2951
Tournaments / Re: MATCH OF DOOM: The Redoomening
« on: December 18, 2007, 04:51:55 PM »
Hey, suicide is a good way to win - you don't have to watch the match anymore!
Show Posts
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
2952
Tournaments / Re: MATCH OF DOOM: The Redoomening
« on: December 18, 2007, 04:30:36 PM »
The only obvious response is a bullet to the face. Whoever voted for Selan is LYING.
2953
General Chat / What Games Are You Playing: 2008
« on: December 18, 2007, 03:17:19 PM »
Welcome back! New forum, almost New Year, it's time to make a new topic!
I'm not going to be playing much later this week, but been playing a mix of stuff.
FE10 - Currently at chapter 3 of part 4. The game is fantastic, easily the best FE game. The climax was great, and they've done a fantastic job of making this game a masterpiece. I'll post more later. Suffice to say, Death Gods Mia and Mist kick ass.
X-Com - Updates in the X-Com LP >_>
I'm not going to be playing much later this week, but been playing a mix of stuff.
FE10 - Currently at chapter 3 of part 4. The game is fantastic, easily the best FE game. The climax was great, and they've done a fantastic job of making this game a masterpiece. I'll post more later. Suffice to say, Death Gods Mia and Mist kick ass.
X-Com - Updates in the X-Com LP >_>
2954
RPGDL Policy Discussion / Re: Regarding the transfer of stat topics
« on: December 18, 2007, 03:08:48 PM »
Set all topics up on the wiki. Basically, the first page would be the game stat topic home, with individual links to the characters (not unlike the dead IAQ GH ran), as well as bosses. Give me a bit of time and I can do an example of it today, once I get some other stuff done.
The home section can also have a list of things needing to be done. Again, let me get an example of this up later today.
I do like MF's idea of adding non-stat stuff as well. Make it more of a database. Like I said, I'll get to this later today.
The home section can also have a list of things needing to be done. Again, let me get an example of this up later today.
I do like MF's idea of adding non-stat stuff as well. Make it more of a database. Like I said, I'll get to this later today.
2955
General Chat / PLAY MORE X-COM!!!
« on: December 18, 2007, 03:04:44 PM »
Because so few of you have played the game it makes me SICK. SICK. SICK I SAY!
Anyway, I figured this would be an excellent game to LP. X-Com is a classic and voted one of the greatest games of all time. The depth the game exhudes is fantastic, and it's got huge amounts of replay value and exposure. AND SO FEW OF YOU HAVE PLAYED IT! So I thought this would be a great way to expose the game here.
Youtube video of the opening to save space and those with 56k a few thousand headaches with the large number of pictures I will have to employ early on:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pX0Cm3N_n6k
So lets begin! With that out of the way, this first post will be a significant introduction to the game and how it works. X-Com is a turn-based combat stategy/builder game, set in the late 90's. Aliens from an unknown source are attacking the Earth, abducting civilians, performing experiments, killing the innocent, etc. Their plans are unknown, but the governments of Earth have developed a resistance group to fight back against the aliens: The Extraterrestrial Combat Forces, X-Com. Privately funded, the group's mission is to protect the civilians of the world, research the threat, and find a way to exterminate it.
Before the game begins, we need to choose our difficulty setting. As you can see, there are 5 levels of difficulty. Obviously, level 5, Superhuman, is the toughest. The differences in difficulty lie in the number of aliens that appear on missions, their stats, the speed at which advanced aliens arrive (Mutons, Snakemen), and the diplomatic effects the aliens have on the governments of Earth. It's been a while since I've played, and to make this easier to follow, we're going to go with Beginner. This way, we can build up the game over time, and ease all you observers into the process of the game.
After choosing a difficulty setting, we're brought to what's called the Geoscape. As anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of geography can tell, this is a map of the world. The date and time can be seen in the center right of the screen, and below that are 6 buttons corresponding to times (5 seconds, 1 hour, etc.). The game speed is defined by which of the buttons is pressed - obviously, time will move at the specified time-frame. The default time speed is 5 seconds. Below that, the globe icons allow you to zoom in/out. Above the time settings is a list of buttons to press that allow you to view graphs and charts, as well as access the game options (saving, sound options, etc.). But we'll get to that later.
