Prine

If you have the DOS version, you can easily run it with DOSBox. Can't really tell what you were getting at with the other question though, sorry.

Oh, as for the proper way to use psi... well, the best thing you can probably do is not use it, because it's basically a doomsday weapon in the hands of a human player. But if you want to, I prefer the 'cascading disaster' method. 1. Equip everyone in your squad with a psi-amp. 2. When you land at a mission, have someone scout out exactly ONE alien. 3. Have the scout run back to the craft like a huge wuss. 4. Dominate the crap out of the one alien. 5. Immediately have the alien drop its entire armament, then pivot on the spot to reveal the surrounding area. 6. If there are any other aliens near the one you now own, have your guys grab those too. If not, look around a bit for one, but make certain the alien ends up back near your craft by the time its TUs run out. 7. Repeat steps 4 through 6 until every alien in the level is under your control. The aliens will generally gravitate towards your team regardless of what you do, so you can play it safe and keep one or two thralls around the shuttle which you can re-MC at the start of every turn. 8. When you're tired of keeping track of your new micro-army, send some of the aliens over to your ship, let the MC run off, and then have whichever members of your squad need a bit of experience plug them in the face. You'll be completing pretty much every mission with a 0% casualty rate. Hooray. 9. Get bored and stop using PSI. There you go! It took me approximately ten missions worth of psi-use to succumb completely to this kind of cheapass strategy.

Tethers. Like helium balloons. Aliens don't sleep though, do they? I figured they were like XCOM staff; mindless, unresting robots, on call 24/7. My guys survive on five minute naps in between refuellings.

Likewise. Usually works well, since the last few aliens mostly panic and run into a corner. In the last mission I played, I was assaulting a landed abductor, and the last two aliens were a pair of medics who both went berserk. They were standing one each to either side of the examination room, both facing the entryway, and they wouldn't budge no matter what I did. I should've punched a hole in the back of the ship with a blaster bomb and come through the other door, but instead I lost one soldier and wounded another. Oh well. I figured they could detect my guys automatically. It explains why they're unerringly precise with non-LOS-affected attacks like blaster bombs and psi (I've noticed that XCOM soldiers can also use psi attacks without line of sight, so long as they can 'detect' the target, or anyone else in the squad can or has seen them in the same turn). On the other hand, I've been totally ignored by aliens who didn't have me in their direct LOS. Weird.

I'm petrified of doors when there's blaster-packing aliens around. In one alien base assault I remember being in a situation where there were at least three aliens with blaster launchers in the circular corridor beneath the command center. When one of them opened the door and got nailed by my reaction fire, one (or both) of the others would send their bombs through and smash my squad to bits. On a similar note, is there any undocumented way of just opening a door without actually stepping through it? I read somewhere that you could do it on the Playstation version.

Something like that. Hey, if the war starts going badly, we can always mentally will the aliens out of existence.

Thanks, that's a great help. I tend to avoid using blaster bombs because it's too tempting to abuse them, but fight fire with fire, I guess. I've never actually used tanks or offensive psi much. After my first couple of encounters with blaster bombs I thought I could avoid being targeted by just keeping my guys out of the aliens' direct line of sight, but it appears they can track non-visible movement. I've had aliens on the opposite side of a wall bomb the wall next to where my soldier was positioned, blowing the whole area to kibble and killing the oblivious trooper in the process.

I've read nightmare stories about psi-capable aliens, but surprisingly I haven't had too many bad experiences with them. Usually one of my guys will get panicked, more often than not he'll run, and some of the time he'll run into some aliens and get shot. Occasionally someone will get mind controlled, which is troublesome, but the few times it's happened I've just had the rest of my squad take cover from the affected soldier and the mind control will wear off in the next round. The worst experience I had was my first recovery mission against an Ethereal craft, which was disastrous, because the things were spamming psi-attacks on my whole squad constantly, line of sight be damned. Only a few of my guys had psi-strength high enough to resist the attacks, but I didn't have a clue about psi-strength at the time because I hadn't researched psi-labs. My solution was to go away and not get involved with Ethereals again, ever. Later on when you're ridiculously affluent from flogging plasma guns and corpses on craigslist or whatever, you can set up a base somewhere nice and out of the way and pack it full of psi-labs and living quarters, like so: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v77/Armisael/psilab.jpg Disgustingly excessive. I love it. Then start up a psi-capable recruitment drive. Hire a hundred soldiers at the end of every month, screen their psi-strength, then discard the ones with anything below 70 or 80 (might want to sack the ones with low bravery too, I think that might factor in to psi-defense somehow, or at least panic checks). Pack the rest off to boot camp, hire another hundred and so on. Soldiers with psi-strength higher than 80 almost never seem to get mind controlled, and hardly ever panicked, so then you only have to worry about *%! blaster bombs. I giggle like a maniac every time I look at that screenshot for some reason. I knew halfway through construction that it was impossible to have that many soldiers at once, but I still kept building. I still kept building.

Hi folks, I've been playing EU for a few weeks now, having fun and frustration in almost equal measure. I've got a few questions floating around in my head, chief among them this topic's namesake. From what I've been able to glean, it's almost always both easier and more profitable to assault a landed craft than a downed one; you don't attract retaliation missions, the aliens are surprisingly no more panicked or disorganised or less numerous in a recovery mission then they would be in a ground assault mission, downed UFOs rarely have any Elerium supply intact, and they often have hull breaches, which only complicates the matter of sieging the craft (as I'm generally relegated to doing, because I'm far too poor at strategy to storm a UFO without losing a bunch of men). This is doubly true for downed battleships, where each destroyed reactor means an additional potential exit that needs to be guarded (how do battleships with only one uncompromised reactor pylon even remain upright?). The only advantages of shooting down a UFO that I can determine is that it gives you time to wait until the day before recovering the craft, and to a more limited extent allows you to choose what sort of terrain to conduct the mission in. I suppose it also affects your X-COM activity graph and thus your score, but is this really a big deal? I had thought it was, and that you might need to shoot craft down to stop infiltration missions from succeeding, but that was before I shot down and recovered an entire invading fleet, levelled a base, and the damnable country still sold out to the aliens at the end of the month. If shooting these things down really makes as little difference as I suspect, then I'm happy to just blow up terror ships and let my guys take the rest of the craft intact. Am I missing anything here? Cheers for any response. Oh wait, I'm having one other large problem, and that's prescient aliens with guided missile launchers. The only way I've found to deal with them is to run somebody right up to them, apparently they're smart enough not to fire a rocket straight into my guy's face, but then again when they can take down half my squad from halfway across the map, or worse still completely nuke my troop transport before I even get a chance to properly disembark, I don't know how I'm expected to respond, other than reloading to before I entered the mission and trying again. How the heck are you supposed to avoid this? I've tried to wean myself off replaying missions that go to hell, but when a devastating loss is so completely out of your control I find it's really hard not to.