destroyteenangst

I just like raiding Psyke. Because you're mates with Megapol they always get hostile with me and it's a convenient excuse to kick some ass. I prefer their maps to the CoS ones too, you get trees and abandoned cars and balconies and such, it's fun to blow a whole catwalk up and send three or four gangbangers plummeting to the concrete. Mwahaha, the puny fools.

Heh.. if it's so easy then why do you play it?

I did download and install the v2.0 patch I found on this website, but it doesn't seem to have helped at all. It's driving me cah-razy!

*grumble*

Oh, whoops yeah I am. The "Do You Name Your Troops" thread was moved here apparently so that there wasn't like four different ones about the same thing.

Are we so sure that the aliens are from another galaxy? The TFTD aliens remind me very much of an old SF story about a race called the Silurians who lived on Earth before man, but sealed themselves away underground when a they saw a giant asteroid on an almost-collision-course with Earth. They thought the 'roid would sweep past the planet, dragging the atmosphere off it and causing destructive chaos with the oceans and life in general. They set armospheric triggers that would revive them all when the atmosphere returned. But the 'roid merely assumed an orbit and became the Moon, so the atmosphere never even disappeared and thus they remained in hibernation for thousands of years. Perhaps I'm really reaching here, but perhaps the same thing happened to the Sectoids after they'd been sent to colonise the Earth. Then when more Sectoids arrived from their home galaxy to check up on the colonists (hell, interstellar travel would take a long time no matter what kind of technology they had), they found the planet populated with monkeys and decided to whoop some ass in 1999. Yay! Eat my admittedly-plagiarised fiction. Engage nit-picking drives.

Usually I have my troops on normal, but if they have no real cover available, you've got to put them on all-out aggressive beserk. The automatic side-stepping just sort of annoys me. Stand still and fire like a madman, dammit. Real-time kicks ass, there are just so many more things you can do than in turn-based. You can't shoot a Brainsucker out of the air in mid-jump, hero-style. And because you can pause at any time, you can still maintain your god-like control over every little thing happening! Apart from troopers who repeatedly panic of course, but hey, a simple bullet will solve that one.

I haven't had as much experience with TFTD as with Apocalypse (mainly because TFTD keeps crashing whenever I'm on a terror site map with multiple floors, does anyone know how to fix that?), but couldn't you just use the motion detector? Of course it doesn't work if they're not moving. I'm also wondering if the detector has a smaller range than those in Apocalypse?

So.. do you know how to fix it? I've been tinkering with slowdown programs and extended memory for ages and I can't figure out what's wrong.

Oh, of course I don't shoot EVERYONE who panics, just the multiple re-offenders. The ones who put everyone else at risk! I don't think I'm totally heartless, I just can't stand it when someone drops their weapon and whimpers for like the fifth time in a week. Ha yeah, I usually pick up the armour from corpses and hand it on to incoming rookies. True, you could just manufacture newies, but I prefer imagining the look on the face of the rookie who is told that his armour previously belonged to an unfortunate former trooper who had his brains sucked out from his skull. Ah okay... I didn't think it was possible to survive a fall through a floor, because all my other guys who fell died regardless of strength, armour or shields. I thought the survivor might have been a slight program glitch, although he was so badly injured I just had him drop everything and run off the map, rather than take the four medikits and sizable length of time it would've taken to heal him. Plus, hell.. he deserved an exit after that!

i see. i never wanted to get close enough to a megaspawn or psimorph to stun it without first blasting the crap out of it a little, so i didn't know that! do skeletoids count as early aliens? the first time i encountered one, my maniacal desire to capture all aliens alive drove me to send a lone trooper running all the way up to stun grapple range to down it. he died from the injuries he got as a result, but pff that's just a sacrifice he didn't realise he'd have to make. ah, mindless following of orders... beautiful.

i used to prefer turn-based, but i think once you get the hang of real-time it's much more fun. there are so many crazy situations and frantic firefights you find yourself in that don't really happen in turn-based. plus there's the opportunity to pull lots of suave sf-action-movie-like moves, like desperately running from the crest of an explosion or running through a hail of gunfire and surviving. and because you can pause or slow it down, you can still have the maniacal level of control over every little thing that x-com seems to instill a desire for in its players. it's great!

of course, if you set them ALL on aim. the ones who are closer would be on snap or auto. having them all on aim would be just plain crazy and also rather dull.

I name them after my friends. Although I give them middle-name nicknames too if they do something crazy or stupid. I once nicknamed a trooper "Legless" after he _somehow_ survived having the floor blown out from under him and falling through, which I didn't think was possible. Does anyone else ever shoot their own troopers when they do something unforgivably stupid or panic far too often? Heh, I often end up using the Starship Troopers creed: "If you don't do your job, I'll shoot you myself." Perhaps I'm just plain mean, but hell, I can't stand it when they panic. Death to wusses! My best mate names troops after his friends as an incentive to minimise casualties, as whenever someone dies he's like "Daniel?! NOOOOOO!" Ah, the melodrama.

i usually use three squads of four men each, that way you can split up on civilian maps and can be sure there won't be any lone troops finding themselves outnumbered. it's also great for assaulting crashed alien ships. just set 'em up outside the entrance on one knee and set to aim, wait for them to come out and blow the pants off anything that dares to venture out the door. ah ha ha ha puny aliens.