If you'll notice the top of the screen, the game is asking me to place my first base. When you begin the game, you must place a base for X-Com to operate out of. You can place it anywhere in the world - Antarctica, South America, Africa, wherever. The first base is free, but where you place it is important. Since you're funded by the nations of the world, obviously, you want your base in a location where you can defend many of those nations. The Arctic is a bad place, since penguins don't pay very well. There are two good places to place your initial base: in Eastern Europe and the Eastern United States. The United States is the largest funder of X-Com, so defending them is a good idea. However, every other country in the New World pays pretty poorly. Meanwhile, there are a lots of good paying countries in the European area, an a base in Eastern Europe can cover Europe, most of Asia, Africa, and even portions of the Americas. A base in the United States, meanwhile, covers pretty much the Americas and minor portions of the Old World. Hence, I decided to place the first base a bit north of where the mouse pointer is, right around where Moscow would be. You'll see a picture of it later anyway.
And thus, DLCom was born. Welcome to our first base of operations! To orient you to the mass of information: the majority of the space onscreen is taken up by the base view. As you can see there's a grid section with buildings taking up varying amounts of space on them. When you create your first base, this is what it will look like. Each structure has a different function: the 3 large, 4-square pads are hangers, and in each of them is a vessel. The top one has a Skyranger (troop transport), the lower left and lower right ones have Interceptors (to shoot down UFOs). Below the top hanger are two other structures - the octagon-shaped one with a red square in the middle is called an Access Lift. It's basically there to...provide access to the base. It doesn't really do anything else, although if we made a new base, it would be the only structure we get for free. The structure to the right of it is the Living Quarters, which is where our soldiers, scientists and engineers live. Basically, think of them as farms in Warcraft terminology - to acquire more people, we need enough housing for them. Below the Living Quarters is the laboratory. Labs are where your scientists do research, which is vital to your survival in this game. The more you have, the more scientists you can assign to research. To the right of that is the Workshop. Workshops are for your engineers. You need workshops to build weapons, craft, etc. The more you have, the faster you can build. To the left of the lab is the General Stores. General stores are just that - stores. You need them to hold equipment you make or capture in battle. Finally, to the left of that is a Small Radar. Radars allow you to detect aliens. The small radar has a 5% chance to detect an alien ship every 10 minutes within 300 nautical miles. Without a radar, you can never detect aliens, and therefore, you can't really win the game.
To the right of the base layout is the base status section. You can see the base name, the area it's located (Europe), the amount of money we have, a bird's eye view of the base (and any others you might have), and a list of options to go through. Let's check those options out, shall we?
This is the base information window. Here we can see how many personnel we have, how much space they use up, and other stats (such as the monthly costs of maintenance on our base). A general overall view of the base, basically.
This is the soldier tab. Each soldier has a name and vital statistics as shown. You can also see their rank, where they're assigned to, the number of kills they've made, missions they've flown, etc. Now, for an explanation of the stats:
TU - Turn units. This stat is basically how often a soldier can act. TUs are expended when moving, firing, priming grenades, using psionics, etc. It's a measure of how often/much a soldier can act in a given turn.
Stamina - A measure of how the soldier can sustain movement. An exertion factor - the higher the elevation a soldier traverses, the more energy they spend, which equates to more TU spent. Wounded characters will also expend more stamina, which equates to more TU spent to move.
Health - Obvious. More allows you to withstand additional plasma bursts to the face.
Bravery - A measure of how BRAVE a soldier is! The higher this is, the less likely a soldier is to panic in the face of disasterous, morale-lowering instances (for instance, if a bunch of your characters get killed).
Reactions - Illustrates precedence in combat. High reactions prevent opportunity fire from defenders, and allow opportunity fire for, conversely. They go hand-in-hand with TUs - high TUs and reactions allow lots of opportunity fire. This stat is great for guarding pathways, as it allows your soldiers to fire on approaching aliens before they get a chance to fire at you.
Firing Accuracy - Firearm accuracy. Self-explanatory.
Throwing Accuracy - Accuracy with throwing grenades and other projectiles not firearms. Kind of not that amazing, as it basically only has use with grenades, practically.
Strength - Indicates the amount of junk a soldier can carry. If they carry equipment heavier than their strength, they get a penalty to their TUs.
It's important to note that aliens have stats too, but you can't see them until you access Mind Probes (which is, admittedly, soonish).
To make this fun and interesting, I'll be naming all my soldiers after DL members. Now, who to start with...well, since I'm not sure of the sex of this soldier, I need to go with someone ambiguous...
There we go. Now, you'll also notice that I've attached another word to the end of the soldier name. This indicates their use in combat. Those I'll get into a bit more later. Usually, it's a smart idea to base their indication on stats (i.e., Scouts should have high TUs, Snipers high firing accuracy, etc.), but you can easily train soldiers up to high levels in whatever you want them to be, so this isn't a huge problem. So, let's finish off the rest of the starting soldiers. I'll go fairly randomly with names, attempting to keep sexes matching up properly if possible:
There we go.
