I put my second radar+interceptor base up at the start of the second month, and also splashed out for a third which was just a single radar… that kind of went to far. I should have waited for the third month for that third one.
Are you using the template system? If you select “shield” it automagically puts equips someone with a shield + pistol. You can then change the layout and say “use this layout as the default for the shield class”. You can also make new classes. (You can’t delete them, though >:()
That’s not entirely correct, you can in fact manufacture plasma weapons. But they’re down the line (it’s weird that you research 2 plasma weapons to unlock laser weapon tech but can’t come back around to plasma weapons until later). But yes, the premise is that the alien versions are unusable and you eventually understand the tech enough to make “human versions” of them. They’re pricier to manufacture than laser weapons, as one would expect. Also, the Plasma Rifle ammo takes up a 2x1 slot, which annoys me for some reason.
I didn’t find winning the first terror mission to be too difficult (relatively speaking). In both games that got that far my second terror mission was brutal though. Since the ground-missions aren’t scored in the same way as X-com’s are (where mission performance is really important) raining doom down on everything seems reasonable to me.
Bataeau, like Pod I want my second base running ASAP, but you have to balance the costs. It takes 500k to get a new site, and it takes 10 days for the site to form. Further, one of Radar Arrays or Hangars takes 10 days. So once you decide to expand it’s an immediate 20 days before you can start intercepting. If you can get a 2nd base going towards the end of month one, that’s great. But don’t stretch for it. The important thing is to be covering more regions for at least a decent portion (5-10 days) of month 2. Central America is a good base spot btw, it basically covers 3 zones I think.
My base immediately gets 2 hangars and 3 radar arrays. Once the 2 hangars are done I erect 2 more, as I’m running with 2x condor and 2x foxtrot. I’m contemplating 3 ship squadrons but haven’t experimented yet.
Anyone else notice that the aliens seem to favor buzzing Europe in the early game? My third game and they seem to focus on Europe at the start. I wonder if that is random, or some biase on the designers part (since he’s a brit).
I felt the same way through 2 (2.5, really) games. My current game I started in Egypt-ish for that reason. You can cover a lot of territory from there.
So good. My insane game is circling around the bowl in mid-December. I didn’t notice the price increase on radars since I last played until it was too late. I agree with the comments above about tactical success not remedying geoscape mistakes, and that’s not a bad thing to me.
This game has the potential to be amazing, but they really need to rethink the difficulty curve and the way they figure out progress. I’m really getting frustrated by the UFO swarms the aliens hit you with, particularly near the end of the month before the funding gets decided. It doesn’t matter how many technologies I make, how many terror sites I save, or even the fact that I knocked off an alien base, the alien UFOs send the funding forecast plummeting. There’s usually 4-5 medium UFOs hitting a region, so even if I can take down one of them, my interceptors still need hours to refuel and rearm, and that’s assuming they got lucky and don’t need repairs.
I haven’t lost any regions, but I’m barely breaking even on funding, which makes it difficult to set up other bases and buy/construct fighters, which makes all those countries slightly more unhappier each month, and the funding dwindles a bit more.
The one thing I never understood about the X-COM type of games - if you are getting more and more attacks the budget would be increased because the military would be screaming, “we need more training, equipment and so on.”
I know it is a game element but I never understood the actual logic.
Godzilla and friends show up and we see how many tanks and planes? Even a nuke or two! ;)
I’m not ENTIRELY sure what you’re getting at here - but in the original X-Com, funding basically kept climbing up at a solid pace, as long as you were putting in some serious effort to protect a nation. If you’d ignore an alien base (or fail to detect it), a nation would retreat from funding X-Com and sign a secret pact with the aliens, which could be a blow, but as long as you protected the main nations, their increased funding would usually completely offset a small drop-out nation at any given time.
I can’t say anything about Xenonauts as I haven’t played it yet. I hope there’ll be some finetuning before I do. ;)
I think the idea is that if the international organization proves ineffective, countries would instead funnel that money into their own military responses (which will also inevitably be ineffective).
Whilst I completely agree that it’s stupid (infact the idea of only sending 12 people is stupid – send as many chinooks full of the local army as possible?), the thematic logic is that if they’re not fuelling money to you they’re funnelling it into their diplomatic effort to “negotiate” with the aliens. aka giving up.
Remember: The aliens have a billion and one UFOs in orbit, and instead of attacking en-mass they send them one at a time, klingon style. So maybe intimation in order to effect a ‘peaceful’ take over is their main aim?
