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[KaelGotDwarves]

When I first played xcom as a kid, my first mission ended up being a night one

I was absolutely terrified during that experience. Still remember fleeing back to the skyranger with the only 2 rookies left. Only one made it back alive.

I just wish for xcom without the mind controll bullshit.

Bullshit? ...  Especially once you can use it.  Heh heh . . .

That's why it's bullshit. Game goes from excruciatingly hard to "Oh I beat the last level in like 2 turns through mindcontrol on Superhuman"

[LegoLord]

Well if that's a problem for you, you can't say you aren't at least partially at fault.

[KaelGotDwarves]

I'd rather not have a completely broken game mechanic in an otherwise perfectly done game.

[kuro_suna]

Eveyone should be on reaction fire. Your snipers should be crouched with multiple reaction fire set. Everyone else should have a single shot reaction fire set. Keep in mind you can select multiple fire modes for reaction fire (e.g. 5 round burst vs. full auto with the smg). TU expended on reaction shots come from next rounds TU's. If you're taking a lot of reaction shots just stay put.

Ok, I thought you had to reserve TU for reactions and the reaction selector was a way to force TU reserving like in xcom. Does that mean they have the same chance of reactioning even if I march them at full speed?

Also why would I ever want to use the grenade launcher in timed mode, every single time it bounces off the enemy and teamkills.

[kuro_suna]

I'd rather not have a completely broken game mechanic in an otherwise perfectly done game.

I think xcomutil has a option to disable psy.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Thanks for that, probably will get some playtime in later.

Now about those remakes...

[LegoLord]

Oh.  Oops.  Kuro was talking about the open source thing.  Mistook it for referring to UFO: Enemy Unknown.  Note:  AI is not an abbreviation for Enemy Unknown.   

Haven't played myself, but yeah, it's different from X-com, a bit.  Sorry for the confusion.

[KaelGotDwarves]

xcomutil doesn't run on 64 bit win7 at all, so I guess that is out of the question, unless anyone has any ideas?

[Volatar]

VMWare! 

[Starver]

xcomutil doesn't run on 64 bit win7 at all, so I guess that is out of the question, unless anyone has any ideas?

Hack into the savegame files the ability to build PsiLabs right from the beginning.

(I make this suggestion after having coincidentally spent some time, this weekend, going through the files.  For what I believe the youth of today call "lulz".   I made (read: hacked together) a nice little cgi script for my local apache server to present savegame files in hex/ascii/numeric format across columns, highlighting differences/non-zeros, and from that worked out a lot of how the base inventories, layouts, economies, research levels, active mission maps/statuses, etc are done.  And the irony is that I'll probably never (except for maybe one "super-cheaty-game" in which I max out my starting stats, just 'because') use it.)


Anyway, assuming we're still talking about UFO-EU (though the above could apply to any thing up-to/including UFO-AI), the main way of completing levels in a slightly cheaty way is to save just before starting a mission (allows you to roll-back and abort, or try a slightly less problematic map layout), just after starting a mission (for a given initialised map, lets you anticipate events you had to discover the hard way) and at any point thereafter when you are about to make a vital move (so if it fails, you can retry/do something else) or have successfully had a fluky shot that you don't want to lose when you do find yourself forced to roll back.

Standard save-scumming, essentially, except that it's almost positively encouraged.  Even moreso in UFO-AI, where an ended mission (succesful or not) gives you the opportunity to redo.  I must admit that I probably overdid that, back when I played it, to get 'perfection' although (IIRC) you couldn't save/restart mid-game.  (For UFO-EU, I particularly abandoned/reloaded mid-game when one of my HWPs 'broke', and the 'firing' tile zoomed off the edge of the board.  An annoying bug, that I assume everyone has.  And actually that's the reason I started thinking about hexediting.  Not to actively cheat, but to correct 'broken' games.  But whatever floats your boat!

[Starver]

Reactions are based on the reaction stat and whether or not the soldier in question has enough time units for a snap shot at the end of your turn.

Soldiers with low reactions probably won't make any shots.

Quick (Ok, turns out not-so-quick) note that the reaction system works differently between (say) UFO-EU and UFO-AI.

