have you checked that the file transfer.dat (or transfers.dat) is NOT read-only? The game uses this file for transfers between bases, so it should be able to change that file.

i ve found out, that when i play it in english all works... only the german version has this mistake. funny :-(
so ich play in english, when i ve samething to transfer...

Hello I am new in this forum, abandonia is the best page of classic games i visited. thanks.

i research the blaster launcher is a powerfull weapon destroy all, i hate the ethereals and the crysalids. bye

i really bad in english sorry :cry:

atleast its readable :ok:


and personally i hate the Mutons, etherals are nothing once you get the psy training going and cryssalids only run around in circles anyway. Mutons are the bastards with the super strong natural armour :hammer:

Chrysalids are definitely the worst enemies, I HATE THEM! Not only do they come out of nowhere, usually take a couple hits to kill, get your guys regardless of their armor they don't just kill your guys they turn in into ANOTHER *dirty word* CHRYSALID! Talk about adding insult to injury...

I have to say that when I saw this games begining I thought:
- Woah, this is gonna be interesting!
But all of it lost since it didnt appeal enough. :(

I totally agree with the guy who said that Mutons are the hardest - those guys are totally impossible to kill in the first couple of months (no lasers/alien grenades)

Oh and to the guy who had the problem with the crysallids - there is a really easy although quite dangerous way to solve your problem - keep proximity grenades (primed) in all of your soldiers pockets :ok:

If the Crysallid survives then you run up to them and taser them - once they drop, pick up the corpse and run back to your ship.

Then fly away before it wakes up!

(I think that getting a live crysallid gives you M.C something, but I'm not sure what)

The game is great. It takes a little to get used to, but when you do you'll be forging your own tactics in no time. I know I have.

I finished this game few times but what actually does reaper.
(that big alien thing that comes with aliens which can float.I dunno their names,Floaters? :D )

Yeah that's it. Reapers, the big hulky aliens? Looks like something from Star Wars to me. *shrug* I never paid that much attention to them, they were just fodder.

Reapers... usually they just hang around (well, not literally hanging), but they have some type of attack. It included those typical orange flashes you also get when ethereals try mind controlling your units. But I *think* it just dealt damage, nothing more.

I've finished the game without ever taking a live crysalid, so apparently it's not necessary taking the risks. Though that's a personal choice :D
It's also a good idea to let soldiers spread in groups of three: if one runs into a crysalid, the two others can still try to take it down in time.

As for mutons early in the game: don't heavy rockets damage them a decent bit (not enough though to take them out in a single shot)? Also, I prefer using auto cannons over rifles (I mean rifles, not laser rifles!) as a few hits with those still have more effect than rifles. A friend of mine once set out with 8 soldiers using only rifles. They all ended up dead while he didn't take out a single muton :whistle: Not me though, me likes heavy rockets early in the game...

Since the whole thread is really long, I cannot read it all. So I apologize if my question has been answered a million times.

In the review it says there is a patch that stops the graphics problems. But I can't find it! When I try to run the game the screen flashes black and says "Input not Accepted"
Please Help! I have an Athlon 2600 with a Radeon 9600 Video Card. I have a Flat-screen Monitor (don't know if that makes a difference)
:help:

f0dder <---- :P

As for Reapers, they have a rather weak "hand to hand" attack. I've lost like....2 soldiers in 8 years of playing. :yawn:

I don't understand the deal with the Mutons. When I fight those I usually already have access to the best guns from a long time, so I don't really have a problem fighting them.

Fighting anything else than the Grey and Floaters with rifle is almost suicidal...

i usually give my men laser rifles with 2 or 4 heavy lasers, it just means that when it comes to the Avenger i can take 2 HWP - Plasma and 14 men with all the other equipment (psy amps, grenades, medikits and so on)

Huh?I actually never used another weapon than laser rifle...I never had problems kill something with these,

Heavy Lasers defy conventional wisdom by both sucking and blowing!

Laser rifles are better, but when you get enough, heavy plasma destroys all (it can even go through UFO walls!)

Blaster launchers are pretty good, but if you want heavy weapons then rocket launchers + incendiary rounds are da bomb. (pun intended)

Also, I have never been attacked by reapers, they usually get blown up by proxy grenades or High Explosive (another weapon of choice), on the other hand Crysallids actually have some of the best armour in the game against high explosive, and easily the worst against incendiary shots.

And whilst the three man team idea is nice, the guy in the front pretty much always gets zombified, so killing him makes the problem worse. You should always try to knock them out if possible with Tasers or Small Launchers, but not kill them or else there will be one more crysallid.

Which can be really, really annoying, especially if the zombie gets in the dropship (happened to me, lost 6 guys with power armour. Needless to say, the high explosive lobbed in solved the problem (although it took 3 packs on different timers , at 0, 1 and 2!)

I have finished Ufo few times on diferent dificulties,and always just with laser rifles(plus explosives and few blaster launchers of course).I think that laser rifles are best weapons in Ufo.(solid damage,solid accuracy,unlimited ammo..).
I want to know what Reapers do becouse I never saw that they are making something diferent that walking(and dying :D ).

LOL same here. I think they have some kind of melee attack, but I am in no way sure. They're not too hard to kill though.

I have a really cool Unofficial Strategy Guide, that I got when I searched "X-Com Guides" on Alltheweb.

it lists all kinds of things and is quite a good read. There is also an X-Com2 guide but it is (surprisingly enough) pretty much the same.

I played this game when it first came out, loved it then, it wasn't until I was looking for a different game I came across this site! thanks!

Started playing it again, and just watched my free time zip down to zero..

One thing though, how the hell do you turn off the music??

use tanks if you ask me strong cost 420 000 but hell they're worth it

If it's the Windows version mute your MIDI (FM Synth)

Actually, as soon as you can get power armour (or even at the start, really) I stop using tanks completely.

The main reason why I don't like tanks is that their ammo takes up loads of space and also that they can't pick anything up.

When you attack supply ships after shooting them down, tanks become awful, as they can't go through the doors without using expensive blaster ammo, or wasting heavy plasma rounds that should be used elsewhere.

And another thing, if you land at night (especially on terror missions) with tanks and blind-fire the walls to get cheap alien kills you will more often than not kill a load of civilians, which is bad.

All in all, they are not worth it, even at the start.

Be controversial and use the Lightning! It's great!

Hmmm, I love the tanks, they're cheap, disposable, good firepower and if they are damaged don't take a month to heal. I usually put 2-3 on each transport. I send them out first so if they do get destroyed, who cares? Buy another one, they're cheap. They're great for just shooting in the general direction of an alien because their rockets are reasonably powerful and they're faster than most soldiers. So if I'm attacking a large ship I send the tanks circling around the map with 1 soldier each following it, the others go straight for the doors to the ship. You can also have one of your soldiers open the UFO's door, drive the tank up and launch a rocket or two inside.

:blink:
Well I dont thing that tanks were so good.In fact one trooper in flying suit with heavy plasma is almost as good as plasma tank AND:deplete a less space,can go in smaller Ufo without depleting a lot of ammo,will get better through the game,and is a LOT cheaper than tank.New soldier costs 60 000(plus some weapons that you have so or so on stock anyway).And btw you must build tanks in workshops anyway, which take time that could be used on much important things.As you can guess I am not big fan of tanks.

I'm not so fond of tanks either, but I usually send one out first, especially on terror sites. I hate it when I have trouble getting my soldiers out...
But unless I've got plenty of elerium, I simply use one of the initial rocket launchers: no manufacturing needed and they don't consume elerium.

However, my experience with tanks is that they get killed about as easily as any soldier wearing some kind of suit.

The only tank I hardly ever use is the rocket tank (perhaps plasma on those Muton missions). Cost more than a Rookie, yes...but if you have a few Captains and Colonels along...um yeah. Takes months of combat to turn them into top notch guys, easily worth $500k a piece. Where the tanks really come in handy is when you need to move a big gun around quickly. The average rookie will take over a month to get up to 70+ TUs and is also vulnerable to psi, which a tank is not.

I use tanks coz i dont get sad when i lose one i know thats :crazy:

A tank IS the best way to go in UFO they can take more damage they dont get wounded they dont panic they dont turn into monsters and if u use ur research wisely ull c that at evey stage of the game ull have a tank that can take out an alien in asingle shot + high time units and good reaction.

TO let a rookie become a colonel which i prefer over a tank ull need to sacrifice tanks and not crew to get there.

I agree with Lightning is a good craft.
Arm it with laser-gun and you have a perfect elerium-hunter, hunting down small crafts, and jumping them on impact.

Regarding tanks.. one of the most evil ways of killing the aliens "tanks" is to MC one of the 4 squars of a cyber-disc, and either move it one square so it reaction-fire on itself, or use it to kill aliens.

Blaster-launcher is en EXELENT way to deal with Secoid craft where only the leaders have psi-powers.
On battle-ships, Terror and surply-ships the leaders is ALWAYS at the same starting-room for theire class, so you only need to bring 2-3 guys with 1 blaster and 1 round loaded.
Send out a scout, locate the UFO, use one blaster-round to open the roof from above, next right down, and yet one more to be sertain that you got them all :)
Or use the same tactic if you have flying suite, to equpits 2-3 of your men with stun-launchers.
just place them at level 4, if the roof is level 2-3, blast the roof open, and have them fire down at different angels, and then drop a prox-nade down... if they are not stunned, they will die if they move :)
On all missions beside terror-sites, brute force is usualy the best way.
Aliens also Panic due to low moral if you manage to knock some leaders pretty fast, and keep the kill-count at a decent rate.

A Large-scout site shouldn't take more then 10 turns.
Use Prox-nades and laser-rifles at the start, and switch to heavy P and prox-nades later.
If you are trapping a door to KILL, place the nade 1 square outside.
If you wanna get the alien alive, and just wanna use it as detection-device, place it right next to the door or wall you wanna cover, or right around a corner, where the blast won't reach the targeted alien.

I ONLY use high-explosives to take out buildings, never inside ufo's, since the blast-radius is too greate, and will destroy too much stuff and put your own men at risk.

If you wanna REALY learn how to use nades, try and start a game @ easy, with all rookie soldiers, and at your first large-scout mission, arm your men ONLY with Proxy and smokers, along with Pistols for close combat.

Realy.. the ONLY aliens you need alive is; 1 navigator ONCE, 1 leader and commander ONCE.. and then TONES of Medics :)
I always try to take every harvester/abductor with blasting the leader if it's sectoid, and hit the medics with stunners, and then place a smoke-nade with 8 turns delay.. seems like it keeps them down longer.. smoke stuns :)

ha for real..... i never noticed that! :guns:


----------Dragonlancer

sry that last post was me (i forgot to login)

For small ufos I've shot down, I do use high explosives inside them: if there's a large hole in the roof already (caused by intercepting the ufo), there's no power source inside anymore. So I pop in a few high explosives through the roof, rather than going in and getting shot in the doorway :)

Sometimes you will have killed all aliens inside the ufo, and there's still one out somewhere. The last time I played UFO, I posted a soldier over any stunned aliens (usually only a few); this prevents them from getting up again. I don't know if stunned aliens that awake ever pick up their weapons again, but if I have to leave them alone, I take no risks: take the ammo, including that in their weapon.
Also, if their plasmas (or heavy plasmas) have been fired already, you'll lose all of the ammo in the gun at the end of the mission. So you could as well use it up instead of firing your own full rounds.

Actually, you do not lose all of the ammo if you unload the weapon.

What you do is, on the last turn, if your guys have (for example) laser rifles and have picked up plasmas or whatever, go to their inventory and click the weapon on the 'unload' button. (a gun with a clip dropping out of the bottom)

This way, you don't have to waste your precious elerium to make more clips.

Oh and another thing, regarding the guy who talked abot proxy nades 1 square away from the door, what you should do if you really need to finish off that one last alien is to save before you throw the grenade, that way if it misses the target, you can load and try again!

:ok: That's my top tip for the day.

Good to know, I didn't know that :ok:

By any chance is there a hint of sarcasm in those words? :crazy:

No, on the contrary!
I used to play UFO a lot, so it's only seldom that someone comes up with something useful that I didn't know about :)

LOL

I am usually a source of not-so-handy advice!

Another thing regarding unloading weapons - you cannot, I repeat cannot unload them at the pre-battle setup screen!

Whenever this is attempted, it skips right to the mission, meaning the only way to make sure (for example) your Missile Launchers start off with incediary rounds is to take only them along, which is a bit lame really.

And one more thing - on the original - again, I repeat original UFO : Enemy Unknown without any patches (and not X-COM - UFO Defence) if a battleship attacks your base (this is a good reason to not defend bases using missile/plasma defences etc. when you have a lot of tanks / soldiers free inside) and you kill all of the aliens who come you can get upwards of 500 elerium! That's enough for about 90 Firestorm flights!

This is completely false, I used to do it all the time. I think armor give a certain degree of protection against tasers tough but you can stun one of your teamate just as well as any other units.

I never try to stun a mind controled unit anyways. I either run away and immediatly make him throw all his stuff at me when he stop being controlled or kill him on the spot when this happen.

Oh! Well I didn't know that! I tried it about 10 minutes ago and it didn't work!

Maybe it is just on UFO Defence that it doesn't work! (I have both)

Hmm... well there I am. Thanks for the heads up, it really did help, especially on those pesky terror missions (which I very rarely actually do - I land and then whoosh! Right off again, until I have power suits)

*retracts previous comment*

Hi there, i ve taken a look at your discussion and you might be just the ones to help me out:

I just researched the psi lab and built one in every base i have...but how can i send my soldiers to train?

i really have no idea, how to do this

At the end of every month it pops up a screen asking which soldiers you want in training. Kind of a pain in the behind that it only goes monthly though. So if you build the lab near the beginning of the month you have to wait almost a whole month to start training.:(

hey there.

I have an question, how do I take screenshots (in battle to more precise) while using the windows version? Everytime I hit Print Screen, and paste the image on Paint the screen is all f*cked up.
Is there any software that can help me?

Yes, Hypersnap DX is quite good look for that.

WOW!!!35 "pages" of UFO... :kosta:
Is Hypersnap DX downloadable?And if yes can you provide a link(and please not to google :D )

Hypersnap DX

Free trial is there, enjoy :ok: .

And once again.Thanks almighty dreadlord :kosta: :kosta: :Brain:

LOL, it's nothing really. :angel:

Now I need some help, how in god's name do you slow the game down? It travels at the speed of light on my PC...

Edit: Wait, nevermind, I just set the priority to lowest.

