SaintD

Heavy plasma is your friend. Especially on Superhuman. Two or three blaster bombs might not be enough but a face full of plasma usually does the trick. The trick is to get your people spread out in an effective firing arc and make good use of scouts. Removing all cover is warranted when chrysalids are present.

Wow. Thanks NKF. Nice writeup. I will have to find a copy.

I ran across the description for "Valkyria Chronicles" for PS3 while cruising Metacritic. The turn based combat and soldier/tank upgrade stuff sounds borrowed from XCOM. Has anyone played it? Thoughts?

My favorite early loadout, especially for early terror missions, is one rocket tank, 10 agents with the following. One rocket launcher loaded with a heavy rocket. One smoke grendade one pistol (laser prefered) One High Ex strength permitting. That's 50 items. Then I stock some flares and a couple of stun rods. Turn 1, pop 2 smokes (one inside, one on the ramp) and deal with any immediate threats. Turn 2, tank clears the area around the craft. Two agents kneel down by the back landing gear. Turn 3. Next two agents debark and fire rockets at the nearest cover then drop the launchers. Turn 4. Pistol weilding agents switch to scouting role using high-ex to remove cover or as grenades. Rocket carrying agents use aimed shots to snipe spotted enemies. Whenever you use up a rocket, drop the launcher and get another one agent out. Keep some launchers with a good line of site on scouts. If the enemy is floaters, use the rockets to remove cover/reapers and the pistols to kill aliens. If it's Sectiods, save rockets for the cyber-discs and use high-ex to remove cover. If the enemy is snakemen, retreat if you can't afford to lose the Skyranger.

Terror was short and didn't feel connected to xcom too much. Apoc is shaping up to be really good and all the back references to xcom are fun. Finished Apoc. I really enjoyed it. F.I. is a great character.

If an alien is bouncing in and out of a UFO door, I set the grenade for 1 and toss it by the door. It goes off with the door open, sometimes getting several kills. I also set 2 turn timers on demo charges when landscaping in order to give weak rookies time to get well away from the blast. I am not sure what the designers thought longer delays would be good for. 10 turns? I mean c'mon.

For the first few terror mission I love having at least 5 missile launchers. Just level the the place. Bring a few Incendiary rounds for night. If I have them, I give the rocket guys laser pistols, a launcher and two heavy rockets with a pile in reserve in the ranger. First guy off the bus fires his two missiles at the nearest cover, the switches to a scout role with the laser pistol. Later in the game if I have points and money coming in reliably, I often just land and dust off right away if things don't look ideal. Winning battles is great, but terror missions can only truly be won in the air. Don't get sucked into a disasterous mission that might put the war effort in jeopardy. Doubly so if you only have the one Sky Ranger! Don't risk it in dicey battles.

That was great. Do you have links to the other play alongs there? Your Infinity PA was just brilliant.

Just read the XCOMUTIL docs and set up autoequip. I ran it for a while. It was handy once I got all the equipment researched and whatnot. It also bypasses the 80 item limit so a fully skyranger can still carry HP + grenades and whatnot that makes sense. I consider the 80 item limit to be a bug of sorts. The problem with autoequip is when you want to take a special kit for a particular mission. You have to edit names and create entries in the EQP file. You can name your people you want to have the smoke grenades /smoke and set the autoequip up for that. Then you can use the sort function to put /smoke in near the door. XCOMUTIL is complex but it can really do a lot of neat stuff if you dig and experiment.

Agreed. There is a way. XCOMUTIL can modify a battlescape save on turn 0 and outfit your squad with a set kit. It's a bit complex to make work, but it allows you to work around the need to "spring clean" all the time and can be used to get around the 80 item limit. EQP:n = Equip the current squad of soldiers/aquanauts from base n according to the equipment type specified at the end of each name. Since equipment is taken from the base and not the ship, use of this flag eliminates the 80-item limit during combat. Steps. (Don't do this in dosbox. Works with Windows versions for this purpose) 1. Install XCOMUTIL. Annoyingling it won't run until XCUSETUP.bat is run. 2. Create a file called XCOMUTIL.EQP in your xcom folder with the following text. This assumes you have enough Heavy Plasma's to go around. See XCOMUTIL docs for more options. / RH1:Heavy_Plasma:Heavy_Plasma_Clip RS1:High_Explosive LS1:Alien_Grenade 3. Save your game as soon as the base battle starts, for this example I saved in slot 10 (which I reserve for this use). Don't do anything else and don't end turn. You get one chance at this! 4. run XCOMUTIL.EXE EQP WRT GAME_10 6. Load the game and your people should be outfit how you like. If you use the dosbox version of the game, you can make this a seemless part of the game.

Nice work sir! Re: XcomUtil, I agree with you and still recomend it if for the DOS version with DOSBOX. However, Seb's extender does everything I needed xcomutil for and more in the windows version.

Xcomgold + Sebs loader work on Win7 which allows per application muting in the sound mixer. Pretty nice really. I disabled the music as above and turned the sound effects way, way done. The button noise is really loud otherwise.

Has anyone got windowed mode and HQ4X to work on Win7 with any combination of dxwnd or not? ROFL I just want everything, I know.

Stunned units can wake up unless you stuff them in your backpack. So one of your victims just woke up naked and feeling drunk. Good thing they aliens don't pick up dropped weapons.

I am not a fan of HQX for XCOM. I prefer ADVINTERP3X from DOSBOX. I am not sure how the algorithm works v.s. hqx, but it makes xcom look nicer IMHO.