Darkfyre

Not from what I gathered, and there are missions to take or destroy both enemies and their gear. Death of enemies is easy, shoot the buggers until they fall over. Caturing them, that's the hard part. First capture mission I had I was lucky as hell on. Imagine this, Alpha Squad has just raided enemy territory in order to capture one of their soldiers. There's six people in the squad, the initial four human pure soldiers, Hikari (soldier/scientist) and Pauline (soldier/tech), all armed with human rifles and equipped with (I think) Heavy Duty Suits. After invading the enemy stronghold they are pinned by hostiles on top of the main platform in the fort area and are fighting for their lives, dropping beasts one at a time. Then the target appears, a beastman soldier. Being in the middle of a firefight and rather hard pressed, they finish off the target that they're on and fire a single volley at the target, which is enough to kill on beastman soldier, but they luck out and injure it badly instead. Shooting down some other beastmen, they run over to the target and capture it just in time to find that it's the last survivng enemy. Second time, targetting a Shaman, and remembering what had happened the first time, the team focused on killing off all the target's support, then Ute pinged it with her rifle until it dropped. Third time was a repeat, then the scientists and techies back at base managed to get out enough stun grenades to equip the squad, making the subsequent to operations to capture enemy personnel a lot easier.

You know, I've been thinking about a D20 X-Com, but to be honest, I actually think that a combination of the D20 Stargate and D20 Starship Troopers would actually work better for how X-Com is run on the soldier side of things than using D20 Modern. At least D20 Stargate's classes and equipment would work better, and D20 SST actually shows how harsh reality is for the troopers you've got fighting the alien menace.

Bases automatically build tracks to their resource provinces in the game. If you look at your first two provinces when you start a new game in track mode, you'll see a thin yellow line between them, that's an intra-country track. All base provinces build those to their country's resouce provinces. The thick yellow lines that represent your tracks only need to go between the base provinces, preferably in as few provinces as possible, hence why most players will tell you to go after London and Spain as two bases, because both have three sea tracks counting the one linking them to each other, and those are much cheaper to maintain than half a dozen land tracks.

Easiest way to find base sites is to set missions around the territory you own and look out for sectors that don't give you resources. Each territory can be one of three generic types, uncontrollable, capital (read base) or resource. If a territory is controllable but doesn't give resources, then it's a base, just keep hitting it with missions until you take it then wait until it has the base symbol on, build tracks to link it to your nearest base and there you have it.

Build at least one school in a base as well, though the buildings mod makes that work a bit more easily given it ups the Knowledge production and allows you to have a college without needing anything to support it. Also, focus on Europe, particularly on coastal bases in Europe, since you can use one sea track to connect that base to another, and once you've got the surrounding territories, you've automatically got enough minor tracks to bring the resources in without losing any from having maintenance on them.

Take along a machinegun or two, those on burst/snap shot, while they eat ammo quickly, they eat enemies pretty quickly as well. I tend to use cyborgs as machinegunners, but anyone with at least the first level of Gunman training can use them, so if your team has that, you could theoretically field up to seven machine guns, which are pretty long range, if not as long as a sniper rifle.

Name: John Richards Callsign: Eclipse Age: 27 Organization: Ex-MegaPol turned X-Com Rank: Sergeant (MegaPol)/Squaddie (X-Com) Height: 200cm Weight: 180lbs Hair: Black Eyes: Blue Preferred Weapon: Dual Plasma Pistols or Heavy Machine Gun Strength: Above Average Speed: Average Stamina: Above Average Agility: Good Psionic Potential: Strong defensively Psionic Energy: Low Psionic Attack: Low Psionic Defence: High Bravery: Above Average Mental Stability: Stable Controlled by: Darkfyre Personality and Character History: John spent his childhood in the slums watching Diablo and Psyke war with one another. As he grew up, he became determined to stop such wars happening again, and to stop the destruction they left on innocent lives, so he joined MegaPol at twenty after training hard to be accepted. When the Alien War started though, he was shot and injured trying to stop a group of Spitters from attacking the station where he worked. Upon recovering from his wounds, he offered his services to X-Com, finding that his station had been one of the damaged buildings.

Heh, I got kinda side tracked by an online World of Darkness game since things were moving fairly slowly in here. Well that and setting up my own Fireborn game and in the process of cooking up a Dragonstar on for offline. Where is the X-Com Int story stuff anyway?

The thing with that is that those on earth have the capability and knowledge to produce their own gear, which you can use yourself, however your being able to get it via recruits is completely down to how much of a rep you have with a group. The better youre reputation with one or another of the three groups you recruit from, the better pick of soldiers you get and the more likely said soldiers are likely to already have training and/or personal equipment from their people's military forces.

Thanks for that, I don't suppose you know which file to search to find out what bases are available and what their maximum number of buildings is do you?

If you can make them, make one of each caliber, then take them out on a mission in someone's packs (squad screen, equipment panel) and just dump them somewhere in the mission and play it through to the end. Either that or start raiding Cult held provinces and pray your squad is powerful enough to survive to see through the mission, or at least kill/KO a cultist, grab their guns and evac.

Even a first level sniper with a good enough "Long Range" skill is nasty. That Psi/sniper I mentioned in my last post? I had her up in what looked like a watch tower structure the first time I took her equiped with the las-sniper rifle and she killed three out of four reticulans on that mission in one shot, the fourth took her two or three, but still... and she can currently hit things around 85m away compared to the 70 the rifle has as the base range.

It varies on the mission refusal. Refusing to do missions where you have to capture someone of an allied faction or take their province by force doesn't seem to affect things, however, refusing to assist them in times of need drops your relationship with them a fair bit and potentially screws you over as well because the Cultists might take the province from the allied faction. On the weapons front, I've confronted and beaten cultists in light armour, however I used level 7+ troops with training and manufactured weapons. You really need to get armour, be able to create your own weapons and ammunition and have a squad of fairly strong soldiers. Also, having someone with a machine gun comes in handy, as do snipers. I've had a psionic sniper kill reticulans in one or two shots and units armed with XM8s kill them in a single volley.

The game auto builds minor tracks between resource provinces and captial provinces, however, to bring a captial province on line and enable base construction, you need to build tracks between the province and the nearest active captial province. Remember, you want to use as little track as possible, so your best bet to start is Central Europe Base to Paris Base to London Base. London then gives you another quick jump around to Spain, from which you can hit North Africa. In the other direction, one option is to head via Moscow Base and split there to two other bases.

ATI Radeon X500 here, with either the latest drivers or the ones just before them