Yup...Or you can just slowdown Dosbox with Ctrl plus F11 :D

*coughs*

No thanks to the old PrejudiceSucks for the Hypersnap DX note in the first place? Oh well *cries and falls asleep in a pool of his own tears*

Ok,Ok thanks.You are best.... :kosta: :kosta: LOL

well all seems fine except when i take out pictures on geoscape mode. the earth is ok, but the space get´s green and such...do I need to change any special seetings before starting using it?

Thanks for the gratitude! :Brain:

I have no idea what is going wrong with Hypersnap DX. I know of it but not really how it works. I've only used it a couple of times, but I don't think that it ever went green.

So sorry. :crazy:

Actually it work flawlessly here. :blink: Althougth I didnt took pictures of geospace mode in Ufo... LOL Advice:In Dosbox you can take pictures with ctrl plus F5.Try it with this...

Well thank your lucky cans of soup this one isn't as hard as TfTD!

Phhew I must look like a total n00b, but I just completed this game for the first time! Woohoo!

Unlucky, you alien suckers, I just kissed your Cydonian arses goodbye! WOOOOO!

Sorry... ummm....

Tip for the day : Get plasma cannons... yeah... inspiring advice once again from the man himself, PrejudiceSucks.

You may cheer now.

Actually I saw that there is Ufo music download on this site.Has anybody tried it?It is worth?(always played Ufo without music...)

I have the HOTU version (with music) as well as the Abandonia version without. It doesn't really add very much and is used mainly for the dogfights in the air, but is also used in the Geoscape (again, it doesn't add much) and some of the missions.

It's not an essential download, but it is quite good just to 'brighten up' the game.

i downloaded the file. i click on it. winZip say its a screensaver!!! aaaaaaahhrg!! :eeeeeh: :ranting: :ranting: :wall: :rifle: :rifle: :rifle: :angry: :angry: :angry: *angry!!* please help!

Hmm... if you're using XP then I suggest you download Winzip and try again, otherwise, I have no idea.

Just extract all of the stuff to a folder on your hard drive and see what happens.

F12 in Windows gives you a .tga file

Yeah, that and the Hypersnap DX method. Try both! Enjoy capturing screens... or something. Yes...

X-Com tip for the day (number 1) : On the last hour of every month, transfer all of your scientists and technicians - you won't pay them a penny whilst they're in transit!

Work it also in Terror from the Deep?I started to play it again...But I guess I am in bad topic.... :whistle:

Hi!

I also played with this awesome game years ago, and installed it last month again. This game is really a hard one, even after so many years :) The first time I could only finish it (an old dos version of the game) by hexaediting my saved game which resulted extra 400 million dollars. With the help of this, everything went smoother :D

I couldnt read all the 36 pages of comments but i'd like to advise you something:

Create a wiki-forum for ufo1! Everyone can make additions, or modify incorrect statements in it.

Some of you have a very high knowledge in the game, dont let these hints go away, or dissapear in forums! I also wrote a complete game-guide about ufo1 in a booklet about 10 years ago (ehh, how old am i :D ) it was about 30 pages (and it wasnt even complete) but i borrowed it to someone i forgot.
I havent ever seen the original manual of the game, but as a base of the WIKI it would be perfect. Only additions and corrections should be written to it.

For example: -mentioning that xcomutil (i've never heard about it)
-to warn users about crashing at landing missions (it happened with me manly at terror sites) OR one can use the DOS-version in pure DOS environment (no windows, see it later)
-i never knew, why can i see the picture of the ufo during aircraft-attack?
-why do fundings change, as they do? i havent seen any ufo in europe, but at the end of the month european countries decrease the money. Is it possible i didnt detect ufos in front of my base in europe? (building more short/long radar would detect more ufos? both type of radars are required?)
-when and why do they do base-attacks?
-and maybe the most important: what kind of versions are available. Since i wasnt able to extract version-number from the executable, i dont know the one i owned is the latest (bug fixes), and now there is even a windows version (which bugs still exist in it)
-and these interesting facts, as: difficulty level doesnt change anything etc.

These are some of my questions, which could be a godd additions to that community site.

Bye!

Ps. i found this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Com but thats just a joke. Even my old gameguide was 10 times longer, than this.
ps2: sorry for my poor english, i am a fun from hungary :)

Can anyone give me tips on this thing? I always die when I land down with my troops.

Well some of them were already posted here,but a little conclussion
-Yes if someone decrase your funds it is becouse there was an Ufo that you dont detected.They will be also more likely to decrese funding when-You ignore landed Ufos or even worse terror sites
-When you have missions with rating terrible
-If you detect some Ufos but they flee
- :blink: Why can you see the picture of the Ufo during airattacks?Never think about it becouse it is pretty??? :D
-Your bases are often attacked in late phases of game,probobly when it become a thorn ín eyes of aliens or something like that.
-There was a bug in original Ufo that causes that all dificults in Ufo were more or less the same.It was repaired by patch.
And there is surely many that I forgot or even didnt know so correct me if I wrote some bullsh*ts... :max:

Here is a rundown of most of the tips and trick I posted on this thread since I began to post here. Please take note that since I might have been talking to someone at the time some part may or not be really revellant. You should have enough to read for a while tough.

And yes, I posted something on Christmas day. I have no life and had nothing better to do at that moment. ;).

Quote:

Originally posted by Eagle of Fire Posted @ Dec 8 2004@ 03:06 AM Quote: Once you get going the best advice is to never do a night mission. They can see in the dark and you cant. just hover over a crash site til the sun comes up. you might lose the crash site sometimes, but you wont lose your squad. Completely wrong. Apart from the flare wich aready been mentioned by Anubis, night missions can be even easier to win than normal mission because altough the Aliens do see better at night than your own men, they are not intelligent enough (in term of AI) to use or counter the use of flares. This mean that you can get even nearer before spotting and shooting at the Aliens. And when this happen, they are 90% of the time caught with their back turned at you. If that's not an advantage I don't know what it is.

<!--QuoteBegin-Eagle of Fire Posted @ Dec 24 2004@ 10:26 PM
I'm not sure what you mean about the "floaters", but if you can't win a mission then just pack up and leave. Try to keep your Squaddies alive and take those expensive equipment from the dead ones while retreating to your Skyranger.

Remember that you will lose anything which is not in the skyranger when you depart. This mean all the Aliens guns, the armors, the equipment of your dead Squaddies laying around etc.

You will also lose score equal to the number of civilians since they'll all die. But then you'll lose way less points that way than if you only ingnored the mission altogether. And you'll still have the + points you gathered in the mission thus far (like killing for killing ennemies). If you have enough it may even out.

I'm wondering how you could lose at the 3rd month tough? Having trouble fighting the Aliens?[/quote]

Quote:

Originally posted by Eagle of Fire Posted @ Jan 15 2005@ 11:05 AM Well, I seem to remember a weird bug right now. If you entered a mission while one of your fighter was still chasing an UFO, the game would crash. Answer to this bug was easy: never chase UFO when you are about to enter a mission. Either disengage and go back to base or just fly near them until you finish the mission. Another idea would be to send the Skyranger next to the mission without selecting it, down the UFO (or get killed) and then enter the mission. Anyways, I never experimented such a bug because I never entered a battle with crafts still engaged in battle. I usually tend to wait for all UFO's to be downed before sending my team so I go get the biggest fish. I also tend to change my squaddies equipment depending of the type of mission before sending them to fight, especially when I'm currently building a new kind of set of armor for my troops and I want them to be equiped with the latest stuff, so waiting is a must.

Quote:

Originally posted by Eagle of Fire Posted @ Jan 19 2005@ 12:41 PM Another nifty trick is the ability to rename your squaddies. I always rename mine based on their rank and I add, in brackets, their accuracy rating. So it would go like this: Rookie (59), 2nd Class (57), Captain (67), etc. Pretty usefull when you want to know if the selected squaddie stands a chance at hitting his target, depending on range...

<!--QuoteBegin-Eagle of Fire Posted @ Feb 2 2005@ 07:58 PM
I always equip 4 stun rods to my squad of 12 squaddies (I always attack with 12 squaddies) just in case get the opportunity to stun an alien once in a while. The 4 squaddies equiped with the stun rods are usually the "crack team" who enter and storm the ship first. This way I always have a nice chance to get a live Alien on every mission, and live Aliens are worth more in points if I remember well.

Once you have stun bombs then I advise you to use them since they are extremely effective on physically weak Aliens and they can be lauched safely from a distance.

Smoke can stun Aliens as well as your squaddies, and here's why: neither does your squaddies or the Aliens have breathing equipment, so if you enter a smoke heavy square the unit will be forced to breath the smoke. Just like smoke can disable someone in a building fire and render him/her uncouncious, a white line will begin to appear and grow higher and higher on the HP bar of the unit each turn. If the white bar manage for a reason or another to go beyong the current HP of the unit then he/she/it will become disabled (or stunned) until the white bar get lower than the HP again.

This is why sometimes you can see your squaddies get stunned by a very weak hit and stand up again one or two turns later if the white bar is near the max HP of the squaddies.

Stunning Aliens works exactly the same with stun rods and stun bombs. When hit, the weapon will bring the white bar up by a certain amount and the unit will be stunned when the white bar go higher than the current HP of said unit. This is also why wounded units are way easier to stun this way.[/quote]

Well some of them were already posted here,but a little conclussion
-Yes if someone decrase your funds it is becouse there was an Ufo that you dont detected.They will be also more likely to decrese funding when-You ignore landed Ufos or even worse terror sites
-When you have missions with rating terrible
-If you detect some Ufos but they flee
- :blink: Why can you see the picture of the Ufo during airattacks?Never think about it becouse it is pretty??? :D
-Your bases are often attacked in late phases of game,probobly when it become a thorn ín eyes of aliens or something like that.
-There was a bug in original Ufo that causes that all dificults in Ufo were more or less the same.It was repaired by patch.
And there is surely many that I forgot or even didnt know so correct me if I wrote some bullsh*ts... :max: [/b][/quote]
Ok, i just think many of the forums visitor have the knowledge to share these not so trivial "features" like the same-difficulty problem :(

Well, if i'll have the spare time (maybe summer) i'll make a web-page. But strictly for hungarian users :D

About the ufo picture during aircraft-attack: there are several icons there, normal attack, aggressive attack, etc. And there is a button, which shows me the shape of the ufo. Anything useful can be done here?

the attack formations are useful when u outrange ur opponent with plasma or fusion.U use cautious attack and receive 0 damage.if u are still on the machine guns Recruit more researchers!!! :ok:

The Shape of the UFO helps when u want to land ur troops near it.u know how many doors there are .I didnt find any more uses fot it

The pic lets you know what kind of ship it is beyond small, medium, large, etc. After you get the Hyperwave Decoder, it's pretty pointless since you are then told in the popup what it is.

I dont need hyperwave decoder, because I get the info about their size right after the beginning...

Ufo-1 detected
size: small
speed=xyz etc.

So it seems to me, that it is there just for fun :) Earlyer i thought i can select where to shoot with the interceptor (if i target the left/right side of the ufo, it will likely to crash land and dont damage the elerium-engine)

Ok, i see, beyond the main categories i can figure which shape it actually has. Well, thx :)

the hyperwave decoder will also tell you what race of alien is in the ufo. some races are harder to kill than others, so it makes it easier to decide if you want to send men down there after shooting it down.
also on the larger sectoid ships they try to use mind control thingys on your men. if your men arent well trained its best to avoid them for the moment, cos just end up getting killed
later on in the game there are so many ufos that its better to be able to choose which missions you want to do, which soldiers to send etc.

the different styles of attack always seemed pointless to me. though if youre attacking a small ship, you will probably destroy it if you use aggressive style.

Yup, what spitfirejohn said about the wave decoder. It's very useful to know if the ship you are going against is more or less normal, full of crazy mind-controlling super-race aliens (forgot the name), or those armor badasses that take something like five shots with the laser rifle to kill.

Besides this, it tells you (if I remember correctly) what mission the whip is on. It's very important, at least for me. If I see "infiltration", that's a priority target. So is "terror mission", but somthing like supply ships I can let pass if I have more important things to do. This sure beats downing one supply ship and then losing an important country afterwards.

As far as psy warfare goes. Even while you don't have it, it's fairly easy to avoid too serious consequences from simple sectoids (who only get one MC guy per ship - the leader). What I do is equip everyone with power armor (useful in any case). For weapons I go with laser rifles. They are usually enough to kill most low-level aliens with, but it DOES NOT usually have the punch to pierce your own guys' power armor. So, even if one guy gets MC'ed, he usually can't hurt his buddies. After the battle, you weed out those guys who got MC'ed easily, because you know they are weak in the mind. Oh, and don't bring alien grenades. :) If you do, drop them all the second you realize you are facing MC.

Attack modes matter! If you go distant and have Avalanche missiles equipped, you outrange almost all UFOs' weapons, which means you can take them down with a single Interceptor and not so much as get scratched in the process. Lovely.

And after discovering that psi f0dder, arm them with standard rifles and no grenades. They can't harm your other guys, and serve as bait for most psi attacks so the rest aren't psi attacked.

Yeah, the Hyperwave decoder is really, really handy. If you know that there will be something/someone really hard to kill (such as Mutons, the armoured ones) then you should still land at the site, but take off straight away, so that you still get some points for your hard work of landing.

Also remember that in the original X-COM (not TfTD) that the same squad can be redirected in their skyranger.

For example, if you are on your way to attack a 'very small' ship (I don't know why you would) but on the way find a base full of sectoids then you could go to the 'very small' ship, kill the aliens and make sure no-one dies (which could even promote someone) and then on your way back stop off at the enemy base and take it down, hopefully capturing a lot of aliens.

You get loads of points for runs like that.

Work it also in Terror from the Deep?I started to play it again...But I guess I am in bad topic.... :whistle: [/b][/quote]
Yes Lizard it does. Hope that help you in the future, and you are right, this is the wrong topic.

In fact, it even works with Soldiers which are more useful to transfer, because with scientists, they lose their research they were doing for that month.

On the other hand, you do get them for free for another month.

P.S it does not affect items you are making, just research.

X-COM tip for the day - Cautious attacks often do not blow up the target's engines, so you might still gain elerium!

ROFL! You said "one of my girlfriends"! LOL!

PLAYAAAA!!!

Anyone have a problem with tryign to use the med kits, its in their hands as they bleed to death over 4 rounds and no matter how many times I try "Use med kit 10 TU" it doesnt bring up med kit window? :ranting: It kinda helps to be able to heal yourself while your assualting one of their bases.

