penchant

I'm well into the buildings in the alien dimension but I haven't progressed much lately because I have been half-waiting for an Apocalypse raid, just to see what it's like. Since I've already cleaned out their fleet, I have just realised that I'm not likely to see much of an Apocalypse even if the aliens can muster an attack. Maybe next game. As for Elerium, I thought that the occasional pods that my agents brought back to base got sold for cash but if the auto cleanup routine is converting pods to LPC ammo then that will account for the growing stocks. Thanks, guys.

ROFL. You actually had me going there for a while. Nice one!

I would like to have use of Transtellar's services again but they and Marsec are peeved at my attacks on their "alien friends." I have lost no-one to infiltration but the city seems to be polarized into the Government and Megapol versus The Cult, Marsec and Transtellar with members of the two sides attacking and raiding one another on a regular basis, punctuated by seemingly inconsequential treaty signings. I see no-one that I might attack in order to curry favour with Transtellar, other than my two closest allies. Suggestions, anyone? Is there nothing else I can do other than wait for the aliens to hit the city with the Overspawn or Apocalypse? Another question, while I remember. I keep finding that I have large stocks of Elerium, like 2k units and more. It's ammo for the Lineage Plasma Cannon and I have at least six of those in use but my stocks of Elerium keep increasing. Where is it coming from? (Solmine are neutral so they aren't donating it, I don't think.)

Ewwww! Please don't tell me that that's the source of the green alien gas that I have seen mentioned in various threads here.

I am still working on my first game of Apocalypse. I'm playing at medium difficulty level and the seven sitess where I can build bases are all slums or warehouses owned by the government. Even after I purchase a site and build my base, the property still belongs to the government and can attract alien infestation separately from an attack on my base. Like Veteran, I think of my base as occupying the basement/cellar/foundations of the building above. The Recyclotorium belongs to Evonet and I get the impression that there is something special about building a base there. I'll find out in due course, no doubt.

Yes, I agree about vessel cloaking devices. I don't use them either but if I had lost the chance to research it I'd have been constantly wondering whether I had missed something vital. I'll know next time, of course. The long, incidentally, has a range of about 4,000 million, give or take a financial billion or two, so we'll need more than $2,000,000,000 before funds go negative. Sounds to me like a job for NKF.

Here is a summary of the advice from the others: Organisations can become hostile because you have done too much damage to their buildings. When that happens, they might become friendly again later if the aliens (ufo) do them even more damage than you have done to them. You might even bully them into trading with you again by attacking their buildings and ships, although I have never had much success with this strategy myself. Organisations can also become hostile because the aliens have infiltrated them 100%, like your GM. When that happens, they are lost for ever and you can not get them back. It is very important to capture alien vessel 3 (ovni 3) when you see it because you might not get another chance. The other ships are plentiful but No 3 is very rare and you have to research it or you will be unable to finish the game. Because you have missed it and because you have lost GM to the aliens, it is probably best to start the game again.

I was aware that I could have sold the excess stocks but it was my first run through Apocalypse (still proceeding) and I didn't want to corrupt the game play so severely. Besides, I had an intriguing new artefact to research. It turned out to be a vessel cloaking device so it wasn't especially important but it's the only one that I have found so far.

I found my earlier post and it's in the Apocalypse thread "Organization becoming under alien control." My GLM stock levels went nuts after Transtellar went hostile and I tried to transfer an artefact between bases by selling it from Base A and then buying it back at Base B. The artefact was a vessel cloaking device and I thought at first that I had successfully transferred it but an unfortunate side-effect was that stock levels for two other items got corrupted, one being GLMs . I coudn't fix the problem, other than by reloading a saved game.

