XCOM Enemy Unknown

[Grundbegriff]

I'm finally playing this after a single unfinished attempt in spring of 2012.

I have lost 5 nations, but the remaining 11 have satellites and those are about to become stealthy.

I deferred the Alien Base mission until I had beefed up my crew and equipment, and then completed that mission successfully. The Psionics tech branch is now open, etc.

My question: I have two aircraft on each continent still in play, but I've only been asked to intercept twice in the entire game. I'm dozens of hours in, I suppose. Is the interception minigame supposed to be so rare, or is something broken? Whenever I advance time, I'm presented with an on-the-ground scenario, and so it has been since very early in the game.

[TheMix]

Hmmmm...

So, when you are on the overview screen, do you see all the enemy contacts - the red triangles? All you have to do is click on a contact, and it will pop up a list of planes that you can send in order to intercept. I'm not sure what you mean by "minigame". There is no automatic interception (that I can recall). It's a matter of having as much territory as possible blanketed by the radars, then clicking on the enemy contacts and assigning planes. If you mean the actual fight once the planes catch up with the blips, I usually just let it play out. I never bothered trying to figure out tactics. As long as I sent 2-3 planes, and I wasn't out-gunned, I never had any problems.

Oh, one thing I learned really late was that you can add radar stations to a base in order to increase the coverage. That's a lot cheaper than building additional radar bases.

[TheMix]

I re-read your post. Now I'm trying to remember how the radar/enemy contacts/notifications worked. Since I would address the contacts as they appeared, I rarely got forced to deal with a ground event. My memory is that those are mostly/all Terror missions. If you shoot down the enemy ships in the air, then you can click on the crash site contact to either send troops or nuke it from orbit (less $$, no salvage, but helps with not getting bogged down late game in those missions).

Are you somehow advancing time without seeing the enemy contacts that the radars pick up? I always did the time advancement from the screen that showed the map. Are you doing it somewhere else?

[NickAragua]

Probably you've just had a run of bad luck. For me, UFO interceptions and landings seem to spawn at roughly the same rate as other missions (abductions, terror sites, council missions, EXALT nastiness if you've got Enemy Within). As I recall, a landed UFO is just as good (and better in terms of stuff you can recover) as a shot down UFO, so as long as you're getting *some* kind of UFO activity, you should be good to go.

[coopasonic]

Hmmmm...

The things you are saying sound unfamiliar to me, but I have played too much XCOM 2 since playing EU and I never really played UFO Defense. Are you talking about UFO Defense (the original) or Enemy Unknown (the reboot)?

[NickAragua]

Grund is definitely playing the reboot, since he's talking about satellites and "the" alien base mission.

TheMix sounds like he's talking about the original. His advice is good for that particular game.

[TheMix]

I was talking about XCOM 1. Though I can never remember which name is the base game and which is with the DLC/expansion. I thought I was talking about XCOM + the DLC. As that is what I most recently played. Steam says I played XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

To my memory:
- I would go to the Command Center
- Click on the arrows to speed up time, and then ...
- When blips would appear, I'd pause...
- Click on the blips to assign planes to intercept them.

My point was, I don't recall ever being asked to intercept an alien ship (except maybe at the beginning when the game was "teaching" me how to respond). I had to actively intercept. Sometimes, if my planes were damaged, I'd have to let the UFOs do their own thing.

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure what the difference is between the satellites and the radars. Putting up the satellites is necessary for coverage, protection, and funding. But in order to actually see the enemy ships and intercept, don't you need the radars?

[coopasonic]

There is no radar facility in Enemy Unknown. You also don't send multiple interceptors at once or destroy the landing site remotely. That's where my confusion comes from.

[TheMix]

/sigh

Yeah, I'm apparently confusing my recent games. XCOM uses satellites. I was remembering Xenonauts (which I played more recently). I apologize for the confusion. You guys must have really been scratching your heads.

I apparently can't remember anything about XCOM.... So I guess I'm useless in this discussion.

[Lassr]

/sigh

Yeah, I'm apparently confusing my recent games. XCOM uses satellites. I was remembering Xenonauts (which I played more recently). I apologize for the confusion. You guys must have really been scratching your heads.

I apparently can't remember anything about XCOM.... So I guess I'm useless in this discussion.

TheMix is mixed up. Bada Bing!

[GreenGoo]

Grund, it's been awhile, but here's what I remember.

The new version is only partially random. The original was completely random, which could result in like 5+ missions per month, or none, depending on where the aliens were being generated each month and whether you could see them or not (i.e. out of radar range).

