magic9mushroom

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.

Back up, thanks.

It's been down for the last 3 hours or so, possibly longer.

Is it always-online DRMed? And do you need a credit card number to make this "purchase"?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

This could be TFTDextender; not sure.

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.)

Okay, maybe I wasn't clear enough. 1) The commander spawns avoid the "only first ~50 spawns used" issue (because it's "first ~50 spawns" of the ones considered, and if there are appropriate spawns it doesn't consider inappropriate ones) if they exist. They are still subject to the "spawn points gone missing" issue, and if they're not there the commanders will go to generic alien spawn points which have the "only first ~50" issue. 2) Sherlock's route mod dramatically worsens the "spawn points gone missing" issue, because it adds a whole bunch of waypoints which clog up ROUTES.DAT (I don't think he knew about this issue when writing it).

I can see it, but I haven't downloaded it because it's not clear from your post what the save is there to demonstrate.

So, uh, what is the save file you've attached?

I mentioned it further up. Aliens in phase 2 of colonies always seem to spawn in the North, apart from the commanders (who have dedicated spawn points in the command module). I believe it's a result of there being too many spawn points for the engine to correctly roll among all of them - those maps are FAR more complicated than anything from UFO*. They can move southward as the mission progresses, but generally you're going to find most of them in the North. (I think this is also why there's the long stretch of nothing in T'leth L2/L3, as the usually-abandoned section is in the South. It's not nearly as striking as the colonies, though, probably because the map isn't 3D.) *Remember, the Gollops made UFO's engine and all the data was designed around it; TFTD was made by a MicroProse team in a year, and they didn't understand the (shared) engine anywhere near as deeply. This is why they made rookie mistakes like changing the UFOpaedia-displayed values for craft-weapon fire rates without changing the real ones, or removing the limit on how many Engineers you can put on a project without twigging to the fact that the limit was there to mask an underlying engine limit on manufacturing rate. And then there are the various ways TFTD expands on UFO, whether that be more aliens, bigger maps, aliens with carried melee weapons or two-part missions, which often run into hidden engine limits (the obvious stuff they noticed and could kludge, but a lot of the subtler stuff got missed).

My guess based on your mention of a downed Alien Sub is that an IBA explosion knocked out the Tasoth and one of your utilities mistakenly gave it to you on the equip screen. Not sure what else could have done it. Yeah, the algorithms aren't very good at keeping things in the water. Alien Subs touching down on land are much worse, since if you attempt to recover them the game crashes.

There's your answer. The other half of the equation is that Base Defences are pretty trivial if you plan for them (particularly in UFO, though somewhat less so in TFTD), and they're lucrative both in points and loot while defence facilities get you nothing if they succeed, so going to all the trouble of reloading and the tedium of the "base defences activated" screen every couple of days feels a bit unnecessary. Yes. The time I saw Reapers fail to appear entirely was on Superhuman. On lower difficulties it's much less of an issue. On re-inspection the ships have less large-unit spawns than I thought they did (3 upper/1 lower for cargo ship, 2 upper/7 lower for cruise ship), so in the cargo ship there's a decent chance of Triscenes failing to show due to lack of spawn points (and I saw a case of it when testing this, in fact). EDIT: I looked at 5 Ports and 5 Islands and got 6-9 large spawns - the island seems to have them guaranteed via the giant Moai/bunker module that's always in the south. So those don't seem like they'd get quenched easily. Basically, my guess of which would have bigger issues with large units was 100% wrong. Sorry. Superhuman isn't actually that much harder than Veteran, and there are other differences than "more aliens" (the aliens have higher stats*, interception's a bit trickier, and the score cutoff for a "bad" month is -300 instead of -700). *The most important increases are to TU, Firing Accuracy, and MC. Tentaculats go from 114 TU to 146, Lobbies go from 60 accuracy to 87, and the defence stat to be safe from Tasoth mind control at 10 tile range goes from 61 to 75.

