Tsathoggua

Do bugs sustain smoke inhalation stun damage? And when the memory allocated to flame effects is filled, and an incendiary shell or rocket is let off, it seems to produce a volume of smoke equal to a small explosion, like a grenade (regular, x-com hand grenade) or AC-HE round rather than a smoke grenade's large area coverage..what happens to the shell after, on impact? does it then inflict either HE or AP damage (more so than the small amount inflicted by the incendiary rounds normally?)

Silacoid, thats it. And yes thats what I had in mind. Replacing navigators, but only on rare occasion. Not so bug-ed-rare as say, xarquid and triscene in TFTD but rare. The psilord would be an even better candidate. Something that agents with an olympic gold medal in spoon-bending not only couldn't just smash into a wall and turn to bloody pulp with so much as a pick of the nose, at super-elite level psi skills, but something one would HAVE to take along a team like that or the one critter be capable of more or less wiping out most of a team of even the best non-psyker specialists, sort of like the psimorph in apocalypse, only worse. Hell, maybe even something that requires most of an entire SQUAD to take down. There needs to be something like that for a challenge, something to draw the full attention of a fireteam at least, if not a full squad, that way you have flanking tactics to worry about whilst your back is turned. And NKF-dr who exactly?

Oops, meant enforcer. My bad. I thought interceptor was alright. Actually I reckon certain bits from interceptor could be good if worked into openXcom, for UFO ('94 one) Namely the aereon elite pilot critters, exclusively as pilots, one per ship for the most advanced UFOs. And better yet, the psilord. As a counter to the ethereals, to expand psionics, as an completely exclusive psi user, not a weapon user, but maybe some further expansion of available psi techniques. And in addition, to massively, overwhelmingly out-do the ethereals in terms of psi capability, as when the war has been going for a long time, agents with elite psi stats tend to become able to become no challenge whatsoever, I've had teams that were handpicked as rookies for their 95+ psi strength stats and trained them carefully until they matched that in skill, rendering the entire team pretty much immune to psi, with more or less 100% success in defense against attack, and god help any bug unit and race that come under psionic assault from even the very weakest of agents (speaking relatively), ethereal commanders even being no challenge whatsoever, not even sectopods, cyberdisks and those slow moving blob thingies...the ones that travel with mutons and don't have much in the way of a brain...forget their name now. Enforcer on the other hand, maybe armor but in general I'd want nothing to do with it. Its a steaming, stinking post-defacation shit-smear on a bit of manky old bog roll, and best flushed. One of those acidic, ring-stinger shites that you get after eating greasy donner kebabs and overfeeding on cheap lager:P

I wouldn't even bother to pick it up from a bargain bin. I might go to the effort to take it out of a skip, IF I was already there taking copper pipe/lead roofing sheet or other such valuables from it (its quite astonishing sometimes how lucky one can get in terms of what people throw out. I've had a desktop computer the other year, a microwave that was almost new in appearance and fully working, that I've done a bit of work on to convert it into a MW suitable for my lab, going to add overhead stirring, a thermocouple to measure temperature if I can find one that is able to play it civilized with MW radiation, some extra screening to cover the hole that needs drilling for overhead stirring&the condenser. And in another, after spotting a few pipes, scored a 16th century solid silver jerusalem cross, in the templar cross style, scenes carved into it of christ, hallmark, date and image of the temple in jerusalem, plus an ivory or whalebone thingy that I originally thought to be a letter opener, but have since found to be a page turner for really lazy upper crust buggers in times long past, with a big hefty endcap made of Ag, that has quite a weight to it, along with some Ag lettering inlaid in it, a broken rolex watch (still good for the gems and gold parts, I have no idea if it is reparable or not, but if it isn't it'l be worth something either for scrap gems and gold, or just the gems and conversion of the gold to catalysts after dissolving the metal in aqua regia, in the same skip also found a huge amount of costume jewelery that can go on ebay, some buttons that look to be silver based on their blackening reaction once moistened and exposed to a jet of hydrogen sulfide gas, and quite a few other things to boot, that were/are going to be worth a fair bit. The jerusalem cross though, along with the lovely thick, hefty braided silver wire link-loop chain that it came with, that I don't think I am going to sell unless I can get it valued first and then also find out that its worth enough I have little choice but to sell. I actually want to keep that for myself though, because it really goes rather well in terms of complimenting my dress style when I have on one of either my leather trenchcoats, or short, really tight, thin leather coats, plus knee-length newrock boots and a spiked/or studded collar/homemade reflective eyepiece armless strap-on goggles, it goes too well and looks too damn good to sell unless I find it to be worth an awful lot that I could sink into the lab for new glassware and reagents if I did sell, because there is ALWAYS room for new equipment and more reagents&various 20 liter jugs of solvents to be bought so I don't run out too quickly:D Plenty of antique or maker's marked pottery in others too. Found a whole bunch of old but goody type videogames on disk in there too, terminator-future shock, and the first system shock title to name just the very best of those. I don't remember for sure but there might well have been a copy of X-com UFO enemy unknown in that haul too. Even a couple of mercury switches (which these days due to political correctness in the name of 'greenness') and the fact that merury and possibly, not sure though, its divalent salts are forbidden for air transport, because of the way Hg metal and Hg (II) strip the protective oxide coating from aluminium resulting in it simply crumbling away, and of course this would be...not very good...to say the least if it spilled in a plane, which are largely made of Al and magnalium alloy; it makes mercury and its salts way too expensive, and of course now its banned from pretty much every over the counter type source available to general citizen end consumers of products, making Hg/Hg-X harder and pricier to obtain., Thats about the only time I'd bother picking up a copy of interceptor; if it were there in the pile of loot I'd just liberated from such a dumpster full of other goodies. And I certainly would not bother clearing space in my pockets or sacks if they were full already. If your dead set on wasting a few hours playing this noxious travesty then download it online via torrent or whatever other method is quickest and easiest. otherwise do not bother, because it is a giant turd, defaecated from upon high from the diseased anus of a syphilitic whore upon the good name of the X-com series.

