I just started playing, not sure what I’m doing wrong. So far I’ve lost zero guys (though a couple have gotten critically injured). Had my first Chrysallid mission (got a poor on people rescuing because I was forced on the defensive), right now I have laser weapons for everyone except the heavy, just researched the Arc thing. I’ve also never run out of money.
HOWEVER, I lost Canada and Mexico. I was careful to manage my abduction missions, but I swear I never even got missions to raise panic in either of those. Is there something I could have done wrong? I literally have no idea what I could have done better. I was working to get satellites up on them to calm them down, but I was lacking engineers – this was before I could build a workshop. After I finally got enough, it took like 20 days to even get a satellite to launch and by that point it was far too late and they dropped.
Was there anything I could have done to calm them down or does the RNG just get you sometimes?
I think panic increases from not completing missions applies to whole continents. So if you had the option of completing missions in the US but chose not to because the US’ panic was low, it may have increased panic in Canada and Mexico. Did you have a satellite over the US?
Not sure about the following: There may be panic increasing alien events you don’t see and therefore cannot respond to until you have a satellite over the country.
That’s the first thing. Laser’s not a big enough upgrade to invest the time/resources into. Wait until you zark your first ET and dive straight for plasma.
Having played three games and completed two, a few points there:
If you ignore a mission (including an abduction you don’t respond to), the panic will rise substantially (the amount depends on your level) in that country and less (I don’t know if it depends on the level, but at Normal it’s one dot) in every other country in the continent. So it can be worth taking a mission to prevent all of Asia going off its brain, even if it means you lose Germany.
I try to keep some satellites in reserve so that just before an end-of-month freakout I can launch them over problem countries. I let North America get to straight fives because I had three satellites in my pocket. I then forgot to launch them, which led me to reload my save, but that’s another story. But satellites typically go up just before month-end.
Completing a mission in one country can lower panic across the whole continent, but not always.
[QUOTE=Airk]
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.
[/QUOTE]
And I totally disagree with you as well. Satellite coverage is the most important thing in the game…especially the strategic placement of satellites. On my latest game at classic difficulty I managed to get through the entire game without a single country leaving the X-COM program. I did this by basically always having 2-3 satellites (and, more importantly, reserve capacity for the satellites by putting satellite facilities next to each other to multiply the effect) in reserve for any given month. If any country went red, then I’d launch a satellite there and on any nations that were above a 3 panic towards the end of the month…otherwise, I’d launch a 2 satellites on whatever was the highest paying member nations left 4 days before the counsel meeting. Between that and the strategic assault on the alien base (which reduces all panic globally), I was able to not only keep every country in the alliance, I had oodles of cash AND lots of scientists and engineers (you get a bonus for each depending on how many satellites you launch in a given month).
Sure, you COULD do it with only 6 satellites for the whole game, but why the hell would you want too? Why cripple yourself? If you want the game to be harder, ramp it up to the top level difficulty.
Uh, because that’s just how I played it, and it didn’t come across as challenging or necessary? I had zero countries leave the project. It’s not like I sat down and said “For this run through, I will limit myself to 6 satellites!” it was just that I didn’t come anywhere near needing more.
Also, I disagree that lasers aren’t a big enough upgrade to bother with, since I find they answer admirably mid game.
I think the BIG trick that everyone seems to be missing lies here:
Completing a TERROR mission in one country will lower panic across the whole continent IF you do a good enough job. Excellent/Excellent/Good for casualties/kills/dead civvies will absolutely ALWAYS lower continental panic, and I THINK Good/Excellent/Good will as well. Excellent/Excellent/Poor, however, absolutely will not lower terror outside of the affected country. Frankly, terror missions are a huge boon, and doing well on them can make satellites basically unnecessary.
[QUOTE=Airk]
Uh, because that’s just how I played it, and it didn’t come across as challenging or necessary? I had zero countries leave the project. It’s not like I sat down and said “For this run through, I will limit myself to 6 satellites!” it was just that I didn’t come anywhere near needing more.
[/QUOTE]
To me it sounded like you were deliberately making the game harder on yourself. You said that in the mid game you were still using projectile weapons, IIRC, and that you only deployed 6 satellites the whole game.
Not sure what you mean by this…one of the things I upgraded to as soon as I could were lasers. Especially the laser sniper rifle is critical as a first upgrade, but also laser weapons for your fighters asap.
Sure they do…if you are lucky enough to get them when you need them, and if you can get through them with minimal civilian casualties. Both require a pretty high degree of luck though. I think in the last game I played I only had maybe 3-4 terror missions the entire game, and I can’t remember any of them conveniently being on the continent I most needed them to be on to cycle back a 4 or 5 panic level nation or two when I most needed it. If you don’t want to rely on getting a lucky terror mission exactly when and where you need it though, and if you like cash and getting free engineers and scientists, it makes the most sense to me to use the easy button provided by the game and strategically use satellites to do it. However, as you said, the game is flexible and you can get to the same place through multiple paths. As long as you are having fun, that’s all that counts.
It was my FIRST playthrough. I had no idea how you were “supposed to do it” according to all the people on this forum. I just kept doing “plot things” and ended up at the Alien Base mission with ballistics and like, 3 satellites up because I’d been focusing my efforts on “priority research”. I suspect that in a way this worked in my favor because I got the panic reduction from beating the alien base really early on, and pretty much never had panic problems from there on out. I suspect that people who are doing tons of research before doing this mission are actually shooting themselves in the foot, hence why there’s this desperate emphasis on satellites to keep things from flying apart.
Basically, I’m saying: All this talk about how you “Have to play the game” or “The most important thing in the game is X” is overstating the case - at least when playing on Normal.
