I'm still finding it difficult to believe when people say they can go through a game with very few or no losses. I'm not as careful and planned out as I could be in the tactical game, but occasionally you run into those situations where it really seems impossible to avoid losing a soldier.

For example recently there was a downed large scout with the interior center walls gone but no hole in the roof. I could tell there was one alien left, and it was in the ship. No matter how I moved around outside the ufo and how long I waited it refused to come out. I had no choice but to send in a soldier. Sure enough it was standing at the opposite end of the ufo, facing the door with a plasma gun in hand. I suppose I couldve gone in with a cannon or RL and killed it even if I missed, but I entered with a soldier with a heavy plasma. He fired, he missed, the alien got reaction fire, hit the soldier, soldier dies.

Another time I landed at some crash site in farmland, sent out my tank, looked around, no aliens, so I threw out a smoke grenade at the foot of the ramp and let it pop. Next round I look around a bit more with the tank, no aliens, so I send out my soldiers around the landing gear in the smoke. At the start of the following round an alien comes out from around some trees nearby and somehow sees one of my soldiers in the smoke, shoots, I'm dead. :hmmm:

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On a sidenote, I recently had one of my bases attacked twice. I thought I had read someone saying that once one of your bases is attacked and you successfully defend it the aliens won't attack it again. This was not the case.

That is definetly not the case. My base, West Point (guess where it's located) was attacked over 10 times in my game.

I feel your pain about when soldiers have to die. Recently on an alien base mission I had to capture an alien commander. I reached the control room with my high ranking must not die soldiers. So I end the turn to wait for my rookies to get there. I wanted them to go up and kill the aliens with rocket launchers before they blow up the control room. Next turn, the control room blows up. I reload (this is the first I have played in years, so I find it forgivable) and move my soldiers around differently and hope I won't get the same result. I didn't. So I had no choice but to send up my best soldier and have her kill the suicidal aliens. In the process she dies.

I guess one way to avoid soldier losses in these foreseeable situations is to grab all the artifacts you can and dust-off, ignoring the last alien. It does sound unavoidable otherwise. Other than, say, pushing grenades up into the control room from below.

Re base attack missions, the general wisdom is once a retaliation scouting mission finds your base, a retaliation battleship will be on its way. If you shoot down that battleship, another will follow, until one manages to land and storm your base.
Winning that mission means only that the aliens have to send another scout mission to re-locate your base again before they send another battleship. (The funny bit is, you'd think they'd remember - or maybe the aliens have a "cell" organization, and every battleship operates independently of the others.) But if there's plenty of shoot-downs in your area, or several races in play at the same time, that could happen sooner rather than later.

Don't feel too bad, about the base attacks.
I once had a game where 15 battleships would attack my base each month.
And this is on SUPER easy mind you.
Sure I was rolling in the money, but I got so fed up with all the base attack missions, I just stopped playing.

Once one particular group of aliens have decided to attack your base, they will repeatedly attack it until one of their ships get through. After that, they just 'forget'.

Multiple groups of the same species can target your base, so it's not surprising to have the same species crew attack it twice in a row. I suppose it depends on how many alien retaliation scouts that they send out at a time -- each one is a 'group' that acts independantly.

As for those aliens that stay in one spot, there are ways to get them.

The alien in that large scout who always stands in the control room is rather annoying if the engine room is gone. One way of tackling it is to drop a smoke grenade by the door way and let the smoke spread about a bit before entering. Some smoke particles seem to be unhampered by the walls of the UFO. This isn't going to help all the time, but it does mean a very small chance of walking through the door without being shot. Once you get through, a few explosive shells or rockets should do the trick, even though you cannot see the alien.

Another method is to exploit the corner walls near it. This may feel a little dodgy at times, but the aliens tend to exploit the corner walls too to shoot at you at peculiar angles (at least in TFTD they do). Fire a rocket or throw a grenade into the wall. In the mountain map tileset, your explosives usually blast away the wall at the same time.

Lonestar: With explosive weaponry, you don't need to be on the same level to hurt your enemies. Just fire at the ceiling in the general vicinity of where the alien is standing. The explosion will go through the ceiling and get anything on the tiles above it. This is especially true in the command centre in alien bases, and in some UFOs like the abducter and supply ships. Even works with stun or incendiary ammo. You can even try throwing a grenade through the ceiling, but this does feel a bit like cheating. At least with the explosive shells it's reasonable enough.

- NKF

The corner bug is not verry common in UFO. this does not mean it doesent exist.
the reason it is their in TFTD is becaus of a problem with the map graphics. the corner peaces on the north and west side of a ship were not created properly guess it got past QA

to get past the large scoute issu.. I would have sent in some one with a rocket launcher or auto cannon... even a miss can be a kill.


-Blade FireLight

I was going to say it's never unavoidable but thinking back... I lost a soldier in my current game... disintegrated...