As you can see, we start with 8 soldiers. I've designated 4 snipers, 3 scouts and 1 carnage (i.e., explosives and mass destruction) soldier. They're all rookies, and all are assigned to the same vessel for transport to an alien attack. Hopefully, we'll have one of those soon. As a note, if you die, I'll probably re-recruit you later, though I'll try to get everyone a stint as a soldier at some point.
This is the equip craft screen for one of our Interceptors (if you're wondering, both of them are equipped the same). As you can see, this ship is equipped with Stingray missiles and a basic cannon for combat with UFOs. Cannons are pretty much useless, except for ensuring you don't destroy smaller UFOs. Missiles are the way to go early - they outrange several UFO weapons, and do decent damage, and aren't highly likely to destroy some of the smaller UFOs. I'm not going to change the equipment on the Interceptors at the moment, as it's fine for now.
I'll post information on some of the weapons/craft a bit later. Right now, this is a basic background to start everyone off with.
And this is our other vessel, the troop transport Skyranger. You can assign soldiers to the ship (all 8 of ours are assigned to it), as well as equipment (to a max of 80 pieces of equipment, including things such as grenades, rifles, stun rods, etc.) and personnel armour (which I don't have any of yet). There's not much to do with it now, so we'll be leaving this screen.
This is what happens when we go to the Build Facilities section of base management. When you click on it, the section on the right pops up, showing you all your options. If you click on one, it will pop up with a window showing the cost, the time to build and the upkeep it costs to have it there. This picture shows what I've already started building. I'm building an additional 2 hangers on the top section (next to the first hanger up there), as well as a Large Radar (next to the small rader - small and large radars stack, with large radars having a a detection range of 450 nautical miles), a general stores below the lab, and a living quarters to the right of the workshop. Why am I doing all this and spending huge amounts of money?
Base defensibility. When aliens attack your base (which, to be fair, won't happen until later), they can access your base from 1 of 2 areas - the Access Lift or Hangers. If you look at the original base set-up, there are no defensible locations - aliens entering from any of the hangers or access lift can prowl throughout the base, and there's no real choke points of defensible locations, since your soldiers will be attacked from all sides. Once the 2 hangers up top are done (in 25 days), I'll delete the two at the bottom, and once the living quarters are finished, I'll delete the other one, making the access lift a great choke point to defend in case of a base attack.
There are several structures I haven't built yet that I fully intend to - Alien Containment is vital, as you can't research live aliens captured during missions without one built. But right now, it's not a huge problem. Missile defenses are for protecting your base from invasion, but they're generally a waste of time, unless you have a base with no soldiers to defend it. Base attacks, if you have a proper defensive structure, are actually good things - lots and lots of alien and equipment lot.
This is what comes up under the research tab. As you can see, there's not much to research now, but what there is is good. This game requires you to research to win - researching gets you new weapons, craft, as well as allows you to win the game. Researching early topics allows you to research more topics, as does capturing alien corpses and technology.
My focus is always on laser weapons first, despite what Alex will argue with me over. Laser weapons are pretty much inarguably the best weapons in the game - early research opportunity, unlimited ammunition, solid damage, accurate and sell very well (Laser Cannons can be manufactured and sold for lots of money on the black market). They even the score very much with the aliens and their plasma weaponry.
Medkits are nice for healing soldiers that are wounded or unconscious. Unfortunately, I don't find them that useful, especially early on. In my experience, soldiers are very likely to die without armour, and they're pretty expendable early when they're all rookies. Probably my last pick of the early research options.
Motion Scanners are good for night missions, as they show you movement of aliens. These are great for when you're in unknown territory, and especially great in cities, where there are lots of hiding places that are hard to search, and where you can't always sacrifice soldiers to look place by place.
Yep, starting lasers. Since I only have 10 scientists, I can't do this as fast as I'd like. As you can see, I have a total amount of lab space for 50 total scientists, so I'd like to get to that number as fast as possible.
And this is the Purchase/Hire tab. Any Terran personnel or equipment (basically anything that isn't researchable) can be acquired via spending a bit of money on things. As you can see, I'm buying lots of explosives (grenades, rockets) and electro-flares (for night missions). Also, though you can't see it, I hired a bunch of scientists (20 more), which run a crapload of money (over 1 million!), but allow me to research much faster. This takes care of pretty much all of my initial purchases to start the game. This should get us started pretty well.
Right below the hiring/purchasing tab is the sell/sack tab. Here, we can sell excess equipment and fire lazy personnel. I'm selling all my Auto-cannon and HE ammo, as well as the weapons themselves, to make some money. I'm not a huge fan of either, preferring rockets myself. While they have uses, I'm going to stick with rockets for this, unless I feel like playing around with them.
