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This is pretty long... you've been warned. :-)
I'll spoiler-tag any late-game specifics, but not worry too much about spoilers otherwise.
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Here's a couple of other threads I started while I was playing; folks posted some gameplay tips in them.
http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=23075373
http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=23093611
I used this setup for bugfixes, hotkeys, and better sound/music: http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Enemy_Unknown_Extended
Some specific comments:
It seemed like the rate of ground assault missions wasn't quite matched to the rate at which they varied. There are several things that can make a ground assault unique -- alien type, UFO type, terrain, my items/weapons -- but even so it felt like I got a lot of missions that were basically the same.
I saw well over 100 UFOs in my playthrough, probably around 120? Does the UFO numbering include undetected UFOs? Anyway, up through UFO #100 or so, I shot down and ground-assaulted the vast majority of them. In retrospect I didn't need to assault so many, but at the time I wasn't sure about the effects of leaving a shot-down UFO alone (on my monthly score or otherwise) and I wasn't sure that I could afford to leave the alien items & materials un-scavenged. By the time I was fully researched & financed for the endgame, I just started shooting UFOs down and ignoring them while my soldiers healed up and various stuff rolled off my assembly lines. Felt pretty good.
I did a lot of TV-watching and podcast-listening during those ground assaults. :-) It was fun, but past the halfway point I was really interested in getting through certain research lines, or getting certain base facilities built, and those darn UFOs kept interrupting. I got a little reckless on the ground assaults to get through them faster, which made me abuse savegame more than I should have. Too bad. I wonder how the higher difficulties would play out; harder ground assault missions (with less savescumming) sound interesting, but only if I could get away with doing fewer of them.
I could also have got more early toys by initially skipping the "fluff" research topics, the ones that just give backstory rather than unlocking gameplay, but I didn't know which those were.
Aliens invaded my bases a couple of times, which was fantastic. The manual basically gives away that this can happen, but I was still tickled to see a 2-D base that I had constructed transformed into a battlescape.
For the endgame I used four plasma hovertanks, and 10 soldiers in flying armor with heavy plasma rifles and a couple of blaster launchers. My psi skills weren't high, but I was able to pick 10 soldiers with good psi defenses. Ethereals still managed to mindgank one of them, and he gunned his buddy down, but other than that the last mission was easy.
Part of that "easy" may have been because of alien butterfingers. A couple of times I heard distant explosions and then later came across alien corpses in the middle of blaster-bomb residue. Gotta watch where you point those things.
BTW plasma hovertanks are great scouts! Fast, armored, no energy issues, got some punch. I was afraid I had boned myself when I saw the small door to the underground base -- tanks wouldn't fit through -- but then I thought oh yeah, blaster launcher make small door into big door.
It would have been satisfying to have a recap at the end of the stats and achievements of my specific playthrough. Oh well.
I'm reading more of the spoilery stuff now at http://www.ufopaedia.org/ and I'm a little boggled at what I managed to overlook. E.g. the fact that each alien UFO type actually has specific behavior patterns, and grouping with other UFO types, based on mission types... I had assumed that the UFO typing and mission descriptions were pretty much just fluff.
Anyway: whew! My gamer-card membership has been renewed for a while, I think. I'm off to find something slick and stupid to play next.
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