Pherdnut

Uh... "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri?" If Firaxis did it and they called it "Sid Meier's X-Com" I'd be pretty pissed.

Ohhhhhh... So THAT'S what happened in my TFTD game when my guy blow through an entire sonic cannon clip after going 'zerkies.

Well, the editor in question was a big fan of the original on the PlayStation, so I think he knows the difference. He also knows I'm a big freak for the series. He said he heard about it in a phone conversation so maybe he doesn't want it linked to him if they haven't told anybody else yet. Not sure though. And no, we didn't have that conversation on April 1st. In any case, keep your fingers crossed 'til people start announcing their E3 lineups (some don't until the show starts).

I would have put this in news, but I can't post there for some reason. I used to write for Game Informer Magazine. Googlestalk my nick over at their forums if you want to see for yourselves. Anyway, one of my old cohorts over there told me that somebody is going to be showing a new X-Com game at E3.

I think it's a waste at occupied bases (you might as well get all that stuff), but at places where you may not have any troops, 3-5 fusion ball launchers and a grav shield will keep the battleships at bay. The annoying thing as that the aliens will keep attacking that base incessantly until you finally let them through and then they forget where that base was. It would be nice if you could turn off defenses after ferrying some troops and gear over.

I didn't see him say anything about having a choice between the two. Was that the plan?

Agreed on that. I'm just saying reloading for the sake of not having to spend every hour moving your fleet from parking spot to parking spot isn't really as lamer as reloading every time you take a loss.

FASes are most dangerous when they are close to another FAS. I like to have a lot more vehicles than what you're packing in week 2 from the very start. I'll start a game in superhuman just for the heck of it to give you an idea of how I afford them. For base setup, I put in 1 more bio lab, 2 more Q physics labs, and a living quarters. I play turn-based so my agent equip might seem odd if you're a real-timer. Standard equip for my agents is 2 grenades, 2 stun grenades, an M4000 with 2 spare clips, and megapol armor. Aside from the motion scanner and the 2 grapples, I sell all other nonstandard equipment. I buy out all stun grenades, 8 more m4ks, all m4k ammo, and any additional motion scanners (I actually like those things). No additional agents. For vehicles I unequip all Janitor missiles. The interceptor gets another Lancer 7000 and the cars get dual bolter 4ks. The additionial Lacer 7000, all Janitors, janitor ammo, ground vehicles, and ground vehicle ammo (easy to overlook) gets sold. For new vehicles and equip, I buy out all the elerium, all the hovercars I can get (four in this game), all light and medium weapons control, the same number of bolters as hovercars, an SD special for the Valkyrie, and as many SD Turbos as I can get for the cars (5 in this game). At this point I have 33,320 in cash left. I'll fast forward a bit for all the stuff to arrive. There are no more bolters for sale, or I'd consider throwing some bikes in for the heck of it. Now I'll strip out all the Janitors and replace the engines. After selling the excess janitors/janitor ammo, and the four leftover sports engines, I've got 57,680. Clearly enough money for additional hovercars if they were available and I've already got an interceptor and 6 hover cars. That's enough to spread your vehicles around for maximum coverage of any UFOs that show up, and you should have a relatively easy time of shooting most if not all UFOs that mess with you. The lasers are actually much more powerful than the janitors if you take ROF into concern and cost no ammo. Selling the janitors is how I can afford so many freakin' cars and if you've stuck with janitors on fewer vehicles in the past, you'll be amazed at woefully underequipped the scouts and probes are for dealing with your laser packing car/interceptor armada. In the first week I'm more interested hitting the cult of Sirius for cash than I am in aliens so aside from letting them drop troops off until I get a light disruptor and a living specimen of each alien type that shows up at this point, I'd rather try to gun them all down. I try to hit every temple 2-3 times in the week. Most of the money is so I can buy out all the prophet missiles and launchers I can for week 2, because once those FASers show up, you'll need to start setting the cars on evasive and they simply won't be able to get many shots in with all that bobbing weaving if they have guns. With the Prophet's superior range (over the Janitors), cars and bikes on evasive can handle FAS as long as you're careful not to let them get ganged up on. Any excess cash at the beginning of week 2 goes to buying as many Air Warriors as I can. Air Warriors are only a few more grand than the Valkyrie and much more effective so sell the valk if it will enable you to buy an Air Warrior. If you keep the valk, stick with the Lancer 7Ks. Valks can't dodge well and don't take a lot of hits, so you'll want to be firing at a longer range. My favorite setup for the Air Warrior at this stage is plasma multi and autocannons. Rendors are better than the autocannons due to the range advantage but you're better off saving the Elerium for now and the autocannons pack almost the same punch. Autocannon ammo is ridiculously scarce at this stage for some reason so buy bikes, unequip their guns and sell them back for the ammo. The ideal way to hit the aliens is to have your Air Warriors absorb the brunt of the FAS medium disruptor attacks while your cars and bikes swarm from farther away with their prophets, but the cars and bikes can easily take an FAS down without an Air Warrior if it's isolated. Be wary of UFOs getting cars into a crossfire. They can avoid most shots a lot more easily if they're only being targeted by one ship. Cripes, why do I write these things? Nobody wants to read that much.