Only lost the one guy though and I'm on my way to cydonia now...

It'd be neat if there were a 'record' option when playing and you could send someone a 'recorded game' for review. I'd love to see how you tackle certain situations, and how you approach the tactical missions in general.

Oh also, The Veteran, on that first mission when you're up against sectoids and you know there will be a leader (like a terror mission or medium ship), before you've gained psi labs, do you keep your soldiers seperated from each other and armed only with rifles or some such, to ensure none die to psi attacks ?

Veteran lost a soldier :o

-Blade FireLight

There are those simply unavoidable situations, especially the Blaster Bomb Incidents which just happen with no precursoral warning.

The worst for me was an alien deciding to commit suicide!

In the small scouts their are usually 4 aliens i think... and i sent a solider into the ship and if u dont check it out properly ,ie behind the power source you can get fried... the alien then shot totally missed an hit the power source an boom!... i didn't think that it would be that explosive to be able to kill both of us?

Anyhow it automatically went to the stats screen cauz it was the last alien... and i didn't save through the mission... now that i think about it i rarely save during missions, only in the geoscape!

It wasn't an unavoidable loss, it was more of a 'Oh well another one bites the dust!' loss

I don't usually do anything when it's sectoids Slythe as I'm confident the guys can usually handle them within a small enough number of turns to prevent any danger of mind control. With Ethereals and the like I usually drop everyone's guns while they're still in the skyranger... Except the ones that go out for battle obviously.

"What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?"

"You fight like a cow"

Heh, if there's one thing the Monkey Island games that I'd like to see in other games would be the ability to cause your enemy's attacks to slip up badly merely by taunting them.

"Aha, you kidney shaped globule of puss, I'll poke you with this sharp pointy stick-like thingy end of this stick" said by a rookie to a celatid, which is not intimidated at all.

But I suppose that's what the psi-amp's panic attack does...

- NKF

Maybe you use the psi-amp to jump the language barrier and send the aliens disturbing images.

"It's dogs! Playing poker! Waaugh"

I find this hard to believe. Let me tell you about my most recent game.

It's early April I believe. My soldiers have personal armor, heavy plasma, and medkits. We haven't gotten psi lab or hyperwave technology yet of course, so I have no idea what the psi strengths of my soldiers are, nor the type of alien in any ufo I assault. A base forming swarm of ships appears in the arctic. I send my European interceptor with dual plasmas and down the 2 larges and 1 small, and lose track of the 1 very large I had tracked. I send my Skyranger to one of the downed large ufos. Once I start the mission and step out from my craft, I see a sectoid, so I know there's a leader on board who I'd like to stun for psi lab tech (It's a supply ship btw). Now it takes MANY turns to carefully move all one's soldiers out and into and up the ufo, all the while having psi attacks launched at you. During this time you're bound to have psi weak soldiers either made to go berserk or taken under control.

Now my options here are limited. I brought the usual heavy plasmas, grenades, medkits, and stun rods, not knowing what type of aliens I would encounter. I had no tank as it was destroyed on the last mission and my new one hadn't arrived yet. If I plan on actually winning this mission, I need to kill most of the aliens, so I have to keep my soldiers armed. The first psi attack on one of my soldiers removes about half of his morale and that's it, so I figure he probably has average psi strength at least. A little later a different soldier is made to panic on their first attack. I plan to disarm that soldier at the first opportunity. At this point my soldiers are gathered around the 2 entrances into the supply ship. Next turn a new soldier is psi attacked, is immediately taken under control, and guns down 2 of my other soldiers who were nearby.

In retrospect let's see what my options were. I could've:

- sent out a few unarmed scouts who would be the ones spotted by the aliens and psi attacked, while my other soldiers hanged far enough back to snipe the aliens. However eventually armed soldiers have to approach and enter the ufo, leaving them open to psi attacks (they will invariably be spotted by aliens).

- brought along only standard rifles and pistols and no plasma or grenades, except smoke grenades, however with personal armor my soldiers can still kill each other. I suppose this would've been my safest bet, but dangerous nonetheless.

Any other options I'm missing ?
How would you have equipped your Skyranger before setting out to recover a downed large ufo with unknown occupants ?
How would you have carried out the tactical assault ?

(All of this assuming your goal is to a) try your best to not lose any soldiers, and B) win)

This is definetely a tough call... Usually when I need to do this (in my current game I am in the same position as you you, Psi-Labs JUST built, havent assigned soldiers yet, and no hyperwave decoders) I just send my normal squad, with everything I have researched. All the goodies.

Then I just send a few guys out at a time, like 3. Have them completely separate, and see what they can do. I keep two guys behind, snipers, to cut em down from a distance.

It's a given that you will lose a few guys, but a full supply ship in the beginning of the game is definetely worth their lives.