Those are all the tabs in the base overview. Now, back to the geoscape...
Clicking on the intercept tab at the top right corner of the screen opens up this window. It shows all current craft in posession, as well as their locations, if they have weapons, their crew, and HWPs (Heavy Weapons Platforms, i.e., tanks) if applicable. Since there aren't any UFOs to intercept right now, this tab is kind of useless, but it should prove useful once we actually detect some aliens flying around the skies.
This is part of the graphs tab, accessed from the geoscape. There are a lot of graphs to show here - graphs showing alien activity in countries, across continents, interception data, income from countries over time, and other pieces of information. Unfortunately, there's not much to go through now, so I'll not be going through every one of them now. Suffice to say, looking at the activity graphs is really useful for figuring out where alien bases might be located, while the income graphs can show how alien activity might be affecting national funding.
Right below the graph tab is the UFOpaedia tab. This is a giant encyclopedia about the game: alien information, weapon stats, etc. It gets updated as you research and learn more about the game. Right now, there's just about nothing in it. We'll make use of it later.
And finally, the funding tab. As you can see, there are a lot of countries providing funding to X-Com. The USA pays the most by far, followed by Japan, France and South Africa. To keep this funding up, you need to make sure you shoot down UFOs flying around countries, respond to alien terror missions, destroy alien bases located in countries, and overall just make the politicians happy by minimizing civilian casualties and maximizing alien killing. This is why it's suggested to make a base in Europe - the Europe base covers a lot of high-paying countries, while the USA base covers pretty much just the USA, in terms of high-paying countries.
So that's the overview of the game. With that done, I proceed to press the 1 hour button to speed up the game and wait for things to happen. Usually, a UFO will pop up within the first couple days. Meanwhile, you usually just need to wait to get everything on track (weapon purchases, research, etc.). Nothing's really happened so far, but a couple days in...
All those weapons and scientists I purchased/hired finally arrived. Immediately, I send the scientists to assist with laser research, and take stock of my equipment.
Laser research completes! Wonderful! From here, I focus on the laser pistol research. Laser pistols are great early weapons - less power than the rifles, but much lighter and can fire far more often. Also, unlimited ammo and faster research, so I could very well have them by the time a UFO comes around at this rate. They're great on scouts for reaction fire, and otherwise are just overall better than the basic projectile pistols and rifles.
Still no UFOs, but pretty quickly, the laser pistol research finishes. As you can see, most weapons have 3 firing rates, though I'll explain them later. The big on is the 25% next to Auto-Fire, meaning you can theoretically use auto-fire 4 times a turn. Great weapon.
And with pistols done, I go to work on researching laser rifles, probably the best weapon in the game, period. These are fabulous weapons for snipers and overall general use, with great accuracy and power. I should probably have them researched by next UFO encounter.
We skipped this tab in the base description earlier because there wasn't really anything to show with it. Now that I've researched something I can produce, it's time to show you what manufacturing does. Pretty self-explanatory, really - you can see what item is being produced, the engineers working on it (following similar restrictions as labs with scientists), the units already produced, units to be produced, price for each unit, and time it will take to complete them. So in a little less than 3 days, I'll have 2 laser pistols to dole out to my group. Awesome.
And I do get that time. It's the 8th of January, and nothing's happened yet. No UFOs detected, nothing else going on. The laser pistols do arrive, and as such, I go and set up the Skyranger with the new equipment.
Out go the old pistols, in come the laser pistols, more grenades, rockets and launcher, and remaining rifles and clips. Plenty of equipment to arm my squad. You can only put 80 items on a Skyranger (clips, rifles, grenades, stun rods...all inclusive), so while it doesn't look packed, it actually is: 61 items currently hold space in the Skyranger. Granted, a lot of it is extra ammo and the like, but when I start getting more soldiers, space will be very limited. This is why laser weapons are fantastic, as they basically cut equipment usage in half, not requiring any clips.
So outfitted ship, and nothing going on. Kind of boring until we get more stuff going on, so we're now just wait...