The new version is much more controlled. You can expect approximately 2 missions per month. You can get more, but that usually means a special event. The missions are randomized, so those 2 missions could be terror missions (edit: only 1 terror mission per month is possible, sorry for confusion), or a UFO landing, or a flying UFO that you shoot down and then get to assault, etc.

So when you say how many hours you've put in the game, that doesn't matter nearly as much as it did in the original. What matters in the new game is which month you're in. What aliens can spawn on each mission is determined by difficulty level, mission and month. This also applies to what tech they have. And the game doesn't give a crap how well you're doing. If you're in September (for example) and you've been completely wiped out and had bad luck with research, the game will happily throw Heavy Mutons with Heavy Plasma at your green, laser wielding crew. Because of this, it can become nearly impossible to recover from 1 or 2 catastrophic missions (unless you reload of course).

You probably already know, but covering a continent with satellites gives you a bonus, so if have a choice between losing 1 or another country, it's often a good idea to lose a country on a continent that already has lost another country. Losing 1 country from each continent is far worse than losing 5 countries from 2 continents. Still, the bonuses are "nice to haves" and not critical.

If you have the DLC, once you assault the enemy base (where you're supposed to try to capture the commander) the aliens will shortly afterward assault your base. This can be one of the toughest missions in the game, depending on how deep your crew is and what tech you're at. Be careful.

Now, to answer your actual question, which I alluded to earlier. The game is random, with a certain number (2 I believe) missions per month. They are almost certainly randomly picked from the various generic mission types. If you've only had 2 UFO interceptions in your game, I'd say you've just had bad luck (or good luck. Or neutral luck). Interceptions aren't special and are actually worse than assaulting a landed UFO because after shooting down a UFO they are damaged and have less stuff to salvage. That said, crashed UFO's have less bad guys to deal with (which also means less experience though).

In short, there is nothing wrong with your game. Random chance has resulted in you getting very few interceptions. It's a bit of an outlier but not crazy strange. Also, this has no material impact on how your game will play out.

Good luck!

[TheMix]

/sigh

Yeah, I'm apparently confusing my recent games. XCOM uses satellites. I was remembering Xenonauts (which I played more recently). I apologize for the confusion. You guys must have really been scratching your heads.

I apparently can't remember anything about XCOM.... So I guess I'm useless in this discussion.

TheMix is mixed up. Bada Bing!

[Grundbegriff]

Thanks for the feedback and ideas.

I'm in September of 2015, and I trigger new missions by scanning on the globe thing. I have experimented to see whether having the globe in satellite view rather than terrestrial view makes a difference, but that toggle seems wholly cosmetic. Perhaps it's not, but I haven't seen it make a difference that mattered.

I guess I'll refrain from developing my air fleet until the game starts throwing interceptions at me.

[GreenGoo]

As far as I know the different globe views are purely cosmetic.

Playing on Hard/Hardcore, I still never had to focus on my air force (i.e. intercept missions are few enough, not important enough, and easy enough that spending research and resources on my planes was not an early or mid game priority). You need to try to get a plane on each continent with a satellite asap, but sometimes other things take priority. Eventually I have 2 planes on each continent. Sometimes I get to the firewhatever UFO tech before I have 2 planes on each continent, but not usually, mostly because I research things that improve my squad before almost anything else, and the UFO does not help my squad finish missions.

I guess my advice is to not neglect your air force, but it's not a huge priority either. It's a balance (a lot of the game is weighing the pros/cons of what to do next) and you can be punished for ignoring your planes. As far as plane tech goes, you can get away with just the regular armament for a long time, especially if you have 2 planes on each continent. Eventually you'll want plasma of some sort, but you can often skip the first few techs or at least not waste resources building them.

[Grundbegriff]

I've lost 5 nations, but each of the remaining has a satellite, and each remaining continent has two interceptors: one with the stock cannon and one with the Phoenix. So that's eight boats, and only one of them has seen action.

[Paingod]

I've lost 5 nations, but each of the remaining has a satellite, and each remaining continent has two interceptors: one with the stock cannon and one with the Phoenix. So that's eight boats, and only one of them has seen action.

Having satellites up is a nice but dual-edged sword. On one hand, you don't get as many surprises and earn more resources. On the other, if you screw up you can't launch a satellite to try and repair the country's trust in you.

The Phoenix is a fair weapon against small ships just because of the fire rate. I usually skip past the laser and plasma air-to-air weapon and go for the EMP as soon as it's available. That might mean skipping really big ships for a couple months if they pop up. The EMP can shoot down almost anything with ease, and once you get the next plane tech, everything melts with relative ease - plus extra salvage.

