I... guess I fell behind?

Okay have to vent. I thought I was doing pretty well with this playthrough- being almost about to unlock plasma weapons, but still wearing jackal armor... :I

Just 'experienced' my first terror mission, and no, no I'm doing something wrong here. Just a million of these grey ***** swarming my chopper. They take more hits, outnumber my guys, do way more damage, are way better *shots* ... and I dunno. My guys still are incredibly lucky when they have a 40% chance to hit ( and that's when I've flanked ) but the aliens here are nailing insane shots that I wouldn't have even tried with my depth perception impaired troops.

At any rate, I think I'll have to let the terror mission happen and take the hit, because no amount of reloading is getting me through this one. Now I wish I went the vehicle route so I could lay waste to everything, too late for that now! God damn it.

Ah! Annd the aliens just wiped my interceptor base - the laser defenses fired at it the attacker, but they probably had a 15% chance to hit just like all my people... FML

yeah, normally getting good armor is better then better weapons, but that is only in my playthroughts.

BTW, on early terror missions, i have found that explosives are my best friend when exiting the dropship.

Also, im gonna tell you this before someone else does, please don't use bad language.

Okay, noted.

I had a hunch that I should have gone with armor, the plasma weapons are taking ages to reserarch/build.

edit: censored it

Terror missions in this game are super hard. Some people like to bring rocketeers to early terror missions as they're accurate and one-shot most things. The only problem is you only get to fire every second turn.

Also, it may be just me, but I find assault rifles to be really bad and you probably shouldn't be using them at all. Their stopping power is abysmal beyond shotgun range, but if you're in shotgun range you should just be using a shotgun. Scout with shield carriers, then snipe with machine guns and snipers. Keep a shotgun or two around to take out enemies that get close.

I know with me terror missions are a bit more manageable with a vehicle( Area of Effect weapon load-out i.e. rockets or laser tech and up),machine gunners, shield carriers and snipers. Although I know there are times when things just don't go right.

The vehicle is useful for scouting (especially night terror missions). I play the defensive hold the line" game until the map gets revealed. Spread my guys out to prevent any sneaky aliens from dropping a squad-wipe grenade and hope that the RNG gods are watching.

The shield carriers are fairly durable to at least survive one round of shooting behind good cover if facing the right direction and machine gunners replace the deficiency in accuracy with bullets and suppression and snipers pick off guys you can shoot at. Also helps to bring extra ammo (or try your luck with alien tech which surprising shoots more accurate burst that single shot in CE 0.31), but once the map is revealed the fight gets A LOT easier.

Sorry for the long post but I know this helped me get better grips with the game:

http://sablewyvern.com/forum/vanillaforums-Garden-8225188/discussion/225/phils-xenonauts-tips/p1

The game is pretty unforgiving if you fall behind; Terror missions are generally quite difficult anyway but if you're behind in terms of your equipment you'll be slaughtered.

Don't worry if you have to drop down a difficulty level either, we intentionally made the game quite difficult.

Thanks for the responses- I figured out what I was doing wrong...

I NEVER realized that I could mouse wheel up/down to change the firing type. So I played all the way up through mid-game using only snap shots. Suddenly I can get 95% hit rates and I can actually shoot back. So this is much more like it..haha.. embarassing.

Was that noted in the tutorial? I assume I just missed it but damn, something as seriously important as that is sure easy to miss considering there's nowhere on the UI that also let's you do that. (I was confused for a time and that that changing the reserve mode was changing my firing type).

You're far from the only person who has missed that and bounced off the game as a result

It's listed in the explanatory tooltips and on the loading screen tips and in the manual and the quickstart guide. The problem is that the controls are pretty much identical to those in X-COM except for that one vital control, so people just skim read the documentation and miss the change. Or do as you do and use the Reserve Control to try to set aim level.

Sadly it makes the game basically impossible to play, so I dread to think how many bad reviews we've got as a result of it! (Hence us planning a proper tutorial for the next game.)

Yeah that's what I did.. I skimmed probably because I thought I was playing X-Com again, so why read anything? I like the mouse wheel function better than having to click somewhere, no doubt. After I learned about it it was like I was playing a different, less frustrating game.

By the way - since I have you in this thread I wanna say thanks for making this. I will definitely point people to this as the 'spiritual' successor to X-Com, rather than the Firaxis game.

By the way - since I have you in this thread I wanna say thanks for making this. I will definitely point people to this as the 'spiritual' successor to X-Com, rather than the Firaxis game.

+1

Now if only the aliens had blaster bombs.

Thanks for the responses- I figured out what I was doing wrong...

I NEVER realized that I could mouse wheel up/down to change the firing type. So I played all the way up through mid-game using only snap shots. Suddenly I can get 95% hit rates and I can actually shoot back. So this is much more like it..haha.. embarassing.

I'm guessing that you have a really fast system with an SSD RAID array or some zit like that. Why? A lot of useful advice is on the ground combat loading screen

Also, it may be just me, but I find assault rifles to be really bad and you probably shouldn't be using them at all. Their stopping power is abysmal beyond shotgun range, but if you're in shotgun range you should just be using a shotgun. Scout with shield carriers, then snipe with machine guns and snipers. Keep a shotgun or two around to take out enemies that get close.

I agree with most of that, but I've found that assault rifles start to become useful once you have troops with accuracy stat above about 70 and you can get mid-range snap/burst accuracy above 30%. I start to get this about when I can build rifles with more gruesome terminal ballistics (i.e. laser and plasma rifles.)

...hope that the RNG gods are watching.

According to Proverbs 16:33, there's only one RNG god

According to Proverbs 16:33, there's only one RNG god

I stand corrected, may the RNG god look favorably upon the defenders of the earth

By the way - since I have you in this thread I wanna say thanks for making this. I will definitely point people to this as the 'spiritual' successor to X-Com, rather than the Firaxis game.

No problem, glad you're enjoying the game!

No problem, glad you're enjoying the game!

I must say, I'm really impressed that you managed to get Xenonauts done. I'm not really satisfied with some aspects in the game, but working around the Xenonauts code is challenging. It takes me a week just to figure out how to add something fairly simple to the game.

Speaking of firing modes, did yesterdays patch rebind the scrolling? Loading the game today, mouse wheel is now tied to camera height. While right clicking works, I miss the ability to toggle both ways.

(Sorry for Thread-hijacking )

Yeah, we needed Tab for soldier cycling so there was a bit of a reshuffle. You can rebind it yourself if you want though.

shotguns and machineguns are the strongest weapons for sure. Usually my shotgun people also carry a sniper rifle in their backpacks incase they need the range.

It's kinda funny. In regular xenonauts rifles are useless but in mods like x-division everything but rifles are useless.