Jump to content

Finished first game, thoughts/questions/tips/rambling inside.


Recommended Posts

So, finished my first game on Veteran difficulty (played with the Community Edition mod). Lovely game, I'm a big fan of the XCom-likes and I think you really nailed it well. What follows is mostly a stream of consciousness thing.

- Geoscape layer

So on my first (learning, not full) game I tried building level 3 radar immediately, then a 2nd base at the start of month 2 and a 3rd base at the start of month 3. Bad idea! Unlike X-Com the problem isn't detecting the UFOs, but scrambling enough fighters to the location quickly. Level 3 radar is a complete waste; you'll detect things so far away that your fighters will probably run out of fuel chasing it down anyway. Not to mention how long it takes to set up, and that by defending one region super hard you quickly hit the funding limit while all other regions are near gone by month 3.

For this game I ignored Radar entirely, planting 2 hanger bases (Center USA and Russia, just above Mongolia. My original base being around Sudan) immediately with a further 2 hanger bases (South America and Indonesia) in month two. Both were strictly used to launch Foxtrots who would fan out and use their personal radar to search for UFOs in response to events. I didn't build a single radar until nearly month 5 and I never really needed more than that with 5 bases covering. I'm happy to say it was a smashing success, I managed to take down what I think was almost all UFOs on the cheap. My monthly income at the start of month 2 was 2.93M (up from 2.86M start) and for month 5 it was 3.5M. Best of all I had a fairly balanced relations status, with only Central America being in danger of leaving and once my detection picked up all countries quickly hit very good relations and funding. Only had 1 terror mission and 1 alien base set up the entire game.

Foxtrots are key for this, research them ASAP and spam them immediately, at least up to 2 per base (my main base ended up having 6 hangers). Condors are junk, no need to buy them and try to decommission them before either month 2 or month 3 so you don't pay maintenance. Foxtrots are way faster, with better radar, and can totally kill enemy fighters. How to kill enemy fighters? 2 options. Best option: Circle around and shoot from the side, the roll won't put them outside the path of the torpedo. Low fuel/Lazy option: Fly straight in and launch the torpedo at point blank range. Doing so I also completely ignored Corsairs and went straight for Marauders.

One issue I had was that there is no way to pause the game when a UFO alert comes on. It's rather aggravating how I had to keep the same at speed 2/3 while passing time just to make sure I wasn't missing out on UFOs early on. Could some option to pause the game for the first UFO event of each wave? It would be really helpful.

Eventually I got to the point where I had around 5-6 Battleships attacking twice a week. It was kind of silly. Reading up now, it looks like it happens when the alien "score" gets too high. It seemed to start happening way too early, I hadn't hardly finished up most research lines. I'm wondering if this was because I left the Alien Base up from Month 4 all the way until around Month 10, does that generate alien points? I was probably being overly cautious there. But regardless it really wasn't too hard to take them down and keep my funding high. Frankly it would be a lot more scary if the Aliens pooled their resources together and launched a much larger wave with 15-20 battleships twice a month.

The Auto-Resolve for air combat felt very fair to me, for which I'm glad. In fact at times it actually gave me chances to win battles that I simply didn't have enough ammo to win in manual combat. One gripe is that I think that auto resolve should never lead to damaged planes when the aliens have no fighters and are weak enough for pure torpedoes to take down.

- Research

It struck me as odd that so much of the research was non-linear. The only way to "skip" stuff in the original X-Com was skipping lasers for plasma, but you can skip almost anything for the later tiers in Xenonauts. I quite like this, but it is rather odd to see the Xenopedia mention things like that our Wolf Battle Armor "is a direct replacement for Jackal Combat Armor" when we haven't even researched Jackal Combat Armor. Just a funny thing.

I ended up getting stuck with Plasma weapons for far longer than I should have and I wasn't aware that MAG weapons existed or how to unlock them. I know the Alien Battle Rifle research entry says "will advance our understanding of Plasma weapons", but I already KNEW how to make plasma weapons, so I didn't bother researching it until the end game. I think description for the Alien Battle Rifle research item should be amended to say something about advancing knowledge about better tiers of weapons, certainly not talk about Plasma weapons.

Alien interrogations/research seemed a rather pointless waste of research time for most of the game. 10% damage bonus is kind of weak, it would be nice if interrogations gave a small bonus to research or something.

- Weapons

Pistols/Shield: Really awesome. Pistols are surprisingly powerful. Shields are insanely useful for drawing reaction fire (Assault Shields probably OP). Make sure to equip your soldiers with Dual Shields on the inventory screen then drop one on turn 1 as a spare to be retrieved if your primary is lost.