I've tried the lasers, and while they're certainly better than the Phoenix, it's costly to re-outfit a bundle of ships. Plasma is just expensive, and I think you see it around the same time as EMP, so there's little point.

[GreenGoo]

The EMP is basically the uber end game weapon so yeah, EMP what everything gets when I can afford it.

With 2 lower end planes you can often still take on bigger ships but you need to tag team it.

Honestly I'm struggling to remember what I do between starting tech and end game tech. I *think* I use one of the other techs as a stepping stone, but I'm not sure, because I can't remember which of the techs that would be.

It's very possible I go from base starting weapons to plasma and/or EMP, where the transition is only a few planes with plasma and then I have EMP before everything has plasma so I just move on to EMP.

In about a bazillion games, I can only remember NOT shooting down a target that I tried to like 3-5 times, maybe, and that's without using any of the buffing items. So either I've been incredibly lucky or it's just not that important to upgrade from early through mid game.

[NickAragua]

I don't usually remember having too much trouble with my interceptors, although they're usually the last in line (while I'm working on a particular tech level) to get upgrades.

This is unlike the original XCom, where I pretty much just made a bee-line for plasma cannons because all the other aircraft weapons in that game are awful by comparison (either they have a much shorter range which exposes your interceptors to return fire or very limited ammo that you have to keep buying or manufacturing). Granted, plasma cannons evaporate the smallest UFOs but those are basically a waste of time anyway.

I actually occasionally try to leave a single continent uncovered by satellites, because that way I can keep getting abduction missions with their rewards, but no penalties for ignoring a continent. Granted, that means I miss out on funding and/or continent bonuses, but the abduction mission rewards usually pay for themselves. Europe is a good candidate to leave uncovered, since the continent bonus is awful and the funding isn't that super.

[GreenGoo]

If I recall correctly plasma cannons were the most profitable to manufacture in the original game as well (KChang?), so getting those early made everything easier.

I also leave 1 continent not completely covered by satellites.

[NickAragua]

Pretty sure it was laser cannons. Plasma cannons require a fairly ridiculous amount of elerium (15 or 30, I forget which) to make. But yeah, I read that strategy guide front to back enough times to memorize it back in the day.

It's a shame you can't pull off that sort of thing in the recent XCom games.

[GreenGoo]

Maybe plasma rifles. Those didn't require elerium to make, only the ammo, which you could scavenge tons of so no need to manufacture.

[NickAragua]

Heh, yeah, I'm pretty sure most of XCom's funds in my games came from selling unloaded alien plasma guns and mind probes on the black market, rather than legitimate funding sources.

[GreenGoo]

How's the game going, Grund?

[Grundbegriff]

How's the game going, Grund?

After I conquered the alien base, I was able to develop a new sensor technology (Hyperwave Comm) and a new type of fighter. But the builds are expensive, so I'm having to let a couple of detected ships fly away until I can mount a credible interception.

I went from too few aerial issues to uncomfortably many!

That said, I've set the game aside for a while in favor of some retro-gaming and a round of real-life Diplomacy.

[dbt1949]

How can you arrange your soldiers on the roster?
Not when you're going on a mission but when your soldiers are just sitting there on your duty roster?

[Fardaza]

How can you arrange your soldiers on the roster?
Not when you're going on a mission but when your soldiers are just sitting there on your duty roster?

Wow! 8 years later!

I don't think you can. It's in order of rank, then the number of missions that soldier has been on, most to least.

I'll double check when I fire it up later this morning.

[dbt1949]

I've been investigating like hell and I think you're right. I was having problems with a base defense mission and read where the first six soldiers on the list were the ones that went in.But after six tries they always were.

[TheMix]

I've been investigating like hell and I think you're right. I was having problems with a base defense mission and read where the first six soldiers on the list were the ones that went in.But after six tries they always were.

I forgot about those. I made the mistake once or twice of stripping all the gear off the soldiers in the base so I could use it in a mission. Bad idea when they got jumped and only had the initial gear.

[GreenGoo]

I forgot about those. I made the mistake once or twice of stripping all the gear off the soldiers in the base so I could use it in a mission. Bad idea when they got jumped and only had the initial gear.

Same. Keeping your base empty as conservation of cash and ease of organization is *bad juju* when the aliens come knocking.

[dbt1949]

Just read the Xcom Wiki. Filrst six soldiers. I had two heavies with blasters launchers next on the list. <hvy sigh>
You can put soldiers in psi training and it'll get the next ones on the list. Gonna have to remember all this for next time.
Also wait for base assault until I have everyone equipped with plasma weapons and Titanium (or you favorite) armor.

