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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Thermal Tazers


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It's about that first terror mission that you have to go with gauss pistols if you are unlucky and rifles if you are lucky. I thought maybe I could use some melee weapons, and as vibroblades are not around, I brought the initial stun weapons along.

 

It got real funny though, since it was a night mission on an island attack (many houses with small corridors, lots of doors). I got 8 aliens stunned and 7 killed. The ones I killed were either standing on top of balconies or protecting each other on open ground (I can't simply charge right into 2 gillmen and 2 deep ones with thermal thazers, can I?).

 

I tink melee weapons are a whole new perspective.

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LOL. These things are almost a cheat!!!

 

Just completed two large subs and one very large sub (all touched down) and one crashed down small sub using 14 soldiers of Gauss Rifles and Thermal Thazers.

 

They were all aquatoid subs (thankfully no lobsterman). All I did was clear out around the sub while making sure I held the enterance to the sub (to prevent nasty aliens from stabbing me in the back).

 

I took care of the jellyfish outside the sub by pulser grenades (researched them before sonic weapons cause they are so useful). So alien weapon platforms did not cause problems.

 

Once I was ready for the sub itself, I just equipped my men with thermal lances and rushed in. Whenever you meet an alien, you just bang it on the head with the lance (aquatoids take one hit in veteran level).

 

Ironically, the very large sub was easiest, because the two jellyfish outside the ship were close to my triton (and they died in first turn). The aliens inside the sub were either MC users or Disruptor Pulse launchers, so I just rushed them (even if I didn't have TUs to lance them) to keep them from firing.

 

The disruptors get nasty, not when they panic you, but when they start controlling you (since I was afraid I'd have to complete the mission with an agent under control and thus M.I.A.). Thankfully, the last aliens in the control chamber had one disruptor launcher and one empty handed (MC guy!!!), so I killed the MC guy and then killed the disruptor one.

 

 

NOTE: I realised I HAVE FORGOTTEN TO BUILD ALIEN CONTAINMENT!!! LOL!!! Last time I had played X-Com 3 so I thought you had it at the beginning of the game in X-Com 2 like in Apoc. BIG DOH!

 

Well, it's mid march, so I'll have a bit more work to do... I'll just need to keep my hands away from the gillmen very large sub when I see it.

 

Do you think that assaulting three landed subs and attacking one to crash it down would piss the aliens off enough to make them attack my base? If I remember correctly, they get pissed off when you shoot them down, not when you attack their landed subs (since then they think it's the crew's fault???)

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Aliens seem to locate your base faster if you shoot down their ships very close to your base. Their retaliation scouts tend to scout around the area where you shot down on of their ships (I'm not sure how significant the ship needs to be before they send a scout out, or as with many aspects of the game, the aliens just send out a scout at random) .

 

On one occasion, as per usual, I started a superhuman campaign. First alien ship was shot down. It was literally almost on top of my base when it crashed. I hadn't noticed this fact at first, and had a perfect run on that first mission. Things were looking up. But a few game hours later, my base got attacked and I had no way of defending myself against the terror units with just harpoons. So I had to restart. I guess it was one of my fastest defeats ever. ;)

 

 

 

- NKF

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From what I've noticed, attacking landed subs do not attract much attention at all (I mean, I've got an alien colony a few miles away from my base, and I keep raiding its supply ship, yet the aliens don't seem to mind. :) )

 

---

 

Regarding the ships, one possibility is that there's a mass infiltration (interdiction, or whatever the game decides to call it) fleet that has been sent to your area. The game likes to throw these do or die missions at you every so often. Nasty. If the area is already under their control, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

 

One other possibility is that it's a base site survey crew. They pretty much appear in droves and land in the immediate vicinity of the intended base site. Then when the dreadnaught appears, it'll be the builder. When it lands, a colony will appear - and I'm guessing the crew of the supply ships that drop by will be determined by the crew of the dreadnaught.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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Hmmm. As I am playing veteran, I have noticed something interesting:

 

Gauss Rifles vs Lobstermen is insanity!!!

:)

 

It's like, you throw two sonic pulsers under the lobsterman's feet, and then you shoot the lobsterman six times with gauss rifle, and it's still standing there, 7 feet tall and all. Just lovely aliens!!!

 

I had to complete that mission using thermal tazers ONLY (it required a lot of "hey lobster!! right here, catch me if you can!!" kind of tricking). It was kinda fun.

 

The thing that's on my mind is. I have MOSTLY faught aquatoids, kinda starting to see lobstermen here and there, as well as gillmen (VERY FEW of them). The only terror sites I had always had aquatoids in them (except for the first one which was gillmen and stuff).

 

It's almost mid June now, and I am wondering if something's wrong. By now I should be fighting gillmen mostly and lobstermen here and there. No?

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Did you apply the XComUtil patch? If you didn't, your game will be at beginner, no matter what you said at the start. That means you'll be fighting the beginner races for a long time, which it sounds like you are.

 

Also, if you completely cream the aliens, it can take a while for them to recover. If you do nothing, it's about a half a month on superhuman, and a 1.5 months on beginner. Then you'll see massive, nonstop UFO activity, which will only get worse. :)

 

Anything less than sonic pistols against Lobstermen is insane. Thermal shok bombs and tazers rule against them, because they take double stun damage.

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I didn't apply xcomutil, but I have the collector's edition (not the whole edition, but the copy of my game is extracted from the collector's edition cd), so I would guess that they have fixed this problem?

 

The aliens feel a lot tougher this time too.

