Vin

I can't really speak for apocalypse, but the I think the biggest flaw with the aliens is that they have to focus. Are they openly attacking(raids/terror missions), or are they secretly subverting our society? If they'd stayed quiet, X-Com would never have been formed. If they'd gone all-out with battleships and destroying cities with ethereals and mutons right from the get-go, X-Com wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes, much less 5 missions. But instead they mixed the tactics, being aggressive enough to make their presence generally known to the people who could do something about it, but staying quiet from the general masses. Way to do exactly what the human governments want, guys. That's using those gene-tweaked psionic brains! I told you not to breath the blast-bomb fumes...

*shudder* Night fighting is so creepy. I'm crazy paranoid at night. It tends to end up lit up like Christmas with all the flares I chuck about, nevermind the fires. But it's all good fun. The screams of civilians, the eleventy-one plasma bolts that seem to come from nowhere and yet everywhere. It's worth it, though. Not much is funner than a good UFO night battle. Of course, not much is more frustrating than a bad one, but that's the bell-curve for you.

Admittedly, the Zerg average pretty low on the think-meats, but they are commanded by what is, essentially, a huge brain, with smaller brains to back it up and help organize things. They aren't tactically inept, so you'll be seeing tactical ambushes and the like. Second, the X-com aliens are hardly anything like a mix of all the aspects of the 3 SC species. They use weapons, sure, but that's like saying Terran = Protoss just because both are known to use technology. The XC aliens have some mind control abilities, but lack the massive destructive power of SC psionicists, like Protoss Templar or Archons. They are like the Zerg only in that they tend to be monstrous in our point of view. If anything, they resemble the Terrans, with a heavy reliance on technology to augment their frail fleshy selves. This may be different in Apoc, I haven't played that one. Finally, my point wasn't numbers(though that plays a role) so much as scale. In any given game, I never hear of huge world-spanning battles between humans and aliens for Xcom. Over decades of trying to conquer our world, they use small-scale combat to the exclusion of anything else, such that a tiny covert group ends up grinding them into dust in the course of a year or two. Even if we multiply the scale of the Xcom battles times 10, that might be 100-200 people killed per skirmish, with 100-150 soldiers battling 200ish aliens. A single SC map might easily involve 5 to 10 times that number of Zerg, not even bothering to adjust for gameplay reducing the scale to something more manageable for the players. Call half of that easily killed zerglings, and you still get 2.5 times the number of aliens in real, genuinely dangerous Zerg. Most Zerg aren't melee either, really. Zerglings and Ultralisks. End of list. And I'd like to see you take an Ultralisk with a sword. Seriously. I'll give you your choice of armor from the Xcom games, even. And even if you do rely on your ranged firepower, how are you going to detect a Lurker ambush? What about that Devourer trick which blocks all ranged fire, preventing you from hurting even the puny zergling? Or his 80 or so friends. Or nevermind Lurkers, what about the fact that *any* Zerg can burrow into hard, tough ground and pop back out at will? Suprise! Earlier someone was arguing that the Zerg air was maddeningly slow compared to even modern aircraft, and easily outranged by alien UFOs. I seem to recall the Protoss glassing a world from orbit with their air-power at some point. In gameplay, no given Protoss ship has "nuke the enemy from wherever you please" range. I'm guessing they scaled it down a bit for gameplay. Call me crazy, but I don't think Wraiths are slow, clunky things that barely manage to get from point A to point B. Or Valkyries. Etc. It seems ridiculous for the Zerg to be fast as fleshy, squishy things, but if a Chryssalid can take a Blaster-Bomb 5 seconds after birth, I'll take mach 5 Mutalisks. The Zerg are shooting for that whole "peak of evolution" thing, after all. Scourge might not move at light-speed, but they are *fast* little bastards. Besides, even if the aliens *do* shoot at them, their UFO weapons are almost certainly designed to destroy enemy air-craft. Take on a fly with a hammer, tell me how it goes. Better yet, take it on by throwing the hammer at it. Now fight off a swarm of bees with your hammer. Bring friends, to help or take pictures. 3 stings and you're "out". That sounds kind of fun, actually, but first I need a stupid "friend" to give my idea to. And a camera. ...I didn't mean to type so much. I swear.

I've only skimmed this topic, but I have an observation to make, if it hasn't been made yet : The Xcom aliens primarily use stealth and hit-and-run tactics to assault earth, subverting countries and organizations rather than simply laying waste to the world. Why? Look at what one relatively small organization accomplishes in stopping them. A group starting at maybe 20ish military troops rising to maybe 200 elite super-soldiers puts a screeching halt to their plans to dominate one world. Twice. They have tech, but neither large-scale tactics nor numbers appear to be on their side. In the course of the Starcraft campaign, the Zerg decimate entire worlds in the space of a few missions. No subversion or trickery, just monstrous brute force and overwhelming numbers. One guy kept mentioning the Zerg losing to the Terrans, but as I recall about the SC campaign, when you came down the it the Zerg whipped the Terran *and* the Protoss up one side and down the other, especially once Kerrigan took the lead. It took their combined strength just to bring down the Overmind, and even that only temporarily scattered the Zerg. Didn't SC:BW end with them(barely) getting a sort of truce with the Zerg, because they couldn't actually stop them? I forget the details, but the point is the Zerg gave two very, very high-tech species a serious run for their money.

So if one was gonna try and increase the item limit, the first order of business would probably be increasing the battlescape's item table size? Assuming this is just implemented in a similar way, would it then be found in the battlescape.exe file? For some reason 'table' seems to imply it has a different way of dealing with that cap, and that increasing it could cause problems.

Where would the info telling the game to stop at 80 items be stored, anyway? The .exe? This sounds simple enough that you'd think it could be changed with just a hex-editor if you knew where it was, at least up to 255. Would it just be a universal value stuck somewhere, or is it more likely a value attached to every ship, to the base, etc? I can't think of any errors that might be associated with carrying more than 80 items into a fight, but my knowledge of the game is limited at best. Any ideas? I plan to try and toy with the .exe(after backing up ) if I can find an hex editor that'll work with moderate sized files(Silly demo limitations.) Any ideas/advice/omgwtfdon'tdothat warnings? Well that's discouraging. I never stopped to think just how....BIG a 400kbish file could be. Anybody know of a more efficient way to try and find this particular bit of data? Or is this idea just doomed to failure?

I like lasers simply because I tend to take way too much on trips. Between grenades(smoke, proximity, normal/alien), flares, rockets, high explosives, stun rods, med kits, an HWP....etc, I tend to feel I'm making sacrifices to carry ammo clips.

"RAARGH! I'm gonna get...hey, is that a heavy plasma gun? I, uh...forgot to lock my door. Be right back."