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magic9mushroom

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magic9mushroom last won the day on February 21 2021

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  1. I think nullifying the Toxigun's ability to pierce shields mostly does the job on the Battlescape, because without an easy shield-piercer (and neither stun grenades nor psi are easy) you lose all your looted shields and have to build your own (which is very slow). The bit that needs more effort to fix is the Cityscape, since the aliens' late air game is rather anemic (the idea of Escorts stunning your craft for the capships to blow up is nice, but non-escort-tasked UFOs almost never fire their weapons so the capships do not actually capitalise on it, and besides that there just aren't enough FASes and Escorts to put up much of a fight) and you also get giant bucketloads of money from Cloaking Fields which gets you permanently out of money troubles.
  2. It's been down for the last 3 hours or so, possibly longer.
  3. Is it always-online DRMed? And do you need a credit card number to make this "purchase"?
  4. If you live in the First World, even A1FI probably won't literally kill you. It's bad, but not existentially bad; a runaway would be existentially bad, but most estimates say we'd literally run out of fossil fuels before we could trigger that.
  5. I mean, technically yes, but it's an unlikely situation. It's usually pretty obvious when a colony gets built (flotilla of four or five subs including a Dreadnought or two, plus often a country leaving), the Alien Activity graphs are a dead giveaway (as are the supply runs, if you have a Transmission Resolver), and they're numbered in order of construction so if you miss a couple early on you'll know about it when you find later ones. I'd say that if you know there's a colony there, you're supposed to find it. But honestly this is the least important of the challenges anyway. Attached to the OP, with instructions.
  6. Okay, so here's a set of fairly fluffy challenges that I think would make for a tough game when taken together, while still allowing you to have fun (4-mission TFTD is well into masocore territory). 0) TFTD on Superhuman difficulty. 1) Iron Man. 2) Council funding only (hacking PURCHASE.DAT to zero out the sale price of manufacturables and recoverables is enough; I'm not a monster). 3) No use of Control Implant. All other weapons and tactics (aside from exploits) are fine. 4) You can't run from Terror Sites (and Artefact Sites). You can ignore them entirely, you can win them, you can fight to the death and lose the sub, but you can't give up once you've landed. (If you get a stuck alien in a ship mission, you can kill it via save editing - again, not a monster.) 5) Destroy all the Alien Colonies before hitting T'Leth (this really isn't that hard compared to the others - but it's thematic). I think the combination of #2 and #4 should keep the strategic game more of a nailbiter than it otherwise tends to become. I know when I was doing my run with #1 and #3, the tactical game remained crushingly hard while the strategic game was reduced to a farce after May or so (I eventually gave up on #3, but that was because the aliens were being very uncooperative with Calcinites and I got sick of just spinning the wheels). I think that in TFTD there are no infiltration-immune countries, so #2 puts you on a timer (though not an especially-strict one), and #4 makes actually losing from score at least kind of plausible (I ended up running from a Tasoth ship in April - if I hadn't, I'd have gotten a -300 that month either from ignoring it or getting wiped out). So, anyone feel like trying this? EDIT: Hacked PURCHASE.DAT attached (all manufacturables and recoverables have sale value $0). Unzip this into the folder containing the save you want to limit to Council Funding Only (not the main game folder - X-Com stores this data per save), overwriting the file already there. There's nothing in particular you need to do to undo this - clearing out the save or saving over the slot with an unaffected game (such as a new game) will both get rid of the alterations. This should work for both DOS and Collector's Edition, though I made it with DOS. Don't try to use this on a game of UFO: Enemy Unknown - it's not compatible. PURCHASE.zip
  7. http://ufopedia.csignal.org/usopedia/077.png While Lobster Men aren't entirely robotic, they have a lot of synthetic components. Eating them might not be the best of ideas.
  8. Funnily enough, at high Accuracy they're actually not very inaccurate at all. The penalty for autofire and for dual-wielding two-handed weapons both only apply to the inaccuracy term from agent inaccuracy, which becomes negligible past Accuracy of 90 or so - at that point, all that matters is the inaccuracy of the weapon itself, and Devastators are more accurate than anything else except the Laser Sniper Gun. Toxin C is a pain to get, yes. However, my table says that even B is 3-4x the firepower of the Devastator (and that's not including the fact that it ignores shields). C is more like 5-6x. The Toxigun is horrifyingly lethal.
  9. To clarify on the armour issue - Disruptor Armour has a 40% resistance to explosive damage. 6 direct hits from Dimension Missiles is 12 instances of damage (missiles do damage on impact and then again on explosion), so that's 2 hits to each body part and 3 to 2 parts. Let's be pessimistic and say they're to the arms. The helmet and chest plate are armour rating 75. 66 damage after resistance does no bleedthrough and 2 points of armour damage per hit. No health damage after just 2 hits. The arms and legs are armour rating 65. 66 damage after resistance does 1 bleedthrough and 3 points of armour damage, the second hit does 4 bleedthrough and another 3 armour damage, and the third does 7 bleedthrough and another 3 armour damage. Adding up 3 hits to each arm and two to the legs gives 29 total health damage; bruised, but no critical wounds and still definitely kicking. On the other hand, the Marsec chest plate is rating 35 and only has a 20% resistance to explosives. 88 damage after resistance does 53 bleedthrough and 7 armour damage; a single hit to the chest is a serious health hit and two is death. (It's a little more complicated than this, as there's a damage roll for the impact damage. But you get the point.)
  10. Using all Disruptor Armour (rather than the Marsec chest piece) significantly improves survivability vs. Dimension Missiles. With all Disruptor Armour, you can shrug off half a dozen direct hits (they'll still take out shields, though, so an Entropy Pod is bad news). Toxin B and especially Toxin C are far more potent than Devastators due to both simple firepower (one-handed gun, and fires 5x as fast as the Devastator) and the fact that they go through shields. Skeletoids usually get one-shotted by Toxin C. This matters even for stopping their BVR fire, because the AI doesn't cheat; they need a spotter just like you do. The other trick to that mission is simply to speedrun it. The objectives are right in front of you and you only have to blow up half of them; you can win the mission within a minute if you put your mind to it. I've beaten that mission via killing all aliens with toxins, and without toxins I've speedrun it (that was harder). I was using larger squads, though (24 or 28). Also, yes, getting hit reveals cloaked units. This applies to you and to aliens. EDIT: Toxins also make Psimorphs cry, because they bypass your shields without damaging them and then bounce off your armour (all X-COM armour has a 70% resistance to toxins).
  11. I do have to ask, Zombie; with all the stuff you know and have and some of it not publicised (like the annotated source code of TFTD), have you thought through what happens to safeguard it if you were to die? This sort of thing has a nasty tendency to slip between the cracks, since relatives won't have your passwords to get into things and frequently won't even know that they're supposed to be looking, never mind what for. Very morbid, I know, but I just want to be sure we don't lose some of this stuff.
  12. Um, it does happen normally. Large units have 1 UNITREF entry and 4 UNITPOS entries. If it is TFTDextender, it's probably an intended feature rather than a mistake; unconscious units from the first stage getting converted into corpses is a known bug in TFTD and Tycho could well have fixed it.
  13. This could be TFTDextender; not sure.
  14. I just use hex-editing. UNITREF and UNITPOS are pretty easy to read and modify with the UFOpaedia articles as a guide; this particular one is just a matter of scrolling down to the aliens and flipping the "is unit visible" flag. (With hex-editing it's also pretty simple to move a unit, because location of units and items is stored as where-is-this-thing rather than what-is-here.)
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