It fills up TOO fast, it seems like it can only take a burst of autocannon shells and a HC-IC round or two before it no longer produces any flame. Do different difficulty levels have different limits on how much one can go about torching farmer's fields, burning civvie's homes to the ground and doing what I and a certain friend of mine once accidentally-(sort-of-ish), did to a certain college and a considerable distance behind it when we were about 9-10, maybe a bit younger (although not with a heavy automatic-firing high caliber handheld anti-armor weapon loaded with incendiaries and HE shells.....although one of us MAY have had a home-made semi-auto grenade launcher involved:P...oops). are larger limits imposed on the amount of smoke and flame coverage on say, advanced, veteran, expert and superhuman in an increasing series? This commander had always been under the impression it was more down to what the game mechanics could handle and was an absolute. Haven't had time to test it though as all my save file spots are taken up and I only relatively recently got the game running under linux. So I've been rather busy rebuilding up my trophy collection of skinned, polished ethereal skull and dismembered chryssalid claws Got one other thing I have been wondering too. When the limit, whatever the mechanics of that limit be reached, what happens exactly when those shells go off nearby an enemy? they still seem to explode. Turn into first HE and then if no smoke coverage available for use to be kicked up by the 'HE' shell/s going off, do they then become HE without smoke? or act like AP rounds? And what about for direct hits on an enemy unit, when it doesn't just go off at their feet but smack, bang right between the eyes (assuming of course the enemy being targeted actually HAS any such organ) If anyone already knows, then I'd sooner be told than have to fart around trying to test it with the combination of a mind probe plus agents with autocannons, HC and different ammo loadouts, plus varying levels of smoke from grenade and HE round use. Partly because it'd be a nuisance but more down to the fact that most of the craft landing and being shot down of late have been ethereals, ethereals are just too dangerous to use for testing given what they are capable of doing with their psyker abilities, as everyone knows, the best practice where ethereals are concerned is to put them down HARD the moment one spots one. And make damn sure the only way they ever move again is when the clean-up crews arrive and scrape them into a jar.

Game isn't on beginner. Forget the difficulty level but I do remember it definitely was not on beginner, that is too easy when you've been at it since '94:D Odd thing is it doesn't seem universal. Just wish it'd happen with something like the starting grenades instead, all the damn time, as the lack of incendiary grenades is a huge pain in the ass. I have quite the tendency to be a bit of an arsonist, to say the least, nothing like burning the bastards out when you have some damned sneak taking up a sniper position in a building then forcing them out of their hiding spot and straight into a wall of rocket launcher and autocannon gunners with a few bursts of incendiary autocannon rounds:D

