Ufo Assault With Hovercars

[Cheshire]

I sold my Valkerie and used two hovercars to deliver my agents. For the first week, that was great - I had enough $$ to get a good start on my next base, and 2 cars was enough to deliver 8 agents, a cargo bin and an alien bin to my alien investigations.

 

However, now it's week 2, and I need to assault the downed Type 3 ships. It will be at *least* a week before I can buy a Valkerie, but attacking the ships with 4 agents is getting old.

 

1) Is there a way to get both my hovercars to land and assault the ship together?

 

2) If not, do y'all think I'm better off:

 

i) Attacking with 4 agents and a cargo bin,

 

ii) Attacking with 4 agents and an alien bin, or

 

iii) Using a passenger compartment to attack with more agents, but give up on any loot that my guys can't get in their packs?

 

I'm leaning towards 2.iii.

[j'ordos]

Never tried it, but perhaps if you select multiple craft (ctrl+click) and order them all to attack the downed UFO?

 

Can you even assault UFOs with craft that don't have any cargo modules?

[Exo2000]

Selling that Valk was really silly. You could fit another passenger module in one of the cars, but you'd have to give up on bodies or on loot.

[[Blehm 98]]

Yeah, you get your valkyrie specifically so you can take down smaller ships easily(nothing over type 3) and for transporting troops. My valkyrie is pretty heavily armed, and it also has a bio transport module, cargo module, and a troop module, so it can carry up to 12 Heavily armored and armed troops, yet also carry all the extra equipment and aliens i pick up from going to 3-4 missions in a row

[[NKF]]

Hovercar pairs are perfectly fine for city missions, but UFO assaults require a ship with at least 8 slots to fit one bio and one cargo module - so it's worth hanging on to your Valkyrie - pity the government gave you a sub-standard engine - I think new valkyries have better engines. Either way hang on to it. There are other ways to make money.

 

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Money is not too hard to come by in Apocalypse after you've been playing for a while (and there's plenty of low-cost alternatives you can resort to), but if you really need the cash early on and refuse to resort to raid or use the dubious 'stun raid', you can use ol' NKF's semi-patented Sell Cars for Cash scheme that utilises the Mega Primus economy to make something out of nothing to put in a bit of extra pocket change in your wallet. It's

 

First off, at the very start of a new game (or at any time, just as long as you have the cash) buy as many Stormdogs as your cash will allow.

 

Strip them apart and sell off the hulls, the engines, the weapons and the fuel you got from them and the ammo in bulk - not one at a time. You'll always get more than what you paid to get the cars (even if you don't add the value you get from the free Stormdog and the free AA ammo). This works well for a few months until the resale prices drop to 50%.

 

But if you want to make a really huge profit, hang on the to the ammo for a couple of weeks - espeically the 'anti-airguard' ammo that comes free with every new Stormdog. After gathering a few weeks worth of anti-airguard ammo, sell the lot off in bulk. You'll get a very good return, at $8 a bullet. They're still quite profitable at $7 a bullet or even $6 a bullet.

 

Note: If you plan to use any stormdogs (yes, I know some of you quite people out there do use them for transport - if not for combat) or even the Wolfhounds, I'd suggest driving them out of the base and parking them somewhere else so you don't accidentally sell them.

 

You can do it with the Griffons and Wolfhounds as well, but don't do it with blazer turbo bikes. You have to sell them in parts just to get back the amount you spent on them with a bit extra for the few chips of fuel that they use, so they're not that profitable.

 

- NKF

[[Blehm 98]]

Also, once you get a type 4 UFO, Hovercars WILL go down in 1-3 hits, so they'll get slaughtered

[Cheshire]

Yeah, I won't sell my Valk again.

 

For now, I'm attacking the downed craft with a hovercar + passenger compartment, and just having my guys pick up all the loot they can, but I would much rather have 12 guys, a cargo bin, and a biocontainment unit.

[Exo2000]

Wolfhounds are very useful for any beam down missions, as for building missions you can use as many vehicles as you like. Try using one soldier-transport Wolfhound, with another as Cargo and Bodies, with another slot for soldiers. Works wonders.

 

Also, later, when you get the Biotrans units, they can carry nothing short of a full thirty six soldiers, if you equip them right.

 

(Biotrans get a 4 wide by 6 long cargo space, which means they can transport a lot of stuff. Use them in pairs or more if you can afford to. Don't keep all your eggs in one basket, either!)

[[Blehm 98]]

yes, just spread them out into 2 baskets so you only lose 2 biotranports for your 36 troops instead of one biotransport and 36 troops

[Exo2000]

yes, just spread them out into 2 baskets so you only lose 2 biotranports for your 36 troops instead of one biotransport and 36 troops

 

Not quite what I meant... but if you spread 36 troops across multiple ships, there's a much smaller chance of losing the lot. Put all 36 in one biotrans and that biotrans goes down, you're down several million in equipment, armour, weaponry and vehicles.

 

(It's why I don't pack all my soldiers on one Wolfhound. Falling stuff is bad. :wink1: )

[[Blehm 98]]

personally, although i take 12 troops with me, if the map is good, 6 troops is very good. By the time you hit 36, you have to line your guys up against the edge of the map and just hit aimed or snap shot, and let the game run....

[Exo2000]

True, but most games can still dissolve into a bughunt on some maps even with 36 (example slums... those are heck)

[[Blehm 98]]

yeah... at least slums burn alot...

actually, if you leave, then destroy the slums, will all the aliens die?

