ulairion

Chrysalids!? I think I left the oven on, be right back... *runs away screaming like a little girl* Terror missions against Snakes/Chris are always a messy affair. At a late stage in the game I just bring a couple blaster launchers and a large pile of missiles. Anything even remotely resembling a Chris or a zombie gets two blaster bombs to the face, just to be on the safe side of things. I'd rather nuke half the map than lose a single man to those bloody things. Civilians are S.O.L. =P

*grabs the Auto-Cannon while chomping a cigar and speaking with a fake austrian accent* "Get to da Skyranga. If they bleed, we can kill 'em." If I'm taking the role of the huge guy with the gatling gun, I'll have to think some good one-liners for when the need arises.

If you're going to reuse names, I think it would be nice to add a number at the end so those following at home can keep track. "John Rook XXVII steps out of the skyrang... *zap* not again. Ok, John Rook XXVIII, your turn".

Classic Terror Mission. Like carpet bombing, only messier. So I get to use the closest thing X-Com has to a flamethrower, I burned half a city to the ground, AND I lived beyond the average rookie life expectancy? Fantastic!

Awesome. Can I join the squad? I always wanted to die a horrible death as soon as I step down the Skyranger. Morituri te salutant

One thing I've noticed during Alien base assault missions is that when setting the path for a blaster bomb, the aim box gets partially obscured by things like walls and scenery even if you still haven't explored that area of the map. With the help of some careful guessing you can find the command center as soon as your first turn... and you can blast it to oblivion before ending the second turn. Any one else noticed that?

Oh yeah, my mantra is something like "When in doubt, blow stuff up", followed closely by "A whole squad firing on full auto will eventually hit something. Praise the RNG and pass the ammunition." Though I have to admit, sometime that strategy can backfire rather badly... we all know there's nothing as accurate as friendly fire.

I would rather say something like "for every rookie that can shoot straight, five don't". I have seen rookies spent a turn's worth of TU with full auto against an alien two tiles away and hitting nothing but air, the ground, and an X-Com soldier halfway across the map.

There are two that I know of: http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/imag...COMAccuracy.jpg http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs40/f/2009/045...y_Gannadene.jpg The second is just great.

Yup, happens to me quite often. The soldier is probably thinking something like "oh no a Chrisa... oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii... wait, did it just turn around? OPEN FIRE!"

I replaced the mission.dat file and everything's working great. Thanks for your help =)

I did the scouting without finding anything (and, of course, with YET ANOTHER battleship going against my base). They appear from al over the world, my main is around Greece and the battleships appear anywhere from Japan to South Africa. I think I'm using a loader, but I can't remember where I got it from. Here's the save btw: http://www.mediafire.com/?wa0s8k9dgxde377

...also known as "Maybe we should take down the huge neon 'Welcome to X-COM Main Base' sign" So, my main base gets discovered by Mutons. The battleship lands, and thanks to a mix of good luck, a good layout, and psi spamming, the mutons get their purple asses handed to them. I clean up the mess, sell the bodies to the local fast food joint, and carry on. Less than five minutes after that, I get a decoding: Battleship, Mutons, alien retaliation, my base. The thing is, in about two weeks of in-game time my main has been attacked no less than ten times. I read somewhere that succesfully defending the base makes the aliens "forget" it for a while, but this is absurd. I'm getting almost an attack every day. As you can imagine, I keep winning every single time, but it's not stopping them. My soldiers are grinding their stats upwards like an obssesed WoW player with a time machine, but I'm growing REALLY bored of playing the exact same mission every 5 minutes. That, and my base's staff is getting rather tired of cleaning the blood stains on the hangar deck. So, is this normal, or is there something wrong with my save? What could I do? The Mind Shield is about a week from finishing, should I just hold the line until then? Would that stop the Mutons from drowning my troops with their corpses?

I start making plasma tanks as soon as I'm able, but there's something great about rocket tanks. What can I say, I love turning half the battlefield to ashes.