I think you need to get another soldier and get them to use the medikit while facing the injured soldier, after all, it's quite hard to carry out first aid on yourself :)

If I rememer well the soldiers in UFO do first aid on themselves. The trick tough is that your soldier need an open wound injury. If you don't have one then you can't "heal" yourself per se. You should get some health back if you heal an open wound but that's it. There is no work around for this.

Wounded soldiers can only recover over time by resting at the base in the medical bay.

You have to have another soldier use it.

Bah theyre right I forgot it has to be done to the fataly wounded soilder by another soilder. Kept giving the med kits to my point-men so they could keep themselves from bleeding to death :whistle:

Perhaps I'm mixing up UFO, TFTD and Apocalypse. But one of those games definitly let your squaddies heal themselves. Must be Apocalypse...

Ahh, i used to play this on the Amiga and then the PS1. It was a cool game, but very frustrating at times. I remember getting to the alien planet, cant remember the name of it though, very hard place anyway.

You are probably refering to Cydonia.

That would be it, thanks for the reminder.

I think most of u know it anyway but for the other guys around....

1 month ago I bought UFO AFTERMATH. It's like Xcom only with better graphics.

You will enjoy it for sure.

hf

It must be hidden behind a lot of pages since then but I already gave my oppinion about that game and I would give Aftermath 65% as a review.

Really a bad game.

I didn't enjoy Aftermath either. Taking away the option to build your base was a bad move, and the way you did research was poor compared to Enemy Unknown. The graphics where good though.

ive never been a fan of med kits. they just use up time units purely from carrying them.
i always found it best to keep many save games of a various mission, so if anyone got killed you could go back and reply a move.

hadnt played the game in ages, then found it on here and became obsessed with it again.

anyway ive completed now. im the MAN!

Couldnt agree more .


@spitfirejon NEVER used a med kit,everytime i finished the game the only research i had left was medi-kit.

I only use the medi-kit once I have personal armour. If you dont have personal armour or better then there is no point in having a medi-kit because whatever shoots you, you die. It is really rare for a soldier wearing no armour to survive.

Also when you start the game check the bravery of all your soldiers and only give the really good weapons to people with high bravery.

Why you might ask...

People with the lowest bravery are most supcestible to Mind Control, Panic and going Beserk.

So it is definitly not a good idea to give the rocket launcher to the guy with the lowest bravery who then decides to go beserk and kill half my team, including the three sergeants I had, so the survivng half decide to panic. They all get turned into reaper food as I helplessly watch. The only amusement I had was when a floater killed two of his own reapers.

Also whoever says Chyrsalids are easy are completly mad. However tanks rule against Chyrsalids, because they do not turn into evil Zombies and they can survive a hit as well.
The best tactic against a chysalid when you spot one is to get at least 3 people to autofire it or rocket launcher it while simutanelusly throwing at least 3 primed to zero grendades at it.
Sounds like overkill and it is, because the bas***s should die extremly quickly.

Also im sure someone said to ignore the zombies as they hatch into Chrysalids after the Zombie dies. True yes, but ignoring a zombie who they attacks one of your men then leads that man to become a chrysalid-hatching zombie. However Zombies are slower and Cyrsalids are the highest priority to attack.

Also a great tactic to use. If you see civillians about to get zombified then you should stun em real quickly. Chyrsalids only attack unstunned people so then the civs wont turn into zombies. However if they wake up then you have to kill them as they become hostile towards you (and you cant complete the mission unless you kill them). You could alternativly try to stun them again but ive never been in that situation.

Also for loads of people who are having trouble with the Download here try getting one from Home of The Underdog as that seems to work great on my comp, the only problem I get is the occasional crashing before a mission but that is nullified by saving before every mission.

Also I notice that on my download that i got from Abandonia did not contain any save game files. That might have been a big problem to many people for who it doesnt work.

UFO Gold Download

If you have a designated storm-trooper (i usualy had 3-4 soldiers) who are the first ppl inside a UFO or if you know you are facing extreamy tough resistance, here is a special trick for you.
Bring a few rookies you've just requited.
Arm them with the heaviest weapon they can carry, preferebly blaster-launcher and a single round for it, along with a proxy-nade.

At the start of the battle, have them all start with proxy-nades in theire hand, and arm it the first thing you do..
Now, put the nade in theire belt, and storm the controle-room.
If the lone soldier survived the entering, fire the blaster.
If he doesn't, well.. you've just placed a trap, since the proxy-nade activetes one it's on the ground, eg the soldier dies... same goes for the regulare explosives (nade, alien nade, smoker and so on..)

BANZAIII!!!!! :rifle:

If you MC an alien that is "useless". Just have it pick up one of it's nades, prime it @ 0, and go back to inventory and take it from its hands and place it on the ground.

It's fun when you've managed to MC one, and he spots another, and another, and another.. and you do this with all of them...
had several mission where i annihilated the crew before they got to move the first time. LOL

Thats sadistic !!!! LOL LOL

I never lost a recruit,loaded A LOT but never lost a single man.
I d never let that happen and do u want to sacrifice one??????????
I only send 2 / 3 troopers per mission but i recruit a lot coz if u do have a lot ull 2/3 troopers gain ranks easier.

Wait i just thought about it! could be fun seeing these bad reaction bad time units bad accuracy chiken rookies die :evil: Its only a game after all

Why not train up a reaction fire team and never have to worry about having to suicide rookies? 10 guys with laser pistols camping a door...w3rd..... :D

LOL those are the totally different tactics to the ones I use.

I just send 8 guys in a lightning with power armour (flying is a total waste of Elerium) all with laser rifles, a HE pack each, 2 proxy nades and one normal hand grenade.

I send them out separately, in teams of 2.

And Crysallids are quite easy if you use incendiary weapons instead of any thing HE. You are basically wasting grenads on them.

Use lasers and IC rockets on them. That makes it easy.

And Etherials are quite easy to kill once you have found them. Just throw as many grenades (especially HE packs) at them as possible at any point. If you let them live, your best commandos can easily get killed by stupid rookies.

So either give rookies basic rifles, or send them on really easy missions like small or very small UFOs (don't waste good ships on them, use a Skyranger).

Finnaly someone who seem to actually read the Alien autopsy text... :ok:

This game has always been great. Love it as I did with Laser Squad. However...if you ever get time to complete it the ending is lame. ... Comes close being to worst ending ever for the time you have to put in. But it still a great game.

Yeah. Surprising that most people don't.

And that's a hint for you all - read the alien autopsy things! They are stunningly useful!

And for the love of all things potato like - look at the weapon stats - read how much damage they do and what type or you will be looking like a real fool when you presume what weapons do and get it wrong!

And also, if you can only see one alien, please, save the lives of your soldiers and use aimed shots when crouching - especially with rocket launchers! If you are going to need to reload it, use an aimed shot, you won't get another anyway!

Hm, sounds a bit risky to me: what happens if your soldier dies in front of the door (so while he's still outside), dropping his proxy grenade?
It could take ages before our green or grey friends decide to go for a little walk to catch some fresh air.

Something I always do, it to leave 2 soldiers wearing flying suits behind in my plane. It happens sometimes that you enter a house, fire at an alien, and damage the staircase in the process. It's hateful if there's still one alien upstairs and you don't have flying suits at your disposal. Of course you could start stripping the building, especially with laser rifles, but still...

Also, the same thing goes for your own bases: quite often some aliens will stay at the top floor of the entrance shaft. It's mightily annoying if you can't see it, while you know it's up there somewhere. Of course there are plenty of ways to work around this, but I prefer being able to send someone up.

I always play the game using 6 soldiers, 2 with blaster and heavy plasma, the other 4 with heavy plasma and psi-amps.. why bother wasting our soldiers if we can waste those aliens? LOL

As for the armors, flying suit is obviously the best choice as reapers, silacoids, and chryssalids won't be able to attack anything that flies.. so, i'd rather leave those losers run around while i killed their other races (floaters, mutons, snakeman) and leave them run around looking stupid LOL

Actually, if you get just above the ground level, any HTH aliens can still kill you. And if you think that flying makes you invincible to alien grenades/blaster bombs, you are totally wrong.

All of the explosions in the game are 3-D, which is handy for bases (throw HE onto access lift and run!)

And another thing - Flying suits - a total waste of elerium.

If you attack the small ships (you can do this in personal/no armour) then you will only get enough Elerium for 3 suits of it and attacking anything larger without much armour is incredibly stupid.

Power armour is way more useful, as they only need 5 elerium and are nearly as good in terms of protection. You could make 10 of those suits from one very small/small alien ship, and with that get a couple of elite squads suitable for base assaults or any other dangerous work.

Another thing is that with Power Suits, you do not get some of the bugs in the game that make your soldiers dissappear and also you keep enough Elerium to use for Firestorm/Lightning flights


In my opinion, Avengers are only good as the way to get the last mission. If you use it as a fighter jet with large amounts of health, ignore it and get Firestorms. If you want a large transport, use a Lightning. And if you really care that much about tanks, stick to a Skyranger.

The Avenger takes way too much Elerium per flight and as I said, is only useful because it is the only way to get to the last mission.

If you add a single Plasma Cannon to a Lightning, it can still take down supply ships and even terror ships and carry a large group of good soldiers, which is what I use them for, and they move very quickly, which helps with Terror missions which are going to be at night within around 3 hours. A Lightning can arrive in time and carry well armed and trained soldiers which can easily beat off the Crysallids and Etherials that usually arrive.

If you want a straight fighter, the Firestorm doesn't need too much Elerium and is a good fighter with two Plasma Cannons.

If you want to take tanks as a way to help Rookies, then just use a Skyranger, as this way you won't waste any of your precious Elerium and you can still take on any ship up to a medium size.

Oh yeah, and Psi-amps are not that useful. Fine, you can panic your enemies, but why waste the Elerium and time instead of just making or buying grenades, which are far more useful?

Wrong... I routinely use a few flying suits for this purpose. I nearly 10 years of playing this game I have YET to be attacked hand to hand on a different level. Also I enter the bridges on large ships a lot using a blaster bomb with a guy hovering directly over the impact point. The only damage it ever does is to the floor tile on the next level.

Explosions are 3-D, try throwing a grenade in the middle story of a 3 storey biulding, it blows away the floor above and below it.

Hmmm... I thought that you could get HTH attacked in the air.

Oh no! Now I remember! It was windows!

Especially against Reavers!

Yes! Windows!

Sorry about the error. The rest of it was pretty accurate though.

Yeah... the thing about the proxy nades can be bad too - if the soldier dies outside of the door (as in right outside) then you won't do any damage to them at all. You really need to throw a proxy nade 1 square (or better 2 squares) away from a door.

2 Squares, what a fool! I hear you all cry, but no. Actually, instead of making it impossible to win the mission (without reloading, which is tedious in the extreme), it actually makes it easier.

Try to imagine where you would go out of the UFO and sometimes it does the same. And if it walks through the gap, you should really have some kind of sharpshooter ready for that.

That way, you can get into the UFO and they cannot get out easily. Problem solved.

Explosions dont hurt soilders flying in the level above. Ive tried taking screens but they wont come out right. Go try it yourself toss a nade under your guy while your in the air. Also wont detenate proxys by flying over them. Flying Suits > Power armor for that, the h2h advantage, and the added mobility and armor (every little bit helps). Dont forget the rooms in the alien bases that are two story. Its worth vrs elerium use depends on how desperately you need elerium for other things, but I think its worth it. :ok:


I have the windows version, dont know if it differs from the dos version about the nades.

Well a really good tactic i like is when you use flying suits to enter through the roof of a UFO, its great to surround and pin in the aliens by splitting your force into two, after securing perimeter of course, nothing sucks as much as being shot from a place you thought youve already checked, sending in one team through the door while another goes through the roof is really usefull in pinning down aliens, especially if it aliens who are ready to blast your men coming in from one side and you simply blow them up from the other side.

Also if your having trouble finding alien commanders/leaders then you should use a mind probe. The Commander/Leader generally has better stats then other members of the race.

And I think someone said somewhere that they dont like to use smoke grenades because it hurts thier own troops more then the aliens. Well thats slightly wrong, if you use power/flying suits then smoke doesnt actually affect you (except for vision) as they are environmental suits and have internal breathing apparatus. Its also a great tactic to panic an alien first and then simply smoke it out while its hiding in a room.

As I said, only the floor tiles are affected, even with blaster bombs.

I was wondering if someone could help me out. I downloaded XCom from this site and I can't find where the game puts the save files. I recently stumbled across some game editors and I wanted to try them out. This game has been kicking my behind since I first bought it for the PS1. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Yeh, the download I tried from here also didnt have any save files, plus it kept crashing everytime at the inventory screen right before a battle.

However I downloaded UFO Gold from Home of the Underdog (HOTU) and that worked great, (except of the occasional crashing before battles)

HOTU

The saved games go in the Game_xx directories.

I found a great tactic.
The best weapons for interceptors, firestorms and so on....are plasma beams. Even battles against Large ufos will be over in seconds.

Hmm look at my posts they're all pretty much hints based.

Here are some extras

With Interceptors try and get the long-range missiles as soon as possible on them all, this means that they can take on medium-sized UFOs or below.

And don't forget that you lose points for ignoring UFOs in the air, so attack them, but straight away disengage.

They usually don't bother following you.

When you get Plasma Cannons, your Interceptors become really handy, able to take on anything below Very Large UFOs and survive unhurt.

With Very Large UFOs, until you get Firestorm craft, and quite a few of them, don't attack them at all, your Interceptors will die straight away. If you attack with a few Firestorms (cautious is best) then you should be OK.

And as I just said, cautious attacks are the best, because the engines of UFOs are very, very fragile, so anything above Cautious will probably blow them up and lose you Elerium, which is the single most useful resource in the game.




For weapons for soldiers, Laser Rifles are just about the best. Some would say Blaster Bombs or Heavy Plasma, but Laser weapons have infinite ammo and you don't ever need to reload them. They are also accurate enough to be used as a Sniper's Rifle and a Laser Pistol is a great sidearm for a heavy weapons soldier.

For heavy weapons, take Auto-Cannons with Incendiary Ammo, as it is very good against pretty much all of the aliens, especially Cryssalids (those horrible black aliens). If you really want something with serious firepower, take Heavy Plasmas, as Blaster Bombs are a massive waste of Elerium and early in the game there is not much ammo for them. If you choose Heavy Plasma then you can stock up on them very quickly and have all of the clips you need.