[[NKF]]

No. Even if the building physically no longer exists, the infiltration in the area remains and will spread to adjacent buildings.

 

---

 

I usually put all my eggs in one basket but I also take a more cautious approach for deploying the troop transport. I always wait until:

 

1. The air skirmish is over. Infiltration takes time to spread, so there's plenty of time to relax until the UFOs are gone or blown to bits. Or

2. I'm using a road vehicle to send a secondary/tertiary team and it's taking a longer route to the drop-site thus avoiding the air skirmish. Or

3. All UFOs in the AD are vanquished

4. Alternately for visits to the AD, if I haven't got the firepower to do #3, I send decoys ships (fighters - like the Explorer) into the first three gates and send my transport last so that the first ships to enter the AD get targeted before the transport. Then I head to the safe zone and wait patiently for a chance to duck into a building.

5. I spend the extra cash and use an Annihilator as the transport and arm it to the teeth with large and small disrupter shields. I prefer the Bio-Trans for general transport, myself.

 

Mind you, when I say I put all my eggs in one basket, my teams generally consist of small squads of up to 6 or 12 soldiers, so my egg basket isn't really that big.

 

---

 

Regarding the last alien synrdome - it doesn't really happen all that often in Apocalypse unless the aliens are having path finding problems (the AI's confused) or are just stuck in a ditch of some sort, or stuck due to their size. Bug hunts are even less troublesome in real-time combat if you use relative motion* to detect aliens with the motion scanner.

 

I prefer it when these remaining aliens just flee from combat. The only real loss from fleeing aliens is not getting the points from killing them. For missions in the city, the effect of fleeing aliens is very minimal at best, and nothing a few game hours cannot handle.

 

- NKF

 

* Moving with the scanner on - since everything else is moving in relation to you, almost everything pops up on radar even if it's stationary.

[[Blehm 98]]

NKF, if aliens retreat, then don't they spread?

also, if you destroy a building then raid or check for alien activity do you search for aliens on rubble?

or can you burn down the battlescape too and cause extra damage?

[[NKF]]

I've played many games where I let aliens retreat, and no, retreating aliens are not serious and even if they did have an effect, the effect would be too small to be of any great concern. As I said, nothing that a few game hours won't deal with - if any.

 

If a nearby building is reported to be infilrated, it definitely won't be because of one or two retreating aliens. The numbers of aliens you see retreating do not match the number of aliens you'll actually meet if you go to investigate.

 

---

 

Each building site has an inifltration level (which controls how many aliens you'll be facing). Levelling the building won't change the infiltration level.

 

I suppose you could always save the game and give it a try, then use the infiltration charts to monitor the infiltration levels of buildings nearby.

 

Burning down the building in the battlescape has no effect except on relations (pretty obvious), your scores at the end and how much money the company loses in the ufopaedia. However, it would have considerable effect on the infiltration level if you killed most of the aliens in the building though.

 

- NKF

Edited June 16, 2005 by NKF

[Exo2000]

So the bigger and more important the building, the more aliens you will face? Interesting. That would explain why you don't meet many in places like Slums, etc., but you meet more in the Senate.

 

I presume you also mean the "Infiltration %" for each company..

Edited June 20, 2005 by Exo2000

[[NKF]]

Well, actually, I was referring to the infiltration percentage, but on a building by building basis. The graphs show it as a whole.

 

And no it's not the size or importance of the building, it's the size of the payload that the UFO can carry and drop that determines how many aliens you'll face. Difficulty also plays a role. The little scouts don't drop much of a fight, while the alien transporters can drop a fairly sizeable sum of aliens. A battleship or mothership for example has the capacity of dropping such a large payload of aliens that you have to play on two full sized maps. I can't even remember how many aliens that has. One, two, many, lots.

 

There's a rumour that the size of your squad influences the size of the map and how many aliens you face - from personal experience, I haven't seen this. I've faced a variable amount of aliens with only 4 - 6 soldiers on small (long) to large sized maps to huge (two large maps). But I'm sure this experience varies from player to player.

 

I'm just going to hazard a guess on how the game treats infiltration, but let's say the aliens drop 50 aliens into one building. Time passess and this value drops to, let's say 40, then the remainder is spread to all adjacent building blocks (which can sometimes lead to a result where the main site being re-infiltrated after you've cleared it out). Time passes, then these number spread out thinner and thinner. Even more time passes, and as the multiworms go through their very quick and short lifecycle, and their defenders die off, the numbers in each building dwindle. But as long as a sufficient number of aliens remain in a building, the infiltration bar rises - with the speed determined by the number of aliens. At various intervals the game does a check to see if the company will ring up X-Com for a bit of pest extermination. You, by going to each of these sites and investigation, deal severe blows to their propagation and reduce the impact of infiltration. Small numbers of aliens tend to die off naturally.

 

One other possibility is that alien growth and propagation may be base on the game of Life. Oh who knows.

 

Some of the mop-up missions can be weird. I once had one where I found only one brainsucker, and it ran away. I guess the others must have scarpered while I wasn't looking.

 

- NKF

Edited June 21, 2005 by NKF

[Exo2000]

Often I found if you slaughter 50-80% of the aliens on a site and take minimal damage, the survivors will leg it. I think this is true of building defenders also.

[komninosm]

If some aliens retreat you can always save and then check on all the surrounding buildings to see where they've gone, then reload and only search for aliens in that building and hopefully kill them.

I once chased an anthropod in 3 buildings from 3 different organisations before I could finally kill it before it used an exit square.