Mission-ground assault on landed craft. Craft type-battlecruiser. Species-ethereal (oh, great, just f*****g fantastic) Caught the bugs at it base-building, a small scout, I think, two large craft, possibly a medium something or other, if there was that one must have gone into the drink, but can't remember for sure; and a very large craft, the battlecruiser in question. Sent a couple of interceptors out on intercept, plus one of the firestorms, all armed with twinlinked plasma cannons bar one with a plasma cannon and avalanche air to air missile mount. All craft bar the very largest down bar the big bugger, that one wasn't assaulted in the air, because it would have been rather a been rather a messy task, although it would have been doable if I had decided to sick the three available firestorms (all w/ twin plasma cannons, contemplating outfitting the next two in production with some of the available fusion missile launchers, have 6 built plus 20 rounds, just haven't decided what to DO with them yet. I think I may decide to outfit standard interceptors so as to have some dedicated craft available for taking out V.large UFOs, rather than waste the versatility of the firestorms as fast interceptors with the plasma weapons. ) Anyhow tailed the battlecruiser with the skyranger, ground assault team inserted. Went perfectly, well almost perfectly. No casualties, one squad member taken over, although they were armed with an autocannon as primary weapon and didn't so much as scratch the flight suits of all but two of the rookie scouts on the team, who were kept away once that shit kicked off. An ethereal to the south below the transport, taken out with autocannon fire, one HC-IC shell shot up to the west to provide some light, set up a kill zone to the north just to the east of the edge of the craft, and to avoid heavy casualties, prox-mined the exits of the central lift shaft on both sides, which put off a sectopod later on. Meanwhile dropped a blaster bomb far to the west, after a sniper kept hammering at the troops, couldn't get a scout close enough, tried covering with a smoke grenade but it went off like some sort of half-smoke, half incendiary, no use, couldn't get anyoen close, too much suppression fire, so decided bugger it, lets deal with the sniper once and for all, blaster bomb straight down there after sneaking the plasma tank up and around to the rear, dropped the missile straight down on the top of the ethereal's head. Result, no more sniper fire. No more sniper either for that matter:D Sectopod came stomping out to the east where the kill-zone was set up by a pack of airborne snipers with heavy plasma and autocannon, plus one wielding a HC and plasma rifle. Prox mine went off and seemed to slow the sectopod down some, it came to a halt shortly after without opening fire. Snipers laid waste to it with plasma and cannon fire. Plasma weapons may not be perfect for dealing with sectopods but there were enough troopers and they just opened up and kept on firing. Then next turn an ethereal made the first mistake on their part, of taking over the commander, wielding an autocannon and heavy plasma. Guy usually uses a blaster launcher and heavy plasma, and is now strong enough to have a LOT of TU. so after being panicked courtesy of a concerted stream of psi attacks aimed at him, he eventually went berserkirgang, only to turn towards the sectopod and hammer shell after shell after shell after shell right into the enemy terror unit from a range of 3-4 tiles away, finishing it off. Next turn had him out of the area, although he got taken over and opened up on several troopers with the cannon, though their armor proved impervious to the autocannon HE shells, quickly as possible confiscated his heavy plasma and plasma pistol sidearm to make sure he couldn't start racking up the wrong kind of bodycount, and used him to go pick up his blaster again and punch a HUGE hole through the underside of the side of the middle deck. Sent in the plasma tank and 3-4 troopers, one blaster launcher round down the middle of the corridor taking out some ethereal. Sniper kill team racked up a big mound of smoking, roasted ethereal corpses, then went up through a hole left by the detonation of the blaster missiles used to breach the middle deck, a small hole left in the ceiling, troops up, and by good luck, managed to keep taking the routes that left the troops right behind the ethereals, to shoot them in the back with plasma autofire. Only to have one last ethereal cop line of sight, and walk round, carrying a blaster launcher, getting off a round. Only to make screwup number two and last. Must have sent the shell straight into the wall opposite wall to it, going from the pained squealing and the way the mission ended. 200 elerium recovered, all power cores intact, navigation systems intact and a LOT of alien alloys. All in all that one went as perfectly as it could possibly have done, no casualties, one scout left with 2 critical wounds after taking a burst of plasma bolts from that ethereal sniper, the one that got it's head turned to hot gas and bone fragments with the blaster bomb posted right down it's neck. Treated within a couple of turns left with only minor wounds. Got quite the stash of weapons, ammunition, UFO parts and elerium. Kills: 13 ethereals, 1 sectopod assault walker.