Armour, as you can see is a very, very dividing issue. I like Power Suits, as they are reasonably cheap in Elerium terms, although for officers or scouts, Flying Suits are very useful, especially when you want to attack a downed supply ship or battleship.

As for grenades and other equipment, I like Proximity grenades and HE packs, mainly because proxy nades are great for trapping and HE packs are very, very powerful. Motion detectors are handy for finding that one last alien that you need to kill, but remember that on Terror Missions, the civilians will move as well. Medi-Packs are OK, I don't use them much, but some people like them. They are good for reviving people who have been knocked out by aliens with Small Launchers.

For Capturing aliens, I usually use small launchers and Tazers, but smoke grenades can be very useful once you get Power Armour and Flying Armour which are smoke-proof, so aliens can be knocked out with smoke without rick to your soldiers. A flying soldier running off with a Sectoid Commander, Medic or Navigator is a pretty funny sight if nothing else!



And if you are really stuck, or arrive at a Terror Site without armour, then I suggest just flying away. Fine, you will lose some points for letting the Civilians die, but nowhere near as many as simply ignoring the site.



And that is my set of hints for today.

It is funny,but I dont remember I EVER had a problems with elerium when I played Ufo.I used aggressive attack,alway equip Avengers and troopers with flying suit plus blaster launchers for some of them and I always had enought of it.Beginners Luck? :blink:

Maybe it's just me, but I liked to keep some saved up just in case something bad happened to my Elerium powered ships / armoured soldiers.

It's handy to have about 200 spare all of the time, just in case a whole lot of Battleships or bases show up, so that you can sort them out very quickly.

Here is a little advice on the very early game - i.e. before you have discovered laser rifles and produced them. You usually get a terror site and several ships before that point, even if you research really aggressively, and if you try to take on them using projectile rifles as your main weapons, you're gonna be up for a disappointment.

So, here's how. Forget rifles - take pistols instead. Pistols are about as good as rifles if you use snap shots, but they let you hold a grenade in your free hand. Grenades are great early on because most aliens die if you toss it anywhere near them, which most rookies can do with no problems.

Also, take rocket tanks - they are incredible machines, especially when you are out in the country with no civvies but still quite a few obstacles and buildings. Why go into a building when you can blow out its wall? :D

Advance with tanks - they have the armor to oftentimes take a shot from the heavy plasma even and survive, which is more than you can say for your rookies. As soon as the tank spots an alien, have the three soldiers that are trailing it fire at it. Doesn't matter if they can't see it, they'll still have the same accuracy.

Use 2 tanks and 6 soldiers, and you'll have two teams of armor+troops. With it you can usually take out an early terror site or downed ship pretty easily.

A question again:

do i have to spare 1 from each alien item to research it, or is it enough that "i had once 1 on my base" and THAT triggered the research menu to show it?
Another releated one: if i have more from the same items, research is faster, or it only depends on the number of scientist?

I think it's never enough that you once had such an item, as far as I know you still need to have it at the time when you want to start researching it. Also, it has to be at the base where your scientists are.

Speed of research only depends on the number of scientists you allocate to it.

hi guys, does anyone know how to slow down the game? my computer runs it way too fast!
thx in advance

Have you tried running it in Dosbox, that should do the trick.

Yeah, he's right.

For research purposes, try to keep one of everything, sell all but one if necessary.

So if you had 6 Heavy Plasmas (not that unlikely) and needed to research one, you could sell the other 5.

So you could do research and get about 900k!

Just remember to keep all of your alien clips so you don't have to waste any Elerium to make more.

Why do the X-Com units right straight towards the Aliens when panicked? You kinda expect them to go the other direction.

Becouse they all want to commit suicude?

As far as I am concerned it's random. But it's more likely that it happen if you are surrounded... ;)

I had one run onto a grenade, a Alien horse lookin thingy closed in to kill him, next round he moved ran far away, and the grenade exploded in the Alien's face, so it worked for the better.

You had luck.Once my captain gone berseker and with three well aimed shots killed my squadies that stand before him and one civiliand.Then he get himself promptly killed by a chrysalid... :ranting:

Question for those who know the ins and out of this game.

All things considered, is it profitable to manufacture things for sale? I have this master plan to run a fairly long game without taking over the Mars base, and I want to ensure myself an abundance of cash by building bases dedicated heavily to manufacture (specificly Laser Cannons, as they seem to pay the msot and not need Elerium). So, would it be possible to make money this way and not have to depend on pesky handouts from nations that start moaning the moment you let anything fly over them without frying said 'anything' thoroughly into one big crash-and-burn?

I used this tactic to get me some extra money but never to totaly rely on it .
I dont advise it coz if u build more bases and more workshops and have more engineers ur maintenance costs will go sky high.
If u need cash just sell ur heavy plasmas i always had 10 unused hanging around and they bring a LOT of money.

For raising funds, I'd advise building a strike base near an existing alien base. Attack the supply ships that land and "raid" the base for kills and loot (don't destroy, repeatedly assault). It gets you money and uber soldiers in a hurry, not to mention a massive score. :P

Never thought of that !!

and i have the nickname!!!
But if u dont destroy the base u lose funding of the country the base is in,

not if you have a higher score than you enemy. :D

Even if you make money through manufacture, you'll still be at the mercy of all the nations: if they all convert to the aliens' side, it's game over, no matter how rich you are.
As an additional way to make money, it might work, but not as your main objective.

Actually, your plan is very dangerous. You may well confuse the Supply Ships for Infiltration ships (I think they are both large) and then you do lose the country.

Once a country has been infiltrated, it is impossible to get back (I think, I have never got one back)

Manufacture is a very good way to make money, as if you have 2 workshops full of Mechanics (I think they are called that) and you make Craft Laser Cannons all month you can actually make 4 million dollars.

That plus selling alien equipment = :D



On other notes, woohoo I got 500th posting :cheers: also 600th!

I usually manufacture Heavy Plasma rifles because they sell for loads and only need all the excess alien alloys you get. I think blaster launchers sell for more but they take longer to make.

And get a hyperwave decoder as soon as possible. That will detect any aliens in its range and you can find data on the the UFO such as the race in it, the mission it is doing (i.e on a supply run or an infiltration or a terror etc....)

Supply ships are the best to kill as they are lightly armed so interceptors can attack them (one plasma beam is good enough) and there are not that many aliens in there.

By the way Jman nice tip on the alien base, ive got one alien base in the antartic so I dont lose much funding :bleh: and there are regular supply ships as well.

The only downside is that my interceptor base is regularly attacked. But i turn my frown upside down :D . My strike base has the best defence against an alien assualt. Nice plasma and fusion ball launcher, grav shield, that takes out most ships, and also my access lift only has two exits, one to the hangers and the other to living quarters.

Aliens only come in through hangars and living quarters so a few well placed proxy grenades and a few hovertanks and a small well equipped security team easily take the alien force with minimal losses (mainly tanks) and lots of dead aliens which leave behind supplies which are more then useful for keeping the base well equipped.

edit:

Meant access lift there instead of living quarters.

I play the windows version of XCOM 1 brought to me by Abandonia ;) and everything runs smoothly.

But there is one little annoying thing: the FX are much louder than the music. Especially the confirmation sound of buttons is extremely out of place. Simply lowering the volume doesnt help because by doing so the music will no longer be audible - and thats a shame!

Is there a chance to correct this?

If there are infiltration ships, they wouldn't land at a base, and if you have the hyperwave decoder (generally first month research) you should be able to determine mission.

True as that may be, sometimes it is hard to get a technician in the first couple of months, at least a live one.

Although I got one last time on the first terror mission because of tasers.



Hyperwave decoders are pretty handy indeed, but sometimes even then it is quite hard to get all of the info you need out of them, especially where they are going (I think, I might be wrong)



And for all of you, beginners or not, try XcomUtil, you can make it easier or harder for your self :ok:

Tip for the day = take tasers to every mission, however pointless it may seem. If you want to get psi powers, taser a Crysallid (if possible) and you will get them in no time.

^^

Something that I think happened to me several times, was that I got the message "alien dies because of no containment", even if I had several alien containment facilities at that base.
Also, when I tried dismantling such a facility, while I had no live aliens anymore (all had been researched), I got the message it was still in use.
I'm not completely certain about this, but it would be interesting to check whether that could actually happen, as obviously it's mightily annoying to return from an alien base and still lose all stunned aliens.

Try the + and - keys for the music volume - they certainly had that feature in TFTD. I've not got UFO running yet, my TFT monitor doesn't like it :(

Capturing a chyrsalid gives you psi powers????

Do you mean it allows you to research the psi thingy to get psi-labs or it just improves your psi-stregnth or something????

What you want is to capture a sectoid engineer to get the hyperwave decoder and you can get that in the first few missions with a few well placed stuns. Much easier once you have the mind probe to see who is the engineer.

However the hardest part of the hyperwave decoder is affording it. I think it costs over 1mill which is a pretty steep figure early on.

If you want psi research youll want a sectoid leader/normal etheral.

Sectoid leaders can normally be found in downed Abductor UFO's in the top floor. They will either mind control or panic your troops so give your lowest bravery troops stun launchers/rods, mind probes or lots of medical kits.

In the downed abductor ships you can also get the whole range of sectoids there (except for commander). Which is usefull if you have a lot of stun launchers.

As for the alien containment thingy, ive never had that and I only had one facility. Try selling corpses mabye, but i dont think that will do anything.

Yeah, capturing any Terrorist live will bag you Psi powers, so just capture anything you can (I usually assign 3 people in power suits with tasers to do this - to do this they need hugely high bravery and psi resistance, though) at a terror site apart from floaters/reavers.

Not to say you shouldn't capture floaters, though. I got a live technician on the first turn of a terror mission, and just ran away (I had no armour/tanks at the time) by hopping out of my Skyranger and stunning the first thing I saw, which excellently turned out to be a floater technician... :w00t:

So the moral is - blind luck will often win when tactics will not :D

Oh, when you have a hyperwave decoder, fly a skyranger over the area which the ships seem to be coming from. This is amazingly important, as it reveals an alien base, which can then be assaulted whenever it seems useful.

And for the love of whipped cream, don't attack muton ships until you have craploads of armour and good weapons/tasers. Laser tanks are good if you have any, but the best type would be a tank with a fusion launcher.

So remember kids, tasers are very, very useful, especially on small type ships. And if you feel a fool because you blocked a door you want to get into with a proximity grenade, then throw a norma grenade at it to get rid of it. Then storm it with crack troops with tasers, with a sniper with a laser rifle outside of the door, with high reactions and shooting skill. Remember that soldiers never reaction fire with grenades (although this is very useful) but remember that soldiers do react with HE ammo, so be very careful about that kind of thing.

The new version of XcomUtil is great, as it makes HE powerful enough to open holes in UFO roofs and blow through walls, which is how it should be.

X-Com tip of the day : Research Mind Probes ASAP, so that you can identify aliens and their rank and decide whether to kill or capture them.

^^ [/b][/quote]
You, sir are a fool. Crysallids should be, under no circumstances be shot with HE weapons. As I previously stated, you are wasting ammo. HE is awful against Crysallids. :wall:

To be honest Crysallids are easy to take down with tasers by anyone with armour. Surround them with tanks (no really) but don't shoot, then move a couple of guys to taser it. If one get turned into a zombie, kill it and the other crysallid with tanks before making the capture. You could try stun launchers, but Crysallids have quite a lot of health, I use small launchers on Sectoids, who have weedy amounts of health.

And it's technicians, not navigators who give you Hyperwave Detectors. Navigators give you UFO information, not Hyperwave Detectors.

Unlucky mate, but you are wrong.

Erm you might be wrong about those psi-power thingys. Unless there is some bug in your game because I just wnet out zapped a few chrysalids here a snakeman there, pretty much stunned all the aliens in the map and only lost two guys,

Researched everything...... and nothing, nada nope. No Psi-Powers there. :not_ok:

However stunning everyone on the top floor in an Abuductor UFO i managed to find a sectoid leader which allowed me to get psi-powers as well as research the martian solution. :ok:

Also if you blocked a door with a proxy grenade, dont fret. Simply take either a rocket launcher or a bomb and simply make a new door, Works great against aliens all sights on one door and then they get blown up from behind.

Now reading back I see many people dont like building a lot of flying suits. I understand why as they are not only expensive in elerium they are annoying to move into the proper position and when in mid-air you dont get a lot of cover.

However there are plus points in being in the air. When equipped with a rocket launcher or any other high explosive when you fire from the air if you miss you usually hit the ground near the alien instead of a rocket swooshing by the alien and exploding far off into the distance.

Also in Base Attacks flying suits rule as there are loads of little places where you can use your suit to fly up and sneak up behind enemies. Especially usefull in hit and run tactics I use in bases now (Thanx Jman) to just sneak in and stun a few aliens, steal thier weapons and escape. I usually leave one alien alive so the base is still there for the next assault.

Flying suits are especially good in snakeman bases as chrysalids roam round the corridors and if your flying your quite safe while you can proceed to blow them up or stun em.

So whenever I assualt a base i give most of my troops flying armour but in normal missions I just give a few flying armour.

Hower if you know there is going to be a chrysalid in a terrorist attack then everyone gets flying armour just to be on the safe side.

Hmm... that's odd... I thought all types of Terrorist gave you psi powers.

Well, I was wrong... sorry all.

This might seem like cheating, but I use XcomUtil, and just disable psi powers.

This is because to begin with it makes the game extremely difficult, and near the end it makes the game very easy, so I just disabled them. The thing about flying is that whilst it is good against melee aliens, when the aliens all start to get heavy plasmas, Power Armour is a better bet, as you can hide behind all of the obstacles in the game.

Oh and when you are inside a UFO, try not to use grenades/HE (especially in small UFOs as you can easily accidently blow out the Navigation/Power sources), due to the large risk of dying and blowing up the rest of your comrades. No really, it might seem obvious, but it is easy enough to do by reaction, and once you prime a grenade you should really throw it , before something extremely bad happens. (Crysallid turning soldiers into zombies etc, as if you drop a grenade, you have 2 of them to take on)

Er prejeduce you might be a little bit wrong about the HE thing.

So er HE does sorta work well against them. Incedinary works best against the reapers (although they never get close enough for that). You want to take on chrysallids, then pack grenades, HE rounds, and lotsa rockets.

Also not a good idea tasering them either. Running to a chrsalid and finding that you dont have enough TU's to stun it or the stun simply doesnt work, you find yourself in a lot of trouble and one soldier less. A much more effective way is blasting it sky-high with a rocket or simply using a combination of stun bombs and conventional fire.

