5:
Interlude
Even leadership knows we're due for another Terror Mission any time now.
Go time.
The aliens stage another ambush on us.
@Duncan Hills Coffee barely has time to get off a shot before he eats plasma and is instantly killed.
Wasting a rocket on a lone Floater is overkill for sure, but Duncan was a valuable soldier and I'm pissed off.
Two Reapers loitering around next to each other provides a perfect opening for some grenades. Not shown is me losing two grenades because for some reason this version of OXCE hasn't fixed the glitch where grenades destroy each other.
Items dropped on the ground have a threshold for damage they can take before they are destroyed. Because a thrown, activated hand grenade is recognized as just another item on the ground, a grenade blowing up next to another one will cause the second to vanish. This combined with a few other irritating quirks has made me interested in possibly switching my OXCE over to the ones Xpiratez uses so I can gain some of the functionality that mod provides. Some other issues I've been having is keeping night vision turned on and such.
The standoff with the Reapers earlier has proven to me that my soldiers have now developed decent throwing strength, so the game quickly turns into a grenade juggling match. Soldiers in XCOM almost always have reasonable throwing accuracy despite the fact that this is highly unrealistic. The grenades kill far more reliably and are less likely to trigger reaction fire so clearing the map this way is just the best option. Our grenades are currently quite wimpy too, so even the civilians you see milling around the battlefield are in minimal danger.
None of my screenshots capture the famous Grenade Relay though since I have switched Instant Grenades on. A grenade relay is where you overcome distance limitations by having a soldier prime a grenade, throw it to a buddy who is closer to the enemy and then have them pick it up and actually throw it at the enemy. I think even with the kind of computerized grenade timers we see in XCOM that's not really how that sort of thing would go down in real life.
The one time I decide to deviate from this strategy gets
@wtfNeedSignUp killed. I make a mental note to check on alien reactions later because I don't remember the late game aliens being so swift.
This lone Reaper stranded in an alleyway with no cover gives me a very foolish idea. I lied earlier when I said there were no melee weapons in the original UFO Defense, because stun rods are so useless that I regularly forget they exist.
I bring Judge Dredd down and have him ready his stun rod as well. Placing any object in a soldier's off hand does not prevent them from firing their weapon, surprisingly, but it does drastically lower their accuracy. Unless the offhand weapon is a pistol, of course. Both of them save for reaction fire. This is extremely dangerous; a Reaper can easily kill either of them in one hit and melee units always have plenty of spare time units. Some can attack 8-10 times in one turn. Making this whole scheme even more ill-advised is that there is still at least one Floater on the map, possibly more. If it appears right now neither Dredd or Gynn have the accuracy to deal with it.
Not shown is almost two turns of me waiting for the Reaper to get closer, it drawing reaction fire, backing off narrowly averting a melee attack, then it inching its way up again. Finally I feel confident to have Gynn go for it. Success. And what bonus does researching a live Reaper impart on us? None. Though live aliens will increase our score at the end of the mission, and quite a few civilians have died so we'll need all the help we can get.
The last alien turned out to be hiding where two of them already were.
Our score was something like 160. Not great, but positive enough. Super Sad Smile, Ponchik and HumanHive all got kills, but I glossed over this and will continue to do so in the future unless they are particularly spectacular. HumanHive almost brought back a live Floater, but it died in the time I spent dallying around with the Reaper. One imagines there might be an arguement about that back on base, but Gynn could easily pull rank.
While the team is en route to to the next destination the Medikits complete manufacturing. Laser rifles are ordered immediately.
The month also ends. The Council is greatly satisfied with our performance. No doubt they have been reading the enthusiastic reports the directors have written. Ignored is the fact that nearly every mission has suffered at least one fatality in a team of only 14, a casualty rate that many special forces divisions around the world would find horrendous.
Little of note happens on this routine UFO mission, except that the layout of the fences and buildings is highly inconvienent and chokes the four soldiers approaching the UFO into an almost single file line at one point.
All maps of UFO Defense are randomly generated from a set of predetermined chunks. This was revolutionary technology when the game was released in 1994, and to this day even a player used to modern randomly generated games would be surprised at the variety of landscapes, building interiors and even UFO interiors. We haven't seen any randomized UFO interiors yet because we haven't assaulted anything larger than a scout though. It probably doesn't come across so well in the screenshots, so I encourage you to see for yourself.
Another footnote, a group of nerds working for a small startup studio called Condor were particularly fascinated by this game's randomly generated terrain, and resolved to come up with a comparable (and eventually superior) system for their upcoming fantasy project. This little game turned out to be something called Diablo, and Condor was purchased by Blizzard Entertainment halfway through Diablo's development, rebranding the studio as Blizzard North. XCOM: UFO Defense/Enemy Unkown is mentioned by name as an explicit inspiration for Diablo's randomly generated dungeons. Diablo came out in 1996, only two years after UFO Defense.
@Judge Dredd is leading the squad to the UFO when an alien ambushes him from the barn. Its a bitter loss. The team avenges him and soldiers on to take the UFO.
Dear Leader chews out command for not equipping his squad with the available Medikits before the mission, but his complaints are not taken seriously. Dredd was killed instantly, after all.
The money is put to good use greatly expanding the science and engineering staff. The engineers in particular have been maxed out for the available workshop space, which command considers expanding.
A medium UFO is detected. Command chooses not to intercept with the Skyranger, even though we know this will damage Russia's opinion of us. We are only days away from a full arsenal of laser weapons, and its estimated by command that the aliens will surely outnumber us during such an encounter.
The hand grenade the alien empire uses is more powerful than any conventional explosive device XCOM can acquire, even stronger and more destructive than the heavy demolition charges we have neglected to purchase. We still don't have an advanced enough understanding of the mysterious Element 115 power source to manufacture these devices, but the dozen or so we've acquired on missions can now be equipped and used by our soldiers.
I momentarily question how much I really used to drink before I sobered up when I see this research list. I'm positive both times I've played through the vanilla game that Heavy Plasma and the Plasma Rifle were locked research until you started with the pistol and its magazine, the same as laser weapons. I don't feel like spinning up the old DOS copy to check so I elect to just start researching the Plasma Pistol. We're already doing much better than either of my last two games so the advantage of getting Heavy Plasma this early would totally break the game.
Command isn't about to just let that UFO get away scott free though. We have nuclear missiles, no alien is going to just walk all over us like that. The Jace interceptor is sent to confront the alien. The nuclear advantage is quickly lost when the alien avoids most of the missiles at range and then slips away from the Interceptor.
The Jace interceptor catches up though and engages again, this time with only the warplane's 50mm cannon. Its not clear whether or not the heavy shells are even effective against the superior alien hull. The Jace interceptor takes enemy fire and is nearly shot down. When the alien slips away again, the interceptor is called back to base; the fight isn't worth it. But you can't keep The Commander down, the pilot vows the next one won't get away.
Finally.
