Silverblade-T-E

well the way I always play is this: set one guy off out front, this is "the bait"..he's either very good, or very bad. i always name my characters so I know who's expendable, who's good shot, strength etc, like "Bob psiweakStr54" or such. The ship is loaded out with a lot of heavy cannons, these ROCK, with 1 autoccannon, and 2 rocket launchers. When enemy is spotted, guys at REAR fire, thus the enemy doesn't reaction fire, and your heavy artillery guys don't reaction fire and blow up yer men! Fan out from the ranger, heavy weapon guys last, scouts/rifles to the front coverign wide area to spot aliens. be prepared ot throw grenades, they are very good ways to flush out enemies or blow apart cover. you can throw from the rear, to a guy closer up, if need a grenade lobbed into a difficult spot. Alien grenades and high explosive packs RULE for clearign areas. Explosives are good becuase aliens have little armour to protect them from a blast underneath. Splash effect can also do damage, and, damage reduces their accuracy and icnreases chance they will panic! so, even if they survive, odds are, they will miss or maybe panic. the heavy cannon is best trade off between damage, #shots etc. you can get 2 snap shots with it, its powerful enough to blow lots of fencing wood walls etc away, but won't hurt your guys if weairng heavy armour..which means..if they get psi controlled, they're unlikely to kill comrades The autocannon is good for blowing lots of holes in hedges etc, and, using incendaries..to light night time areas up! also, sinc efor some odd reason, incendiary damage is applied each time ANY of your men fire, the auto cannons rapid fire soon racks up damage. Explosive weapons are best fired from high ground, so angle of fire means they detonate on the ground, so, troops in hover armour are good, or fire from rmap of Avenger etc. Rocket launcher with heavy rocket is most devastating, but a bad shot can wipe out your own men, so be VERY careful of the placement of the rocket firer. They also excel at vblwoing huts/houses apart. In "farm" areas, I blast every building to pieces from long range to take out any aliens and expose them. Nice trick is to blast them, then throw grenades (prefferbaly alien), so if an enemy falls from roof/upper floor of destroyed building, the grenade may take them out, hehe. carry spare ammo on your transport aircvraft, or strong troops take it to throw ot allies. My usual load out is 2 heavy cannons (2 HE clips, 1 incendiary each) 1 auto canon (2 he clips, 2 icnendiary each) 2 rocket lcuanchers (3 HE, 1 incendiary each) Rest laser rifles, maybe some scouts with laser pistols and grenades in hand and a few spare laser weapons for heavy wepaon guys who run out of ammo 2 grenades per man 1 prox ggrenade per man 4 medikits (can be tossed to others) and perhaps 2 psiamps or 1mind probe depending on how far the game is along. As I've explained before, explosions and incendiaries, can go THROUGH UFO hulls and floors, generally if they hit at an angled section. Incendiaries are good as they won't destroy equipment! I lob proximity grenades into the corners of large scout UFOs, so they blow up enemies as they move inside, and use an autocannon and heavy cannons with icnendiaries to blast the crew section. heavy cannon hits won't destroy weapons lying ont he gorund, they do destroy ammo, corpses, but I blast ships with incendiaries.

*bows* Ok I use Poser stuff, they are bought items, perfectly legit, perfectly legal to use 3d renderings made from then, not the actual models, k? So any images I make for you would be legit. textures I know tons of texture sites but most are not for commercial use, ie ok for renders, not for inclusion in 3d molees to whit, games. :/ Dosche Design is a great sorurce of high grade commerical texxtures but no idea if that's too high spec for you. I have lots of contemporary weapons as 3d models for Poser so I cna render varied weapons I also have 3 different suits of "sci-fi" armour posisble suitbale for rendering as different XCOM amrour. silver@steve14.freeserve.co.uk some spamming sucmbag's been using it for junk mail, sigh par for the course.

I was asked to post here by "The Veteran", in regard to X-Com art anyway here's the previous items I did in that, also a link to the 2nd Ed D&D XCOM stuff I made. http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/vue1/xcom_assault.png http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/vue1/xcom_minigun.jpg http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/xcom/intro.html