If you are facing a Chrsalid you should use lots of weapons just incase. Prime a grenade and throw it at the chrsalid and then start shooting. It is very unlucky if all your troops miss or only get grazing shots.

Although the most fun way to deal with chyrsalids (not advisable to do in terror missions) is simply hover above them with a laser pistol and annoying them.

Ooh and btw, dont sell all your laser weapons. Once you get etherals doing terror missions they bring along your friendly playful sectapods who are beasts to kill and are almost immune to plasma attacks, however laser weapons work quite well.

Foolish me doesnt lose people to crys because I read the autopsies. Crys also have something like 120 TU, messy trying to catch one for a taser, try a small launcher. Crys are hand to hand so flying works wonders too.

Sharp and I use pretty much the same tactics for them and bases, but I just use a full set of flying, dont waste elerium on power suits that way. As it is I dont have problems with elerium because I rely heavily on finding weapons and ammo off the bodies of the fallen foes from afar. Current game I have nearly 700-800 units or so scattered between my bases. (late game)

The creature you capture and research has to have psi powers to learn them from it aka sectoid leaders commanders? ( i assume so, but Ive always had psi before I capture commanders) and etherials.

And it should have read that you can also use navigators as well as technicians, either gives the HD. Doubt it? Boot a game up and try it. Like Ive said before I run the windows version and it MAY have changed from the DOS version (cant tell if I cant play it) But I find Navis in the small scouts and such early on camping the door, so i stack on the door equip a taser to my high reactions TU guy AFTER poking in and out to see how many are hiding in there and try to rushem and takem down (if theres only one left, ie toss nades in corners and hope you guess which one is navi correctly and try to not get him in the blast, open the door auto shot and back out untill theres only one left hard to do early because of lack of armor though >_<) Because the smaller craft are only a few tiles wide so even early on my guy has enough TU for two maaaaaaybe three shots depending on where the badie is.

O, and sectopods are teh devil. I walked out not expecting them on a terror mission once four of them were camping the door.... it hurt.... laser tanks = good. :sneaky:

Oh yes....about 70% damage from plasma, 150% damage from laser.... :max:


And even if something has a modifier to negate HE, it is likely very effective since it is dealt against the unit's "under" armour, which is generally the weakest.

Nononono did any of you read what I said?

To get one with a taser, surround it with tanks. At this point, send 2/3 soldiers to stun it. That way, it is quite easy to get. If it breaks lose, blow it to pieces (hopefully with Laser tanks)

And you do realise that Plasma with 70% damage kicks 150% Laser Rifle behind and hands it back on a silver platter?

Laser Rifle: 60avg (7 shots per turn)
Heavy Laser: 85avg (2 shots per turn)
Heavy Plasma: 115avg (7 shots with no movement whatsoever)

60*1.5=90
85*1.5=127.5
115*.7=80.5

Taking into account the massive armour on a Sectopod (142 front, and around 90 rear), the Heavy plasma doesn't even do damage most hits, with the Laser rifle being slightly better (10 more beyond armour). The Heavy laser actually has a use here. Shoot it in the back from a distance with a sniper and possibly oneshot it. :bye:

Well, i don't know whether i'm wasting elerium or not, but i seemed to have endless supply of elerium whenever i play this game. So, i'll always go with the best equipment there is.. I only care about elerium early on in the game when you get only about 50 of them.. but once you have the larger UFOs coming, then there should be no problem about elerium.

As for the psi amps, i rarely (almost never) use it for panic attacks.. i'd rather MC them, and let those aliens "throw" their weapons, and use them as scouts.

And terrorist don't give out psi-lab/amps research. Any race (here it's just sectoids & ethereals) which have in their stats "psionic strength/skill" will give out psi reseach. In this case, sectoid leader/commander and ANY ethereal will do the trick.

Well, the first time all of us face ethereals in terror sites, i believe we all suffer lots of casualties from their psionic attacks :D

Hmmm... while you do make quite a good point, you miss out on the fact that if there are going to be sectopoids then there are gonna be aliens that will probably kill you if you somehow manage to get behind it on the tiny maps.

I suppose that flying suits would help, but they will leave you horribly exposed if you try and fly behind a sectopoid. The aliens using it will probably have heavy plasmas and you will be getting shot in the back by them, and trust me, that is very, very bad.

So snipers are not the best plan with sectopods, the best idea is to stun launcher it. Whilst I would usually go for my Taser and Pray tactics, those things are a bitch in combat. A stun launcher would probably do the trick, and if it misses, on a terror mission it will probably sort out a few aliens that will inevitably surround it.

Just hope you don't hit any civilians with it.

X-Com tip for the day : Rookies can be used as effective 'bullet shields' by commanders etc. once given power suits. Captains or whatever can throw hand grenades from behind the rookies and still get a kill pretty much all the time. Plus a rookie with a laser pistol can always finish the job.

Sorry to find faults in your post again Prej, but its not always the best idea to send rookies as bullet shields for commanders.

It can work well but when your rookie gets mind-controlled/beserk its not hard to miss a target right next to you. Therefore later on in the game when i lost a few elite members i simply get rookies only using mind-probes and stun launchers. (laser pistol in belt just incase) until they get a bit of exp under thier belt.

Although rookies are less likely to go beserk when a Officer is nearby they may still get Mind-Controlled and shoot your team.

Oh and an absolutely great tactic for stunning aliens in a UFO, especially a small one is to simply chuck in a few smoke grenades and camp near the door. Also whats really great is if you get a unit who is amazingly fast, give him a power/flying suit and a stun rod and stun the aliens one-by-one as the smoke grenade gives you cover from thier attacks, (helps to chuck in about 3 and wait a turn first) but you have to try and guess where the aliens are as they are in slight cover also (i think).

And the heavy laser rifle is actually still really really useful later in the game if you manage to train a unit to be an excellent sniper, the heavy lasers power actually beats the plasma but does not have auto-fire although both have the same accuracy and same TU cost and similar damage with the laser narrowly beating the heavy plasma. However the laser negates its disadvantages by requiring no ammo, which means no reloads and you can take a shot whenever you want.

A sniper in a power suit makes a great unit, especially in terror attacks as you just put him on a high building and take pot-shots at any enemy. However you can also use a heavy plasma rifle just as equally as you usually get loads of em along with clips. Once I had a dude shoot through 2 windows and hit a snakeman on the other side with a plasma rifle, the snakeman was about to decimate two troopers who both missed (yeh they almost deserved to die). But it was just a nice aimed shot, missed two civillians as well who were one hex away from the aimed shot.

He's now my favourite sniper. Picks off targets he cant even see. Not only that when theres a fence or something blocking the way he simply shoots it so my other team-members can pass without wasting ammo.

My all-time favourite HWP is the Plasma HoverTank. You dont need to buy ammo for it as it automatically reloads 255 ammo everytime and its got great movement. Fusion Tank is good as well but not enough ammo for the big battles.

Now heres a great tip. Ever been stuck in that situation where one of your team-members misses an alien and doesnt have enough time units to move away properly or they are blocking the door/window so none of your other teammates can shoot or fire through to the alien?? Well there are two simple tactics, one is to try and throw a grenade over the team-mate (never tried so dont know if it works), all you do is what you do to units near chyrsalids...... stun em, stun em real gooood. All they do is fall down and you can either simply move and fire at the alien or just wait another turn in a safer position until you get more TU's. And if you need your unconcious person back into the battle just stim em back to full health.

I always keep around 6 stun rods to the strongest people in my team so there is never a case where an alien kills a person in a bad position or has to kill a mind-controlled team-mate/beserked or paniked.

Also My-Q, I hardly ever use psi-amps for Mind-Controlling, its far easier to make em panic and when they panic they can drop thier weapons. Also if you stun a mind-controlled unit then you wont get it at the end of a mission so it is easier to panic them and then stun-em.

But now as a final tip. Always have one unit in the team with a demo charge at least. They come in usefull everywhere, whether it be blowing up walls or blowing up aliens. Its so fun dropping a demo charge through the hole of a UFO Roof. (Note you might have to use a demo-charge to make a hole in the roof in the first place).

Grenades work well through holes as they are lighter and can be chucked further but a demo-charge just has that nice feeling of, mmmm overkill........

Also Prejeduce, when you block a chyrs with tanks im sure the tanks get damaged as well. But also its far easier to use a stun bomb through the tanks which wont affect the tanks but will stun the chrys.

The tank is going to be VERY damaged when attacked by chrysalids.It destroyed me plasma hover tank just in one turn.I couldnt believed my eyes :blink:
So block chrysalids with tanks isnt such a good idea... :rolleyes:
to sharp:Excellent idea,that with stunning your troops that would be killed by aliens next turn.I am going to use it in Terror from the deep :D .Congratulations :ok:

All of you should read my earlier posts - I use XcomUtil and turn the Psi powers off.

To start with the game is just too hard and by the end it is piss easy to just Psi everything and win. Hence it goes off.

Also, XcomUtil makes tanks better, so Laser tanks = good armour + TUs.

If that makes me a noob then whatever, but I think it improves the game quite a bit.

The stunning thing might look useful, but if you really want to do that you need added security to wake people up and keep them alive.

By this I mean 2 med-kits.

And I have to say that whilst making holes in the roof of UFOs and throwing in HE packs might seem good, but you'll be kicking yourself when you take out all of the Power Sources/UFO Navigation + kill anyone useful.

Smoke grenades can work, and I like the idea about flying suits + taser.

Mmmm hit + run... :w00t:

Yeah, that's called cheating by my book... Not something I would do... :blink:

It's one of my favourite tactics for the smaller ufo's (size 9, in whatever these were measured). If there's a 3 by 3 squares hole in the roof, in most cases the power source was gone long before you arrived at the site anyway. And a little later in the game, ufo's of that size don't carry anyone important enough to keep alive.

And speaking of cheating: half a year ago, I decided to replay UFO. But since I didn't have enough time for a normal campaign, I speeded things up by boosting my soldiers. I must admit I've never enjoyed invading alien bases that much :D
Mind you, I wouldn't do this if I'd never played the game before, I always want to see whether I can beat the game honestly.
But it was fun... only 3 casualties in the whole game :sneaky:

LOL I boosted my soldier once is was fun. I liked watching my men taking 3 direct hits from blaster bombs and then staying in hospital for about 200 days :D

Er one thing to be careful with the stunning thing, stunnig and being unconcious are pretty much the same thing i think, one of my soldiers had a primed grenade ready to blow up alien scum but he just ran out ot TU's (my fault, really wasnt thinking straight).

Anyway 3 dam sectoids take pot shots at him (in an Abducotor UFO which had the whole of the NW wall gone). Luckily he only was knocked unconcious, however the grenade went off.

The body actually disapperaed although i could actually find the guns (they seemed to fly off onto 3 hexes away).

End of the mission it came up as no losses on soldiers but he simply disapperad. Not even an MIA. (Also one really big bug in the game, Mind Controlled units at the end of a mission are lost wheter your mind-controlling or being mind-controlled.)

Also, when using democharges against UFO's, i like to do it against the big ones as they dont have power sources on the top floor, dont use it on aliens you havent discovered yet or anything as it can easily kill leaders and other good units.

I love this game. I really love this game. Its amazing.

Hi folks, I'm back playing UFO, but the Abandonia version doesn't work for me because it has no savegame slots. I think someone said you can get it to work by creating the ten saveslots like "GAME_1" through "GAME_10" as subdirectories to the main XCOM directory.

Anyway, I have one thing that bugs me: I don't know how to open doors without actually moving INTO the room!!!!!!!!!!! Anyone have suggestions?

There is an okay Strategy guide at: http://www.the-spoiler.com/STRATEGY/Microp....defense.1.html