 

Also, I just attacked a crashed large ship which was filled with lobstermen and tentaculats. I had to kill/stun about 6 (?!?!) tentaculats in that ship. I don't remember having that many even in colony mission when I played easiest.

 

Edit:

I did hit them pretty hard the first month (well, actually, I hit em pretty hard every time). The first month was getting three touched down subs (two of them large) and the second month was clearing two terror sites (which appeared at the same time).

Edited by Jonaleth Irenicus
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Update:

 

I scored about 4000 in the last month, shooting all the subs I saw (even very large ones) except for one very large sub (two of them appeared, I had run out of barracudas in the vicinity).

 

I thought I had scored pretty good (and stopped most of their activities) but at the end of the month, I suddenly lost USA!!! I was WTF all over the place. Well, probably an alien negotiation ship got through without me seeing it...

 

Just after that shock, I got a terror site show up. So I head on to it hoping it's not a crazy one. And I realise it is a two sider cargo ship one with lobstermen and bio-drones!!! (man, I think they are PISSED OFF!!!)

 

It took me a long time to clear the first level (because of certain bugs which I'll mention later), and if I hadn't brough heavy thermic lances with me, I would probably have quit the mission (I once had to clear a single spaced corridor with one lobsterman and two bio-drones all standing next to each other, I ended up opening a hole into the corridor before getting to them).

 

BIO-DRONES ARE ANNOYING. They have high reaction, high damage, good speed, and to top it all off, THEY DESTROY THE LANDSCAPE THEY TRAVEL ON. At first I thought this was a cool graphical issue, but if they travel over elevators, THEY STOP FUNCTIONING. There was a lobsterman on top the captain's tower in the ship, and because of bio-drone droppings, the elevator was "broken", I spent my whole time trying to shoot him down.

 

I'll proceed with the second level when I can gather myself. It probably will be worse so I may choose to quit (I already have a positive score even if I quit, I almost killed 6-7 bio drones and a lot of lobstermen). If I am playing veteran difficulty, I can't even imagine 4th diff level or super human...

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Yep, you're playing beginner.

 

All versions of the X-COM 1 and 2 game have the difficulty bug. You have to apply the patch, if you ever want to play at a higher difficulty.

 

But, you're doing pretty well, regardless. TFTD is a pretty tough game. If you care about your aquanauts, that is. :)

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Actually, there was never anything wrong with the difficulty level in TFTD. Even before I installed XComutil, the stat levels for the aliens were consistent in that they got bigger as you climb up the difficulty levels (and they became more aggressive in the geoscape).

 

It's only the dos versions of UFO that had this problem where it would revert back to beginner after the first mission. UFO 1.4CE has this fixed.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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I have finished the game once in beginner. So far my expression for the veteran difficulty (and why I think I don't have the difficulty bug):

 

-I detect more subs per month. It would be very late game until I got to see very large and large subs circling around the world, but it's august now and mostly subs appear in twos or threes.

 

-Aliens are most certainly harder to kill (gillmen sometimes survive sonic rifle shots).

 

-The aliens have started attacking my base (they have done it twice). In beginner, they didn't attack me at all until I got PWT defences (and they started attacking me before I even had PWT tech in this game).

 

 

Another update:

Cleared the last part of the terror site, and it was easier than the first part. The only problems were a lobsterman and a bio drone that were in sniper positions near my start location. I had to carefully move among the buildings to "smuggle" my men through the sniper fire. After that, it was mostly lancing lobstermen and biodrones all over the place.

Finished last month with a score somewhere between 6000-8000 (can't be sure). An important thing happened, my USA base got attacked a second time. Again, I had gillmen and deep ones. The funny thing is, I needed a live deepone (because I had forgotten to build an alien containment before the first terror mission), so I killed a gillmen, took the thermal shock launcher off it's arms and got me a live deep one :).

I also recovered a lot of subs and almost all the time I had to fight gillmen (no MC rocks!!!). I still don't have MC technology (leaving all live aliens to the last so I don't get stuck in research), so MC is my only weakness right now.

I had to recover two very large subs with aquatoids though, and the second one caused a lot of problems. Two of my men were paniced for the whole game, and one stayed under alien control more than half of the game. I finished the mission without losing my soldiers though.

 

BTW: Using heavy thermic lances inside subs really makes the game too easy (not as easy as MC, but almost).

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  • 1 year later...
  • 11 months later...
I saw somebody speculate that the UE equivalent of the tasers worked better if you had your second hand free. I think they may have been right, as I had a tough mission that I kept reloading that involved a sequence of events, one of which was stunning a tougher alien critter and dropping the gun seemed to guarantee a KO whereas with the gun still in hand I almost never KO'd it. I haven't noticed this in TFTD though. Anybody know if single handed tasering makes a difference?
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Well, the stun rod in UFO is classed as a 2-handed weapon in the object file. But it's not the accuracy that's in question. It doesn't care if it's 2-handed or not as it always hits adjacent enemy units. It's the damage.

 

The stun rods are faster but have less stunning power than the thermal tazers. The tazers are slightly slower but pack a heavier punch, so you deal more stun damage on average per attack.

 

Edit: Just for comparison, the stun rod does 60 stun for 30% TUs, while the thermal tazer does 80 stun for 40% TUs. 80's not bad! That's between 0 - 160 stun damage!

 

Curiously enough, the melee accuracy for the tazer appears to be 120. The vibroblade has 150 and the other drills get 160! Not that these values are used by the game... or are they? Hmm.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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