There we go! Whenever a UFO is detected, it will pop up in a window like this. As you can see, it's taken 8 days for something to pop up. The indication of UFO-1 indicates this is the first UFO to fly over Earth. This doesn't necessarily mean I've detected them - this could be UFO-4 and been the first one I've actually detected. Size of the UFO is fairly obvious - larger UFOs have more firepower, more crew, and more loot. The altitude illustrates whether the UFO is flying or not - in this case, it's landing on the ground, likely doing something (abduction, harvesting, etc.) nefarious. Heading illustrates which way the UFO is flying, which helps with interception (send the fighter in the way of the UFO so it can catch it - early craft are much slower than alien vessels, so predicting where they're flying is important for actually catching them and shooting them down). Speed, obviously is how fast the UFO is going. Slower flying UFOs do different procedures than faster ones - generally, a slower flying UFO will be nearing its location (terror mission, supply mission, etc.). Faster ships not only are generally larger, but indicate that the ship is going towards a location - this could be a base assault, a fly-by scouting mission or a vanguard for other vessels. This ship is grounded, and it's small, so it's probably a harvesting or research mission. More about those later.
And here, I sent out craft to recover the ship. The light blue square in Europe is the base, DLCom. The yellow dot right below it is the Skyranger, filled with soldiers. The green X is the UFO, landed. Real close to it is another yellow dot, one of the interceptors from DLCom. I have it hovering over the UFO, just in case it decides to fly off before the Skyranger gets there. This way, the interceptor will shoot it down, keeping it grounded so I can recover it.
It doesn't move. Our Skyranger arrives. It's time!
And thus ends part 1, the basic introduction to the game. Next post will be about the DL's first alien craft recovery!
Anyway, I figured this would be an excellent game to LP. X-Com is a classic and voted one of the greatest games of all time. The depth the game exhudes is fantastic, and it's got huge amounts of replay value and exposure. AND SO FEW OF YOU HAVE PLAYED IT! So I thought this would be a great way to expose the game here.
Youtube video of the opening to save space and those with 56k a few thousand headaches with the large number of pictures I will have to employ early on:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pX0Cm3N_n6k
So lets begin! With that out of the way, this first post will be a significant introduction to the game and how it works. X-Com is a turn-based combat stategy/builder game, set in the late 90's. Aliens from an unknown source are attacking the Earth, abducting civilians, performing experiments, killing the innocent, etc. Their plans are unknown, but the governments of Earth have developed a resistance group to fight back against the aliens: The Extraterrestrial Combat Forces, X-Com. Privately funded, the group's mission is to protect the civilians of the world, research the threat, and find a way to exterminate it.
Before the game begins, we need to choose our difficulty setting. As you can see, there are 5 levels of difficulty. Obviously, level 5, Superhuman, is the toughest. The differences in difficulty lie in the number of aliens that appear on missions, their stats, the speed at which advanced aliens arrive (Mutons, Snakemen), and the diplomatic effects the aliens have on the governments of Earth. It's been a while since I've played, and to make this easier to follow, we're going to go with Beginner. This way, we can build up the game over time, and ease all you observers into the process of the game.
After choosing a difficulty setting, we're brought to what's called the Geoscape. As anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of geography can tell, this is a map of the world. The date and time can be seen in the center right of the screen, and below that are 6 buttons corresponding to times (5 seconds, 1 hour, etc.). The game speed is defined by which of the buttons is pressed - obviously, time will move at the specified time-frame. The default time speed is 5 seconds. Below that, the globe icons allow you to zoom in/out. Above the time settings is a list of buttons to press that allow you to view graphs and charts, as well as access the game options (saving, sound options, etc.). But we'll get to that later.
If you'll notice the top of the screen, the game is asking me to place my first base. When you begin the game, you must place a base for X-Com to operate out of. You can place it anywhere in the world - Antarctica, South America, Africa, wherever. The first base is free, but where you place it is important. Since you're funded by the nations of the world, obviously, you want your base in a location where you can defend many of those nations. The Arctic is a bad place, since penguins don't pay very well. There are two good places to place your initial base: in Eastern Europe and the Eastern United States. The United States is the largest funder of X-Com, so defending them is a good idea. However, every other country in the New World pays pretty poorly. Meanwhile, there are a lots of good paying countries in the European area, an a base in Eastern Europe can cover Europe, most of Asia, Africa, and even portions of the Americas. A base in the United States, meanwhile, covers pretty much the Americas and minor portions of the Old World. Hence, I decided to place the first base a bit north of where the mouse pointer is, right around where Moscow would be. You'll see a picture of it later anyway.