I think that the best the aliens can do for the spearhead of their invasion is a guy with a crappy gun and his collection of easily slain pets is one of my pet peeves. Seriously, what would you rather play as? An anthropod, a couple spitters, some brainsuckers, and a multiworm or a heavily armored team of agents, all with long range weapons and stun grenades. Ground vehicles of course. They CAN help, if you download the indestructable street mod, but really, who cares. The aliens are UGLY. Ugh... crappy art. I dont' mind the bio theme, but the UFOs look like flying blood pastries and I made cooler/scarier looking aliens out of playdoh when I was 9 years old. The factions can't be shutdown or even signifigantly crippled for any meaningful period of time. The alien dimension just wasn't interesting enough and their mass transit system sucks. I would have liked if you could have picked specific structures to hit in your own preferred order and that would cripple them in a different way. Killing the rejuvenation chamber for instance would make them groggier and less effective in combat. UFO building structure (much more heavily defended) would drastically slow down but not stop their UFO production. You'd have to hit the megapod structure to prevent them from rebuilding other structures. The UFOs on the other side should really hit you with their full armada all at once when you cross over, forcing you to build a really large fleet to take them all down. There is no good reason to use alien missiles. Personal shields show up too soon after Devastator Cannons. If you have toxiguns at roughly the same time, the only reason to use Devastator Cannons is for raids on humans. No flying Disruptor Armor? Come on! There is no reason to use any new X-Com craft other than the biotransport and the Annihilator if you have everything researched. The Retaliator is only a marginal step up from the Air Warrior, the Explorer is a joke, and it's not even necessary to build the probe to research the alien dimension. Week 3 is way too late for power swords to come into play. No vehicle to exit at the landing site. For shame! Jumping out of your ship was a big part of the strategy and fun in the first two games. No day/night - Actually I'm divided on that one. I don't mind seeing the electroflares go. Pyro ammo still worthless, but funny. Now it's even more of a problem since fires will destroy equipment on the ground. For you M4K naysayers, the M4000 is your best friend at the start of the game, IMO. Even if it did take 14 shots to kill a human on full auto (not too bloody likely), that's a lot fewer TUs than most other guns would require. I frequently kill 2-5 aliens in one turn with a single agent packing an M4000 if they cluster together. Just run up and hose 'em down if they don't have the reaction fire to hit you back. Also that low damage increment but insane ROF makes it a great weapon for pushing slightly stunned aliens over into dreamland without the risk of overkill and agents parked on a corner have no need to fear whether or not they have the TUs to shoot something at point blank. M4000s, stun grenades and grapples are all you really need until the shields start showing up, and you should really have your first toxiguns rolling off the assembly line by then.

Maybe a little late for this one but what the heck. Hovercars with guns is suicide after week 3, IMO. Sounds like you took too many vehicle losses. I'm an anal player and rarely lose a ship (typically reload if I do). To really hit the aliens, it's best to save your game every day after your vehicles have rearmed and repaired from the last encounter. When you see the UFOs show up at a certain time, reload and park all your vehicles (not too close or they'll get shot at while they're taking off) near the gates before the UFOs how up. This might seem lame but it's really just shortcut from going through the hassle of pausing the game every hour or two and moving all your craft to wherever the gates have moved. Cars and bikes should be set to evasive and only use missiles after week 2 when the fast attack ships show up. Prophets are ideal since they have a longer range than janitors. Once missile equipped UFOs show up, either trade up to air warriors exclusively or equip those cars and bikes with long range justice missiles and fire from really far away. Everything bigger than a car should stick with guns since they can't really evade well enough to be worth using the less damaging missiles. The best guns available will always do more damage than missiles. In week 1, all my ships use lasers exclusively. It really makes a difference in how fast the scouts and probes get shot down and you get a nice early boost from selling all those janitor missiles they give you. I strive to shoot down every single UFO I can in my games and even without reloading I frequently bag all the ships in week 1. The lasers are very effective in the first week and much more cost effective. If Air Warriors are available, ditch any valkyrie's you have. AWs only cost a little bit more and are 5 times the machine. And remember, this isn't a roleplaying game. Restarting and trying something new is half the fun.

"The combat portion of the game was going to have a very similar feel, but it would have had slightly different mechanics (real-time, for instance-more on that later). " That's from the Dave Ellis interview at: http://www.thelastoutpost.co.uk/games/dave-ellis-genesis

Middle of the North Atlantic so that I can get coverage of Eastern US, Western Coastline of Europe, and a bit of Central America and the Mediterranean. Seems to work. The Pacific is so huge I'm never sure how to distribute my bases there. One base in the middle of the Pacific simply won't extend to any of the coasts. Numbers wise, it might be best to put your first base near Asia/Australia since there are more individual paying entities there than anywhere else AFAIK.

I'm confused. At what point did Gamecloud make an argument that the cancellation of those two games was a good thing? I saw alliance in action and was actually interested in it in spite of its lengthy delays. Don't know about Genesis though. It looks kind of ugly. That never hurt the older games but still... if they had to go RTS, it should at least be pretty.