Technically, the second one is a Cruiser, not an Escort. By the way, the Escort and Cruiser will land (though the first Battleship won't), so if you want to inspect their crews (to confirm race) you can just assault them while they're touched down and avoid delaying the mission. Not quite. Mixed Crew may have a Calcinite, certainly, but there's also the 10% probability of it simply being Aquatoids (who will always have Calcinites). So it's 10% + 20%*75% = 25% per ship site investigated. The chance is 4% on Beginner, 8% on Experienced, 12% on Veteran, 20% on Genius, 28% on Superhuman. I forgot about The Ultimate Threat. Yes, the second topic in the sequence leading to T'leth. Once you research that, the aliens schedule an extra Floating Base Attack every month (2:30 AM on the 1st, like the Escort for Port/Island). I'm not 100% sure of the racial breakdown, but I know it picks from Aquatoid/Gill Man/Lobster Man/Tasoth (i.e. NOT Mixed, so it won't get you Triscenes but can get you Calcinites). If you're doing an Iron-Man run (no reloading), making Base Defences more likely via these mechanisms is your only real chance to improve the odds (besides the obvious "don't shoot down the Port/Island Attack Battleship"), which is why I mention them. But yes, if you're save-scumming it's pretty trivial to get the correct terror sites and there's no need to go this route. As an aside... if aliens find your base, subs and defence facilities won't help you very much. The mission logic is rather odd; once the aliens have found your base, they will keep sending Dreadnoughts every few days until one gets through and you get a Base Defence mission, after which they stop. The Dreadnoughts come in at full speed and outrange all your craft, so you're quickly going to run out of undamaged advanced craft to fend them off, and if your defence facilities are less than completely airtight (by which I mean at least 8 shots of P.W.T., and preferably 10) they'll get through eventually. Defensive strategy against Floating Base Attacks is mostly a matter of shooting down the scouts, using M.C. Generators, and/or designing your base for easy missions when the aliens do come calling. You'd need to go after the Cruiser, not the Escort, to fully confirm Mixed (Mixed Escort and Tasoth Escort have identical crew loadouts, but the Mixed Cruiser will have 1 Aquatoid). Of course, you could go after the Escort, reload if there's no Tasoths, then check the Cruiser to confirm that it's Mixed rather than Tasoths. The particular clincher here is that if you spot a Mixed sub, you've already succeeded - there's (almost certainly) going to be Triscenes at the Port/Island Attack. The reason I mention it for Aquatoids - at least if you're not save-scumming - is that you might see Aquatoids doing e.g. Interdiction or Colony Expansion, which won't give you a Calcinite on its own (no land missions) but does give you an opportunity to provoke them into attacking your base.

Would anyone be interested in me doing an LP of a Superhuman run with Council Funding Only? I've beaten Superhuman before; it's tough but I know the basic traps (early intercepts are playing with fire, make sure to get a dead and live Deep One in January, carry Tazers on every unknown mission until you get Sonics, get Displacers before June and use them as Tentaculat bait). But Council Funding Only is a step beyond anything I've done. I'd be doing CFO via hacking PURCHASE.DAT to zero sell price for manufacturables and recoverables; manually destroying items or building a billion General Stores is just tedious.

Basically. Of course, in the case of a Shipping Route terror site you don't know it's Mixed until you actually go there in any case, so you're still looking for evidence that it is Mixed and not, say, Gill Men or Tasoths (the race). Port, Island and Shipping Route all use a Battleship crew (Shipping Route has two of them). Base Defences use a Dreadnought crew. The key points are that a) Base Defences include terrorists, b) Base Defences count as on land, so they'll be the land terrorists. No, it figures out what it wants to place before figuring out which spawn points to use. The issue is that Triscenes are spawning pretty late in the order (after all the Tasoths and Aquatoids) and the first two X-Com games are in general not very good at having enough large-unit spawn points and keeping them available for large units (rather than something else taking them first - small units are allowed to take the spawn points of large units, and large units are usually spawned last). I'm thinking more about the randomly-assembled Port/Island maps here than about the ship maps. I've seen a Superhuman Floater terror site in UFO have zero Reapers because there weren't any large-unit spawn points left by the time it had spawned all the Floaters. I haven't seen this happen to Triscenes in TFTD (there are cases of e.g. 2 Triscenes instead of 6 due to this issue, but that's not zero), but I wouldn't be surprised if it did on occasion. It's fine.

The stuff I've needed help with, I've asked for as I needed it. The roadblock is mostly in testing whether my changes work properly, not in making them in the first place.