The X-Com Files: Play the early history of the agency

Well the first mission went very quick. Walked around, caught sight of what they were searching for, fired and missed, then both killed by it the next turn. I guess I should hold off on naming agents after qt3 members for a bit. Now that I think about it, I wonder if that means they lost the car.

You did better than me! I met the first several officers who explain elements of the base, then got a sighting! So my agents got in their car, drove north from Pasadena all the way into the Arctic Circle, equipped a shotgun and pistol, and then stepped out…into pitch black. Oops, nighttime mission and I didn’t think to invent flares first. Seriously, though, that’s on me as I deliberately enabled the mod for better visibility of the day/night line on the geoscape. Sorry, agents, I made you drive all the way to the North Pole for nothing, get back in the car. Which aborted the mission, as expected, but then we lost contact with the sighting and had to make the 4000-mile return trip dejected and empty-handed. But at least we were alive and had completed our first mission!

The problem is that somewhere around the third step of @Nightgaunt’s otherwise very helpful instructions, I seem to have gotten turned around, because I kept getting error messages about the save file directory being invalid. So I have no way of saving my game until I untangle whatever I screwed up with the installation, which isn’t really the X-Com files game I was hoping to play… :(

But my initial assessment remains: goddamn adorable!

EDIT: I sorted my directories issues, verified I can save the game, put a couple of flashlights in the truck of the car, named the car “Chickmobile”, and I’m ready to give this another go:

chickmobile

There should be some mag-lites in the inventory that you can bring along. Luckily I had one equipped with the pistol toting agent.

Yeah, I learned the hard way about night missions as well! Sorry I didn’t warn you!

If you think it’s adorable at the start, wait until you research X-Com Dogs!

I’ve been doing fairly well. Losing a few agents here and there, but hauling in a lot of cultist prisoners. Unfortunately, you can’t build labs at the start, so your research bandwidth is terrible. It’s taking forever just to research the stuff they hand out at the beginning. Unless I’m missing something.

My 2nd attempt went better. Reading the info screens I guess it is a rental car, and we take commercial flights to the location, so no worries about losing the car if I have another mission wipe. Considering what we found at the site this is going to be interesting.

Edit: Yeah, I didn’t catch that there were only 5 slots initially, so I have a couple scientists just sitting around.

So how are your agents doing? :) I made some friends last night that you would like.

I ended up building a 3rd hangar, and have been keeping all 3 vehicles pretty busy. Research is going slow. Hopefully I will eventually hit upon the tech that will allow building more lab space. I think it took me 3 or 4 missions before finally remembering to add equipment to the vehicles to apprehend people instead of just killing them on missions that need that. At least one of our new friends a mechanic that surprised me when it first happened (perhaps it was evident the whole time, and I missed the cues beforehand Zombies! and they don’t “die” they are just down for a couple of turns, so if you don’t drop them all within a few turns of each other, the others start jumping back up).

I wonder how feasible it is to have multiple bases early? I did my normal thing of dropping my first base in Europe, but I think the majority of my missions have been in Asia, with North America also having about as many as Europe so far.

Working on those frequent flyer miles:

I started in Greece and then later plopped one in central America to try to cover the western hemisphere as I was getting overwhelmed with just two vehicles. Gotten a pretty even global distribution of events, I would say.

Sadly, I’ve spent most of my time with X-com Files troubleshooting directory structures and saved game files. Mods, man. So fucking aggravating, even with all the obvious work to streamline everything with Openxcom Extended. But it turns out the source of (all?) my problems is Windows 11’s permissions structure. I eventually figured out that it wasn’t letting Openxcom write to the directories it was creating, at which point it was trivially easy to fix. But what a goddamn goatrope trying to troubleshoot all that crap when the solution was so basic. It’s enough to drive a fella back to boardgames. :(

Well, at least now they’re able to exist beyond quitting out of the game! I’ve basically restarted about five times, but I’m getting further each time.

I actually went back to vanilla X-com for a bit just to get my X-com legs back. I’m forgetting how all this TU and reaction fire and manufacturing stuff works, and unfortunately, I’m starting to bristle at the limitations of the combat. For instance, line of sight is giving me fits, and I’ve gotten spoiled by the LOS tools that made XCOM and Phoenix Point so painless. I guess we’re just supposed to eyeball it in X-com? By moving guys where we think they might have line of sight and keeping our fingers crossed?

I’ll figure this stuff out eventually and either ragequit or lose myself in it, but I obviously need a primer in Olden Days X-com before I make much progress in the mod. :(

I was surprised when I sorted out finances and realized how much money the game gives you at the outset! Seems like it would be wasteful NOT to build a second base.