Right, now I have a precise observation of the effect, the exact number of smoke grenades and incendiary shells, weapon type responsible for deployment of incendiary rounds, mission&ship type as well as alien species. Just clocked the bugs starting swarming round an area and after first intercepting a smallish craft, engaging with twinlinked plasma cannons and completely evaporating the bugger, then sending the same aircraft to engage and shoot down a large ship, two or three more craft turned up, another large, which was blasted out of the sky somewhere to the NW of oz, on the mainland just to the NW of the cluster of small islands above australia, then there was the nasty task of the airborne phase of the extermination, the very large craft. Followed it, manually piloting the skyranger to force the aircraft to take the most expedient direct route, rather than trust the pilot, with his buggering about taking a stupidly long, curving flightpath instead of the shortest point to point routel So anyway, tailed the battleship, and launched a ground assault the moment the sons of bitches set down. Jungle terrain, pretty dense in parts, send a SERIOUSLY well-armed heavy weapons assault team in, my very best handpicked troops drawn from the elite soldiers. These guys are the very cream of the best X-com has to offer, and the 'ranger is heavily loaded with heavy weapons, rocket launchers, stun launchers, HE demolition packs, a pair of blaster launchers and some 10 rounds, alien grenades, a HC, two autocannon, both with IC, IC and HE loadouts plus heavy plasma and plasma rifles, along with a pair of plasma pistols for the two rocket guys. In short, this squad is not going to be messing around, and only the very highest value targets such as leaders and commanders are to be taken alive. Within a handful of turns after catching the battlecruiser landing, having already sent the skyranger to the region the UFO swarm was congregating around and dropping in to go mess up their day, there was one smoke grenade tossed out of the skyranger, and being a jungle mission, an incendiary round (HC) fired to light up some cover, and on seeing an ethereal (just my luck, a battlecruiser full of ethereals and very little ammunition available for plasma weapons larger than pistols, many of the heavy plasma and plasma rifles on board were empty, so the crew are relying on the old laser rifles, heavy laser and the starting heavy weapons like rocket launchers (2 of) autocannon (2) and a heavy cannon with two incendiary clips and a HE mag for if they need to start killing stuff. Main use is marking targets, illumination and either temporarily blocking off corridors or driving the enemy into kill zones. So one smoke let off, , ethereal spotted in the jungle, HC incendiary round fired off, starting a blaze, followed by hitting an ethereal with a three round burst of HE rounds, killing it, then another smoke grenade. The smoke however went off oddly, nearly evenly split in half, with a 50-50 distribution of flames and smoke, smoke on one side, fire on the other, along with two 3-tile diagonal columns of flames spreading in two lines one from each front wing of the 'ranger plus an additional pair of 3 tile straight lines of fire on the opposite side to the main body of the fire from the grenade effect close to each other, on the smoke-half of the yield.

Possibly it has done, can't remember for sure. Haven't been seeing much action in montane locations. Last time it happened the setting was a rural farm type area. Happened several times within that mission, grenades seemed prone to starting fires. Also something has been making me think.. Do smoke (possibly pre- or anteceeded by AP) form a kind of, well not sure how best to put it but they seem like the effects of smoke, HE, then flame; or possibly HE, smoke, then flame form a discrete series, of a kind? What got me thinking was certain effects when heavy cannon go awry, and the way both HC, autocannon and rocket launchers autoload when there are ammunition constraints. When bringing along HC or autocannons to a mission, if all three types of ammunition for the cannons are available onboard the transport, armor-piercing rounds are automatically loaded, if only AP and HE are loaded then AP comes first, likewise if AP/IC AP loads by default, but if HE and IC are the only types of round carried, then its HC-HE or AC-HE rounds get loaded. Likewise, if HE rockets of either size, and incendiary loadout are both available then ignoring the large vs small difference between HE rocket loadouts and concentrating solely on damage type, then its always explosive before incendiary. It seems almost as if there is a progression series of different screwup damage types when rounds or grenades go off and effects other than intended. Only snag is its difficult to figure out, since there are no smoke rounds available for the autocannon, heavy cannon or rocket launcher, and there are no incendiary grenades. I don't know how to install openXcom, I don't know what files to copy where (could anyone give me any pointers here? so I can't currently install add-ons through that route to test it. But I've also noticed heavy cannon fire in particular (vastly more so for even single shots from a HC with HE loadout than with HE autocannon shells fired in volleys) being prone, when agents are standing in smoke and near stunned due to smoke inhalation wearing no armor or alloy armor to causing the agents currently standing in the smoke to suddenly drop, BEFORE ending the turn.

Anybody know what the cause is of smoke grenades (vanilla x-com, DOS edition I think, running on linux via dosbox) starting fires when they go off? Usually its localized to the tile the grenade goes off at, plus a handful of tiles within, roughly, by eye about 2 3rds to 3 5ths. Odd thing is, that the fires that start away from ground zero and don't radiate outwardly in a uniform manner, but rather single tiles or isolated, separate groups of a few tiles on fire. It still smokes, usually at least, although often the smoke ends up somewhat in the wrong place. There can be quite a few patches, all of them small, in a punctate patterning, although a handful of times they have gone and exploded in quite a fireball, one went off recently that blanketed the interior of a skyranger transport in an inferno (had tossed a smoke grenade out of the transport at the bottom of the exit ramp to cover the troops, and another one just at the first tile above the ramp to cover airborne soldiers as best possible, to avoid anyone getting their face melted off by an opportunist with a plasma rifle, or snipers under cover in LOS, to say nothing of some of those damned robotic terror units with their lightening-fast quickdraw, powerful weapon mounts and bad attitude to match (dropping in uninvited on an undamaged battlecruiser crawling with ethereals, after it landed to start causing whatever grief they were on a mission to cause in order to kidnap some high-ranking ethereals, nab the UFO parts and scrap and send the rest of the buggers to perdition in a doggy bag. Pulled it off without casualties; at least no deaths, but it was still an intense, messy mission with lots of close quarters slugging it out with heavy plasma, rocket and stun launchers and blaster launchers, which are somewhat unnerving to have to loose off in a bunch of narrow corridors and rely on line of sight to curtail the shockwave, to say the very least) Anyhow, the grenade thrown to the bottom of the exit ramp, on the ground went off in that petechiae-like pattern of small fires, whilst the first pretty much filled the transport with flame, Unless X-com has taken to issuing soldiers with molotov cocktails, last I checked there were, unfortunately, no incendiary grenades even available, but it went off and blanketed all but the rearmost few tiles in flames. Little, if any damage done, luckily all bar the very rearmost few troops were wearing powered armor, flight suits whilst even the last couple of rows of soldiers wore personal armor.