My two cents:
1. BUILD STRATEGY: Since bases take forever to build up, I expand ASAP. It's top priority, before anything else; you can't afford to let many UFOs slip past you and infiltrate countries to knock out your funding. Usually I start in Europe (and build like 4 large radars to increase my UFO detection rate to 20% plus alien containment just in case I get lucky with stun rods) and start another base in USA in the first month. The next month, China and Africa, then Australia and Brazil in the third month. Get to 50 scientists and engineers while you wait to build more workshop and lab space. In your first base, 4 living quarters, 100 sci and 70 engineers is about right (they need 30 workshop space to build firestorms, and the last 30 living quarter spaces go towards soldiers and the massive amounts of them you’ll be buying later, like buying 20 and sacking 18 of them and keeping the two good ones).
2. MONEY: get heavy laser, then laser cannon so you can have your engineers make and sell the very profitable laser cannons that don’t require any special materials to build. Never worry too much about money because any decently large UFO will net you a few million bucks after you sell off equipment. Remember to eject ammo clips at the penultimate round of combat, because any clip with less than full ammo that’s still in a weapon by the end of combat disappears. Meanwhile, even a clip with one shot in it, if it’s out of a weapon, counts as “full.” This only applies to plasma weapons, I think. It’s a stupid rule, but I didn’t make the game.
3. Your headquarters (HQ) should have the skyranger and one or two interceptors; the other bases should ONLY have interceptors, storage (for elerium fuel for your firestorms, and missiles if you still use them), and a few workshops and living quarters to make laser cannons. Don’t bother to build defenses until much later on when you're rolling in dough; if you have a couple of plasma-equipped firestorms at each base, and have them double-team battleships, the battleships can’t even reach their targets.
4. SOLDIER HIRING: You only need a max of 10 soldiers in the beginning. Having more than 10 in any base with more than 1 psi lab sucks, too, because they refuse to change psi labs… so if you have 11 soldiers and 2 labs, then sack the bad-psi ones, you’re stuck with two psi labs in all likelihood because some of the good-psi soldiers are in one lab and some are in the other. Once you have enough money, hire another 10 soldiers in your second base, and another 10 in your third base. More than 10 soldiers is optional, because a skyranger can reach any point on the planet, and you usually won’t have to make it fly back-to-back missions. Plus UFO crash sites usually last at least a couple of days.
5. SOLDIER STRATEGY: Always try to keep your BEST soldiers alive; I'd much rather have one crack team of 4 supersoldiers than loads of cannon fodder. Losing a bad soldier is no big deal, but I’d still rather sack them than have them giving me negative scores for dying. Fire the ones that have low bravery to begin with. Fire the ones that panic/get mind-controlled.. you'll find out when you go against psi-attacking aliens. (Meanwhile, when they snap out of it, tell them to toss all of their weapons down and run back to the Skyranger and stay there till your more psi-resistant soldiers finish the mission. Then fire the psi-weaklings after the mission.) STUN Sectoid leaders/commanders or any Ethereals and research them ASAP to get psi-lab. Once you get a psi-lab up and running and lots of cash (probably from arms sales where you tell your engineers to make and sell as many laser cannons as you can--laser cannons are VERY profitable), order tons of soldiers and fire all but the very best, then wait a while till you find out their psi scores and fire the psi-weaklings.
6. BATTLE STRATEGY: I like soldiers getting inflated Reactions scores, so try to close in on the UFO door ASAP. Then have a few soldiers watch your back while some of your soldiers kneel down on either side of a UFO door. Don’t just have your soldiers right up at the door. Make sure that they are positioned such that if an alien exits, he has to turn a FULL 90 degrees just to see your soldier. That usually means he gets pasted before he can do anything. Sometimes aliens refuse to come out, even after you click “next turn” 20 times in a row. Then have a rookie open the door and take one (or more shots) for the team, then walk in with your less-expendable soldiers guns blazing and hope for the best. Else you can use explosives to throw down holes in the UFO, or make your own “door” with a blaster launcher. Note that kneeling increases accuracy by something like 10-20% and not having something in your other hand when you are using a two-handed (i.e., non-pistol) weapon allows you to fire at full accuracy. I never walk my soldiers around with rifles + something in hand if I can help it.
7. RESEARCH: I research in this order: laser weapons, laser pistol (make and use a couple of these while you're waiting for laser rifles to get researched), laser rifle, heavy laser, laser cannon (to get the all-important, profitable laser cannon tech to make your workshops into profit centers), heavy plasma, plasma cannon. Things vary from there:
8. PSI: From there, if I have a captive ethereal or sectoid leader/commander, I try to research psi-stuff ASAP. Getting a psi lab in place means that you’ll have a much easier time identifying the good-psi soldiers and sacking the deadweight. Since I almost never research Small launcher + Stun bomb as a high priority, usually I end up chasing after a Sectoid leader with a stun rod or something. =)
9. FIRESTORMS: If I can't, I research alien navigator to get Hyperwave (just get one hyperwave in each base and sell off all the radars), then alloy + alien elerium-115 + ufo power source + ufo navigation to get UFO-building tech. To get Hyperwave, STUN at least one navigator of any race and research it. Use Mind Probe to conserve your Stun Launcher shots, or if you're a cheapskate like me, use stun rods on panicked engineers/navigators, or on one that got too close to the other side of a door so you open it and zap them before they can shoot you.
10. After getting both PSI and Firestorms (the latter to blow up battleships, since only one or two or MAYBE three of your bases have any soldiers in them at all, and none of your bases have any defenses or shields), get alloy + personal armor + power suit + flying suit and build flying suits for your troops to make them stun- and smoke-resistant. The armor doesn’t help so much, a head shot to any of your soldiers is a lethal head shot, regardless of how much armor they are packing.
11. BUFFING UP SOLDIERS FOR THE FINAL ATTACK: Just play lots of missions and they “learn by doing.” Want more strength? Get Medi-Kit tech and load up the skyranger with tons of them; soldiers will pack up to five apiece (three in each backpack, 2 in each belt) and the weight will slow them down for a few missions before they get buff from having to lug around so much weight all of the time. Kneel on either side of UFO doors to increase reaction and accuracy. Sack psi-weaklings. There’s not much you can do to improve psi strength or bravery (at least for bravery it’s possible to increase, but very difficult to do in practice), so just don’t hire those soldiers in the first place and sack them ASAP so they won’t go berserk on you and shoot up your good soldiers.
12. A NOTE ON BIG UFOS: You can't really take the Very Large ships or the big supply ships with interceptors at first (maybe if you gang up with three or four, but even then it's a pain). So just see where they land and assault the UFO on the ground, instead. (You may have to take them on at night before they fly off, that's the bad part. Generally, never fight at night if you can cycle through another 12 hours and land during daytime. Electroflares do work, but it's a pain to have to keep throwing them around, which eats up real-life time even if it doesn't eat up game time.) Some big or small UFOs are sometimes on Infiltration missions, you must stop them by killing them or assaulting them on the ground, unless you want to lose an entire country's funding source. This is why Hyperwave is so important; regular radar misses too many infiltration UFOs unless you have like 6 per base which is too expensive.
13. ALIEN BASES: You need to let the aliens have at least one base to get the Commander to beat the game, but generally don't let them have any. Check the UFO Activity graphs and if you see a big spike, send a skyranger to that area and fly to a few spots, patrolling for a few hours per spot. Its onboard radar can detect nearby alien bases.

P.S. One last thing: Psi-amps are hard to use; you basically never want an alien to kill another alien, not when your soldiers can get experience for shooting aliens. So I don't really care for them. Same thing with grenades; every soldier has pretty good throwing accuracy, even rookies, so I want to get a kill by shooting, not a kill by throwing, if possible.

What a smashing game this is, it's great to be back at it. I originally owned it as X-COM on the Playstation. Had to sell the PS when I moved away, so this game never got the attention it deserved at the time.

I hunted around yesterday, and eventually found the Dos version of the game so I could play it in Dosbox. Why would I want to do that you ask? Well, the Windows version is no good to me. It plays fullscreen and on a 19" monitor the graphics are too pixellated to be even thought about. Worse, is that my monitor is a pile of dog's arse and is just too damn dark. In Windows, I can crank up the gamma, but in the game those settings don't apply. So you know how dark things are in night missions? Imagine it being like that during day missions then ... or not knowing if the UFO you are chasing is over water or land ... oy! In Dosbox, I can run it windowed which means the gamma boost works and I can see what I am doing. Woo yay! A bit small, but it is all good. An added bonus is that the speed is correct too. Alright, so I would rather just have a Windows fullscreen copy with bright and non-pixellated graphics but that isn't going to happen. Anyone with a dark monitor like me is highly advised to go the route that I did.

I'm bidding on a copy of X-COM on eBay at the moment for Playstation. I figure that I might as well give my PS2 something to other than GTA: San Andreas. I guess that I recognise that a game like this takes a few hours of your life at a time, and I'd rather get cosy on the sofa rather than sitting in the back room staring at small window on a massive monitor. All that would be missing is the beer, which thankfully won't be a problem. Are there any fundamental flaws that would make X-COM on the PS not worth getting? I found an interview online with one of the developers that said they fixed the level difficulty flaw, and obviously there are the added FMV scenes which are nice. The only downside I can see is the price, there is already a copy going for up to ?22 so that shows how much people want this game. (Like I need to explain its appeal to anyone here!)

I'm certainly a novice when it comes to playing this game, I'm currently pootling along on "beginner" and seeing how it goes. I do remember getting my arse kicked several times over way back when. There's been a lot of good advice on this thread, and I'll certainly be using it in action. I'll stop there, as I only have time for another 4 hours' gaming before bedtime. Eat hot lead alien scum!

Can't do it in the first game. You can do it in the 2nd by right clicking behind the door. I've heard it is possible on the PS version, but I don't have a PS to verfy it.

ive never heard of being able to open doors without actually walking through them, thats why i always have atleast 4 people per door when entering a UFO

woops, forgot to login :whistle:

Does the Ps version differ a lot from the Pc's???

Well, I always liked using the MC function to make the alien work as scout. I never use the alien puppet to kill other aliens, since the point is.. why improve something you'd kill afterwards? :D
I like grouping the puppets in one corner, and blow 'em up to smithereens in the next turn using the blaster.. the scream of pain is so loud LOL

And i don't think that bravery factor can be increased. The same thing applies with psionic strength, which can't improve.

Also, i never knew that holding something else in the other hand while one hand is holding a gun will affect the accuracy.. that's new.. i guess there's no telling that we know EVERYTHING about this game huh? :D

Well actually when you use a pistol then you dont lost accuracy by only holding it in one hand. What would really be great to see is a person firing dual pistols though, that would be nice.

Well I think the bravery can be increased because its jumped by 20 on one of my soldiers, i dont know how it improved but i dont care as before it was a shoddy 30 and now its a respectable 50.

Also i dont like expanding to much. I hate micro-managing. I usually have mabye 4 or 5 bases, one on each continent.

The one in Europe and the one in America are the only ones with Skyrangers.

Also I only use psi-amps for paniking aliens, easier to do and makes them easy to stun.

For improving my soldiers though I just send around 8 at a time to the alien base in the antartic which i never fully destroy. Just kill a few aliens, try and snatch a few bodies and ammo if i can and then get the hell out. Whenever a soldier successfully hits an alien from a decent range their accuracy improves.

This is the best time to use aimed shots on aliens as your soldiers accuracy will soar by miles. In one mission a soldier gained 2 increase in shooting by hitting an alien which was quite far away. He already had a 66 accuracy but a nice aimed shot with a heavy laser decimated the muton and boosted him to 68.

By the way axident, whats your definition of crap soldiers?? I fire anyone below 30 bravery and thats about it. Between 29-50 they are fodder, no Heavy Weapons, last pick on armour and mainly using stun guns.
I dont bother firing for other stuff unless its all really bad.

However i have got a grenadier with 80 accuracy with grenades, he lobs em through windows and holes. Absolutley great when crouched and blows up an enemy on the otherside of the window. Can also throw through for miles as well, though that might be affected by str as well as he has over 50 str i think.

I always fire those lower than 50 accuracy and with a low bravery. All the other stats can be trained easily, the 50 accuracy is only because I hate to have squaddies dying because they can't hit an elephant in blank range with auto fire... :not_ok:

For me close range firing doesnt seem to improve accuracy that much. Ive got a commander whos got 20 kills and started with 60 acc but now has 62, all his kills were pretty much auto ones against a person right infront of him.

And then there is my sniper who increased 2 points after 1 kill with an aimed shot against a target he couldne see.

How far soldiers can throw grenades, indeed depends on more than throwing accuracy: when I boosted my soldiers, they couldn't even throw to the adjacent square, very likely because their throwing accuracy was so high. Though I don't know how it works exactly.

Throwing accuracy only matter to calculate if the grenade will land on the spot you asked for or not, and if not by how far. I beleive strenght is the stat you should look at if you want to be able to throw further.

Also, sometimes you can't throw further because there is something blocking your throw arc. For example you'll notice that you can't throw far in a house because the above floor will block your throw arc...

Kneeling when throwing can allow you to throw further or in a way you could not before. Such an example would be to throw a grenade in a window while kneeling. I never tryied such a tactic myself tough.

Getting paniced a lot usually does it.


From my experience it is a random amount from 1-5 with it leaning toward the high side if you get a lot of hits on aliens. Laser pistols at point blank own at this.


Maybe you upped strength so much that a value looped back to negative?

I don't even like mind-controlling aliens to scout. Maybe to drop weapons (by using the "next soldier" inventory trick; click on inventory of a regular soldier and keep clicking next soldier while in the inventory screen) and run towards my guys who flatten them, but that's about it. The problem is that I don't want ANY aliens to die by anyone other than a living, breathing soldier. Sending them as scouts may mean that they die against other aliens.

That said, I do agree that MC is a lot of fun sometimes, esp. on the last mission when I don't care about improving soldier stats.

It IS possible to improve EVERY stat EXCEPT Psi Strength. I know of no way to increase Psi Strength, only Psi Skill, which is not important to me since I almost never use mind control anyway.

When I buy 100 soldiers and sack 90 or 95 of them, I look for the stats that are most difficult to improve: Bravery (very hard to improve) and Reactions. Everything else like time units, health, strength, firing accuracy, throwing, etc. is easier to improve. I think bravery goes up if someone panics a lot but survives a battle anyway.

Reactions is hard to improve because
1) if it's too low (I don't hire anyone less than 50 unless they have gonzo stats elsewhere), the soldier may not react in time to safe his or her own life = no improvement, only a dead soldier

2) usually your soldiers have some variation in reaction time. Say you have three soldiers parked next to a door, one with 40, one with 50, and one with 60 reactions. An alien pops his ugly head out the door. Your 60-soldier pops him. At the end of battle, they have 40/50/61. If this keeps happening, you'll soon have something like 40/52/67. (The 50 guy will probably get a few kills in, because Mr. 60 sometimes misses.) The fast get faster and the slow stay slow. You can try to fix it by sending Mr. 50 and 60 somewhere else, but then if Mr. 40 MISSES the alien or is too slow to shoot him in the first place, Mr. 40 probably ends up dead. Moral of the story: Reactions is one of the hardest stats to improve easily, so when picking your soldiers, focus on Psi strength, Bravery, and Reactions, which are the top three hardest stats to improve. Everything else you want good stats too, and if you can afford to hire 100's of soldiers try to get at least 40 bravery and 50 reactions with 60+ accuracy. Of course, many of those soldiers you will find out in a month have crappy Psi strength, but it's hard to get around that without cheating.

Yes, that's what I was saying about weapons; you're right that pistols, being the only one-handed weapons, don't get accuracy penalties if you hold a grenade or something else in the other hand. I'd like to see a two-pistoled soldier John Woo style, too :)

Please see the post right before this one on why I care so much about Reactions, but anyway, you asked for my def of a crap soldier.

Crap: any soldier who has less than 75 psi OR less than 40 Reactions.

When I have tons of cash to burn, I usually sack everyone with bravery 40 or less to start with. Among the remainder:

soldiers with reactions 57+ AND accuracy 60+ I ALWAYS hire so long as they are bravery 40 or more, like I said above.

soldiers with reactions 50-60 plus accuracy 55-65 (reactions 50 with accuracy 66+ and I'd hire that soldier automatically). These are "maybe" soldiers. I'll hire them if I'm low on cash, else it's back to hiring another crop. A 40 bravery, 50 reactions, 55 accuracy soldier is the absolute minimum I'd consider even if I were dirt poor.

soldiers below those get sacked.

You can get "good" soldiers one by one if you want to cheat. The stats are set at time of hire, not time of arrival. So you can save just before you hire. Then hire and save, then fast forward and see what kind of soldier you get. If he's good, go back to your savegame where you had just hired him, then hire another soldier. Save it in a third slot, fast forward, etc. But that's kind of cheap and also unnecessary once you get your Laser Cannon riches, anyway.

I didn't know that range and shot selection (Aimed shots) matter when improving accuracy; maybe that's why I sometimes end up with soldiers with 90 Reactions but only 80 accuracy, because most of the time they are parked next to a door at close range waiting to shoot the next alien that steps out.

