Quote:
Originally posted by Juan Rayo@Mar 27 2005, 01:24 AM
All is quiet in the American front... UNTIL...
man this game has a way of kicking the difficulty up in a second. My latest campaign is going pretty well, I have a well organized weapons/corpses traffiking ring that keeps my bases well equiped, my people ALL have personal armour and the great Laser Rifles, and I usually keep a rocket tank in every Sky Rangers to "flush out" the aliens. In the latest terror attacks I lost no soldiers. Why, I have even captured a leader allready! (with a Stunrod, too. Floater drooped like a ton of bricks, heh).
And SUDDENLY, China surrenders to the Alien menace, and 4 VERY LARGE crafts come out of nowhere and ALL LAND in USA! My 3 bases are scrambling their Sky Rangers to the sites as I write this (leaving Europe and Asia unprotected), while my suddenly diminished air force (lost 2 interceptors, bravely trying to oppose the monster's ships) patrol overhead, I can only imagine the pilots frustration, knowing that there is a full scale invasion going on and their interceptors can't to a damn thing about it.
So this is time to ask for some strategic help. I am only starting to build the, uh, thingy that lets me know what the alien missions are, so I am in the dark. All i know is 4 very large (battleships?) crafts have landed in my biggest contributor backyard! there is no way I can hit all of them, having only 3 Sky Rangers. I saved just before it happened, too, seeing as it was all pretty quiet.. Could they ALL or more than one be infiltrators? if so, I am very much screwed I think. What to do, what to do....
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That stuff happens every once in a while.. in my last Superhuman game, I lost three countries even WITH Hyperwave. I'm still not sure what happened; I guess a craft slipped by the cracks of my 8 Hyperwaves.
My advice: don't sweat losing countries.
Try not to lose too many countries, but I lost USA, UK, and one other one that I forgot.. France or something, but I had so many engineers cranking out so many laser cannons for sale that I hardly noticed. You can't let too many countries turn on you, or the XCOM project will shut down no matter how many tens or hundreds of millions you have generated from your legion of engineers. But you CAN win despite losing several XCOM sponsors.
Try to gang up on battleships with at least two Firestorms+Plasma Beams. Don't attack battleships with anything less than a Firestorm. Four Firestorms can quickly rip apart a Battleship and suffer only a few days' worth of repairs. You could take out a Battleship with one Firestorm if need be, but it'll probably be in the repair shop for a couple of weeks.
As for the interim missions, it's not that bad to fight Battleships that were not shot down. Just camp the gravlift and there will soon be a pile of alien bodies just outside the UFO doors. The goodies you get from those undamaged-battleship missions should ease the pain if you really do lose a country's funding.
Anyway, get Hyperwave ASAP. Run around a corner right into the chest of a navigator holding a stun bomb launcher and hopefully it stuns both of you with reaction fire. Use stun rods to beat up Panicked aliens. Do whatever. Just get it.
What you want to do is to have at least one (preferably two) Firestorm(s) per base armed with 2 Plasma Beams. For your third hangar, either have a Skyranger (or Avenger if you have tons of Elerium) or have another Firestorm (or even an interceptor for local patrols, if you're running low on Elerium) with laser cannons to chase down smaller UFOs without destroying their Elerium-containing engines; that will allow you to get more Elerium 115 to convert to more power/flying suits and plasma beams, as well as ensure that you have enough fuel for your fleet of Firestorms.