Just caught the buggers building a base, took the scout out, made too much of a mess to recover anything, dropped one craft, medium sized, right in the drink, two large craft downed on land, taken out by a squad of interceptors armed with a mixture of dual plasma cannon and plasma cannon/avalanche launchers, then had the skyranger on base loaded with my best troops, ten soldiers, plasma hovertank to follow a muton battleship or, I think possibly supply ship, went all over the place, assumed it was looking for x-com bases, as it went quite far from the area the swarm of UFOs building the base (or rather, intending to, they never got the chance.) were concentrated over, right from one side of the european continent to the other and back again, but caught it landing. Could see a muton straight ahead the moment the craft landed. Caught a second one looking the other way, tank out, shot the first one, dead in one hit, shot the other in the back, downed that one also. Several troops exited skyranger, taking up sniper positions, kneeling on the skyranger wings (all but one soldier is in a flying suit, the one who isn't, has just set the timer on a demo charge, about to leave it beside a wall in the hope of blowing through the upper floor and storming the bridge in order to work down and take it floor by floor, from where the aliens least expect it coming), if the charge fails to blow an entryway into the bridge then a couple of shells from the 3 blaster launcher-armed soldiers should do it. Send a missile in, have the same guy, hopefully pop off a regular incendiary rocket into the hole and flush targets towards holes created for the sniper teams to pick off anything crossing past with their heavy lasers and plasma cannons. Going to prox mine the entry/exit lift shaft, and blow a tank-sized hole in the bridge wall, as it can get a bit hairy going up those long corridors with only smoke cover. Third muton walked out the entrance/exit lift before anyone had a chance to make with the proximity mines, one of the snipers spotted movement but could no longer see the target come next turn, sent him down, immediately traded shots with the target, having a plasma blast narrowly miss the soldier, who loosed off a burst from their heavy plasma, missed every time, another airborne rook aim with a rocket launcher and left the bug standing in a blazing inferno of WP from their incendiary rocket, direct hit, area lit up (its a night mission) Other soldiers start filing out, grabbing stun rods, the two specialist stunner teams grabbing stun rods, launchers, some alien grenades and smokes, one grabs the laser pistol kept onboard the skyranger for downing heavily stunned but not unconscious aliens. Ready to make with the carnage. One of the blaster launcher-equipped men, one of the two most senior soldiers on board, and a bit of a bruiser to say the least, able to carry several times the weight the rest are, bar the commander, capable of carrying, and dual-wielding launcher and plasma cannon flies out a little from the craft, and pops off a blaster round, guiding it up and through the entry hole, dropping it down into the blown-out floor tile immediately on the other, interior side from where the first round punched a hole through the side of the craft, and using the target selection box to feel out the walls in the dark, guided it to the middle of the + shaped corridor, then diagonally into the corner of the nearest side wall of the corridor so as to direct the blast as many ways as possible. Presumably grinning with satisfaction at the chorus of dying shrieks that followed. Nobody has yet been inside the craft itself but from the sound of it, that made a hell of a mess and took out quite a few mutons. Bet they really weren't expecting that to drop through the roof and blow them to hell haha. Spotter camping out in a corner below the hole in the upper deck floor spotted more movement, called in another missile, the lift ended up not being connected to anything, as all the floor tiles there and on the upper deck had been blown to hell. Making things too easy really. Spotted a couple more mutons, sniping from the SSE of the lift on the ground, plus one muton with a blaster launcher trying to sneak round the sniper there, but failed, when he just walked round and put a burst of plasma fire in its face. Last enemy was a silacoid, in a house right at the bottom right of the map, in a house. Soon put an end to that, luring it to just where its TU ran out, in front of the soldier that sighted the creature, and who then promptly ended it, with a point blank plasma burst. Rich pickings from the spoils of war, 4 power cores, had been being somewhat careful what explosives were used where for that reason, 4 cores, 200 elerium, 4 navigation whassits, and dead bodies everywhere. Plus a fair few blaster rounds and spare launcher. Could have done with those. Had made about 70-80 launcher rounds a while back but have been using them pretty liberally. 2 questions-does ammo from a completely unused magazine get returned to stores without unloading the weapon? and do part used clips get returned (whole) if ejected from the gun?