Nice tip on alien base raids that you leave alone after getting a few kills, I may have to do that with the Floater base that I let survive in Africa. I let it survive because it's a Supply Ship magnet, and I get tons of goodies from its downed supply ships.

By the way, I'll have to eat my words a bit on strength not mattering. My USA base was down to three rookie soldiers after I sacked the other 7 that were psi-wimps (which I found out on the previous mission against Ethereals). Why couldn't psi strengths be displayed at purchase? Argh. Anyway, with only three soldiers I took on a downed Muton battleship and survived, but it was rough since my time units were cut to almost half. If I were smarter I would have told them to drop those 5 medikits + 6 grenades they were each carrying, but I didn't, and it took me about 10 turns just to walk over and set up my ambush configuration next to the main elevator. I had to reload a few times because I got hit by a blaster bomb right as I got there.. if I were smarter I would have told them to drop stuff early, like I said before. Ugh.

The bottom line is, do what is fun for you. Some people like sending in masses of rookies with grenades (since even rookies have good throwing aim), others like the small super-soldier squads, some like rocket launchers, others use blaster bombs to tear open doors, some like MC. At the end of the day, we all beat the game and [edited out]. :) (I do think it's funny that when you blow it up, the ending says that you shoot plasma at it, even if you did it by some other way like a blaster bomb or grenade.)

P.S. Another way to overload your soldiers is with High Explosives. Lots of them. Yeah, your soldiers will be slooooooooow for a while, but if they get a few kills (the game rarely increases the stats for soldiers that don't get kills), their strength will increase by a lot. Try doing this with half of your soldiers weighed down and the rest unencumbered, to provide cover fire for your slowed-down soldiers.

Pst, don't spoil the ending by telling everyone too much :D

You're right about the ending though, I noticed that too. I guess they were too lazy to take that into account, it would be a lot more complicated that way.

Speaking of crappy soldiers, I also used to sack soldiers with very low TU, like 50 or so. While it doesn't matter for firing (that takes up a fixed portion of a unit's TU), it makes quite a difference when walking.
And if you're using units with low TU, let them be followed by one or more with very high TU: that way, if the first runs into an alien, the other(s) can still take a shot at it.

Bravery can actually be increase. I am not sure about being panicked, but one way I know of to train bravery is to let morale drop below 50 and NOT panick.

I never sack people with low bravery, as I usually get enough kills to keep morale near 100. The only occassions I have problem with low bravery is with panic attacks(which depends a lot more on psi strengh) and when most of my soldiers, especially officers, being wipe up in a single turn(but when that happens, I am most likely going to lose anyway and bravery is not going to help).

But I think one of the reasons that make this game so good is the many different possible ways to play(and win).

Well, maybe we can step the challenge on this game up by NOT using any alien tech (except craft & craft weapons) when playing. Let's say.. using only the rifle/pistol, heavy cannon, auto-cannon, rocket launchers, etc (a.k.a traditional weaponry). Not even lasers allowed. What do you guys think huh? Oh right.. no ARMORS as well.. medikits & movement sensor (i forgot the name haha) is okay :max:

Nah, make it only strictly human technology is allowed. So that would allow lasers. All the standard rifles and autocannons end up totally useless after a few months. I once took control of a muton and emptied an entire clip into him from a rifle and he was barely injured. It's insane. That was about 7-8 months into the game though because all the aliens stats slowly go up as time passes.

Well.. :whistle:

Maybe lasers are allowed JUST for the sake of facing mutons.. but i think grenades (HE pack) will kill 'em easily right?

Something I just remembered:

Use grenades to raise firing accuracy. Each alien in the blast gets you a "hit".

I think lasers should be allowed... Not just because of mutons, but because of some of the other tougher aliens as well. Also, mutons can easily have some 80 Tus, so it's hard to get close enough to throw any HE packs...
After all, lasers are human technology, so why not use them to toast some aliens?
Interesting idea!!
Though I don't know at which level you'd try that; I myself have no experience with other difficulty levels, I've always used one of the old versions (with the bug that all difficulty levels were the same).

Heh when are the lasers allowed,it wouldnt be very diferent from my ordinary game.I always play only with laser rifles,laser cannons and sometimes blaster launchers...(and of course armors...)The true challange would be JUST human "normal" weapons...It is interesting idea.Btw can I use manufacture/sell strategy???

It would be nearly impossible to kill the Sectopods though... :cry:

I dunno.I think it would be possible but damn hard.It is a reason to finally use Earth heavy weapons...I love them but they become too fast obsolete :cry:
I think in the end of the game(in this challenge) you would use only them...

hey guys, I'm having some trouble here...
i read the first 6-9 pages and others had the same problem, but no solution was really discussed

i run the game in windows xp(i try to run it in dosbox but it says dosbox cannot run this game)

everything is fine until i try and land my troops. the game crashes. i have no other programs running in windows aside from xcom

any ideas?

If you mean you cant land your troops as in it crashes as soon as you press the accept mission button when your skyranger is parked there the I have a solution.

Try downloading UFO from Home of the Underdog (link is around between 2-6 pages back i think). It should work fine but just with a few randon errors which cause the gane to shut down, but they seem to occur less as you play more.

Otherwise i dont really know the problem that much, it only seems to affect some users (me :cry: ).




And Lizard, earth's heavy weapons dont become obsolete quick, i mean late in the game i still use the autocannon with HE/AP rounds and they rocket launcher with large rockets.

I know the blaster bomb makes rockets pretty obsolete with thier improved range and firepower, but its great to just fire from A-B with a large rocket, also useful in terror misions when its not the best idea to blow up the whole building justincase civs are there.

The HE autocannon is usefull in base assaults and defence, they have a good explosive radius to blow up lots of enemies in the small corridors. Especially usefull against chyrsalids who seem to die in one hit.

What is really good though as ive said before are heavy lasers, they are cheap to produce and maintain, great accuracy and high damage, just give one to your best shot and you will reap the rewards of one hit-one kill.

Okay I edited it out. :)

Jman is right about the Sectopods, esp. at higher difficulties several months into the game. Lately I've been loading up my soldiers with tons of medikits and High Explosives (everyone on my primary team has 70+ strength thanks to my forcing them to bodybuild :)), so I don't have room on my Skyranger for weapons with ammo. This means laser rifles as main weapons. My soldiers all have great accuracy, so an auto-fire means 2+ hits many times.

Even so, and even though Sectopods are weak (150% damage) against lasers, I had to score something like 8 or 9 hits per 'pod in a recent mission. Regular rifles would do nothing. Grenades would do nothing. Autocannon, Heavy Cannon might scratch the thing sometimes. High Explosive maybe, but it's hard to get close with those--they are meant to be demolitions packages and not to be thrown. Even with strength 75, a soldier can chuck High Explosives about 5 squares max. Rocket launchers could injure Sectopods once in a while, but by the time you kill two or three, you have no ammo left.

So maybe the suggestion of only earthling tech, including lasers, is okay. Or lasers only when going up against Mutons and Sectopods.

What about base defenses? Earthling missile defenses are a joke. And craft weapons? You HAVE to have more than just cannons (even laser cannons) and missiles after a couple of months. So exceptions for plasma beams and fusion ball launchers should be considered unless you want your Firestorm to be sitting in repairs for months at a time because it was downing supply ships with Laser Cannons. :)

Also, what happens if the other side's alien dies and drops a plasma rifle or something? Do you get to use alien weapons for that combat only?

Are you sure about this? If that's true, I might just start sending people in chucking Earthling grenades, one after another, and slowly injure aliens and get like 6 grenade hits on one before it dies.

It ups nearly all of the stats that are normally raised in battle. Firing, throwing, strength, TUs, stamina and health. Not to mention being able to attack from complete cover and through walls (to a certain extent). HE and Stun weapons can also be used the same way, just no arcing.

Not really...I've thrown over 20 tiles. Just get in a place with a clear ceiling and you should be able to get max range.

And while on the subject of HE. It does 4x damage to the large units. Not sure if it registers as 4 hits in your mission experience that is added up though... :wall:

Wow, if that's true, I'm going to start throwing lots of grenades to increase my firing accuracy. How odd. "Jim, you should pitch for the major leagues with the arm you have." "Nah, boss, throwing these grenades like fastballs helps my aim with rifles just as much as it improves my throwing accuracy."

As for explosions, you know, I always wondered if it was a 4x thing. I thought not, because once I tossed three alien grenades at a cyberdisk and ran for it, and the disk didn't die. But then, they have armor, so maybe that's it.

Actually, I was outdoors. Then again, the soldier in question was carrying a huge load of junk (for strength training), so maybe that had something to do with her throwing only 5 tiles. I also hear that crouching improves distance.

It that case the first nade to blow takes out the rest of them. Meaning only one nade works vs the target. It was fixed in TFTD (more than 0 armour for objects on the ground). An alien grenade or HE pak should be able to do it though.

Does this 'human only' stuff also include Hyperwave Decoders, because if so it is gonna be a bit tricky to win the game.

:bye: Wooo I am back from Belgium. You all missed me, right?

Of course... :whistle:
I think that you could use all "alien" buildings ,crafts and craft weapons...

Well if you want hard try goin through the game without saving.

Only save when ya finished playing for the time being. So even if you lose your skyranger with all your best troops you still cant reload your previous save.

Then try completing the game.

That's a nasty one... Remember that annoying error several people get, with the game crashing just before a mission? :D

By the way (and more than a little off-topic), PrejudiceSucks, why did you visit Belgium?

Are you implying Belgium's not worth visiting?

There was a mode in Alpha Centauri which forced the smae rule you're suggesting on you, called IronMan, so you could only save on exit. It was useful - I always have difficulty forcing myself to do the same thing on Civ 3

The worst thing ever that happened in the this game to me was that I was only just starting and right away a full shipload of guys assaults my base. Needless to say, I lost.

Certainly not! I happen to be from Belgium.

Probably the worst thing that happened to me in UFO, was that somehow I ended up with too little Elerium to fly my Avenger... and I didn't have any Skyrangers left. I have to add that was one of the first times I played UFO :whistle:

I only save Civ 3 on exit as well - getting that space race is very difficult even on easy level

I consider saving the game too often to be a form of cheating. Save after a mission, sure, save on exit, fine, but multiple saves and restores during a tactical mission is highly dubious. I don't do that in any game that I play on any system, if I get my arse kicked (but the game can still continue), then I take the loss and try and get back into it. If it is impossible to do, so be it, that was my fault for poor preparation.

So just wondering, which alien do you hate most in the game??

Is it the chyrsallid which can decimate squads in seconds?
Is it the mutons and thier friend blaster launcher?
Is is the sectapods, the tanks which just wont die?
Or the etherials and there uber psi powers which make your men break down and cry?

Personally i hate all of em. Though Chyrsalids more then others. If i see one i will use all available firepower, even if there are civs nearby. Im just saving them from being zombies.

With any game if im getting my behind whooped i fight it out until the end UFO - enemy unknown - civ 3 etc even space empires 4.

Sectopod without question. Heavy armour and resistance to plasma makes them just devastating if you don't have enough blasters and stun bombs to go around.... >.>

Stun bombs work on sectapods??? Never tried that, always lazed them with my snipers.

I save quite often, but just in case the game would feel like crashing.
Even if a mission turns out to be disastrous, I usually don't want to go through the past few missions which went well, redo all the research, etc... Just too much trouble. And indeed it would be cheating.

I hate crysallids, sectopods and ethereals the most. Though I've had more trouble with crysallids than with sectopods, maybe because I don't shun overkill, together with my usual tactic of letting several soldiers stick together. Not too close of course (did someone mention blaster launchers there? :D ), just positioned so that they can cover each other.

The worst are chrysalids....But personally I hate floaters at most.Not becouse they were very dangerous but one floater sniper had once killed 9 soldiers.It was really frustrating...I killed all others floaters and ran around the map like insane, and mysteriously my soldiers died one after another and I STILL cant locate this motherf*cker.He was on the roof of UFO in the middle where you cant see him and after each shots he go back there :wall: .I never got problems with sectopods and mutons :max: and ethereals are random-sometimes they take mc from half team and panic other half and sometimes I kill them without problem...

:ot: I visited Belgium with my school, we went to the battlefields of World War One. I saw the graves of about 200,000 people, it was most tragic. Also, I stepped off a duckboard in the trenches at Hill 62 and half of my leg got covered in mud.

Belgium was pretty good and I learned a (very) small amount of Flemish while I was there. Tekkere = Turkey I think and Kattekwaad = Steak?

I stayed in Nieuwpoort which was quite nice, but most of the time I was in Ieper/Ypres. :ot:

Now that's done, I have to say that Mutons are really, really hard to kill, even when you get plasma. The first time I played, I looked at them in the intro and thought 'ha it will be piss-easy to kill them' so I took rifles to fight them. Big mistake.

My Skyranger touched down and I saw one, so my Sargeant, who was nearest the edge fired and Auto Shot at the bugger, hit him all of the times it shot.

Mind probed it and it had lost about 10 health. So I fired another 6 Auto shots at it for it to only be at half health. At this point it decided that enough was enough, so it climbed into my Skyranger and took down four soldiers before the alien turn. At this point it decided to stay where it was and kill the other 6 soldiers in the craft.

And that's when I learned to respect all of my foes. (apart from Sectoids, of course, and also Reavers, both of who are weak in the extreme)

So Mutons are hard, yeah. Sectopods are also very, very hard to fight.

Crysallids are ok to fight once you start to use laser tanks + laser rifles/pistols and Floaters are not too hard to kill with any weapon. Etherials get owned by tanks once you learn to crouch your soldiers inside the transport and just send your tanks out.

X-Com tip of the day = Always, always reserve time units for a reaction shot. You never know what could climb into your transport.

I really don't understand why you would want to keep units in your transport. I always (cautiously) disembark all soldiers except 4 from the Skyranger at turn one. I would be way more cautious in TFTD because of ennemy grenade toss, but in UFO you don't have to fear from those.

The 4 remaining soldiers are usually those who carry the 4 tasers I put in the Skyranger, and those 4 soldiers disembark at turn 2 and aim directly for the UFO. It's my "assault team" which enter the UFO first. If there is no UFO then it simply become my 3rd squad of 4...

Yeah, I don't keep my men in transports either. If you read the post you would see that it was my first go at UFO and I had watched the Mutons get blown to pieces, so I got a bit cocky.

