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[Lt. Razak]

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


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

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

[SyDemon]

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

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

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

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

Qn: How many vehicles can a base hold?

[Eagle of Fire]

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

[SyDemon]

Thanks for the reply

Previous Fleet:
15 Hoverbikes
2 Hawks

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

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

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

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

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

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

[PrejudiceSucks]

Hmm possibly their allies are infiltrated, not them.

You could just annihilate them though...

[SyDemon]

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

[Sharp]

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

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

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

[Lt. Razak]

I luv war

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

[SyDemon]

Originally posted by Sharp@Nov 9 2005, 06:52 PM
That is odd if Diablo are not infilitrated at all and give that message.

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

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

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

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

[SyDemon]

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

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

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

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