A Few Good Questions

[G.Wood]

Okay,

 

1. Does the time you take to react to an infested building determine the type of enemies. Such as, if you react quick, there will be less enemies, and some will be eggs and chrysalis, etc.

 

2. Does equipping only a single weapon give a noticeable accuracy differance then dual.

 

3. Does the recruiting pool Refresh or do people get added, and is it every day or week.

 

4. It would be cool if someone could ceate a patch that you could save custom setups, and load them onto another agent, and same for vehicles. OH, and formations in real time etc.

 

5. What should i produce in my alter dimension fleet, all annihilators, or mixed.

 

 

Im sure ill think of others.

[Guest Azrael]

5 - Annihilators are the best ships in the game, try to get as many of them as you can.

[G.Wood]

What happend to xcomdl.com ????

[j'ordos]

What happend to xcomdl.com ????

unfortunately, it seems down ATM, dunno if it'll ever come back.

 

1. I don't really know if the eggs disappear, but they do spread to nearby buildings, if you wait too long

 

2. beaneath the weapon icon, you can see a bar, which is the agent's current accuracy, add a weapon to the other hand, and you can see for yourself . Once your agent has trained firing accuracy to a high level, it doesn't really matter anymore, but in the beginning you may want to limit yourself to one weapon.

 

3. I think it was every week, and they get added.

 

4. Well, it's still better than xcom1/2 . What do you mean with formations in real time?

[[NKF]]

1.

 

If you react quickly, i.e. within the first, let's say, five - ten minutes, after the UFO first dropped its payload into a building (and without using the ultra-fast time elapse mode): You'll get LOTS of aliens, eggs, etc (depending on difficulty and the type of ship). Especially so with the mothership/battleship, as you'll sometimes get two full-sized maps chained together. Very nasty these. Note that dealing with the site immediately tends to drastically reduce the infiltration in the area.

 

The longer you wait (a couple of hours, for example), you'll meet less aliens, but the aliens will have spread out a lot more and you'll get a lot of infiltration in the general area around the dropsite (and if it's really bad, it might spread to two or three buildings away). If left unchecked, this tends to produce a lot of sirens. Sirens are bad. The less sirens the better.

 

2. Equipping a two-handed weapon reduces accuracy, but it increases your fire-rate. Basically a tradeoff of accuracy for rate of fire. If the weapons are fast enough, you could even upgrade from auto to snap, or snap to aimed and still maintain excellent speed.

 

Now, with pistol sized weapon, like the plasma gun or toxigun, you won't suffer from this.

 

3. The recruitment pool is randomised every day. Every day. Some soldiers/techs may stay in the pool, some may disappear. You can test this out by saving before the end of any given day, ending the day and checking your hire list. Reload and repeat.

 

4. True. You can equip multiple agents with the same equipment at the same time by ctrl+selecting your agents. Just set up your inventories with identical setups (say medikit on left leg, stun grenades in left pocket, AP's in right, smoke grenade on right shoulder, cloaking device in left hand, etc). Ctrl+select your agents, then equip the current agent, and all the others will do the same (or will try to).

 

Actually, it would be nice if the game didn't make empty clips disappear and just swapped it out with a full or partial clip. See, the game already knows how to rearm a partial clip. So if there was an empty clip, your agent would automatically refill the empty clips as long as there's enough ammo lying around. As it is, it's very annoying to re-arm a weapon that is fast but has a very small capacity clip, like the Law Pistol and Toxigun. It takes forever to load the clips, but you eat up the ammo like popcorn. Woosh.

 

5. Well, if all you want is to blow the alien fleet up in the alien dimension, a handful of Annihilators is all you really need. Any of the interdimensional ships can easily deal with any of the small to medium class UFOs with no trouble. The capital ships tend to pose a problem though.

 

The Explorer is technically a Hawk Air Warrior in what it can do in general, except for its smaller module space. Also the cheapest of the three 'fighter' ships. Great for hit-run-recharge-repeat attacks against ships in the alien dimension. I recommend 4 ships if you want to go one-on-one with a capital ship (okay, 4 on one)

 

The Retaliator is more of the same but slightly slower, but is worth 3 Explorers in terms of firepower (i.e. it can arm 3 medium disrupters), and can carry the same amount of shields as a Hawk. These can go head to head with captial ships in sufficient numbers. 3 - 4 is a good number, or combine 1 or 2 with 3 - 4 Explorer escorts.

 

The Annihilator is more of the same, but now it has even more firepower and a heck of a lot more module space that can give you up to 1400 shield points on top of your existing 700 hull points. These guys can stand on their own!