Shotgun: Also really awesome. That 1.5x reaction modifier is just amazing for charging in, and at point blank 2 soldiers can fairly reliably take down 1 enemy if they have the proper tech level.

Rifle: Was I the only one who found these pitiful? Jack-of-all-trades Master-of-none does not a good weapon make, especially when you can carry multiple weapons. They have essentially no benefit over pistols except beyond 10 range (at which point there is probably an obstruction that stops you from hitting accurately anyway, and snipers are obviously better). Close up, they just use too many TUs for too few shots (can only burst once while a shotgun can shoot 2, potentially 3 blasts of 3x shots), and 45% burst accuracy is a joke unless you are literally hugging an enemy, to say nothing of the problem having only a 1.0x reaction modifier brings compared to the 1.5x both pistols and shotguns have. IMO, they could use a boost. Maybe give them the half the damage mitigation that snipers have? Maybe give them a stronger close-range accuracy bonus (I'd say start it at 10 tiles)? Whatever the case, I ended up dropping these early. Most other weapons could reliably kill with 2 shooters available and a 3rd in reserve in cases of poor luck. Rifles would nearly always require 3 shooters available and bad luck would require 4 or 5.

On that note, what exactly does mitigation do? From what I've read it negates the armor of enemies hit, but according to the Xenonauts wiki virtually every enemy is armored enough that the armor will always be above the mitigation value of your current sniper rifle, which would make it pretty much the same as just a flat damage boost. I'm assuming I'm missing something about how mitigation works here.

Sniper: Godly. Surprisingly mobile, you can move quite a few tiles to avoid small rocks and crap that messes up your aim, then score an easy 95% shot. Also have the option of taking two shots at normal aim, provided you have 100% TUs available, which with top tier snipers means 2 95% shots and is incredibly satisfying to pull off. My best sniper ended the game with 52 (all) missions participated in and 80 kills, my best Heavy Weapons got 56 kills with the same number of missions, and no other non-sniper attained a greater than 1:1 kill:mission ratio.

Machine gun: Cool. Generally better than snipers in instances where you can put them on covering one firing lane and one firing lane only, but much less able to be mobile and respond to enemies coming from different directions without a turn to set up. Predator armor is insanely OP, had I gotten it earlier I'd probably have a few more high-scoring machinegunners. I'd say that Predator Armor's machine gun TU consumption could be bumped up to 60% and the normal machine gun TU consumption lowered to 75% to make things a bit more fair.

Rockets/Explosive grenades: Rather underwhelming. Destroying loot is already bad enough, it would be nice if they could at least destroy cover properly while they are at it. Once upon seeing a traincar in front of a UFO entrance I had the idea to destroy it so that my snipers could shoot into the UFO from out of sight. 6 rockets later and I had a mildly damaged traincar still blocking sight. And several fusion rockets would prove incapable of fully destroying some cover elements within UFOs. They did pick up in usefulness in the midgame when I didn't care much about destroying loot anymore, but using rockets as strictly direct fire weapons is still feels kind of wrong.

On the note of destroying objects: Exactly what inside the UFO can be destroyed and screw you out of loot? What counts for Alloy or (more importantly) Alenium? Or can you only destroy the intangible research artifact things?

Tanks: Was rather put off at first test, never researched in game. I used tanks in X-Com for lots-of-rockets destroying leveling the map (rockets suck at this in Xenonauts), for drawing reaction fire (shields are better for that now), and for scouting (pistols or shotguns with their 1.5x reaction modifier are better at avoiding reaction fire even if tanks have slightly better vision). So that kind of leaves tanks without a niche to fill for me. Couple this with the fact that they take research, money (much more tight in Xenonauts) and a facility. And costing Alenium is just a kick in the balls. Alenium is incredibly important for maintaining air superiority and air vehicles are always retrieved and repaired, while tanks are lost forever along with their Alenium at the whim of a lucky reaction shot while scouting. At the very least I think they should be rebuilt similar to how aircraft work and higher level tanks could use the 360 degree FoV that Sentinel armor gives. And a bit more ammo would be nice.

Overall my general composition was 2/3 fireteams of 1 shield/1 shotgun/1 sniper/1 heavy, with the sniper and heavy elements shifting between teams when one needed to advance while the other forward elements kept lookout. Eventually when strength allowed my snipers and heavies got shotguns and my shotgunners got sniper rifles, at which point we absolutely went to town chewing through enemies.