On the latest (I think) built base, finished building a hangar a while ago, positioned at one edge of the base, and on completion, it turned out to be..well...in two pieces, one on one half of the wall, the other on the opposite side. Anyone seen this screwup before? (vanilla UFO). And whats more, is it safe to use it to host an aircraft or is this likely to result in further cockups? And for that matter, anything that can be taken advantage of? it can't host two aircraft, determined that much by adding two interceptors to the order menu but not following through on it. I've heard of cowboy builders before, but this takes the biscuit!

Its happened a few times. So chances are it might just potentially, maybe, happen again. (watch it never show itself again for the next ten years now:P)

Definitely armed the prox mine(s-this was not an isolated occurrence), and by time the game has been running, do you mean the length in game time that has elapsed since starting the new game or do you mean the length of time the software itself has been running continually?

Having trouble (in a manner of speaking, although in this particular case it could have been worse) Just sent in my most highly trained crack assault team to a terror ship, that the pilots had intercepted and brought crashing down in the arctic, after following it at standoff range to get it out of the dense trees and avoid a nasty close range and messy fight against a bunch of snipers hiding in the jungle terrain, and into the snows before hitting it with a pair of avalanche missiles to soften it up then bringing it screaming down from the skies, smoking and burning by means of repeated blasts from the interceptor's onboard plasma cannon. The craft was when found, quite honestly, a smoking ruined MESS. Not a great deal left, bottom deck was an insurance writeoff to say the very least. Wouldn't be flying off to the nearest elerium filling station, let alone back to cydonia. A few bits of cover, but otherwise the power cores had all blown, punching holes in the deck above from the explosions. Outside was infested with a few snakemen. Two fell immediately upon being spotted by the laser tank, and a trooper inside the ship shouldering his blaster launcher and dropping a missile in between the pair of them, 3-4 tiles away from either. Result-snakemen completely evaporated, leaving nothing but a set of heavy plasma, grenades and plasma rifles, Hehe, trooper sent the guided missile zooming up into the skies before dropping it with a bounce right at their....errr..............errm...feet??? or at least, where feet should BEn, let alone back to cydonia. A few bits of cover, but otherwise the power cores had all blown, punching holes in the deck above from the explosions. Outside was infested with a few snakemen. Two fell immediately upon being spotted by the laser tank, and a trooper inside the ship shouldering his blaster launcher and dropping a missile in between the pair of them, 3-4 tiles away from either. Result-snakemen completely evaporated, leaving nothing but a set of heavy plasma, grenades and plasma rifles, Hehe, trooper sent the guided missile zooming up into the skies before dropping it with a bounce right at their....errr..............errm...feet??? or at least, where feet should BE. Chryssalid comes howling out of a door, only to be turned back by the firestorm left there for just such an occasion by the autocannon gunner with their incendiaries. Next turn, gets heavy plasma right in the face. To prevent a repeat of that incident, only going less in the team's favour, the doors were both mined with proximity grenades until such time as the team is ready to storm the UFO and slaughter the inhabitants. Then comes the strange bit. Accident of gremlin-infested laptop mousepad, being more oversensitive than a 13 year old girl after a bottle of vodka (before anyone gets the wrong idea, the sole reason this has been experienced, is that at one point in his life, believe it or not, Tsathoggua WAS that age himself. Shocking, I know, but he was. He may have been a bit of an...odd..kid with stranger interests and hobbies but he did nevertheless start as a foetus and get older from then on, and of course spent a lot of time around that age drinking and smoking weed with others of contemporary age, Anyhow his point is that he is not hanging around parks plying young girls with spirits for any untoward purpose, lol. If he hangs around parks to ply anyone with anything its to ply himself with a full collecting basket full of tasty wild fungal delicacies for supper:D) But anyhow, cursed mousepad sent soldier off like an idiot straight onto the landmine. Thought he was going to end up as pink mist, but no, it didn't go off. Nor when the problem repeated itself and another suicidal trooper ran up to join the first at his side, doubtless leaving soldier no.1 in need of a change of under armor. No explosion. And as it had happened there was a damn chryssalid in the UFO on ground floor. Didn't get away with owt, as a trooper tossed in a HE demo charge, making one sodding big mess then stormed the craft from both sides simultaneously, with a rocket launcher trooper and one with a blaster launcher camped outside each door just waiting for anything not human to poke its head out of one of those doors. But that prox mine wasn't the first to prove a dud. vanilla ufo. What gives?