The first time that I encountered the problem I "fixed" it by re-loading an earlier saved game. When it happened subsequently, I thought about it a bit and tried to work out what had gone wrong. Like the others have said, it's to do with stocks going spuriously negative and sending the reported stock level "round the clock" and round the bend! Anyway, it's fixable if you can find a way to return one of the crazy-value items to storage. When it happened to me, it was the stock level for a piece of armour that went haywire and I fixed it by going to the "equip soldier" screen amd removing the relevant piece of kit from a soldier. So the problem is easily fixed when you know how and you can do something similar with craft equipment - just send a vessel to the base, go to the "equip vessel" screen and unload one of the crazy-quantity items. Hmmm... I have just noticed that you refer to GLM arrays. I had a problem with those and it was caused by something else... erm... it's somewhere in another thread here. As the unforgettable whosit said unforgettably "I'll be... " erm..."back" Yeah. that's it: "I'll be back"

Ah, thank you, I think I understand now.

Three of us seem to be at about the same stage of the game, namely the third building in the alien dimension, give or take a building. Ki-tat Chung and knight of the ravens have been more adventurous than I have in tackling the AD because I had personal teleporters a long time before I ventured forth. My current score is 83K and, as far as I can work out, I had PTs before my score reached 65K. I'm playing on medium difficulty level so NKF is probably correct when he says that his suggested 144K is "probably more than you need." The difference must be attributable to difficulty levels but we'll have a definitive answer after Ki-tat's current mission finishes. I'm assuming here that you do intend to return home eventually, Ki-tat? I take the point about the cloning pads because I scored a miserly 670-odd points after I destroyed them as quickly as I could in the Maintenance (4th) Building. This contrasts with nearly 3K points in the previous mission so it does, indeed, make a big difference.

Seconded! Recovery missions quickly become very samey. The original game's seek and destroy format was better. This is one of those questions that I have puzzled over for a while: What's eva?

I have just realised that I have never used smoke grenades in Apocalypse. I used them occasionally in the original UFO game but they have never been a favourite weapon of mine. I've forgotten, did TFTD have an equivalent? Have you noticed that the aliens use Megapol smoke grenades? They certainly use them to great effect, rendering my troops almost sightless while the aliens continue their assault, seemingly unaffected. I think that this is why I have never used smoke grenades. Are they effective against the tracking devices like entropy and dimension missiles? And that reminds me... I have noticed that when aliens fire off tracking missiles they need not be aimed at anything in particular. When discussing right of way with security stations, for example, I have seen them launch missiles that had to loop a full 180 degrees to find a target. Nutters!

It's interesting and informative to read about all the different techniques that we employ. As NKF has mentioned, what suits one player might not suit another but their ability to cater for most styles of play is one of the things that give the X-COM games lasting appeal. From comments here, it appears that many players resort first to carrying one, then two and then three Personal Disruptor Shields in response to increasing alien firepower. I know that I did. Also like other players, I find it advantageous to have agents who can fly and shields are necessary because of the vulnerability of the Marsec torso units. What led me to abandon flight and shields was Marsec and Transtellar both going hostile. This meant that flight plates were impossible to replace and that other equipment was difficult to shunt around. The main problem, however, was that PDSs were forever in short supply and so I tried kitting out my troops in full X-COM gear and going entirely without shields. It was NKF who mentioned the efficacy of a full set of X-COM armour and I decided to see whether that might be an answer to my logistics problems. I discovered that it works great for me. I set my agents on "fearless" to stop them prancing about while they aim that expensive ($64.25 per round, retail) C-Toxin and they seem impervious to all, except the dreaded entropy. As others have observed, those Entropy Launchers are a real menace. Without shields, one hit will kill and so a quick jog/teleport to somewhere safer while the agent strips and runs about is essential. Admittedly, entropy is ineffective if a shielded agent withdraws to cover immediately, but the temptation is to linger and seek out the alien with the launcher, often resulting in more hits, destroyed shields and the same smoking agent with melting armour. I find that knowing an agent is definitely going to die, unless I do something about it, leads to fewer mishaps overall. With regard to flight, I soon found that being earthbound was rarely a real drawback. There was only one occasion where I could not reach a hostile because the means of access had been destroyed - it was a Psyke rent-a-cop on the roof of a slum and the external ladder got broked rendering the roof inaccessible. Since the advent of teleporters, however, even that sort of thing is no longer a problem. Anyway, a full suit of X-COM armour, no shields, is now my preferred kit.

