Pretty low on the IQ level


I happen to have downloaded TFTD a long while back. (Somewhere last year) and I noticed whilst playing the game just how STUPID the Lobstermen in the game can be.

Note that the game happens to be on the beginner level.

Now, Lobstermen usually turn up on a shipping mission when they first appear in the game. When playing on that mission. One of my soldiers came across one at the front of the ship on the deck. (Second level) and, of course, I fired at it.

Suddenly, the lobsterman fires a S***load of sonic rounds at my soldier, followed by GAS rounds (YES, Gas rounds, the ones from the Dart gun and gas rifles from X-Com soliders in the game) and then went back to sonic rounds and then shot a load of missiles and then fired a massive S***load of sonic rounds before it stopped finally.

The amount of time it took to wait was enough for me to go downstairs into the kitchen, make a cup of tea, bring it up stairs to my room, drink it and take it back downstairs to put by the washing and come back and wait for another ten minutes to finally be able to do anything about it.

And the most funny thing is. It completely missed my soldier. They didn't get hit ONCE!!!!

Since then, I've had a couple more situations like that, but, because they took LONGER then the previous scenario, it usually ended up with me rebooting my computer because it was taking so long. And I have Windows XP.

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This next thing is also on a shipping mission. When I enter the kitchen area. I found about 3 lobstermen in there with 1 civi. I was able to save the civi. But one of the lobstermen went into the FREEZER in the kitchen and I had to send a soldier in there just to kill it. It wasn't coming out for anything.

No unit has enough TUs or ammo to fire for more then a minute. The only thing I can recommend is to perhaps turn the firing animation speed up?

As for the lobster in the freezer, that one makes sense. It's more dangerous for you to go after a unit who's mangaged to hole himself up somewhere, so he was just forcing you to do that.

The trick is to blast out the walls behind it.

The freezer door's is quite buggy line-of-sight wise. But that's just an aside.

Regarding the weird attack, the weapons can sometimes get briefly corrupted at the end of the turn, resulting in extremely unusual weapon behaviour. Such as hydro-jet cannon rounds cutting through the Triton sections (or X-Com aqua base), or a gauss bullet being fired from a sonic weapon.

I don't know how the lobsterman was able to open fire for a minute or two, unless the game had the weapon corrupted to fire at a near 0% or 1% TU cost. 1% firing cost shouldn't take several minutes, and with 0% firing cost, it would never stop firing until the game crashes. (The game tends to crash if any unit uses continuous reaction fire after a certain number of attempts - which is quite high but shouldn't take too long to reach).

- NKF

I've had Gillmen (or perhaps Deep Ones) doing MC on a base defence mission. I still have a save, so if anyone wants it...

I don't think it's a bug - some Gillman officers are able to launch MC attacks, although I'm not sure which ones.

If the sectoids in UFO are anything to judge the Gill Men by, then it would have to be the higher ranking Gill Men. Leaders and Commander sectoids had psi in UFO, but not the rest of the henchmen.

I think for Gillmen that it was Squad Leaders that had molecular control powers. However, I'm pretty sure you can meet Squad Leaders early in the game. So I don't know if they get access to MC later in the game after a certain event has occured (score, research, whatever), or if it's always there but they just never got round to using it during the earlier stages?

No, actually, now that I think about it, I have had MC attacks early in the game during Gillman port raids. It's just not fair - but that's superhuman difficulty for you.

- NKF

If someone wants to test, I have the save, only problem is, I don't have MC Readers at that stage, so you'd have to know a way around it...

You know, I've been thinking. What if it was a Berserk reaction?

I've seen some of my soldiers go berserk and display a similar behaviour to the Lobsterman incident. Also, when they went berserk, they didn't use up any ammo from the weapon.

That answers the S***load of stuff fired. But that doesn't answer the gas round from a Jet Harpoon being fired from a Lobsterman.

Then again, NKF's explanation explains how they could. But the conditions were different. It WASN'T at the end of a turn. It was Reaction fire from a Lobsterman.

Oh and by the way, I usually keep the firing speed low to know where the shots are actually coming from.

(I found a program somewhere on the Net that slowed the game down to normal speed. But it wasn't a program that slowed the computer clock or anything, it was an application that allowed me to play the game at a slower pace without affecting the computer. I cannot remember the name of that program though.)

With that in mind, would it be a good idea to keep the firing speed slow until I find an enemy and speed it up when I deal with it?

Well, reaction fire from an enemy unit may very well have that effect. The main thing to do is to make periodic saves so that you can reload in case the game decides to go buggy on you (and just a reminder for those that might not yet know: reaction fire from a DPL is not a bug. It's rare, but it can happen.)

As for you firing speed, why not just set it to a moderate level where the speed is slow enough that you can see where it's coming from, but fast enough that it doesn't take several minutes to cross the screen? ;

For something that slow, I'm thinking of speed-1 on a 80286 with only 2 megs of ram - well under the game's minimum requirements. One of my earlier attempts at X-Com UFO and Ultima Underworld II was on such a system!

Oh, and wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more. Just a Pythonesque reference that came to mind when I saw this thread.

- NKF

Eh, what? You got those games running on a system like that?

You sure 286 isn't a typo?

I seem to recall that it was an 80286 - but it could have been a 80386. However, it certainly was no where near the same standard as your average 386 at the time. It was the best computer in the student's computer club - when the teaching staff were using their blazing fast 486's and the newer pentiums (II's? Or was it 586's?) that were appearing. You can probably imagine the resentment I still hold against them for that. Anyway, it was quite a stripped down thing, actually.

We couldn't get music or sound effects on account of not having a sound card, so that chopped off a good chunk of the RAM requirements.

I don't think TFTD would have ever worked, but UFO (v1.0 or 1.1 - floppy version in any case) certainly worked fine. The load times were horrible and the Geoscape crawled. You could see each frame update. Remember we manually used the MPS unpacker program to extract the game as the disks were slightly corrupted by the floppy disk drive (did I mention it was the only computer in the lab with a 3" drive? The others had 5" drive and chips with Apple-IIe or GWBasic roms in them).

Underworld II worked fine, albeit rather slow every time it needed to access the disk. The Hard Disk was only 20 or so megs, so we had to run the operating system off floppy.

It's amazing the things you can do with minimal and absolutely pathetic hardware. You don't get that much fun squeezing an extra few k's of conventional memory these days. I was an absolute computer whiz back then! What's happened to me? College, then University happened - that's what.

Ah, but enough reminscing.

- NKF

I think I might have found the program I was talking about. For the first game, UFO, its known as "UFO ET", (There are two versions of this one.) and for TFTD, its known as "TFTD ET (January 20, 2005)"

You'll find them in the mods section for both games.

Were you using Max's ET patch when the earlier reaction fire frenzy occured? If you were, then it might be worth knowing that the reaction fire bug is a known problem with the patch, and is usually associated with the blasta-rifle, but I cannot confirm that.

- NKF

Yeah, ever since I got UFO:EU and TFTD I've used the respective ET patches for both games. Those patches help keep the time on the Geoscope go at a much slower rate.

Thanks for letting me know on this bug.