Morganjs1

Getting back into UFO after a while, and was doing reasonably well on beginner mode. Nicely developing squad, each with around 4 missions behind them and around 3-4 kills each. Just starting to get comfortable. Then I had the most disastrous terror site deployment, I had to come on here and talk about it to make me feel better. Skyranger touches down in rome for a night terror site attack. HWP rolls off the ramp and is immediately destroyed by plasma fire. Move the rest of my agents into position to exit, deploy a smoke grenade and manage to snipe a sectoid from within the craft. Not too bad so far. I deploy my decent squaddies from the craft and also 1-2 rookies. My regulars manage to kill a cyberdisc and another 2 sectoids on the 1st turn, so all proceeds well. I was keeping my sergeant in the dropship along with 2 rookies as I didn't want the ramp area to get too tightly packed. Then it all goes horribly wrong when a rookie that is still INSIDE the ranger gets mind controlled, and lobs a grenade at his feet. Boom. 2 men dead. Similar story outside where I get an alien grenade in the face, killing 2 of my best troops. My sergeant is still miraculously alive in the skyranger despite the grenade, so I decide its best to stage a retreat. I get another trooper back to the dropship and decide to wait another turn for my last remaining man to get back. Yet again, an agent inside the skyranger gets mind controlled and shoots his incendiary rocket at the wall, engulfing the craft in flames. Somehow, my grenade surviving sergeant also manages to shrug off a rocket and is still alive, despite being on fire and smouldering slightly. I then bug out with 2 of my original 7 troops left. That put me in my place anyway. I love this game.

Excellent, thanks. At least that will save me uninstalling the fix when I want to play UFO

The TFTD only fix doesn't seem to work, the display is all garbled. Looks like the usual directdraw bug. Don't worry, I'll just stick with the old method of using the original fix and uninstalling when wanting to play UFO.

Hi Gimli, thanks for your assistance. the original vistafix always starts UFO Enemy Unknown correctly, colours always ok. The trouble is that when using the vistafix the game freezes on my PC whenever I intercept a UFO. Terror from the Deep however, works perfectly with the vistafix. So when I want to run UFO I just run the "xcom1.exe" in compatibility mode and its usually fine (aside from the occasional colours messing up, which can now be sorted out by alt-tabbing). When I want to run TFTD, I install the vistafix and then use the CE edition exe. If I want to go back to playing UFO I have to uninstall the vistafix. Not too much trouble, at least they both work.

You sir, are a gentleman. I alt-tabbed it the next time it happened and... it made it even worse at first! Then I did it again and it completely fixed the problem. So at least when it happens I can just alt-tab a few times until the colours sort themselves out. Thanks very much.

Hello everyone, does anyone know the reason behind the distorted / incorrect colours that occur when running Enemy Unknown on Vista? It seems to happen almost randomly, some days I'll be able to start it up no problem but then others it wont work no matter how many times I keep trying it. The first major sign of it is at the geoscape, when the globe looks normal but the menu on the right looks like this: http://img129.imageshack.us/img129/6955/xcommenuia8.th.jpg Any ideas on how to stop this happening or even why it happens?

Ah well, I will just restart and hope for a better chance to build up this time

Hey all, after starting a new XCOM game on beginner difficulty I go through the usual setup, order more scientists, buy a HWP, sell unwanted equipment etc. It all arrives, I arrange it as I want, then save the game. Then immediately I get a base invasion by the aliens.. This seems a bit harsh considering its beginner difficulty and I was wondering whats the shortest time people have had their base invaded in. This must have occurred within 1 week, and only previous UFO I'd seen was a very small one which I'd destroyed.

painmonger, I had this problem with my CE version installed from the CD, but when I tried a version from an internet site with an included windows "fix", it worked fine. I could PM you the link, though perhaps I had better check the rules first.

Well this is weird. TFTD now works perfectly but the original UFO has decided to stop working. Now whenever an intercept takes place on the geoscape, the mouse freezes and the intercept window refuses to come up, so I cant take down any UFOs. Prior to this, I was also having trouble with garbled colours on the buttons to the right of the geoscape. I don't understand how these problems can appear so intermittently, you'd think if there was a problem it would be the same all the time.. Damn vista, preventing me playing a classic.

I'd tried that and couldnt get it to work. After double checking what I had done, Id copied the Blade patch to the TFTD folder but forgotten the .sdb file so no wonder it didnt work (oops) Now I've stopped being an idiot and installed the fix properly, it works great! Sorry about asking a stupid question. Thanks for the help.

I've got UFO enemy unknown running in Vista at a good speed, using the collectors edition + the xcom1fix.exe file found on this site. I run this in win95 compatibility mode with all of the options below it ticked as well. However when I try to run Terror from the Deep using xcom2fix.exe I get "patch timed out" error message, and the display ends up being garbled. I don't know why XCOM1 works fine yet XCOM2 doesn't, anyone got any ideas how I could get this to work? I won't even start with xcom apocalypse, as I remember that was tricky to run under XP let alone Vista. Thanks