I’ve had this happen a couple of times. In every case there is a leaker out there somewhere…some mob who ran away in a battle and is hiding. What I usually do is save the game, then send folks out in every direction until I figure out where the alien is. If someone gets hit then I reload and move the whole team to where I found the thing. Remember, when they are running they can go back to where you started, or into (or on top of) buildings…and generally they don’t move once they find good cover and just sit there on overwatch. It’s a pain to track them down sometimes, but like you I don’t want to restart a mission if I’ve been really successful (hell, I never have captured 4 aliens in one mission! Wow, motherload of good weapons for free there :)).
I should (in theory) have some play time tonight so first thing I’m going to do is track that directory down and move a bunch of older saves to another directory. I guess I need to use a different strategy for saving…I’ve just been creating a new save every time I want to save (in case the game gets corrupt or I do something stupid and have to backtrack several missions). Thanks again for the tip. 
Interesting…maybe the folks at Firaxis will be smart and bring out a new DLC for the game while the iron is still hot and interest in the game is still high.
Apparently modders have uncovered a feature Firaxis meant to include, but ultimately left on the cutting room floor due to time constraints.
It was to be called “second wave” and it would add several new options to a game+ mode.
Some of the code has been brought back to life, but not all the options work correctly, so we’ll have to wait for modders to finish up the work, or perhaps Firaxis will include the mode as part of upcoming DLC?
Do you have an Alien Mind Controlled, per chance? This confused me last night (finally got the mind control skill on one of my troops), and as long as the alien was left alive (while mind controlled), the mission didn’t end. I had to wait three turns for the mind control to wear off so I could eliminate him, and then the mission ended normally.
But bugs like this is the main reason I don’t dare go the Iron Man route my next playthrough.
Yeah. I’ve done that. Gave it another twenty minutes last night just sweeping back and forth, looking in every room, on every rooftop, behind every box and vehicle, in the two trucks you could enter. Couldn’t find hide nor hair. I’m pretty sure that no-one got away, too.
There’s the rub. This is the ‘bring it back from the brink’ mission. It’s the best I’ve done in a mission and if I abort it the game’s basically over. If I can knock it over we can probably last another month Asia calmed down a little, some good plasma and a couple of key promotions.
[QUOTE=abel29a]
Do you have an Alien Mind Controlled, per chance? This confused me last night (finally got the mind control skill on one of my troops), and as long as the alien was left alive (while mind controlled), the mission didn’t end. I had to wait three turns for the mind control to wear off so I could eliminate him, and then the mission ended normally
[/QUOTE]
Nope - no mind-control in play. Thanks, though.
Multiplayer:
- Do you get hiccups too? By that I mean situations where you move as your first action and then the game repeats your initial move action and ends that unit’s turn. That is, you only get one move instead of a move action and then another action.
I have cable Internet so I doubt it’s a connection speed issue. Is there a way to reduce this because it can really mess with your strategy.
2) Aren’t sectoid commanders overpowered or am I just using them quite well/others fight very badly against them? I was just in a game where the other guy had the advantage over me until the fourth turn where I MCed his two units and won. The first MC had a 75% chance of success and the second 100%.
I’ve decided to hold off on purchasing XCOM:UK, but I’m thinking of pre-ordering Xenonauts. It’s still in alpha. It’s an indy title and looks more old school.
I am not sure this is entirely wise, based on how long Xenonauts has been “coming soon” (They updated their website a bit over a year ago and tossed all the hints that it’d been “in the works” for ages. Even if you read the linked RPS article, they talk about how long the project has been ‘in the works’.) but I guess if you’re not in any particular sort of hurry, it will likely do a fine job of emulating 1995 when it finally launches in 2015. 
In all seriousness though, these games aren’t remotely in competition with one another. Why would you spend money to pre-order one (lets face it, Xenonauts does not have the finest “Yes, we are really going to get this game done” credentials") that will come out MAYBE next year “instead” of buying an extremely entertaining one that’s out right now? Fear that you might encourage people to make more games in the genre?
Seriously, I think if you have any serious interest in the squad based TBS genre, you really should pick up Xcom, because, frankly, it’s a high profile example of the genre, and the better it does, the more likely we are to see more companies trying to make entries in the space, rather than funded-out-of-somone’s-retirement-account “No no, we’re still working on it!” fan efforts like Xenonauts.
I don’t mean to pick on Xenonauts here, but it is pretty much the poster child for niche genre games.
Well, I got pissed and deleted my game. Guess I’ll have to try again. :rolleyes:
Ran into Mutons out in the open. And well, they started chucking grenades. I didn’t even bother to play it out. My guys were toast - I knew it, they knew it, and the swarm of rocket-boys about to drop on me knew it. And that would have been basically everything I had. Oh well, time to throw out that story and all the charcaters and stories that developed.
There are two things which really irked me.