 

So, the easiest is to just build 3, 6 or even more Annihilators and deck them out with as many shields and disrupter guns as you can and you're all set. Mixed ships need more hit-run-recharge-repeat strategies.

 

- NKF

Edited November 28, 2004 by NKF

[Jonaleth Irenicus]

1- I don't think so. Like the aleins getting new technology, I think score determines what kind of (or number of) enemies you get. Example: You will only get antropods and spitters in the beginning, then worms start showing up and then poppers. I usually do not wait for an alert and go clean out an infested building myself, and even if I go there mere seconds after the alien unload their troops, there are lots of aliens around. You still should respond as fast as you can, as j'ordos pointed out, aliens tend to spread around.

 

2- I think there is a small accuracy penalty for dual guns and a bigger one for using two handed weapons (rifles and heavy launchers). It all boils down to what you want to and the capacities of your men. In my superhuman android game, I have to dual equip weapons so I can keep firing over a large area (I also bring a lot of soldier into missions).

 

3- You get changes to the recruiting list every day. The buy items list changes every week. You can save/load to get the number of recruits/items you want.

 

4- This is j'ordos' area.

 

5- Annihilators are better than Retallitators in terms of withstanding damage. In terms of firepower and items, they are not so very different. If you are going to blast away the alien dimension and you want to do it fast, you can just round up Retallitators and be done with it. Remember to micro manage your Retallitators and withdraw the ones that are low on health/shields.

[G.Wood]

What is micro managing and macro managing. is that just, controlling a group and controlling an individual?

 

What i mean by formations in real time is, could you set up custom formations, like a v or line or whatever, without micromanaging it, (i think that would be micro managing) When i arrive in the alien dimension all ships immediately attack my ships and i dont stand a chance, and my ships come out 1 at a time.

 

What is required to be able to research the advanced workshop bio lab and quantum lab. so i can get to it faster and produce things earlier.

[[NKF]]

Micro managing is just manging everything in minute detail. i.e. you spend most of your time micromanaging your troop equipment, and then you spend most of your time micromanaging all your troops in combat. For air combat, keep watch of everything that's happening to your ships. Easiest is to just pause every so often and see what's happening. Micro - or small - managing is basically just managing in the short term.

 

Macro means long, or over a long period, so macro-managing means managing over a longer period of time. Sort of managing the big picture. Your long term plans and goals. Like saying "I want an Annihilator" or "I must get Shields" at the start of the game, and then planning out your course of action on how you are to achieve your goals. So, in contrast, Micro managing basically deals with the details of the larger picture.

 

As for formations, yeah, pity. You can have four ships stack onto one location by having them each on different elevations. As UFOs can only hit 1 of the 4 at any given time, 3 of them are safe from everything but friendly fire. Not quite the formation you may be looking for, but certainly a formation that can be achieved in this game.

 

P. S: For alien dimension raids, you can send ships in 3 at a time by sending each ship to different gates. So if you have 9 ships, send 3 ships in each gate. Makes for rapid deployment.

 

Also, once you enter the AD, immediately head to the right edge of the map. Few UFOs tend to wander there unless they're chasing after you, so you can use that as a place to rest up and stage your assaults on the UFOs. It's not a good idea to immediately start fighting multiple ships at the entrance. Flee to safety and if you're sending a transport in with troops, it's easy enough to zip in when the coast is clear and land at the building.

 

As for the large workshop, hmm, I think you needed to go up the Dimension Probe research branch for that. Can't recall the exact details. I know you need two of the three UFO subsystems (power supply and ... I think it was navigation, just do all three) and a Type-3 UFO (That's the first medium transporter you meet. Purple. Not to be confused with the purple escort that's often partially cloaked). They rarely, if ever appear in the mid to late game. So it's best to catch them early.

 

- NKF

Edited November 30, 2004 by NKF

[Arjuna]

For advanced workshop you need to first research the Dimension Probe, which is a pain in the @ss because that means that you won't be able to start building one right off the bat, but must first wait to get your shop online. To research the probe, you must have captured an intact UFO of at least type-3, to research control systems, power systems, and propulsion systems. The Dimension Gate UFOPedia entry tells you this. Alien probes and scouts self-destruct remotely when shot down, so these won't get you anything.

 

As for the labs, I think that you need the Alien Life Cycle or Alien Genetic Structure research before you can get the advanced biochem facility, and I don't remember what it was for the QP lab, but I think it's some ship component.