And thus, DLCom was born. Welcome to our first base of operations! To orient you to the mass of information: the majority of the space onscreen is taken up by the base view. As you can see there's a grid section with buildings taking up varying amounts of space on them. When you create your first base, this is what it will look like. Each structure has a different function: the 3 large, 4-square pads are hangers, and in each of them is a vessel. The top one has a Skyranger (troop transport), the lower left and lower right ones have Interceptors (to shoot down UFOs). Below the top hanger are two other structures - the octagon-shaped one with a red square in the middle is called an Access Lift. It's basically there to...provide access to the base. It doesn't really do anything else, although if we made a new base, it would be the only structure we get for free. The structure to the right of it is the Living Quarters, which is where our soldiers, scientists and engineers live. Basically, think of them as farms in Warcraft terminology - to acquire more people, we need enough housing for them. Below the Living Quarters is the laboratory. Labs are where your scientists do research, which is vital to your survival in this game. The more you have, the more scientists you can assign to research. To the right of that is the Workshop. Workshops are for your engineers. You need workshops to build weapons, craft, etc. The more you have, the faster you can build. To the left of the lab is the General Stores. General stores are just that - stores. You need them to hold equipment you make or capture in battle. Finally, to the left of that is a Small Radar. Radars allow you to detect aliens. The small radar has a 5% chance to detect an alien ship every 10 minutes within 300 nautical miles. Without a radar, you can never detect aliens, and therefore, you can't really win the game.
To the right of the base layout is the base status section. You can see the base name, the area it's located (Europe), the amount of money we have, a bird's eye view of the base (and any others you might have), and a list of options to go through. Let's check those options out, shall we?
This is the base information window. Here we can see how many personnel we have, how much space they use up, and other stats (such as the monthly costs of maintenance on our base). A general overall view of the base, basically.
This is the soldier tab. Each soldier has a name and vital statistics as shown. You can also see their rank, where they're assigned to, the number of kills they've made, missions they've flown, etc. Now, for an explanation of the stats:
TU - Turn units. This stat is basically how often a soldier can act. TUs are expended when moving, firing, priming grenades, using psionics, etc. It's a measure of how often/much a soldier can act in a given turn.
Stamina - A measure of how the soldier can sustain movement. An exertion factor - the higher the elevation a soldier traverses, the more energy they spend, which equates to more TU spent. Wounded characters will also expend more stamina, which equates to more TU spent to move.
Health - Obvious. More allows you to withstand additional plasma bursts to the face.
Bravery - A measure of how BRAVE a soldier is! The higher this is, the less likely a soldier is to panic in the face of disasterous, morale-lowering instances (for instance, if a bunch of your characters get killed).
Reactions - Illustrates precedence in combat. High reactions prevent opportunity fire from defenders, and allow opportunity fire for, conversely. They go hand-in-hand with TUs - high TUs and reactions allow lots of opportunity fire. This stat is great for guarding pathways, as it allows your soldiers to fire on approaching aliens before they get a chance to fire at you.
Firing Accuracy - Firearm accuracy. Self-explanatory.
Throwing Accuracy - Accuracy with throwing grenades and other projectiles not firearms. Kind of not that amazing, as it basically only has use with grenades, practically.
Strength - Indicates the amount of junk a soldier can carry. If they carry equipment heavier than their strength, they get a penalty to their TUs.
It's important to note that aliens have stats too, but you can't see them until you access Mind Probes (which is, admittedly, soonish).
To make this fun and interesting, I'll be naming all my soldiers after DL members. Now, who to start with...well, since I'm not sure of the sex of this soldier, I need to go with someone ambiguous...
There we go. Now, you'll also notice that I've attached another word to the end of the soldier name. This indicates their use in combat. Those I'll get into a bit more later. Usually, it's a smart idea to base their indication on stats (i.e., Scouts should have high TUs, Snipers high firing accuracy, etc.), but you can easily train soldiers up to high levels in whatever you want them to be, so this isn't a huge problem. So, let's finish off the rest of the starting soldiers. I'll go fairly randomly with names, attempting to keep sexes matching up properly if possible:
There we go.
As you can see, we start with 8 soldiers. I've designated 4 snipers, 3 scouts and 1 carnage (i.e., explosives and mass destruction) soldier. They're all rookies, and all are assigned to the same vessel for transport to an alien attack. Hopefully, we'll have one of those soon. As a note, if you die, I'll probably re-recruit you later, though I'll try to get everyone a stint as a soldier at some point.
This is the equip craft screen for one of our Interceptors (if you're wondering, both of them are equipped the same). As you can see, this ship is equipped with Stingray missiles and a basic cannon for combat with UFOs. Cannons are pretty much useless, except for ensuring you don't destroy smaller UFOs. Missiles are the way to go early - they outrange several UFO weapons, and do decent damage, and aren't highly likely to destroy some of the smaller UFOs. I'm not going to change the equipment on the Interceptors at the moment, as it's fine for now.
I'll post information on some of the weapons/craft a bit later. Right now, this is a basic background to start everyone off with.
And this is our other vessel, the troop transport Skyranger. You can assign soldiers to the ship (all 8 of ours are assigned to it), as well as equipment (to a max of 80 pieces of equipment, including things such as grenades, rifles, stun rods, etc.) and personnel armour (which I don't have any of yet). There's not much to do with it now, so we'll be leaving this screen.