- Enemies

Caesans are moderate difficulty. Later levels with Psi were annoying but never actually led to deaths, only extra turns waiting. The 2 times I had a unit mind-controlled in my entire game I simply ran away and the victim chased after me only to put a single shot into a shield, after which we continued as normal. Maybe I was lucky with that but I think their psi abilities could be buffed a bit.

Sebillians are by far the hardest enemy. Regeneration is ridiculously OP since you basically have to take them down in one turn and they are not easy prey (this was not helped by my being stuck at Plasma as I was assaulting Battleships). Being quick doesn't help, and GRENADES GOD DAMN I HATE THEIR GRENADES. Supposedly "poor" accuracy doesn't mean much when they throw grenades or use AoE weapons, and frankly their poor accuracy was suspiciously good whenever they took shots. Being immune to smoke effects meant that I couldn't just smoke a person stuck out of cover like I could with every other race and be confident of their survival. Really fearsome all around.

Androns were fairly easy. Sure, armor sucks, but they are very predictable and very rarely attack in groups like Sebillians do. Not taking cover just makes them sitting ducks as they slowly charge at you while your nimble soldiers pop out of cover and easily wear it down. I could see them being a challenge if you researched and upgraded armor first, but I didn't, and these present a pretty compelling reason to always go weapons first. Lasers handle early ranks without a problem and Plasma was able to take them on all the way until the end.

Reapers were surprisingly weak. I think almost all of them that charged me died to a single shotgun blast, and those that didn't died to multiple reaction shots. In fact in one instance a single (plasma) pistol shot downed one, but it might have been weakened by civilian fire, dunno. Never lost a man to these. I think they could do with a lot more armor and/or health.

Harridans were complete pushovers. Caesans without psi who expose themselves ontop of buildings for my snipers to eat up. They never really came at me in numbers enough to make them deadly (and they were usually partnered with Androns who also have the same problem of never really swarming you).

Wraiths I only saw once while assaulting a battleship with Caesans. Could have been deadly but there were only like 3 of them and the only one who teleported didn't really use it well. Maybe I got lucky with only seeing them once but they could really use showing up earlier and in greater numbers IMO.

- Other Stuff

A few minor gripes: Enemies would seemingly get stuck walking back and forth in certain buildings at times. The enemies inside UFOs seemed to "cheat" and know when you were standing outside on overwatch, but in fact this made it far easier to breach UFOs since you can always predict what they will do and thereby easily take no casualties once you understand the methods needed. It would be nice if there was a way to suppress the viewpoint changing every time you selected a new unit or a unit moved, for instances when you are running a dozen people up teleporters.

Alien turn timers got way too long in some of the missions. I timed one at 30s. It would be nice to have a fast-forward button on that. I'm sure its not my PC being too slow as I was able to attach Cheat Engine to the process and speed hack it to 2x speed, which I recommend for anyone else who has this problem.

Was it a conscious decision to screw over troops who start with low health/high other stats in terms of health advancement? It was rather annoying that my best sniper capped out at 60 health after her stats were 100 TU/100 STR/100 ACC, while other rookies (well, comparatively rookies) were floating around the 70-80 range. It would be nice if potential stat gains after a mission still counted towards the 5-per-HP even if said stat was capped. Heck, make it so they only count half and that you need 10 TU/STR/ACC improvements for her to gain 1 HP, that would be fine. Just feels unfair to permanently limit certain stats. On other notes of stat advancement: Moving 500 TUs for maximum TU advancement is kind of laborious but essential to do (I eventually modded that to 200). Slightly overloading soldiers for +1 STR per mission is also pretty essential but makes sense. God bless my sniper/shotgun combination soldiers.

Final mission was pretty cool. Could use with being a bit longer IMO. And the Reapers could come a bit earlier, I only saw one pop out the same turn I killed the Praetor, and I had already taken the generators as well. The idea is excellent though, and was a good way to wrap things up.

Overall the game was a bit on the easy side, but I'm an X-Com veteran who eats Superhuman TFTD for lunch, and I think my geoscape strategy completely turned the tables and gave me a decisive edge over the more obvious strategies. I look forward to a replay on Insane difficulty.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I always rage at androns bloody reaction fire and didnt have much trouble with sebillians...

You didnt mention the ironman option so I assume you didnt use it? It helps with the "too easy" feeling.

Oh and if you plan to do another run, be sure to check out the mods, preferably ones with melee aliens. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Very well written, and I feel the same about most of what you said. I've not used the pistol/shield setup (I got so used to playing the recent XCOM games that I automatically just hide my troops at the end of turn lol), I may have to give that a shot. I have never, ever used vehicles, and I've never really used them in the other X-COM games/clones, either. I play all of my games, so far, on normal because I want longer games, and the descriptions on the harder difficulties says it speeds things up.

