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[Soulwynd]

The actual UFOs piss me way more than the tactical combat in Apoc. But those appear in a very specific time frame, so you can be sort of ready for it, but trying to get enough money to be ready for them is a real pain, real real pain.

[Sowelu]

I was never a fan of smoke grenades.

Me either...but I just started using them in my new game.  Round 1, chuck a smoke grenade on your Skyranger's ramp, end turn.  Round 2, you mysteriously DON'T DIE when you charge down the ramp!  If nothing else, they're good for that.

Oh yeah, and if you and an alien spot each other at the same time, they don't get a reaction fire that move.  And reaction fire is calculated at the end of an action, not the beginning...which means that if you were just at the edge of visible range when you met an alien, you can take a step back and it can't reaction-fire on you.  Then you unload on it from just outside of its visual range in perfect safety.   If you plan on meeting aliens head-on instead of being sniped from the side when you walk past a doorway, smoke grenades can help your survival a lot.  The game I'm playing right now, I don't think I've even been shot at with alien reaction fire in about four or five missions.

Oh yeah, and a fact I didn't previously know:  It costs the same amount to reload your weapon from ANY slot.  So you can stop storing your clips on your belt for quick access; it'll cost the same if they're on your leg or shoulder or backpack slots.

[breadbocks]

The actual UFOs piss me way more than the tactical combat in Apoc. But those appear in a very specific time frame, so you can be sort of ready for it, but trying to get enough money to be ready for them is a real pain, real real pain.

I thought that 3 & 4 which are the only ones which really get you were a nice way to push you out of complacency cause by other games gradually mixing in stronger enemies, as opposed to just shoving them in.

[Pnx]

So I just completed the game, with a moment of sheer badassery. I'd started getting into the habit of save scumming, which I tend to do in x-com games, and others... But I wanted to break out of the habit, so I ran the final battle without saving, despite how bad it got. So I have a squad of 9 guys (was 10 but one died) who are all at least squadie, a few of them have some rank (it's irritating how rank is based on how many other people there are). Three of them are decent psychics. so I fill that squad out with 7 other guys, so I'm to 16 guys, since equipment space is actually fairly tight, I give everyone (except the psykers and one guy with a just blaster bomb launcher + ammo) one heavy plasma gun (with only one clip since I doubt they'd run out anyway), a smoke grenade and an alien grenade, the psychers get the grenades a mind probe and the psychic thingemejig (what was it called?). Everyone has flying suits except the psykers who wear personal armour so I can tell them apart when equping them. The first few rounds of the mission go well, I take down about 5 or 6 sectoids without a casualty, despite some close calls. Then 5 or 6 more come along, and the psychic mind control manages to take over one of the rookies, who shoots a guy in the back, me not feeling in a forgiving mood shoot him as well. A blaster bomb also manages to take out three guys, at which point I find the exit and opt to run for it under cover of smoke with everyone I've got. 9 guys make it to the exit, 4 of them are rookies and 2 of them are psykers.

When I get to the other side everyone only has the weapon they were carrying due to the game being bugged. One poor guy doesn't have anything at all, They're split into two entrances, one of which contains two soldiers and a psyker, the other is 4 soldiers, another psyker and the unarmed guy in a flight suit. I keep the psykers and the unarmed guy in their spawns, when the 4 soldiers go down they immediately see a sectopod. Now I should mention the guy who popped up with no weapon was actually carrying the blaster bombs I planned to use should I run into one of these... oh well, I roll out the firing brigade and take down the septopod relatively easily, taking only one casualty from the return fire... Then I manage to pop one guy around a corner and take out a chrysalid. From there things get progressively worse, one of the 4 guys gets mind controlled shoots the guy he's next to, then heads up the lift into the spawn, where he continues to be mind controlled and shoots the unarmed guy... but mysteriously leaves the psyker alone... At this point I decided I'd be better off having everyone split up and hope for the best rather than shooting each other to death. Despite the confused hassle, mostly it's just two soldiers who keep getting mind controlled and panicked, so I leave them to it and have all the other soldiers search out, eventually they find a likely looking place, and I start to converge on there... except now everyone else is suffering panic attacks too, and one of the soldiers got shot by another again, and one other soldier started getting mind controlled... So now there's only one soldier who isn't clinically insane... So I send her up over to the objective, she kills two ethereals, moves up there... and discovers and alien museum... god damn it... so I look around and notice another door, and start sending her over there, and I notice one of my psykers has a clear shot for it, so I get her to drop her mind probe and grab a heavy plasma from one of the soldiers that got shot in the back. And she starts making her way there...

So the psyker is making her way over when one of the crazed soldiers comes out from a side corridor and shoots her in the face... and she survives, despite having only personal armour, but she has only a small nub of health left... and if he doesn't kill her, she's probably going to bleed to death. So soldier girl now no longer being able to count on backup, moves up to the lift, shoots an ethereal just above her and moves up to take a look, there's 4 more ethereals around a pulsating object that has to be the brain, I realize they're probably the ones doing all the mind control, and that they're probably all leaders, I remember the other psyker that's still safe in the other spawn, so I have him probe one of them figuring I wouldn't be able to control one of them anyway, and he discovers it's a commander, I have him probe another one and it's a commander too... So I have soldier girl auto shoot another one then move back dow- ... only thanks to my idiocy she's actually just run out of TU, so now she's exposed to three ethereal commanders... And I'm completely doomed, so I go and take another look at the psyker who's standing there bleeding to death in front of the soldier who just shot her, I've pretty much given up on the mission at this point, I fiddle around looking at one or two of the guys who have dropped their weapons and are sitting around cowering in corners. Then I notice that psyker girl still has her psy-amp in her backpack, so I take that out, and she's got 49 TU left, so she can only do one mind control attempt before she dies, so I go back over and make an attempt on one of the commanders but I've never even been able to control a leader let alone a commander... and yet it works, he shoots the other two down, and give soldier girl her oppertunity to shoot him, then gun down the brain... Victory is mine, it is an uninvited, yet not unwelcome guest.