This is what happens when we go to the Build Facilities section of base management. When you click on it, the section on the right pops up, showing you all your options. If you click on one, it will pop up with a window showing the cost, the time to build and the upkeep it costs to have it there. This picture shows what I've already started building. I'm building an additional 2 hangers on the top section (next to the first hanger up there), as well as a Large Radar (next to the small rader - small and large radars stack, with large radars having a a detection range of 450 nautical miles), a general stores below the lab, and a living quarters to the right of the workshop. Why am I doing all this and spending huge amounts of money?
Base defensibility. When aliens attack your base (which, to be fair, won't happen until later), they can access your base from 1 of 2 areas - the Access Lift or Hangers. If you look at the original base set-up, there are no defensible locations - aliens entering from any of the hangers or access lift can prowl throughout the base, and there's no real choke points of defensible locations, since your soldiers will be attacked from all sides. Once the 2 hangers up top are done (in 25 days), I'll delete the two at the bottom, and once the living quarters are finished, I'll delete the other one, making the access lift a great choke point to defend in case of a base attack.
There are several structures I haven't built yet that I fully intend to - Alien Containment is vital, as you can't research live aliens captured during missions without one built. But right now, it's not a huge problem. Missile defenses are for protecting your base from invasion, but they're generally a waste of time, unless you have a base with no soldiers to defend it. Base attacks, if you have a proper defensive structure, are actually good things - lots and lots of alien and equipment lot.
This is what comes up under the research tab. As you can see, there's not much to research now, but what there is is good. This game requires you to research to win - researching gets you new weapons, craft, as well as allows you to win the game. Researching early topics allows you to research more topics, as does capturing alien corpses and technology.
My focus is always on laser weapons first, despite what Alex will argue with me over. Laser weapons are pretty much inarguably the best weapons in the game - early research opportunity, unlimited ammunition, solid damage, accurate and sell very well (Laser Cannons can be manufactured and sold for lots of money on the black market). They even the score very much with the aliens and their plasma weaponry.
Medkits are nice for healing soldiers that are wounded or unconscious. Unfortunately, I don't find them that useful, especially early on. In my experience, soldiers are very likely to die without armour, and they're pretty expendable early when they're all rookies. Probably my last pick of the early research options.
Motion Scanners are good for night missions, as they show you movement of aliens. These are great for when you're in unknown territory, and especially great in cities, where there are lots of hiding places that are hard to search, and where you can't always sacrifice soldiers to look place by place.
Yep, starting lasers. Since I only have 10 scientists, I can't do this as fast as I'd like. As you can see, I have a total amount of lab space for 50 total scientists, so I'd like to get to that number as fast as possible.
And this is the Purchase/Hire tab. Any Terran personnel or equipment (basically anything that isn't researchable) can be acquired via spending a bit of money on things. As you can see, I'm buying lots of explosives (grenades, rockets) and electro-flares (for night missions). Also, though you can't see it, I hired a bunch of scientists (20 more), which run a crapload of money (over 1 million!), but allow me to research much faster. This takes care of pretty much all of my initial purchases to start the game. This should get us started pretty well.
Right below the hiring/purchasing tab is the sell/sack tab. Here, we can sell excess equipment and fire lazy personnel. I'm selling all my Auto-cannon and HE ammo, as well as the weapons themselves, to make some money. I'm not a huge fan of either, preferring rockets myself. While they have uses, I'm going to stick with rockets for this, unless I feel like playing around with them.
Those are all the tabs in the base overview. Now, back to the geoscape...
Clicking on the intercept tab at the top right corner of the screen opens up this window. It shows all current craft in posession, as well as their locations, if they have weapons, their crew, and HWPs (Heavy Weapons Platforms, i.e., tanks) if applicable. Since there aren't any UFOs to intercept right now, this tab is kind of useless, but it should prove useful once we actually detect some aliens flying around the skies.
This is part of the graphs tab, accessed from the geoscape. There are a lot of graphs to show here - graphs showing alien activity in countries, across continents, interception data, income from countries over time, and other pieces of information. Unfortunately, there's not much to go through now, so I'll not be going through every one of them now. Suffice to say, looking at the activity graphs is really useful for figuring out where alien bases might be located, while the income graphs can show how alien activity might be affecting national funding.
Right below the graph tab is the UFOpaedia tab. This is a giant encyclopedia about the game: alien information, weapon stats, etc. It gets updated as you research and learn more about the game. Right now, there's just about nothing in it. We'll make use of it later.
