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[axident]

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.

[Parkingtigers]

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!

[Jman4117]

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?

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

[Mr. Barman]

woops, forgot to login :whistle:

[xcom freak]

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

[My-Q]

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?
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?

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.

[Eagle of Fire]

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.