And even on TFTD the aliens are not so harsh as to throw grenades onto a transport on the first turn.

i could never get the hang of XCOM games. always get shot to pieces LOL

This game isnt so interesting to me... the intro movie looks as if the game will be played in another way or smth, and that end when I see it... :whistle:
Well, still the soundtrack is quite nice... LOL

I cannot get this game to work in the mac version of dosbox is this a win only game?

I think it is win-only, yeah. Sorry.

Oh and the thing about getting shot to pieces?

Start off fighting only the small/very small craft you shoot down. It might feel bad, but taking off as soon as you try to handle a Large craft at the beginning of your X-Com career may be a better idea. Learn to play a trading sort of game, with research to get the points you need.

Don't fight at Terror sites unless you know how to fight properly or else it will go even worse than if you just left (you would lose the points for all of the Civilians + any you accidently kill + 200 points for the ship + all of the points for the dead soldiers + tanks)

*edits post :ok: *

Anything related to the game is welcome in this topic.

After all this is the topic visitors will come to if they want information on the game ;)

And the compatibility for the game is one of the most asked questions.

Well, i think using only earth weapons and "any CRAFT techs" is quite a challenge.. i know it's hard fighting mutons and sectopods without plasma, but hey, that's a challenge right? :D
It won't be called a "challenge" if we used the best available weaponry.. and blaster included as alien tech right? so, no blaster allowed as well :)
I think i'll play the game using only earth weapons in beginner level 1st.. it'd be suicidal playing superhuman LOL

Hey, it would stay quite easy if we used Lasers, which are sort of human technology. Do they count or not?

I vote in favour of using lasers... After all some of our green/orange/... friends are tough enough to require a few hits from a laser rifle.
And I'd rather not fight Mutons with some pea-shooter like an auto cannon. It should be a challenge, not a suicide mission :)

LOL yeah. Hey, can someone reserve the 700th post for me? That would be sorta cool (500th, 600th and 700th then!)

I tried with just rifles etc. no lasers and it was near-impossible.

Especially the fights against the Mutons. In the end I just tasered them, as this took them down quickly. The final mission was incredibly difficult, even with X-ComUtil for easy access through the walls in the alien base ( pretty handy, I know),
so I vote in favour of lasers.

I vote against lasers.Damn I after first time I finished UFO, I played ALWAYS just with lasers and it was easy enought...It would be very interesting to see how I will stand against mutons,chrysalids and sectopods just with autocannons and rocket launchers :evil:

Btw:PrejudiceSucks, I will reserve you 700th post when you reserve me 1000th post :evil:
Btw2:When we finally agree on rules,would we make thread in Challenge forum? :huh:

LOL in the end I just started to run away from Terror Sites after the Sectopods arrived. They are basically untouchable by any of the human weapons, even Rocket Launchers + Autocannons, doesn't matter what ammo you use, you will lose whole squads.

Crysallids are OK once you learn to use pistols instead of rifles, (as this can knock them unconscious as well as kill them) but mutons just own whole squads alone.

Trust me, I tried it and I tried quite hard!

Yeah I am really curious... :evil:
691 posts.... :whistle:
I think it should be a challange like TT deluxe that was here some time ago...

The TTD deluxe is still there. ;)

I think it's a good idea. Hard to judge who is better by a screenshot tough.

That's a good idea, just to lets everyone know what's going on and to keep diccussion of this challenge separate from diccussion about the rest of the gamr. Oh, and I vote for laser weapons. Btw, are all types of armour allowed (since you need alien alloys to research personal armour).

Hi again! I read a huge part of this topic (but not the whole :whistle: )

And i have some new questions, which will be pushed into my giga-mega walkthrough:

-do i need small AND large radars to increase the number of succesfull detections, or is it enough to buy ONLY some large ones?
-if stunning isnt succesfull at once, the stunned-ratio is seen in a grreyish bar inside health bar?
-if one sees the target, but i shoot with an other man/tank, accuracy is affected?
-is there always a commander on the base? even on fresh/newly created base?
-i read that cautious attack is the most "engine-friendly" way of attacking. But does the altitude of the ufo affects the damages of the wreckage when it crashes land?

-and a special problem of mine: i attacked even 2 bases in the late of '99, both had 1 sectoid commander. I stunned them, killed everyone else, but after finishing, i didnt see live alines captured in stat, and at home there was no researchable commander. Is it a bug? I can send my savegame, if anybody is interested.
(i used win version with the modified executable of Collectors Edition Musix fix that has 1 time unit change/sec on geoscape)

Thx to all!

Ps. 12 years ago, when i first played the game as a kid, never thought that it is a so complex and amazing startegy game. Maybe, thatswhy i couldnt finish it without cheating :) I'd glad to see an IRC chat with the makers of the game, about tricks/interesting facts that nobody discovered till today :cheers:

Large Radar are more efficient. If you can replace small radar with large one then it's better. Once you have the hyperwave decoder then you don't need any radar.

You got it. The grey bar over your HP bar is the stun bar. You can see it if one of your own soldier is being stunned or is trying to breath in a smoke square.

You can shoot a target even if your squaddie don't see it if he have clear line of fire. I don't think there is extra innacuracy involved apart for the obvious part that you do fire from further than normal range.

For the commander thing, make sure you don't already have 10 Aliens in your alien prison. If you are the kind of people who never do autopsy then it could happen that you don't have space in your alien prison and the commander is then killed before reaching base because you don't have space for him. I'd suggest launching an attack from a different base with a new prison or perhaps building a new prison at your main base and try again.

Yeah, Careful is the most engine-friendly way to fight, and I think that all combats take place at the lowest altitude possible.

With UFO1 you really do need to do Careful attacks, as the engines get blown up really quickly.

1, You dont need small and large radars.

I think the specs are that small radar has a 5% chance of detecting a UFO every minute in 160 nautical miles (approximations)

And large radar has a 5% chance of detecting a UFO every min in 320 nautical miles (also approximations)

so basicalls you dont need small radars. By increasing the number of radars you have all you do is simply increase chance you have of detecting a UFO, not the range.

2, Er im not too sure about the stunning thing, if the stun doesnt work first time then posibly the greyish bar, i think the greyish bar however can only go as high as the health left so a damaged alien is easier to stun

3, Accuracy is affected by range (i think). It is possible to shoot with a solder who cant see any aliens but stilll has a direct fire to an alien (ie out of the soldiers vision and no obstacles blocking the way).

4, There is always a commander, in the room above the room with a huge grav-lift. Alwyas a commander there, usually with a few other aliens as well.

5, Cautious is only engine-friendly when going against UFO's who cant shoot as far as your interceptor, i.e. a plasma beam interceptor can take down a large scout from cautious range without getting damaged. However when facing battleships i think it works best to attack using aggresive as the battleship can fire even out of your range, use multiple craft however when engaging and disengage the weaker dying ones, also only use firestorms, interceptors die in one hit against battleships.

As for the altitude thingy, ive never actually tried that, it may be a factor but if you use a cautous attack less damage is done to the UFO.

Dunno about your bug thingy, mabye the commanders died if you shot them before and bled to death or you didnt have enough storage space in alien containment, research the aliens to free up space.

If you Agressively assualt a small or very small UFO with good weapons (Plasma Cannons) then there is a chance that all of the aliens will die.

This means none of the danger or hassle of attacking a downed UFO, which is always dangerous.

Yeah,even to destroy the Ufo...Which isnt very good.
:ot: PrejudiceSucks I got 699th post,go! go! go! :D

Although power + flying suits are smoke-proof

X-Com Hint of the day: Get Flying and Power armour quickly!

:cheers: WooooHOOOOO

Ok...I am going to create a challenge Ufo thread...
R.Havell and Eagle of Fire are right.Let this thread for Ufo troubleshooting and Tips & Tricks... :max:

Pistols only!....yar... ^^

Is there a way to play UFO gold windowed? I tried the usual -window in the target line of a shortcut, no dice.

I can't imagine how many soldiers will die a honorable death using only pistols and rifles against the mighty aliens LOL
And to imagine soldiers in flying suits and holding a rifle or pistol LOL

LOL yeah. Flying suits with pistols + Stun Rods (I keep calling them tasers) is a bit of a piss-take.

To make it really playable like this, you need XComUtil so that High Explosive can blow hole into a UFO roof and also blow through the walls. Very handy, or else it would be even more difficult.

X-Com tip of the day: If you need to take out an alien base quicky, get XComUtil and bring along loads of HE packs. You can blow up walls, roofs, anything you can imagine with an explosive that does 150 damage :sneaky:

It's one of the B E S T Games I've ever playd!!! And sometimes I'l play it still yet - if i could run it :whistle:

Why can't you run it?? :blink:

Hi everyone. Saw this game in 1996 for the first time. I was only 8 back then. :)

Anyway, I think the difficulty of UFO is a bit more balanced than Terror. UFO starts out pretty hard, but then it adds more dangers.

Terror starts out a good bit harder but becomes easier and easier and when you get psi ability, all your troubles are over.

"Enemy spotted. *molecular control, throw away oscillator, make alien walk to melee range of agent, kill alien* and repeat until done. :)

You could always try posting in the TFTD forum as well. It hit as sort of bottleneck when I last posted, you should try and restart it.

Replying to the alien commander subject:

1)I have plenty of free space in alien containments (no research is avaible, i assume because there are no living aliens on the base) and after the status screen, it says that captured alien died because ther is no free room in alien containment

2) i am sure the commander didnt die, because i shot it with stun launcher, and inspected with my soldier (placing it to the backpack :D )

Maybe i'll transfer my avenger to anothr base (with built alien containment) and start affack from there.

Thx for the other answers!

This reminds me of something I posted earlier, a similar situation which I *think* I've experienced:
plenty of alien containment, normally no live aliens inside them, and still stunned aliens that die after a mission due to "lack of containment". I then proceeded to destroy some containment facilities, built new ones instead, thus solving the problem. But it's been a few years since I played it, so I'm not certain anymore that this really happened (there's a small possibility that there were live aliens, but of a type I'd already researched, I have no idea whether these are kept alive at your base???)

Yes, all live aliens are kept at your base, regardless of whether they have already been researched.

I think that live aliens that has been researched will go as "corpse".. at least that's what happened to my games all this time..

Also remember that aliens and their stuff miraculously goes at the speed of light towards your base instead of being taken back in the transport, so before you clear out space keep that in mind.

Base Design

For some reason my games crash sometimes when there are base defense battles, so I intentionally shoot down everything that moves ASAP. Unfortunately, a single interceptor with Avalanche missiles can't take down a battleship that is closing in quickly.

That said, in my latest Superhuman game (I think I have the patched-up version where the difficulty really is higher, because Snakemen shrug off a lot of my laser rifle hits), in April 1999, I got my USA base hit by an alien battleship with snakemen and chryssalids(sp?).

All I can say is, good thing that the battleship hit my USA base, because I intentionally build my expansions with an access lift all the way on one side, a hangar below, and a long hallway leading to the rest of my base. So aliens have to go through hangars and then to the access lift and then face a three-section-long corridor.

[6][ ][ ] E
[ ] E [ ] E
[ ] E [ ] E
[A] E E E
[H][H] E E
[H][H] E E

A = access lift
H = hangar
6 = six rookies
E = empty space

I had about 14 rookies with laser rifles and some prox grenades.

I immediately tried to throw some prox grenades as mines to stuff up the access lift area, then I placed my soldiers off to either side of the main hallway to go into hiding (and prime prox grenades in their hands while they were waiting for aliens to walk by). My last six rookies I placed at the end of the corridor, so far away from the access lift that the aliens AND humans can't see each other. (Three soldiers kneeling, three standing right behind the kneeling soldiers.)

A snakeman shot a soldier that I messed up on (I thought I had enough TU to run around a corner, but he stopped just short and got shot.) A chryssalid ate another soldier, but my six shooters down the hall mopped him and the zombie up.

Every so often, one of my rookies midway down the corridor would poke his head out and look at the access lift, usually spotting 2-3 aliens. He then went back into hiding in his little nook while my six rookies down the hall blasted the aliens. Since the hallway is narrow, even misses sometimes kill the aliens standing on either side of the intended target.

With those few rookies all along the hallway being able to "spot" for my shooters down the hall, and with the shooters being so far away from the access lift/hangars that aliens couldn't see where my lasers were coming from, it was only a matter of time before all the rest of the aliens died one or two steps outside of the access lift.

Casualties: 2
Kills: 22

I didn't even need the prox grenades, and in hindsight I probably should not have mined the corridor because the prox grenades destroyed a ton of valuable Heavy Plasma and Alien Grenades in the process. :not_ok:

Moral of the story: build your base so that there is a long corridor that aliens from the lift/hangars have to go through to do anything, and then it's like shooting fish in a barrel. (That, and I lucked out that I wasn't fighting Ethereals or Sectoids, since it was only April 1999, a lot of the soldiers had low bravery, and I had no psi labs yet to weed out the psi-weaklings.)

hi, i just wanted to play x-com too
hadn´t played it for a loooong long time
but now my problem is:

a) it doenst work with dosbox
(well, ufo doenst, terror does but is awfully slow and the window is very small)
B) if i cant use dosbox wich other programm can i use to limit the frames??

Ive said this loads of times before, try Home of The Underdog and get UFO:Gold. It doesnt require dosbox and plays fine, just sometimes crashes before a mission so its best to save frequently, (you can usually do 2 missions in a row before it crashes).

I tried the download from here but no save_game folders and it crashed on the equipment screen everytime.

Also dos-box doesnt seem to work on my comp, that or its cuz im too lazy to get the proper version.

Hey Axident.

I found something really cool for stopping battleships with a single firestorm, thats right a single firestorm. Simply just take one firestorm that has two plasma beams and engage the battleship, once your Firestorm gets 3/4 damged tell it to dis-engage. Hopefully if you did enough damage you might force the battleship to crash/land. And when you send a skyranger it is usually intact, but nonetheless very usefull for Base Defense, however i dont think the UFO will land if you fight overseas.

Heh, in one of my games its 2001 and I still havent had to do a singe base defense, not even a missile defence. Although I have had several ships with Alien Retaliation on the HWD screen. Must be me being amazing and killing all UFO's in my Black Forest base.

I also said this millions of time. THere is a pure dos version of UFO, should we upload it?

Why wait for game to crash, when you can play it nice in DOSBox???

(Versio of UFO at Abandonia is patched, same as so called 'gold' version.

thats not the problem, i can play it on xp without any errors or crashes.
the only thing that bugs me is when the mouse "touches" the edge of the screen my pc (2.4 amd xp) scrolles to the end of nowhere (and the scrolling didn´t even work on a 468 because it was too fast there too)