momerathe

I've got the heavy plasma and the assault plasma, and am currently researching them. If I understand Kordanor's tech tree right, though, you don't have to have researched plasma weaponry to get to Mag- you just need to pick up the other two alien guns. how soon do they appear? can lasers bridge the gap? the reason I ask is that it seems to take an exceedingly long time to manufacture a squad's-worth of kit, not to mention grinding crashed ufos for raw materials, and I'm not really looking forward to making a whole bunch of plasma rifles when I could be building Corsairs instead

why not 4?

I've gone for a sniper/rifleman centric mix so far, but reading this guide has motivated me to try out the MG build instead. I've got a few heavies in the barracks, so I'll crank out a few scatter lasers and see what's what.

okay, seems I should have just gone for it rather than trying to be cute

..armed with aelenium/gatling lasers. I was trying this yesterday, and with the usual bait and switch got one of my Condor behind the corvette, whereupon it shot itself dry - hitting with everything but failing to down it. The other Condor, which had been leading the corvette away tried to out-turn and get behind it, but got shot down when it evaded in the wrong direction. Any tips? would a frontal assault with missile from the second Condor have been enough to do the job? (assuming I dodge the plasma torp) FWIW normally I intercept with a Foxtrot and 2 Condors, but at this time I'd just sent the Foxtrot off to deal with a scout.

Yeah, this is probably what I'll do. It's not as if I'm going to have my snipers running around inside UFOs anyway.

Okay, so I get the idea that sniper rifles are unwieldy and difficult to use in close quarters, and so have a low reaction mod. Except that describes about 1% of reaction fire situations. Most (of my) reaction fire is at medium-max range, in a direction that the soldier is already facing in, typically coming from somewhere that I've put him or her there specifically to guard. That's exactly the situation snipers should excel in. I wonder, is it possible to mod some sort of range-dependent reaction fire? otherwise I'll have to edit the value manually and forget about the short ranged business.

Wow, I thought that the mac version might be a bit buggy, but I wasn't expecting this. Without exaggeration, I've had more kernel panics in one afternoon trying to play this game than in the previous five years of owning this laptop. Graphics glitches (both in ground combat and in the geoscape), autoresolve crashes; now my savegame's borked because I saved the turn before ending the combat (because I was having to quit & reload every other turn) and now the game crashes immediately the last alien dies. It's all a bit pony, really.