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Time for a new playthrough of this game now that I finished UFO:Extraterrestrials Gold. Seems like my Gold edition playthrough had some mods enabled so this time I tried to make it as vanilla as I could. Here's what the Geoscape mod screen looks like: Differences: Lightly Wounded Soldier Recovery Speed: Kept this at 4x since it makes sense that lightly wounded soldiers aren't in the hospital as long as unconscious soldiers. UFO's Travel In Packs: This was enabled in my Gold playthrough so I disabled it here to change things up. UFO Swarms: Again, another Gold mod mechanic I like as it gives rare items. HWD Mod: If you have the advanced detection module built (and certain topics researched) you can see the alien race in a UFO and also it's mission type and destination. Soldier Limit: Bumped this up by 2 to 32 so that I can still look at the new recruit class. Hire Soldier Cost: If you lower the price to $0 (Mod Disabled) you can't hire soldiers anymore so I increased it to $1000. Hire Soldier Delay: Normally soldiers are immediately put into the hospital when hired, this mod allows hired soldiers to be used instantly. Varied Soldier Names: If you disable this mod some of your soldier's names will be an error message, so I left it enabled. Better Soldier Stats: Soldier stats are lower than in Gold by about 10 points so this brings it back to that level I'm used to. And now the Tactical mods: Recover Partial Clips After Combat: A Gold mod I kept in place because it makes sense. XP Bonus for Successful Mission: Another Gold mod I'm used to so it's staying in. Enable Burst Reaction Fire: Yet another Gold mod which is useful and almost a necessity. Sight Ranges: Everyone, soldiers and aliens have identical sight ranges, no cheating. Alien Bounty Reward: Changed this to $30k per alien as it was in Gold since that's what I'm used to. Soldier Placement: Manual because I need to be able to control who gets off the transport first for xp training. Encumbrance System: Made it the same as in UFO:EU, the whole min strength limit was too restrictive on certain items like armor. Inventory AP Costs: Meh, put these all to 0 so that it's easier managing stuff on a mission. Other than that, the game resolution has been changed to 1600x900 pixels so screenshots are a little better. So I start the game and the first thing I need to do is: Hell yes I do! Where to you may ask? Russia of course. Placed it East of Moscow so that it covers a good chunk of Russia while still being close enough to the other areas in case interception help is needed (whenever I build a new base that is). The issue with the North America Brotherhood starting base location is that there aren't a lot of areas which can help intercept and shoot down UFO's (same with South America and to a lesser extent, Africa). I'm also going to be building new bases further inland away from the coast so that UFO's have a greater chance of being shot down over land. The more inland a UFO crashes, the quicker my team can get to it. That's the theory at least. First order of business is to start research on something, in this case, the medkit: I'm not convinced that shielding is going to be more beneficial early on as the ability to patch a soldier up on the battlescape will keep them out of the hospital for less time. The other thing I need to address is my initial soldier prospects because mostly all of them are garbage. I need to hire some new soldiers stat. so I sorted by 50 in everything except for bravery which I kept at 45. Here they are (changed the names to forum regulars). First up is Thorondor: Space Voyager: NKF: And last but not least our fearless leader, Pete: That should be enough to get us started at least. After we get through some missions I'll start sacking the soldiers with low stats and hopefully hire a new batch to fill the ranks. Little by little it'll get sorted out. There's one other thing we need to do and that's base facilities. For some reason the Laboratory costs an astronomical $3.8 million which means that's not an option (yet). So this is what I came up with: From left to right on the bottom row: Hangar. With a new base a fair way off on the horizon, we need more planes to down UFOs currently. An extra interceptor should help in that. Two Cannon Defenses: Whereas in Gold the defenses only activated from a direct imminent attack against the base, in UFO2 the defenses will shoot at any nearby threat so they act sorta like another interceptor in practice. Workshop. Quick build time and not crazy expensive like the Lab so we might as well prepare for the eventual need to produce something quick (like the medkits) in a reasonable amount of time. Other than that, it's the standard strategy of prepare, then wait. So hopefully something happens soon. Stay tuned for the next episode. - Zombie