I've had lots of "everyone dies as soon as they step out of the Skyranger" so I'm going to go for something a bit more epic: The Ballad of the Mindscrewed Rookies and the (Un)Lucky Bastard's Last Stand. Some context first. While I prepared my second strike team I noticed some of the rookies had really awful stats. Rather than sacking them, I chose to rename them and give them a warm welcome to the glorious Red Shirt Brotherhood of X-Com. Their callsigns became things like "Dead Guy", "Cannon Fodder", "Meat Shield" and, the one of legend, "Unlucky Bastard". So, first mission comes along. The Red Shirts did what they were meant to do: explore the map, reveal the alien's locations so they could be sniped from half the map away, and dying in awful ways so that my good soldiers could stay alive. After cleaning the surrounding area, comes the time to enter the UFO. Unlucky Bastard goes forth, steps through the door of the Large Scout, and sees a Floater staring at her. Shruging I order her to open Auto-Fire on the alien... and the sucker goes down in a single shot. She goes even further, to the engine room. Two floaters, and both are killed in a single Auto-Fire burst. The mission ends, and I'm mildly amazed at UB's luck. Missions come and go and, every time, UB goes charging across the entire map, bursting through the UFO's door, and punching the blood out of anything moving along the way. Once and again I used her as a Red Shirt, and once and again she laughed at me from the top of a smoldering pile of alien corpses. I check her stats and I discover that her accuracy is over 70, and that she has survived over twenty mission, on an average of 3 kills each. I check again, and I discover that her stats and mission/kills ratio are actually higher than my Commander... or any other soldier I had. A new callsign comes along: "Lucky Bastard" (I thought about renaming her to Kara Thrace, but it felt a bit awkward) So, I set another base, gather a new, all rookie strike team, and I send LB to lead them with a brand new flying suit. She has earned it. A supply ship gets shot down over North Africa, a great chance to send the rookies to get their feet wet. With LB leading from behind and above, the rookies start deploying around the Skyranger and checking the area. First turn ends without any visual contact with the enemy. I deploy a bit further and one of my fresh, unexperienced rookies sees something that makes me recoil in horror... Ethereals. I try to spread my guys as much as possible. Not enough. As soon as my turn ends half the squad gets mind controlled and starts blowing the other half to fist-sized chunks. A small group under the Skyranger gets blown by an alien grenade, other two guy get plasma'd, the only survivors (besides the MC'd soldiers) are two wounded rookies and LB. As soon as my turn starts I rush to the inventory screen to try to patch up whatever I have left. No medkits. I forgot the bloody medkits. Looking at the remaining HP and fatal wounds I figure I have about 5 turns before my two remaining rookies bleed to death. They charge across the burning sand, through the smoke and the bits of their ex-squad-mates, and open fire on some Ethereals standing behind a dune. The Ethereals die. The charge continues as my dying soldiers leave a bloody trail behind. Then, as one of them moves, a single plasma comes out of nowhere and puts him out of his misery. A single Ethereal is hidden near the UFO's hull. The remaining rookie moves slowly towards the Ethereal, opens fire... and misses. Opens fire again... and misses. No TU's left, not even for crouching to kiss his behind goodbye. The last rookie gets killed just as LB, who was going around the UFO, appears behind the ethereal, and shoots it down. So, now it was a single soldier against whatever was left inside the UFO. She goes in, charging as ever. Two Ethereals go down in a single turn, and a third one on the middle floor manages to shoot her before getting killed. She's still alive, but wounded, and bleeding. After checking the middle floor, she goes down to take the elevator to the top floor to put an end to this mess. As soon as she reaches the lower floor, another Ethereal shoots her. Bleeding even more, but still alive. A two turns cat-and-mouse game begins, but she finally gets killed by that last remaining Ethereal just before she could blast it. And so it ends the story of the Lucky Bastard, the Red Shirt that became the most badass soldier X-Com has ever known, who killed half an Ethereal crew by herself. The mission was a huge FUBAR from the start, but this single girl's thoughness almost managed to turn the odds against the aliens. Almost. (Sorry about the lenght and the bad grammar, English is not my first language)