Hey Guys ...

Suppose im pretty late to this party...

Having played X-Com (attempted to) as a child I kind of over looked it as being very complicated …

Roll on my new O2 Contract and stellar … and I find Pocket UFO .. Im hooked!

So ye rim here for some general advice.. pocket UFO appears to be Enemy Unknown in pocket form … and on some insane difficulty. My first terror site seems to bounce up about 2-3 months in, and I can only describe them as mass graves …

Floating discs take an average of 6-7 shots and only miss 1-2.. So I was wondering if anyone has any advice on how to clear these urban sprawl missions … I refuse to accept defeat!



Generally I start my game by researching for laser rifles, then Motion sensors to sell …

I research Alien Grenades and Alien Alloys and Armour as soon as I can … then generally start trying to head for the Plasma stuff (guns, rifles).



But I digress … Terror sites … Murder … Slaying of soo many rookies.. any advice would be welcomed … I’ve started taking 2-3 rocket launchers and levelling the map, but then its silly cost and casualties.



So yer, Hi guys

Look forward to talking to you all!



Martin

P.S. Anyone know a online shop that sells the original game / Terror from the deep please message me, be nice to see the full (easier) PC version

First of all, here's a link to a topic which has information on where to buy the games. I'll note that TFTD is currently only available in North America, if you want it I suggest you check back in a few months. Hopefully it will be available everywhere again.

Now as for your problem. Your first stop should always be UFOPaedia. It has bundles of good tips.
The discs can be dealt with either with laser rifles or high explosives (or alien grenades). Laser pistols can work, but are not very good. Common weaponry is practically useless against them. Remember to use smoke grenades to cover your exit out of the Skyranger. Personally, I take one of the guys closest to the ramp, prime a smoke grenade, then go to the equipment screen and drop it on the floor. If you throw it instead, it may trigger a reaction from the aliens and they rarely miss. That's about the only thing you should do on the first turn. Any movement or firing can trigger reactions and like I said, these will likely prove fatal. About the only things you can safely do is turning a soldier, priming grenades and changing equipment.
Anyway, after you do this, you can prime any other smoke grenades you have and end the turn. Now why would you only do this? Well, the combat system has to be fair to both sides. Now if you have the first turn then you could theoretically gain a huge advantage and kill half the aliens in the very first turn. So to even things up the game gives the aliens full Time Units. They use these for reaction fire. And since every alien can do at least 2 reaction shots with full Time Units, you can see how you can quickly lose half the team on the first turn.
After the first turn, you'll have to get them out quickly but carefully which is quite difficult. The problem is, if you get everyone out immediately, they'll be too close and the aliens will throw a grenade or two and quickly wipe out a lot of them. If you keep them in the Skyranger too long, they'll mind control one of your soldiers and then he'll kill half of your team. In either case you'll get a lot of panicking which means you've likely already lost.
So you'll have to get them out at just the right speed which is not easy.

Anyway, UFOPaedia has a lot more information by better players than me, so be sure to read that.

Thanks for the download link.
I did indeed see the sticky with that information. Since my work place seems insistance on swapping my laptop all the time, I was more looking for CD versions, since then I could install it to a USB drive and use the CD to run it on any machine (I'll teach work to let me play on the commutes!).

Thanks for the UFO link, i'll go have a looksie!
And I really didnt know first turn aliens get full TU's ...
I think its time for me to start packing smoke grenades again!

You're going to have a tough time for CD versions. You can try Ebay and Amazon I guess.

If UFO is currently not available to be bought, you can always try less legal methods. I mean, how illegal can it be to download a 15+ year old game that is hardly sold anywhere? who's gonna even say it's wrong?
Not going to post links here since I think the admins position is other, but I believe there's nothing really preventing you from doing so, and I think it'd even be discussible if it's piracy. I mean, if it's not even being sold...

Az, both UFO and TFTD are actively sold online.

Though granted, UFO can only be bought in America. Not sure about TFTD.

Over time things have changed. The "good days" were when FilePlanet had the games up for anyone who wanted them.

Anyway! Pocket UFO is based strongly on the original, but it's not quite the same thing. Most of the usual strategies should still work, but just keep in mind the wiki isn't aimed at the pocket version.

One button you should never overlook is crouch. Unless a unit is somewhere you know is safe, use it. It really does dramatically increase you chances of survival and also gives an accuracy bonus as well.

Terror from the deep is available on Steam for about $5 US. I think. No idea where you'd get UFO: Enemy unknown from though.

ALso worth noting that neither will run on Vista, compatibility mode turned on or not Believe me, I've tried!

It will if it's in safe mode. I should really try to get around to e-mailing someone in MS and asking them how I would go about turning of Direct X (I assume that's what's the problem).

It's licensed to GameTap at the moment.

Can't say I recommend them (encrypted game downloads (no modding!) with access terminated the moment you end your subscription, plus it's American access only) but they legally have the rights at the moment.


Nerfing your graphics drivers does the same job. I figured "hardware profiles" would be the way to go as far as making things user friendly, but it would appear that Microsoft (in their infinite wisdom) has decided that allowing users to, well, use hardware profiles is a bad thing. Vista handles them "transparently".

It's a lot like how Windows ME had the ability to boot to DOS, but it was hidden in order to make it look like it wasn't old code... Unless... No... It's too horrible...!

Windows Vista is Windows ME, risen from the grave!

OMG DOUBLE POST! BANBANBANBAN!!11



Anyway, I have no idea how these hardware profiles work and if I turn the drivers off, well I don't recall exactly what happened, but it wasn't good.

Now how did that happen? And here I thought we had a post merging system and stuff.

I don't think post merging and flood control applies for admins. I'm not sure if you can configure this per group.

Flood control settings can be overridden by user group permissions. Auto-merging posts (if I'm not mistaken), cannot be overridden by a user group. For some reason the auto-merge feature was turned off so I turned it back on.

Anyhow, this topic really belongs in the Pocket UFO forum, so I'm moving it there. Pocket UFO and Enemy Unknown do share a lot of common ground, but when it comes to stats, all bets are off. For instance, if it took x shots to kill an alien in EU, it doesn't necessarily mean that it takes the same number to kill a Pocket UFO alien of the same race. The programmers made some changes to the game to make it (IMHO) harder and alien stats and/or damage modifiers may be jacked up. I should really start up this version and check...

- Zombie