Thanks for the write-up, I always enjoy reading thorough posts about others' experiences :-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Be aware on Insane that Sebillians can be a total pain in the arse. I have this on good authority from a fellow who plays these kinds of games on Insane all of the time.

Sounds fun. And by fun I mean scary.

I always rage at androns bloody reaction fire and didnt have much trouble with sebillians...

You didnt mention the ironman option so I assume you didnt use it? It helps with the "too easy" feeling.

Oh and if you plan to do another run, be sure to check out the mods, preferably ones with melee aliens. :)

Androns definitely surprised me the first time with reaction fire. I was expecting their reactions to be low for some reason.

I never like Ironman mode because it punishes me whenever I make some stupid misclick or forget to move a spotter back into cover at the end of a turn...

I'll look into mods but new "surprises" while trying insane for the first time is probably a deadly idea.

Wait, you guys feel it is too easy?

I almost get pulverized just playing normal back when I first started.......

Well it helps to have a lot of X-Com experience, and as I said I had about half of a "test" game devoted to figuring out a lot of this stuff.

Very well written, and I feel the same about most of what you said. I've not used the pistol/shield setup (I got so used to playing the recent XCOM games that I automatically just hide my troops at the end of turn lol), I may have to give that a shot. I have never, ever used vehicles, and I've never really used them in the other X-COM games/clones, either. I play all of my games, so far, on normal because I want longer games, and the descriptions on the harder difficulties says it speeds things up.

Thanks for the write-up, I always enjoy reading thorough posts about others' experiences :-)

Ohh I definitely still hide troops at the end of turns whenever possible. But if your frontliner only needs to spot for the people in back then they may as well spot from behind an 80 HP shield, and it helps for surprises. Also great for the first person to storm a UFO. Pistols are still surprisingly powerful at close range. And in the final mission I had 3 soldiers dual wielding shields, because adding 320 HP per soldier is pretty neat when you want to charge quickly. I might go dual shields from the beginning on insane difficulty.

One neat trick you can do is that you can drop your weapon (or anything in your hands) to lower the TU cost of throwing grenades. Since dropping the weapon costs 0 TUs and throwing is cheaper with a free hand, in dire straits you can drop the pistol in order to get that essential smoke/flashbang/explosive out.

I'm glad you enjoyed my ramblings.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting read. I like the strategy of focusing early on getting bases online.

Personally I feel the late game is actually very boring from the geoscape perspective. While the early to mid game are very well executed I found that the late game became very boring, as I gained access to Marauders which effectively shut down the aliens air superiority.

No more Terror Missions, no more Base Attacks and no more Alien Bases. Just in the first month of me getting Marauders I would suddenly see a massive rise in the money I have as I shoot down UFOs and increase my relations with the funding nations.

Another thing I find weird is how irrelevant Plasma Weapons are, due to the way the research works to unlock Plasma Weapons you have to research 2 of the 5 late game weapons. To unlock MAG weapons you have to research all 5 of the late game weapon (Plus one other weapon). What this means is that I usually only get a Plasma Precision and Machinegun and just wait for MAG weapons to show up.

I do only play on Insane though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

...or forget to move a spotter back into cover at the end of a turn...

I hate that. X_X

I'll look into mods but new "surprises" while trying insane for the first time is probably a deadly idea.

I found Insane not much different from veteran. Playing vanilla again would probably bore me. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting OP indeed. Some things:

Alien turn timers got way too long in some of the missions. I timed one at 30s.

I'd be happy if my old comp would do turns in 30 secs.

Was it a conscious decision to screw over troops who start with low health/high other stats in terms of health advancement? It was rather annoying that my best sniper capped out at 60 health after her stats were 100 TU/100 STR/100 ACC, while other rookies (well, comparatively rookies) were floating around the 70-80 range.

Starting guys simply do not improve over a certain limit in health, while newly hired guys do?

Is this modddable in some XML to give all equal chances to progress?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Starting guys simply do not improve over a certain limit in health, while newly hired guys do?

Is this modddable in some XML to give all equal chances to progress?

The problem is that HP increases as a result of other stats increasing. So the higher a soldier's other stats (and the lower their starting HP) the less chance they will have to improve it and it will cap out at some point lower than other stats.

It is possible to change the rate of HP growth, though, in gameconfig.xml

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...