Had to start anew, because my other laptops screen broke. Running linux on this, got it working just recently (UFO, that is) Not long into the game, most advanced tech is personal armor and laser rifles. Just had a terror site, the terror ship appeared and landed almost instantly, somewhere around the west to southwest of france. Sent in a full squad in the skyranger, ten troops and a tank. Turned out to be sectoids, taking along quite a few cyberdiscs in tow. Damn glad of those laser rifles and even the pistols are quite effective with multiple hits. First out of course was the tank, immediately spotted a sectoid, then a second one. First trooper out of the 'ranger was a bit of a bruiser, carrying a heavy cannon w/ HE loadout. He loosed off a round, that hit a house wall right to the side of the sectoid, one or perhaps two tiles away. Pained scream. No more sectoid. No more house wall either come to think of it. Oops. The big hole showed another one, again to the south-southeast, not far from the first. Send another man out, covered by a smoke grenade. Second trooper slaughters the sectoid, again, packing another HC-HE. There are three of those in the squad, two with HE packing incendiaries for those sneaky little sniper problems so they can be burnt out of their hiding holes, either that or just roasted alive in the shell.- General plan is position a few snipers with rapid reaction weapons, laser rifles or pistols if hunting sectoids, send a shell through the nearest window, or if there isn't a window handy then one can be arranged with a few laser bolts. Burn shooter out, and have the snipers positioned right to the side of the stairs, so the moment the sniper shows its face, it gets it shot off in a hail of laser fire. There turned out to be a LEAST five, maybe six cyberdiscs present, can't remember which. Not too much trouble surprisingly as the team sent in the tank to check things out, scout and mark targets (and it did pop a pair of sectoids with its cannon. First, spotted a sectoid and its second near some shops, both taken out with heavy cannon and autocannon shelling (two autocannon, three HC users, two rocket launcher support troops, all armed with laser pistols as sidearms, a handful with stun rods but only issued to the heavy support troops not using rocket launchers, so they can take point and use the rods and laser pistols to quietly drop anything that hasn't seen them. Saw first cyberdisk in the distance to the west, laser fire took that down, then a second one in the middle of a gas station. Wrong place to hide when there are soldiers carrying heavy rocket-loaded rocket launchers. Sent one right into the gas station, direct hit on the cyberdisk, and the entire place got blown straight to hades. Scratch one cyberdisk, and the resulting chain of explosions resulted in at least two screams, neither of them human, must have taken out two unseen sectoids. Saw another live one down there, or it was, until a HC shell blew one of the remaining two pumps, taking it to pieces. Took a quick break, to eat, smoke a rollup and attend to a synthesis of 3,6-dipropionylmorphine, add a little more base, stir and a little more propionyl chloride, then got back to taking the bins out, because it is obviously trash day on mars All in all, something in the region of 16 sectoid kills, not a scratch on any of the soldiers, or even on the tank. A couple of stray laser pistol rounds hit it and a HE shell from a cannon went off pretty close, but no damage done. Trickiest bit was a pair of sectoids, one to the north and one right to the far southwest in the corner of a building, in the back alley to the side taking potshots, and there was a cyberdisk in there right near to it. Rocket launcher put the sectoid out of action, but not before it very, very nearly killed quite a few soliders with its plasma rifle when it went berserk, and so did the other one hiding out in the shops. Both went apewaste, shooting at random, although luckily every single plasma bolt went sailing past the two fireteams and their support troops. Narrow misses sometimes, couple of troopers probably needed a change of under armor, but still, no harm done. Not to X-com forces anyhow, quite a lot done to the sectoids, both put down with extreme prejudice next turn, took a few to take the cyberdisc down, getting the heavy support and laser rifle equipped troops in position, then blasting holes in the wall and taking the nasty little sod out with a combination of heavy cannon, autocannon fire, a few laser rounds from the rifles hit, but what took it out in the end was repeated hits from the pistols at medium long range. Crunch, boom, bye bye. Job done, 5 civilians dead to 6 saved, score of several hundred, good rating. 8 turns from start to finish. Prope-dope done 10 minutes or so after, time for this commander to put his feet up and relax

Still haven't got openXcom to work in linux but last night managed to get vanilla working and pull an all nighter, after finally getting my fix of bug huntin' (and dipropionylmorphine helped a little too ) But definitely found myself fiending to get a game going since it had been ages since I've gotten playing. Until about 8:30AM Got a new game going now, since I had to reinstall everything on this other machine I've been borrowing.