Yeah there's doors, your soldiers/HWPs can walk through and htey open, can usaully be seen by heavier lines than rest of the hullplates. As said, you can often blast the enemy through the hull, this is a great way to take the enemy out! this alaso works with grenades, proximity grenades, high explosive packs. Nice tip is on the large scout ship, the X shaped one, throwing prox grenades into the diagonal walls, as the enemy move around wblast will get them, very nice trick. Incendiaries won't destroy equipment, where as explosives do. ie, you fire multiple heavy rockets into side of a small scout you'll maybe blow up the engine, and will destroy the gear/bodies of dead aliens. The autocannon's explosive shells do so little damage compared ot other HE, that they rarely destroy gear/bodies, making them good for gathering alien equipment. HE damage, iirc, isn't mitigated much because aliens have lousy under armour. Flying around using the flying suit, a soldier armed with an explosive weapon is firing DOWN on enemies, so splash damage is really good Heavy rockets and high ex packs are great, because the explosive radius is so huge you can blast enemies you can't target, and clear jungles. Another trick is, if you're in a jungle, light the place up with incendiaries, keep back (armour stops fire damage or stay in ship)..this takes time, but it will clear any cover as the fire spreads, and perhaps do damage. Autocannons with incendiaries are very good for this. One of my fave things is to have a very accurate, strong guy, flying around or up high, using autocannon with HE and incendiary (2 ammo packs of each, at least)

Blasts can go THROUGH UFO hulls especially if they hit on a DIAGONAL wall. I use incendiary weapons to burn out the crew of smaller UFos this way, muahah. On big ufos, smashing a Heavy Rocket cna penetrate deep enough to do damage on the upper deck of a Terror Ship, and thus kill/damage the ones there.

Never noticed how each HIT on an incoming battleship reduces the number of attackers? Enough hits and only 4 or so aliens will be inside. So, base defence is worthwile!

Boxed in the lift?? NO NO NO!! Always rememebr the enemy attack through the hangars and lifts, you want ot FUNNEL them. .....H...H...H.... ..........L......... ..........S........ .........LQ...R... ..........S........ That's a good base design, H hangar, L Lift, LQ living quarters, R radar, S Stores or any kind of design off that: see the enemy must funnel through the lift. There you can leave proximity grenades to mess theem up, hide tanks and troops behind doors and corners, send tank out to scout, snap shots with troops, throw prox grenades etc. It really works a treat

Zager Iran's leaders are ANYTHING but rational, they are hard line nutjobs who've squashed the younger generation's attmept at liberalization, and their premier has publicly called for Israel to be wipe dout... lol. I foresee glass...

Aye lobestermen are grossly over the top but as the poste rpoints out they ARE resistant to AP stuff Nealry all creatures take more damage from explosions at their FEET, ie grenades or misisles detonating beside them, low lower body armour Incnediary wepaons are great ways to cook monsters inside hulls without damaging gear Stun bombs work for full on lobsters..then blow them up as they lie there! Thermic lances rock

Kriptor, I used: -Vue Infinite -Paint Shop Pro -Rhino3d -Poser4

*looks around....no ctiticism so far...* Ok no one gets minigunned then :> you wouldn't believe how hard that's been to work with just 'cause of the proggie having fits at the polys/textures, hehe.

hard drive died, ugh only 4 month old system. Anyway system running smoother and art proggie glitching less as a result, so tweaked the Minigunner pic. Shell casings are a tad large: modelled to be 5.56 mm, but setting them into this is a total PIA (figured way to do that and use low resources though), end up like 7.62mms, but stuff it, not gonna change that if I can avoid it :> Improved muzzle flash, bridge texture, added some trees, slightly different camera angle etc. http://silverblade.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/xcom_minigun.jpg

Vue does actually have ways to randomize things, in this case the Duplicate and Scatter tools, but as said the dern proggie really struggles with more than 1 Poser character currently :/ Seems to be a memory leak due to the large textures. 3 figures + armour figures (the armour is complex figures), plus rather than use simple metals the armour has texture in it = BIG load on the proggie :/ But gives better end effect on the armour. Yah chrome miniguns look sweet

although there maybe a bit of "femur extension here", I suggest folk try and make such art themselves before getting too critical... It was a major PIA making the scenes, not helped by the fact the program is very buggy (only couple of months old and not even to 1.1 version yet), and the fact it has very high polygon/large textures in it, and I'm not I.L.M. I could indeed have precisely modelled the spent shell casings, I have and use Rhino, a model maker used for industrial production. I could have thus made perfectly accurate 5.56mm shells, and put them in. I could also have individually positioned each casing to give a quasi-effect of vibration on firing. However considering the program was crashing all the time as it was straining under the poly count/textures, and gets sluggish as hell (on a p4 3GHZ 2gig RAM system), I don't bloody think so. Ahem, *evil grin, taps baseball bat meaningfully* :> Additonally, the time taken to throw out approximately 30 shells (about 28 visible in the falling stream) would be 1/2 a second...4,000 Rounds per minute....

As I told a pal who suggested the same thing: miniguns don't eject bullets sidewys like most guns. Similar to most *belt fed* machine guns they dump them out of the bottom far more neatly I liked the shiny look on the armour as it's supposed to be a flexible metal, and a stainless steel minigun just looks "kewl" hehe.