EDIT: Yay for gigantic wall of text.

[0x517A5D]

Oh yeah, and a fact I didn't previously know:  It costs the same amount to reload your weapon from ANY slot.  So you can stop storing your clips on your belt for quick access; it'll cost the same if they're on your leg or shoulder or backpack slots.

Reloading from the ground takes the same amount of time as well.  This makes "throw the rocket reload to the guy who needs it" a reasonable tactic.

@Pnx: nice win.  Barely skated through, but you saved the world.  Take a bow.

[MrWiggles]

Has anyone read the cannon short story that takes place after X-Com one?

[Sowelu]

Okay, it's already been mentioned but:  Man, I just can't understand why anyone would not want to use UFO Extender.  Sure, XComUtil can save your equipment.  But Extender does that and displays unit stats on the loadout screen, so you don't have to clutter your unit names with ugliness that won't fit.  Hotkeys in both geoscape and tactical, so you can adjust timescale with the number keys.  Popups when your craft are refueled and rearmed, plus you can launch on less than a full tank of gas if you want to.  It adds the "right click to open door" from TFTD, because seriously...yeah.  Blowing up stunned people now counts as kills.  The amount of smoke you can have at a time is increased, so smoke grenades are viable for once.  Re-order your guys to change their exit order in the craft.  (Of course, absolutely everything is optional.)  Hell, even fixes the little pause when it changes music tracks.

There's enhancements to the heavy laser that I haven't tried and probably won't enjoy, so I'm not using those.  But my favorite optional addition of all?  Range penalties.  On the default settings (which you can change), autofire accuracy starts to fall off after 7 tiles and snap shot accuracy starts to fall off after 15 tiles.  Aimed attacks never suffer base accuracy falloff.  Oh, and it displays the chance-to-hit next to your cursor, too.  Makes it feel a little more modern, like JA2 or something.  And suddenly aimed attacks are actually worth doing for snipers, which is nice.

Yeah you probably won't want a lot of the enhancements, but it's worth it for the bugfixes and you'll probably find some things that are /really/ nice in there, to the point where you don't know how you ever lived without them.  Equipment saving and displaying stats on the loadout screen alone makes it actually feel fun again, instead of a chore.

Oh and of course it works on the Steam version, yes.

[Myroc]

I'm already using UFO Extender. It's kickass. I don't use the Heavy Laser improvements or the accuracy falloff/indicator but the rest is awesome, especially being able to launch fighters that aren't fully refueled.

Actually, screw that, you know what I like? Queuing base facilities and the fixing of the Base Disjoint Bug.

[Pandarsenic]

New Heavy Laser actually looks cool enough to try. I think I'll install UFO Extender and see how it is.

[Mephansteras]

I love the UFO Extender Heavy Laser. It's one of the things I miss most, I think.

You have to give it to someone with a really high Endurance since it relies on Stamina to fire, but you can basically use it to lay down covering fire and blow away buildings. Really nice weapons and they stay useful even after the majority of your people are using plasma. I think the game I had using them I still had one or two guys with them in the squad even at the very end.

[Burnt Pies]

The Heavy Laser's pretty useless in vanilla Xcom anyway. I think the only thing I ever used them for was Sectopod ambushing. They're outclassed in usefulness by the Laser Rifle, due to not having an Autofire function (Unlike the Heavy Plasma), and by the time you're using them the Aliens will have Plasma Rifles, which are a much better weapon.

[Sowelu]

Oh the plasma rifle.

0-160 damage, 86% snap shot accuracy, 55% auto shot accuracy.

I'm liking its snap shots /very much/.  I'd often rather do less damage with more accurate shots than take higher chances, because the more you injure an enemy, the worse their aim is when they shoot back.

Curse the aliens for stopping using it; oh well.

...Man, the rocket launcher with heavy rockets NEVER gets old.  I'm sending like three guys with full loads of heavy rockets on pretty much every damn mission (they drop them if we run into psi-capable enemies).  Also, I'm discovering that the small launcher, or the stun baton if you're seriously ballsy, can take down a hoverdisc without it blowing up.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I've found that cyberdisks sometimes fail to explode if they're killed by an explosion of another cyberdisk. Which is the way I've obtained most of my cyberdisk corpses.

Btw, UFO Extender may be good, but it only works for XCom CE. Those of us who can't use CE because of OS issues (or just plain don't like it for other reasons like lacking music) are stuck with the DOS version, for which only XComUtils provides any sort of fixing. Well, that and other assorted mini-patches like the radar stacking fix.

[Burnt Pies]

I've never managed to get a Disk with a stun rod, I'm usually forced to hit them from below with a laser rifle. Works fairly well, as I think explosions in the first X-Com are limited to the z level they start on.

[Sean Mirrsen]

In my latest game, the modus operandi against a cyberdisk is/was "laser pistol firing squad from a safe distance". I've only recently switched to laser rifles, since I made personal armor (and other things) a priority.