Listen, if they can’t make it through a few missions using nothing but a stun rod, they’re not X-com material.
From the manual:
Don’t allow your soldiers to be killed in the ground assaults
Now they tell me.
I understand the game play reasons for the craft loss, but I would expect the pilots to get the hell out of there.
The soldiers appear to be the pilots.
Whew, this game is brutal. I have learned to keep one soldier in the Skyranger as my “tits up insurance policy,” which is necessary if I ever want to get my plane back again. The concept of body armor is apparently foreign to X-Com, which is starting to look less like an elite collection of Tier One Operators and more like the French Foreign Legion.
When the aliens are firing hot plasma at your soldiers, I don’t think there’s much that is able to stand in the way.
Does overwatch happen automatically if you leave enough time units at the end of your turn? I can’t find a button for it, and I assume it does happen because the aliens sure seem to use it. I think I even saw one of my guys do it once. Unsurprisingly, searching for “X-Com overwatch” brings up only results about the new games.
Also, does kneeling make you harder to hit and/or improve your shooting accuracy? It must do something!
Overwatch is automatic and based on your stats; simply having enough TU to fire doesn’t guarantee an overwatch reaction, but you do need enough TU left to fire.
Kneeling provides a small accuracy boost, but that’s not the main reason to do it. The main reason to do it is to more safely bring more fields of fire into play. Friendly fire is real and dangerous. Situationally kneeling means you can get more shots from more people at specific targets.
@peacedog explained it nicely, but keep in mind X-com isn’t about moving your dudes and manually pew-pewing every last shot. A lot of it is about positioning: getting the right guys with the right reaction stat in the right place and then just leaving them there.
Was it even called overwatch back then? As far as I can recall, there’s no literal “overwatch” in X-com, so it’s not going to Google well. There is simply leaving unspent time units so a soldier is eligible for reaction fire. Actually, that’s the term to Google! Reaction Fire should give you all the info you’re looking for (and then some…look at all that math!).
Yeah I was going to say “Reaction Fire” is what they used to call it back in the service. I adore X-com’s TU system. It’s very elegant. It just needed a few UI tweaks to go along with it (Open X-com helps with this somewhat, as I recall).
Gonna have to start up a run soon, I think.
Time units just seem like action points but fiddlier, although I’m not hating it. Most of the time I run out of those, but every once in a while I run out of energy instead and it’s not super clear why.
There are buttons to push to set it so a soldier doesn’t use more TUs than he needs to fire a reaction shot with the weapon he’s holding (aimed shot or snap shot). You always want to have one of those settings on. Individual soldiers will get better at reactions with experience.
Also, keeping this setting on will keep soldiers from using all their energy moving.
I found those buttons and have started to use them. It’s funny how fast the game started feeding me my own asshole.
First mission:
Second mission:
That’s the equivalent of your stamina. Here’s the math, but in short, energy depletes at half the rate of your spent time units and it recovers slowly over time, or quickly with healing. But the bottom line is if you keep moving continuously, it will run out and you’ll have to take a breather.
Oh, nice. That’s good to know.