Not practical to guess them with much accuracy for me. Memory loss (no, I am being serious, and do not mean absent mindedness...talking the type of memory loss thats bad enough to have someone forget they have been working all day in an atmosphere of the most unspeakable nature because SOME forgetful arse does something like measure out and weigh some thionyl chloride to finish up on some project work, turns away noticing the methanol carboy was left topless, goes to amend that and leaves the SOCl2 there forgotten until its entirely evaporated into the room, hydrolysing into SO2 and HCl gas, and to cap that royal twatup off, forgets something was heating and has it crack into some sulfide and mercaptan stinkers that old nick himself wouldn't touch with a bargepole haha. I can't remember anymore WHEN the damn flights take or or where, only predict where they are going from flight path and send the bugs a nasty surprise up ahead as well as the pilot trying to fly up some sectoid pilot's...well bits clones do not need, less said the better. And my memory is only getting worse. Seizures do that sometimes. Have them, they suck, and fry my memory longterm. Although going off a bridge didn't help, nor falling out of a tree or getting my head stamped on by some pikey dirtbags. I do remember though that it seems mighty quiet round here, in the time since its taken me to get UFO working on linux, although still not openXcom.

Right got that done. Just need to know where to place the openXcom executable. Fucker was a mess on a windows inst. Never figured it out, got it randomly right somewhere along the lines enough to make the vanilla game runnable. Any pointers as to where to put it, once UFO itself is unzipped to a directory?

Thanks. Probably saved me a week or more of pissing about. And I wanted to spend the evening getting this working. And I am absolutely shot. About half the day troubleshooting a chemistry project, which I am pleased to say, bar coming back from an evening spent with the old man tramping through the woods picking wild mushrooms to eat, albeit to a stove top slathered by a slurry of diethylene glycol and ammoniacal slop. Coolant bath had melted and overflowed the pot haha,

I must confess I tried and failed. Using a computer running linux mint at the moment. Not what I am used to at all, and I don't know a damn thing about the OS to be honest. If anyone else has actually done it, could use a few pointers, to say the least.

Anyone know if its possible to run UFO under linux, and if so, how?

In the case of aliens, what happens if such a 'ghost' alien is hit with stunning weapons? if the stun rod cannot target such an alien, this of course means area-effect weapons, the stun launcher. Never seen it happen with an alien, even if its happening with soldiers. It seems salient to note, that the troops in the missions it was happening (repeatedly) in were all very, very heavily armed. Enough munitions to take on (and equip) a moderately sized army, and enough backup rounds and stocks of various things-that-go-'boom' in the transport to level a city and leave behind only smoke and ashes. For the squads themselves, there was not so much a case of 'heavy weapons support' but rather the inverse, only a couple were carrying heavy plasma, those taking point, two per team, plus a sniper or two with heavy lasers per fireteam, the plasma tank, and the rest all carrying autocannon, heay cannon, rocket launchers and/or blaster launchers, plus every one of them bar a single senior soldier that cannot justifiably be sacked, because relatively less innate ability as a psyker, were strong, strong psykers and carrying psi-amps, and aside from space reserved for stun-rods, medkits and a handful of motion scanners distributed amongst the troops, plus a sidearm on the belt, usually a plasma pistol, but a few pistols for reaction training with aliens disarmed by means of psionic control, after unloading their weapons and dropping the ammo, I have them walk/float/ooze on over and then let the control go next turn, having panicked them before taking them over, so they usually make a run for it and the troops can get some target practice and reaction training. If (and it sounds like your probably right) it is due to the aforementioned fail-safe for stunned troops, the odd thing is that they remain invisible once revived by a medkit, and thus should no longer be a body or an item. Although they become visible once again next turn. Invisible chryssalids sound like a fucking nightmare! if that ever happens you can bet I'll be ordering the troops to carpet-bomb the area and smother the entire place in incendiary shells, so anything scurrying about in the shadows is lit up like a ghostly xmas-tree, with a nice big fire lit up under its arse to follow it by whilst the grisly little horror burns alive and target it by using much more lethal weapons. Wonder how my elite snipers would fare, since they can easily make kill shots using the heavy laser from way beyond visual range, indeed as long as there is a direct line of fire the targets their spotters pick have had it. But invisible..now thats not fair! can such invisible units still trigger react-fire?

The only times I've ever (irony intended) seen an invisible chyssalid, is one thats just been socked between the eyes with a blaster launcher round, and evaporated to the last femtomole of stinking chitin.

THREE sectopods so far, only brought the last five blaster launcher shells the base commander possessed. Cannot yet make more although multiple bases, including the main industrial complex, 'Spazz Tech' base is dedicated to R&D and now to cranking out ammunition, armor and craft PWT shells. But current workshop is almost finished building the first of a pair of avengers to transfer to the interception and radar bases with currently no craft. For taking out bastard big battleships. Will load them up with fusion bombs and plasma cannon. Or do people recommend either dual fusion bomb launchers, or dual plasma cannon? or even laser cannon? could a pair of avengers, one loading dual fusion warheads, one with dual laser cannon, or one each laser and fusion bombs assisted by a firestorm with dual plasma cannon or plasma cannon and fusion missile take down a single battleship?