derrickec

Loaded up X-Com again after many years and discovered (once again) how addicting it could be. I was playing through on Beginner and ReLoading during battles, when I realized how easy and lame it was. So, I decided to go all out. Downloaded XcomUtil, set "Reasearch helped by captured aliens" to 'on,' and started a game of Superhuman, intending to never save except when I needed to take a break. After 5 or 6 relatively successful missions (including two Terror ones), I spotted a 'Very Large' UFO sitting on the ground. Now, in Beginner this would have given me no pause, and being the cocky X-Com player that I am, I decided to throw in my squad of newbies and rack up the kills for max experience. Whoops. I thought I would share my tragedy with you all. After deploying a smoke grenade, I took a few potshots at some Snakemen I could see from the Skyranger. Using my newly manufactured Laser Rifles, I hit one with two shots, dead center. It didn't even phase him, and pissed him off enough to where he shot my two frontrunners in the ship, including one of my best officers. Oh well, that's the price for not re-loading. I figured the Snakeman's resilience to my laser blast was a fluke and decided to disembark the rest of my troops. I deployed 4 around the struts of my landing craft, and shot at that nasty Snakeman again. My piss-poor rookies missed him everytime, and so I ended my turn and waited with fingers crossed for the return fire sure to follow. However, that was the least of my worries. Breaking X-Com rule number one, I had failed to scan the entire area around my ship to make sure there weren't any baddies hiding underneath it. Out of nowhere, a Chryssalid comes striding in and approaches one of my men. "Oh yeah, I remember those guys" I thought to myself. Remember, it had been years since I had played. "Huh... I can't remember what they do exactly." Well, I found out real quick as one of them worked his mojo magic on my unsuspecting rookie, turning him into a drooling orange zombie. This made me quite angry. Angry enough that I did everything I could to kill the sucker on my next turn. I moved every soldier I could out of the ship and around the Chryssalid, intending to blast it into the E.T.-hereafter. The first Chryssalid took 7 laser shots before it died. 7! And, much to my dismay, when I shot my former-soldier-turned-walking-undead, I rediscovered that it too turned into a Chryssalid. However, I had clogged the area so much with my soldiers that I couldn't get anyone else into place to shoot it. So, at the end of this turn, I had 9 X-Com operatives with exhausted TU's in and around the loading platform of my Skyranger, tightly grouped together, with a Chryssalid smack dab in the center of them. Crap. I clicked 'End Turn' and waited for the worst. The worst was much worse that I thought it would be. Flying across the screen comes this small, purple sphere. "What is that?", I thought for one second before it hit the landing platform and erupted in the biggest explosion I had seen so far. When I started my turn I expected to be greeted with a few dead corpses, but I also expected a few of my soldiers to have survived (what I thought was) the normal grenade blast. Instead, what I saw was a massive, burning, ring of fire. The mission was on jungle terrain, and 'jungle terrain' apparently translates into 'highly flammable' terrain. I couldn't even see the corpses of my fallen men. All of my best soldiers, gone in one fell swoop. It was then that I remembered what Blaster Bombs were. On top of that, the last officer I had left, the only one with any experience to his name, who I had affectionately named Bullseye for his sharpshooting skills, panicked and ran screaming out into the flaming carnage! The two rookies left in the ship went beserk and narrowly missed shooting one another. My only consolation in all of this was that the Chryssalid had been taken out as well (backstabbing buggers, those Snakemen), and it wasn't much of one. I ended my turn again and hoped Bullseye would stay calm and not catch on fire long enough to put him back on the plane and abort the mission. That was not to be, as those Snakemen b*stards decided to add insult to injury and snipe my sniveling officer from the shadows. I aborted the mission and returned to my base a significantly less cocky X-Com commander. Any other Superhuman tragedies people want to share?

Makes sense. I put DOSBox on my smoking G5 at work, jacked it up to 10000 cycles, and it works like a charm. My little Powerbook just can't push it past 4500... any higher than that and the sound starts to stutter and it becomes really unplayable. And yes, installing FreeDOS is significantly more difficult. Rather than just being a program, its the actual DOS OS you're installing, and while I might have been able to handle it back in the good ole days of '94, I'm spoiled on programs and OS's that install with one click and a minimum of options. Do you remember how to configure autoexec.bat files, allocate memory, and how to navigate effictively around your OS by typing? Neither do I.

I'm running DOSBox .65 on OS/X 10.3.9, and I'm pretty sure I have the X-Com version with the difficulty bug (I have CE but cannot get it to run on my Mac). Downloaded XcomUtil and tried to install it. I get this error message. Error executing XCOMUTIL, aborting XCUSETUP I checked the xcusetup.bat file to figure out what would trigger that error message, but could only figure out it was called "errorlevel 1," which I assume is specified within xcomutil.exe . Any experienced users who can help me out on this one? I have everything in the right directories, and I searched extensively for this error msg on the forums, so I apologize if this has been asked before. Do I have to have windows, is that the problem?

I have been using DOSBox .65 to run X-Com, but my Mac Powerbook (1.0Ghz, 768 Ram, OS 10.3.9) handles it sluggishly at times. I max out at 4500 CPU cycles and use a frameskip of 3. On the Geoscape, any zooming is painfully slow, and when I intercept airborne UFO's I have to wait a good 10 seconds before the intercept box is brought up. The Battlescape works well enough, until lots of smoke appears OR (and this is odd) I reach the 2nd or 3rd floor of a UFO. On the same map, I can have tons of soldiers on the base floor with few slowdown problems, but as soon as I click up to the third level everything grinds to a halt. Takes forever to finish missions. So, I downloaded the Q emulator and attempted to install FreeDOS. I have to admit that my DOS skillz are sorely lacking these days (took me forever to figure out it was TYPE and not EDIT that allowed me to look at a doc), but I finally got it booted up in safemode. And now, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get X-Com installed on it. Even if I do get it installed I'm not sure it will run any smoother than DOSBox. Anyone else out there had any luck with this? Thanks.