Oh man, I know. Cover and line of sight are just a black box that may or may not cooperate with you. I had a battle where a fence with two thin horizontal slats would block shots from half the spaces along it but not the other half. I don’t think there’s any solution except to tolerate it (and lean on save games if it’s really devastating; I think it autosaves every turn?).

My worry was there is something they haven’t told us about yet that is going to need my money, so I’d been a bit conservative, but I guess I should open up another base. Asia has been busier, but I think western hemisphere is probably the best bet like @Nightgaunt did, and then both can send teams to Asia if needed for now. We’ve upgraded to renting vans now. I agree on the interface. They sure can seem to fire a lot of rounds from a glock in 1 turn though. :)

Surely there’s a mod or something by now to help! I can’t imagine people have been playing, banging on, and modding X-com all these years and no one’s solved the LOS issues, yet they’ve managed all these other wonderful QoL improvements.

Because I’d hate to ragequit over something so obvious. Especially now that I’ve read up on how reaction fire works. I had no idea it was an interactive system rather than just a “saving throw”! Leave it to Gollop to go the extra mile.

I think what we need is Ray to give his love to x-com like he did MOO. :)

And as I feared, line of sight has no easy resolution. Which is fair enough, I get it. It’s a tough problem in any simulation, and it will be decades before Gollop makes Phoenix Point, where the player’s actual line of sight replaces hit chances.

But I didn’t realize how wacky things can get with X-com’s LOS rules. Did y’all know that because a sectoid is so short, it can shoot a soldier through a farm’s wooden fence while the soldier’s return fire is blocked by the same fence? Oof.

Okay, I’m about to start my fifth or sixth attempt at this mod. My previous game ended when my last two agents were devoured by rats as soon as they stepped out of the car. Willard, noooooo! But at least I’m getting a handle on things!

Which difficulty are you playing on? I’ve been playing on experienced. I lost a van-load (and the van) of agents to something that I don’t recall now :/. I guess I’m trying to repress the memory (oh! I remember it now a reaper). One odd thing I’ve run into, perhaps a bug is if someone is fatally wounded, and we finish off the enemies, it will ask me if I do not want to exit, because someone is still fatally wounded. So I said no, initially because I thought maybe we can get back to the car and that huge medpack and fix them up a bit, but it ends when you hit end turn anyways and they end up showing up as wounded. Perhaps a thing with dropping it down from veteran to experienced as well I guess.

I chose the middle out of the five difficulties, so Veteran, I think? I looked up what difficulty levels do. It’s a pretty wide swathe of effects, and I don’t think you’re supposed to assume the middle setting is the middle difficulty. Oops. But the difficulty level isn’t my issue; the learning curve is what’s getting me.

I believe this is in case you want to use an item to patch up the character before ending the mission. If I’m not mistaken, it’s a weird artifact of these games that you can patch someone up in the field using a medkit, but otherwise, they’re going to have to sit on their butt for several weeks back at the base until they heal. At least I think that was going on when I was getting messages like that.

I’ll try to verify next time I see it, but I initially had the same reaction as you: “Gah, does this mean my dude is gonna die???”

Okay, question time! If I right click on an agent’s weapon, it creates a tiny yellow dot next to the weapon graphic:

What it that? And more importantly, where can I go to figure out basic interface stuff like this???

EDIT: Well, Google is one option. The dot lets you set a preferred weapon for reaction fire. Only useful if the agent is dual-wielding, I presume.

Probably true, especially since everyone always and only ever played the original Xcom on Easy, whether they meant to or not. Didn’t seem so easy at the time, did it? Hey, having a bug that forces only one difficulty level is one way for developers to “tune their game!” :)

Anyway, I am watching this thread with copious amounts of popcorn. Keep going, X-Commers!

Yeah, I was thinking fatally would mean they will be dead if I exit. I guess that means someone has to lug that case around. I’ve been sending the smaller medical bags with the teams as well.

I just fired it up to see if I could figure that out, and I wasn’t seeing it on my weapons, but they just had glocks equipped, so maybe something with the shotgun. Just about had another team wipe, had to run 2 agents back to the van and abort.

Edit: I think I found it @tomchick

Right click on a hand item slot: Toggles this hand as preferred for Reaction Fire until toggled again; the preferred hand is marked with yellow dot. This preference is for hand, thus persists whether armed or not, but normal rules of reactions are obeyed: melee weapons and built-in melee weapons are used if in range, but if the item in the hand is not a melee weapon or gun this unit can use, the preference is ignored and the unit will fire the gun in the other hand instead. Toggling is free, no extra TU cost.

I found that on this page.

some x-com files wiki thing: OpenXComExtended Mod Data Viewer
ufopedia open xcom page: OpenXcom - UFOpaedia