#1) The game implies that you need to be racing ahead to complete the “story”. I did not realize this was basically a quick way to completely fail.
#2) At no point was the importance of satellites made clear. I had no clue what I needed to get these running until I was about two months in, and still had a week to go to build the power in order to build the facilities required to operate the satelites, assuming I could even afford it by the time that came around (asnwer: no). Even playing catch-up, I was so far behind the money race it didn’t matter. And then three Mutons wasted me.
Y’know, given how fucking useless and beat-the-dead-horse-until-it-rots the turorial was, maybe they might have spared ten seconds to explain that satellite coverage is the most important factor in the entire game?!
I started a new game. I stopped after the first mission because my beehive setup is crap, and I may as well stop there. Of course, I’m torn between starting locations.
I’d like to figure out whether Europe or South America actually results in shorter overall research - I’m betting Europe. However, the time you save with South Am will come earlier, letting you hit some of the best techs and gain and early-game advantage.And of course, Europe’s bonus is about equal to one lab. Africa, on the other hand, is the money pit (because of the well-known fact that Africa is an insanely rich continent 
). Asia’s bonus is nice, too. In fact, only North Am. seems really sucky. It’s a bonus you can’t use until the late game, when you’d probably have the resources already.
I disagree. North America’s bonus is the best, because it lets you get satellites up faster. Nothing matters except satellites.
I disagree with this entirely, because the hard part of getting satellites into the sky has nothing to do with the cost and time of building the satellites and everything to do with the cost/power/engineer requirements of having enough uplinks to actually launch the darn things. Satellites are hilariously cheap compared to the cost of the uplinks, so cutting down on their cost doesn’t really make a big impact.
Also, I completely disagree that Satellite coverage is so important. I went through my entire playthrough on normal with a grand total of 6 sats, two of which didn’t launch until very late in the game. Honestly, I’m a little confused by people who think they’re so important, since it’s entirely possible to make it through the game on a relatively limited budget. You only “need” 6 suits of armor, six weapons, and six ‘backpack’ items, and that’s only after you’ve gotten both squad size upgrades. And you’re probably getting tons of random alien corpses and stuff that can help buff up your funding.
I kinda feel like people who say satellites are crucial need to start trying to do more with less-that-100%-optimal gear. I’m on a classic playthrough now, and beating terror missions with carapace armor and ballistic weapons, squad size 4. Maybe I’ll run into trouble later, I dunno, but on normal, this really shouldn’t be a problem.
Putting a satellite up reduces that nation’s panic.
That means a well-timed satellite launch will save a country from withdrawal.
Yeah, you can go through the game with only a few satellites up, but that requires massive amounts of luck on which countries get abduction missions, terror missions, council missions, etc. You can’t even shoot down a ufo without satellite coverage.
Sure. But if you’ve got so many countries panciing that you need MASSIVE satellite coverage, you’re doing something else wrong. This doesn’t make satellite coverage “the most important thing in the game” or “noting else matters except satellites” by a long stretch. It just makes it a useful tool for when things start to slip.
Yeah, but so what? If you’re “looking for” UFOs to shoot down, sooner or later one will wander into the coverage you do have (as a result of deploying satellites for funding or panic reduction), and if you’re not actively “hoping” to shoot one down (i.e. you’re feeling beat up right now), it’s actually better to NOT detect it, because the council gets crabby at you for not dealing with it if you ignore it, but if you never see it in the first place, no one is the wiser and you don’t get the penalty.
Having too many satellites will actually make the game harder because A) You can’t deploy a satellite to reduce panic once you’ve already got one there and B) You’ll see and have to deal with more UFOs.
On a side note, does anyone think Bill Hader is a well-disguised Thin Man?
“Doing something wrong”? No - just takes the RNG screwing with you. Getting the “choose one of these 3 missions” involving the same 3 continents 3 times in a row will leave you with two of the continents at 4 panic or worse. And it gets worse if you’re playing at higher than normal difficulty.
Huh, good point. Thanks.
I like the demo, though.
Maybe you get these missions way more often than I do, but it takes a couple of months for me to get three abductions, and there are other missions in between that generally lower panic.
And even if this does happen, not all the countries on those continents are going to be in high panic, because you’re going to have dealt with the abductions there which results in a panic reduction.
And even if you do get the “perfect storm” like this, which is rare, it’s still not game breaking, because you can lose a few countries without any real adverse effects. Also, how does higher difficulty impact this? I’m not seeing any great difference between my classic game that I’m playing now and my normal game in terms of panic and missions, I’m just seeing things on the ground being significantly more dangerous.
I’m still not seeing the argument for “Satellites are the most important thing in the game” and I’m definitely not seeing much argument for the still sadly weak North American bonus.
Really? Weird. I get one to two abduction missions every month.
Technically, we’re saying the same thing here - that it takes ~2-3 months to get three abduction missions.