Sorry, it was someone ELSE who said “skip laser and go to plasma immediately”.
I obviously can’t speak for your experiences, but I feel that once they started, I had almost as many terror missions as abductions. (Though that’s “abduction events” not "possible abduction missions, since each “event” is three possible missions.)
I really feel like not sucking on terror missions isn’t that hard. You need to lose more than half the civvies to get a “poor”, though some of the maps are definitely harder than others.
Calling Satellites an “easy button” doesn’t strike me as accurate, because after the first few, they represent a large investment of time, money and facilities - oh and interceptors to cover that area to prevent you from losing funding by having UFOs fly by your covered areas without response. Yes, they eventually pay for themselves, but I don’t think they’re the license to print money that people seem to be treating them as.
Yep - I stand by it, too. It’s a drain on resources for a small, short-lived upgrade; particularly if you can get a capture relatively quickly and start down the plasma track. You can spend the research time and costs more effectively elsewhere.
I don’t know how randomised that is, but I’ve always been running a pretty consistant rate where there are more abductions than UFO events and more of either than terror missions.
They’re a big investment, but they’re one of the few reliable payoffs in the game and they set a baseline cash level that’s more than adequate. One of my friends who plays keeps running into cash problems - I only do for a couple of months and then my limiting factors become elerium and weapons fragments. They also tend to keep a lid on panic in the early game, but later on you use the cash to generate such a large recruitment bench that you can respond to every mission, no matter how badly the last one went.
Eh. Laser weapons are entirely adequate for most of the game - the only plasma weapon I’d say is an essential is the Plasma Sniper Rifle, which is crazy good.
If you hold off on Plasma weapons, you can get them way faster and cheaper later.
I get by with starting weapons fine for a long time. When I think of the window where laser weapons would be nice to have it is a small window that is not worth the cost or time to get them.
It’s like this (to me):
Early game - Ballistic weapons
Late early game - Lasers
Mid game - Plasma
Everything after mid-game- Better Plasma
In short, there is this small place where you can have lasers but not plasma yet and frankly you can get past those few missions just fine with ballistic weapons.
As soon as you research plasma everyone you have can use light plasma guns and by that point you have picked up enough to equip your whole squad (probably and of course not the heavy or sniper). The light plasma gun is better than the laser rifle (same damage but with a bonus to hit for the plasma).
My Sniper is downright evil with a plasma gun. Hell, he was pretty damn lethal most of the game with his starting rifle. With the plasma sniper rifle devastating barely covers it.
Seems to me the laser weapons are a complete waste of time (with the caveat that I have not played Classic and/or Ironman).
These are the two key points. In a game that’s fundamentally as much about management of insufficient resources as it is about odds-based tactics, you can concentrate on captures and start bringing back plasma pistols and light rifles pretty early. Once you can research plasma, you’ve already got a bank of free upgrades waiting and in the meantime you can devote your laser resources to the skeleton suit.
Don’t overlook the plasma pistols, either. They’re easy to capture early on (but not as easy later), and your snipers can do 4-6 reliably after moving with one of those and the appropriate upgrade, and even after developing the plasma cannon I’ll arm my assaulters with plasma pistols because they’re more accurate for the coup de grace shot at medium range. Then there’s the foundry upgrades…
I’ve had a look in a few strategy discussions, but the capture/South America/research/plasma technique never seems to come up. It’s disappointing, because I find that the most secure way of having your team overpowering the invaders in the early mid-game. Then if you can hang there long enough to build up a satellite network you start to reduce pressures on your endgame due to the quantity of money that lets you recruit a deep bench.
The thing is, if you can manage to use ballistics for a “long time” then you can easily get by with Lasers until the post-mid-game period. In fact, I find most of the plasma weaponry to be gravy.
The “Capture/South America/Research/Plasma” strategy would be…what? A contrast to the super easy interrogate a sectoid/research beam weapons/profit strategy? It’s possible to get lasers SUPER early with the bonus for a sectoid captive, whereas if you want a bonus for plasma weapons, you have to wait until you can capture a muton, and they don’t even show up until after you’re wrestling with Cryssalids, which are less that entertaining when you’re still using ballistics.
Yeah, I disagree with you about the satellites, but definitely agree with you here. I pushed for early laser development so I could deploy the laser weapons (which weren’t all that expensive in terms of money or materials), and then used my research to do other things (armor, power systems, fighter development, etc), only getting around to plasma later on down the line. The nice thing about plasma is I had tons of plasma pistols, plasma rifles (light and heavy) and even heavy plasma cannon thingies, so all I needed to buy was the plasma sniper rifles and I was set. I can’t imagine stretching my early projectile weapons that far into the mid-game though…again, like with the satellite thing it seems like trying to do stuff the hard way to me.
The fact remains that the time between when you can have lasers and when you can have plasma is relatively small. Better to skip lasers and put your research time elsewhere.
Exactly. IIRC, I thought about jumping right to plasma since I had a bunch of light plasma rifles, but it was going to take like 50 days to research that one thing, so I went with other, quicker research paths until I’d built up my labs and scientists enough to tackle it in less than 10 days. By that time I had already had laser weapons to my team for quite a long time (over a month IIRC), and they make a huge difference in the early to mid-game over the crap you start with.
Silly beginner questions: Does the area of your base influence where your soldiers come from? I started in Africa and seem to get about 3 folks from Nigeria and whatnot every time I hire. Interesting if true. Also how should I balance my loadout? 6-soldiers: 2 medkit, 2 arc throwers (capturing is a pain in the ass) and vests for my vets? I usually give vests to assault first, since they’re up close.