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[Puzzlemaker]

This game angers me and I will probably have to start over.  Once you fall behind... it's hard to catch up.

[Fikes]

This game angers me and I will probably have to start over.  Once you fall behind... it's hard to catch up.

I don't understand what you mean by "Fall behind". You can always ignore things that are too advanced for you, like battleships, etherals and mutants. When income drops terribly you can build and sell things to keep your head above water.

Starting over, though, with lessons learned isn't a bad idea, but don't feel like all hope is lost.

[Tarran]

I don't savescum at all. It removes all the challenge from the game. If I screw up, I pay the price for it. If I succeed, I feel much, much better than if I used savescumming.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, some of us are still re-learning the ropes. It's bad enough when you can't make it to half the UFOs you see because there's three huge ones landing at once, and you only have one Skyranger. Damn China and their secret pact. I'll show them!

Right now I've stumbled onto an alien base. A Sectoid base. Great!... I've saved at the start of the mission, just in case, but I have a feeling I'm not going to see most of my away team for much longer. Sectoids are pretty weak though, and with my new and improved laser I can more or less just cut my way to the center, but keeping out of their sight isn't an easy task. The HWP will be seeing a lot of action, I'll wager.

[Shadowlord]

I started a game a few days ago and wasn't saving during combat, only to have the game crash immediately after combat, erasing the 30 minutes of combat and the 10 minutes prior to it (Thanks, xcomutil and ufoextender, for minimizing the game every time it switches between geoscape and tactical, and for it crashing whenever I switch to another program, and for the d3d windowed completely failing to not crash when switching to another window as well. You both also failed to put stats in the soldiers names, by the way.).

(It had already crashed 3 or 4 times, so at that point I just stopped bothering and decided to play something that wasn't crash-happy)

[Sean Mirrsen]

You sure you enabled all bugfixes in Extender? I've got no crashing problems so far.

Also, you can keep the window from minimizing by setting AlwaysOnTop in Extender's init file to 1. Or just closing all background windows.

And Extender doesn't put stats in soldier names, it puts them in the inventory screen, where they matter.

[Fikes]

Yea, crashes make Iron Man mode very frustrating. It happened to me a lot in X-Com Apoc (BTW, if you want the real iron man mode, it is that game. If you miss mid range ufo's you are fucked and you NEVER have enough money). Saving regularly is a good idea and more than fair. Just don't load because you lost a Skyranger.

If you play an excellent mission and the game crashes at the end, then replay it and fair miseribly, I think it is totally fair to reload your save and try again.

On a final note, I will reiterate that you DO NOT need to chase down every single UFO. Even losing America or China is acceptible in the long run. Pick and choose your battles, it is far cheaper in the long run.

[GlyphGryph]

You know, even on the harder difficulties, this game isn't all that hard.

But then, my first step is always to ignore the aliens and build a collossal industry based on motion scanners, and then hire swarms of soldiers to throw into the meatgrinder, and losing missions isn't that big a deal to me, and I don't bother with most of the researches, so maybe thats a big part of it.

[andrea]

but ignoring aliens and building industry from day 1 seems rather.. cheaty almost.

I prefer to play normally, selling captured stuff and still send lots of recruits as (plasma) cannon fodder. it works...

[GlyphGryph]

Well, I don't ignore the aliens for long. Shooting down alien ships is profitable (and ya got to research that plasma asap)! As long as I leave one person onboard to flee if things get rough so I don't lose the ship, missions are almost always worth their costs in bodies, so after the first bit I shoot down/board every ship I can, and once my manufacturing funding is secure, I push as quick as possible for plasma weapons and better ships to more quickly speed my UFO destruction ability.

Though I do prefer to follow ships and wait for them to land instead of shooting them down if it all possible - a lot more profitable that way.

[breadbocks]

You know, Glyph, that isn't half bad of an idea. I will attempt to ignore teh alienz and spam up to dem lazer cannonz nd c wat i get.

In TTS, of course, since I don't have a copy of XCOM I can use presently,

[Sowelu]

Research completed: Laser Pistols  Our scientists can now research:  Laser rifles.

...I tend to save regularly, but I really only scum when I mis-click.  I'm fine with losing a guy to reaction fire.  What really pisses me off is "Okay, my guy with my rocket launcher is in position to kill all these guys, now let me just click this other soldier to--NO DON'T RUN OVER THERE YOU'RE WASTING ALL YOUR TU AAAARGH YOU GOT SHOT".  I re-load from that, because otherwise I'd rage too much to keep playing.

I had a lot of fun with the Sectoids in May just last night.  It took until a terror mission to finally get those mind scanner things researched + small launcher, and I kept killing their leaders with reaction fire before then...so I still had no psi.  By the end of the mission I had just their leader and two cyberdiscs left.  And by 'two cyberdiscs' I mean "Okay, let me sacrifice a rookie to lead one cyberdisc away from the sectoid.  Okay stun bomb!  He's stunned!  And now another cyberdisc is parked ON HIS BODY.  Okay, sacrifice two more guys to stun the cyberdisc instead of killing it, and then lose two more guys to the sectoid soldier I still didn't know about!"

But now I have psi labs.  And because they take so goddamn long to build...I'll get my first batch of psi-trained soldiers at the start of August.  Did I mention it's early May now?  Ffff...

[Mephansteras]

I consider any game where I manage to actually get Psi before the Ethereals show up to be going pretty damn awesome.

[Sowelu]

You know what I'm noticing?  Higher-difficulty games seem easier, because you get MOAR LOOT.  Something like 50% more aliens, often in situations where you can take them all out with one shot, means a much faster start (and more reliable ammo on the weaker plasma weapons).

Oh yeah, on the subject of taking out aliens in one shot.  Has anyone else noticed that floaters really, really like to hang around in barns?  It's like they're part bovine.  Swear to god, wherever there's one floater in a barn, there's like...three.  EVERY.  TIME.  NO.  JOKE.

And also on the same subject.  The heavy laser is seriously overpowered when sieging UFOs.  It's awful for reaction fire, but if you make someone pop the door and let your heavy gunner hose down the inside, well, I killed five out of six floaters hanging out in a single medium scout.

...God that gun can be broken (WHEN YOU CAN FIRE IT).  First time I used it I thought it was bugged, because I put all the waypoints on one alien who was just on the edge of my LOS.  Five shots, three alien screams, must be a sound bug right?  Man, those floaters sure are weird about lining up in rows.

[breadbocks]

Do you possibly mean the Football of Powah?