And finally, the funding tab. As you can see, there are a lot of countries providing funding to X-Com. The USA pays the most by far, followed by Japan, France and South Africa. To keep this funding up, you need to make sure you shoot down UFOs flying around countries, respond to alien terror missions, destroy alien bases located in countries, and overall just make the politicians happy by minimizing civilian casualties and maximizing alien killing. This is why it's suggested to make a base in Europe - the Europe base covers a lot of high-paying countries, while the USA base covers pretty much just the USA, in terms of high-paying countries.
So that's the overview of the game. With that done, I proceed to press the 1 hour button to speed up the game and wait for things to happen. Usually, a UFO will pop up within the first couple days. Meanwhile, you usually just need to wait to get everything on track (weapon purchases, research, etc.). Nothing's really happened so far, but a couple days in...
All those weapons and scientists I purchased/hired finally arrived. Immediately, I send the scientists to assist with laser research, and take stock of my equipment.
Laser research completes! Wonderful! From here, I focus on the laser pistol research. Laser pistols are great early weapons - less power than the rifles, but much lighter and can fire far more often. Also, unlimited ammo and faster research, so I could very well have them by the time a UFO comes around at this rate. They're great on scouts for reaction fire, and otherwise are just overall better than the basic projectile pistols and rifles.
Still no UFOs, but pretty quickly, the laser pistol research finishes. As you can see, most weapons have 3 firing rates, though I'll explain them later. The big on is the 25% next to Auto-Fire, meaning you can theoretically use auto-fire 4 times a turn. Great weapon.
And with pistols done, I go to work on researching laser rifles, probably the best weapon in the game, period. These are fabulous weapons for snipers and overall general use, with great accuracy and power. I should probably have them researched by next UFO encounter.
We skipped this tab in the base description earlier because there wasn't really anything to show with it. Now that I've researched something I can produce, it's time to show you what manufacturing does. Pretty self-explanatory, really - you can see what item is being produced, the engineers working on it (following similar restrictions as labs with scientists), the units already produced, units to be produced, price for each unit, and time it will take to complete them. So in a little less than 3 days, I'll have 2 laser pistols to dole out to my group. Awesome.
And I do get that time. It's the 8th of January, and nothing's happened yet. No UFOs detected, nothing else going on. The laser pistols do arrive, and as such, I go and set up the Skyranger with the new equipment.
Out go the old pistols, in come the laser pistols, more grenades, rockets and launcher, and remaining rifles and clips. Plenty of equipment to arm my squad. You can only put 80 items on a Skyranger (clips, rifles, grenades, stun rods...all inclusive), so while it doesn't look packed, it actually is: 61 items currently hold space in the Skyranger. Granted, a lot of it is extra ammo and the like, but when I start getting more soldiers, space will be very limited. This is why laser weapons are fantastic, as they basically cut equipment usage in half, not requiring any clips.
So outfitted ship, and nothing going on. Kind of boring until we get more stuff going on, so we're now just wait...
There we go! Whenever a UFO is detected, it will pop up in a window like this. As you can see, it's taken 8 days for something to pop up. The indication of UFO-1 indicates this is the first UFO to fly over Earth. This doesn't necessarily mean I've detected them - this could be UFO-4 and been the first one I've actually detected. Size of the UFO is fairly obvious - larger UFOs have more firepower, more crew, and more loot. The altitude illustrates whether the UFO is flying or not - in this case, it's landing on the ground, likely doing something (abduction, harvesting, etc.) nefarious. Heading illustrates which way the UFO is flying, which helps with interception (send the fighter in the way of the UFO so it can catch it - early craft are much slower than alien vessels, so predicting where they're flying is important for actually catching them and shooting them down). Speed, obviously is how fast the UFO is going. Slower flying UFOs do different procedures than faster ones - generally, a slower flying UFO will be nearing its location (terror mission, supply mission, etc.). Faster ships not only are generally larger, but indicate that the ship is going towards a location - this could be a base assault, a fly-by scouting mission or a vanguard for other vessels. This ship is grounded, and it's small, so it's probably a harvesting or research mission. More about those later.
And here, I sent out craft to recover the ship. The light blue square in Europe is the base, DLCom. The yellow dot right below it is the Skyranger, filled with soldiers. The green X is the UFO, landed. Real close to it is another yellow dot, one of the interceptors from DLCom. I have it hovering over the UFO, just in case it decides to fly off before the Skyranger gets there. This way, the interceptor will shoot it down, keeping it grounded so I can recover it.
It doesn't move. Our Skyranger arrives. It's time!
And thus ends part 1, the basic introduction to the game. Next post will be about the DL's first alien craft recovery!