I'll soon be tackling my fourth building in the alien dimension and I have noticed that, as one might expect, the missions get progressively harder. I'm playing at Medium difficulty level and, so far, I have taken each building with a 10-squad (3-3-3-1) of my best troops all equipped alike: full X-COM armour, a Toxigun with 4 spare clips, a Megapol grenade for Brainsucker emergencies, a Personal Teleporter, a Cloaking Device and a Medikit. After the first mission, they all had a Vortex Mine as well but they can still really motor! I returned from the third mission with a seriously wounded agent and no fewer than 37 dead Poppers. There would have been more of both had it not finally dawned on me where the aliens were coming from. I had to go scavenging for more Vortex Mines to stop them and destroy the "concrete blocks" to complete the mission. So who needs Disruptor Shields? Or am I in for a rude awakening?

Buildings get razed to the ground by hurricanes and other severe weather, so maybe that's storming.

A starfish flower? A wounded one, maybe.

I was puzzled by your description of the Personal Teleporter, NKF. Until I looked at it in the Ufopaedia, that is. However, I wonder if Nightshade was asking what it looks like in play? If so, it looks to me like a woman's mauve handbag (or purse, to our American cousins).

I was talking about the program's "button captions." After you take your agents to a cityscape building, the options you then have are either to investigate the building (for alien activity) or to raid it. Whichever you choose, you must then pick real-time or turn-based operation on the screen where your mission objectives are described. If you are on a raid, it warns you there about the consequences of taking such drastic action. When you select one of your aircraft in the cityscape you may then send it to a map-point, send it to a building, return it to its home base, equip it, man it, attack another unit, or attack a building. If you decide to attack, you are then asked to select the building or unit you want to target. I still want to "storm" Transtellar, though.

When we send our agents to a Cultist Temple, the program refers to this as "raiding." Similarly, airborne aggression against enemy ships or buildings is described as "attacking." As far as I am aware, the program never gives us an opportunity to "storm" anything. It should. If storming involves piano wire and gonads then I want to storm Transtellar.

Although I didn't know it at the time, the item that I tried to transfer was a Cloaking Field. After I notice the stores problem and I reloaded the saved game, I experimented to ascertain whether the sell/buy routine was responsible and it was. :dontgetit: There's nowt so queer as program bugs!

Thanks, Mouse Nightshirt. Knowing that a solution exists makes me feel loads better.

I reported a couple of days ago that I had successfully transferred an alien artefact between bases by selling it and then buying it back at a different base. Although this works nicely for most stock items, it does not work at all well for unresearched, zero value Alien Artifacts. The procedure appeared at first to have done what I expected but I discovered later that it had "disappeared" the artefact and scrambled a couple of stock levels in the stores at the original base. I didn't make a note of the exact details but I think that I ended up with 127 Rumble Cannon and 128 GLM Air Defence systems in a hopelessly overloaded stores. (This looks like the -1 stock level problem again, except that it's corrupting two 8-bit values this time.) Fortunately, I was able to retrieve the situation by reloading a saved game.

Whilst others seem to be troubled most by aspects of Battlescape activity, my own pet gripe is the absence of any sorting facilities on the game's various assets. Newly acquired vehicles, for example, mesh into the existing list seemingly at random, as do new recruits. This makes it difficult to select the vessels I want when responding to UFO attacks and/or the soldiers I need to equip when defending a base. Why, oh why, didn't the developers implement some kind of sorting mechanism!? I can see that this thread has lain dormant for a while but I needed to get that off my chest.