In the latter, it's more clear what you're going for (once you spot the 'check-boxes' in the all weapons' reaction-possible firemodes), and you can never 'dive below' the reserved time (if you have less than you need, you're already blocked) and apart from the not-applicable Reaction Time on the likes of the rocket launcher being moot (and should probably be better indicated as useless/disabled) it more or less lives up to the idea of well designed and bugfixed.  (Other issues with UFO-AI excepted.)

Whereas in the former (at least in my experience), you can click the reaction buttons but there's nothing to stop you trying to use auto-fire reserve on weapons without an auto-fire option, it doesn't give you any visual indication of how much it will reserve (before leaving you cold, or having to unreserve to get into the next bit of meager cover), if you pass a particular reservation level before activating it blithely lets you use all TUs up without further complaint and HWPs just don't seem to work it.  So you need to actually think about how many TUs each unit needs for each (possible) fire mode, and movement, and position adjustment.  But then this is a far earlier game, without the benefit of hindesight, so you can't really complain too much.

[BishopX]

UFO:AI reserves 7 TU's for a single reaction shot, 14 for multiple, These represent the extra care your Agent's are taking as they move/shoot. If they fire they TU's come from the next turn's budget. So firing a 3-round burst from an assault rifle as a reaction shot will cost 12 TU's from next round in addition to the reserved TU's. Your TU's regenerate at the end of your turn.

XCom 1, had buttons that reserve some TU's from this turn, for use doing what ever. Either taking a shot, or reaction fire. Your TU's regenerate at the begining of your turn.

Note the the UFO:AI mechanic is rather broken and promotes a huge camp-fest, it's been removed in the dev version.

[Starver]

UFO:AI reserves 7 TU's for a single reaction shot, 14 for multiple, These represent the extra care your Agent's are taking as they move/shoot. If they fire they TU's come from the next turn's budget. So firing a 3-round burst from an assault rifle as a reaction shot will cost 12 TU's from next round in addition to the reserved TU's. Your TU's regenerate at the end of your turn.

Ah yes.  The joys of forgetting that your trooper is currently on some form of overwatch after he has just blitzed (to some degree of effectiveness or other) aliens that passed across his or her view, and already 'borrowed' so many TUs from this turn's (i.e. given at the end of last turn) points that if you take them off of the overwatch you can't even reinstate them.  But if you leave them, they're happy as larry and blast away during the next opposition-phase, using the 'next phase' TUs.

Forgot about that.  Even though I had eventually theorised to myself that it was end-of-turn refreshing of TUs that caused that. (If this fact is documented, I obviously didn't read the documentation correctly.

But AI's 'green/red-line route helper' is definitely a good feature.  And lets you micromanage the route if you prefer that they end up at their zero-TU point facing in a slightly better direction than it would have given you normally.  Pity it seems to not work so well for the yellow/crawling phrase.  And the number of TUs (and potential shots) I wasted by raising and re-kneeling soldiers on the same spot by accident.  If it weren't for the possibility of adjusted line-of-sight giving observing advantages I would suggest that such actions could be given a special "undo to reclaim the TUs" mode.  One which is still absent from rotating, and of course moving.

Still, I remain confused as to some aspects of XCOM-1's reaction mode.  Like I said, older.  And hasn't got a fairly current development team making bugfixes/logical improvements/designing a more considered interface in from scratch with all the available hindesight.

[kuro_suna]

Another problem I'm having in UFO:AI is that some of the maps are way too big and have too many buildings to sweep with only eight guys, in comparison the sky ranger could hold fourteen guys and most of the maps were farms fields with a barn and maybe a house.

For now I'm just reloading any time I get a big city map.

EDIT:
The main problem is that sending a team of less than three to do anything seems to result in stabby death. Though it might be that I'm still having trouble with reaction fire.

[BishopX]

Yeah... Teams of less than 3 don't work. When using small groups keep them together and make sure they end their turn facing away from each other. You can Right click to adjust facings. With large maps I typically lock down areas with snipers and clear sector by sector. Areas with  live civillians tend to get bypassed.