[TheMix]

That does seem like a crappy mechanic. Though I don't recall having to jump through too many hoops. Maybe I just got lucky. It's been a long time since I last played. And it would have been the Long War mod last time anyway. It's possible that let me actually pick my folks for defense missions.

[dbt1949]

I tried the Long War. Too much going on for my taste.

[TheMix]

I'm working through Long War of the Chosen for XCOM2 right now. I tried once before but got stuck on a mission that would crash every time. So far so good. Though it does take a really long time. To be fair though, I also doubled the timers. So it's a much slower game. And I dialed back the difficulty - because I want to feel like a badass.

It's crazy having 10 classes though. But, ninjas!

I do miss the armor that let my snipers fly up and hover.

[dbt1949]

Archangel armor?

[TheMix]

Maybe. I don't recall the specifics. I just know it would allow me to have my snipers "climb" to the "top" of the map and hover. Then they would get all the height bonuses as well as being able to snipe safely via squad sight. Though some maps would through stuff in to break line-of-sight. Boo!

[Kurth]

Man, I loved that game. The original "XCOM: UFO Defense" was the first game I played on my Playstation 1, and I was hooked on the franchise ever since. Enemy Unknown was a real return to form, too. Definitely my favorite TBS of all time.

[GreenGoo]

I get confused between this modern version and the older version, since the older version was UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe, and the modern version is XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I forget which is which most of the time. Especially because I'm careless and just call everything Xcom.

[Fardaza]

Just read the Xcom Wiki. Filrst six soldiers. I had two heavies with blasters launchers next on the list. <hvy sigh>
You can put soldiers in psi training and it'll get the next ones on the list. Gonna have to remember all this for next time.
Also wait for base assault until I have everyone equipped with plasma weapons and Titanium (or you favorite) armor.

I had to attack the alien base yesterday because I was going to lose a couple countries if I didn't. (The gang doesn't have plasma or titanium armor.) After that my game threw 4 or 5 missions at me while I was gearing up for the retaliation. I had to strip the gear from the best six soldiers and give it to the next soldiers. I then had to re-equip the best 6 again. Then another mission would pop up. Rinse and repeat. After giving my best six the gear 4 or 5 times, I finally got the base defense to pop. I'm right in the middle of it now!

Then the game crashed right after I killed a cyberdisc and a sectoid. After restarting from the beginning of the turn, both survived the attacks to continue to try and beat up on our base. I had to stop there for a doctor's appointment. Drat.

[dbt1949]

I've been watching youtube videos of base defense missions. They making it look so easy. As I said before, if I can help it, I'm not attacking the alien base without better technology. It's not attacking the alien base per se but that damn base defense afterwards!

[Fardaza]

I've been watching youtube videos of base defense missions. They making it look so easy. As I said before, if I can help it, I'm not attacking the alien base without better technology. It's not attacking the alien base per se but that damn base defense afterwards!

Yep the alien base attack is relatively simple. Even stunning the boss isn't too hard after you've done it a few times. The base defense mission is another story though.

Here's how I do the base defense mission:

Get everyone upstairs on the opposite end of the area where the "flyers" appear. Keep the expendable base soldiers on the sides. Shoot the aliens as they appear. (It's difficult, but try not to allow the cyberdiscs to explode and blow up the cover on that end. You'll want it later for your crew to hide behind.) Once all the "flyer" enemies are dead, start moving your soldiers to that end where they appeared.

You always want to be on the far end of wherever the aliens are coming from. Put your sniper in the middle and a heavy as well. Everyone else can line up in other covered spots along the upstairs railing on the end. Keep 2 of the expendable base soldiers downstairs as spotters and grenade throwers. The rest can stay on the sides upstairs. Let the enemy come to you. They usually come in 1 at a time allowing you to shoot from overwatch and then kill any that survive on your turn. Rotate turns of reloading, so you always have 3 or 4 ready to shoot from overwatch. Rinse and repeat until they all come to you. Usually one or two enemies will remain in the far bay area. You'll eventually have to go find them. Don't expose them or yourself until all of your team is in a position to attack on the same turn. Move in for the final kill!

I keep track of the enemies as they appear on a notepad. For example, I write "Sectoid" with a / mark next to it. I write the name and make a new / for each enemy that appears. I then make a \ mark (to make an X) as I kill each one. That way you know what's still out there.

It's a tense battle, but not too difficult. It's definitely easier with better quality weapons.