Let's Sperg Let's Play XCOM UFO Defense (Completed) - Heavy casualties expected.

[Lemmingwise]

Uh....
View attachment 1992672
...perhaps I was too stingy with it after all.

I guess it helps that you aren't shooting down ufo's when you can help it. That gives a lot of Elerium.

 

[L50LasPak]

Actually in that game I was shooting them down in almost every encounter. That elerium is mostly from base assaults.

 

[Considered HARMful]

Flawed though it is Apocalypse has a dedicated group of die-hard fans. Including me, even though I've probably played 10 minutes of it in my entire lifetime. The game is an agonizingly slow, schizophrenic wreck but its art and setting are so alluring I still count it as one of my personal favorite videogame settings.

Could you (and anyone else with experience) elaborate on the Apocalypse, what's good and bad in it etc?

 

[Tactical Wizard]

View attachment 1986086View attachment 1986087
XCOM: UFO Defense is a 1994 isometric turn-based strategy game where you play an underfunded organization that has the goal of stopping the alien infiltration of Earth. You start out with mostly conventional weapons against an alien army with superior technology. Your soldiers are almost worthless nobodies expected to die en masse on the first few missions. However, soldiers improve with experience, and research will eventually help you close the technology gap enough to assault the alien base on Mars and win the game.

View attachment 1986112 View attachment 1986116View attachment 1986117

I will be using the OpenXCom port with UFOExtender (OpenXCom EX) as the game runs much smoother on modern operating systems and has a number of quality of life improvements such as accuracy percentages and time unit counts. I’ll only be playing on difficulty 2 however. I’m not actually that good at this game and it’s been awhile.

Why is it autistic?
A: Just look at it man.

Where do we come in?
A: The life of the average XCOM soldier is short. Anyone who wants to be an XCOM trooper, just say so in the thread and I’ll add people to the list of names in the order I see them. The gender, nationality and starting stats of the soldier you get named after you will be completely random. Glory awaits those who survive 2-3 missions.

People will only get an @ when their name is applied to a soldier, and when/if said soldier dies, to prevent this thread from spamming people’s notifications.

How many names do you think you will need?
A: My last vanilla game had 250+ casualties.

What’s the victory condition?
A: Do not have negative funding for 2 months in a row. Do not allow more than 10 or so nations to fall to the alien menace. Research the most advanced craft and assault the alien base on Cydonia, Mars.

What happens if we lose?
A:

Will you be save scumming?
A: At my leisure, but only if something extremely bad happens.

Will you play Terror From the Deep after this?
A: I doubt it.

How often will you update?
A: Depending on the level of interest perhaps once a week, or at least once every two weeks.

Isn't there another thread on this already?
A: Its three years old and the person who made it was banned so I figure this is fair game again.

Where can I get it?
OpenXCOM: https://openxcom.org/git-builds/
OpenXCOM EX: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,6586.0.html
You will need a copy of the original UFO Defense though. Go torrent it yourself, the game is only as old as I am.

Accepting volunteers immediately. I'll need about 10 names to get started.

Sign me up but I have just one question.

Is this gonna be a stand up fight or just another bug hunt?

 

[L50LasPak]

Could you (and anyone else with experience) elaborate on the Apocalypse, what's good and bad in it etc?

You've opened up a can of worms with this one.

XCOM Apocalypse is the third game in the series depending on how you want to count Terror From the Deep which was mostly just a retread. It was supposed to update XCOM for the next generation by incorporating better sprite work. It also had drastically larger maps, and a more complicated alien menace to fight.

The larger maps introduced a problem though. XCOM is already a game that takes a long time to play, so maps that were between 4-10 times the size of the original means you could spend hours alone on a single regular mission. So the parent company insisted the devs switch to a real-time system, because Warcraft 2 was cleaning house only the year after UFO Defense was released. Fans of the original hated this change though, so the devs compromised by creating some kind of mutant hybrid system where you can toggle between real time and turn based during the same mission. If that sounds sloppy and difficult to understand to you that's only becuase it is sloppy and difficult to understand.

To add insult to injury, the game was rushed, so a large amount of content was axed from the game including an expanded endgame and most of the ambitious system XCOM would use to interact with the other factions in the game.

You see rather than the entire planet, XCOM Apocalypse concerns a futuristic mega-city called Mega Primus. And rather than funding nations, there are multiple corporations throughout the city that all have AI, security forces, assets such as structures and vehicles, and a complicated matrix of relationships with the five main factions. Government, MegaPol (the police), XCOM itself (now funded by the Government), the Cult of Sirius (an organization that despises XCOM and worships the aliens) and the unknown Alien menace, unrelated to the enemies of the previous two games and hailing from some other dimension.

Most of the rival corporation AI and behavior is gutted. Several of the companies are functionally non-existent, only there to fill space and own the utility buildings. Various espionage missions and stuff involving the kidnapping or tracking of important VIPs was cut, essentially all the life was sucked out of what was meant to be almost a third of the game. The three gangs that deal in psionic techno drugs do engage in gang wars and conflicts with the police though. There are both android and mutant rights organizations in the city vying for recognition, and there was supposed to be two competing and equally corrupt political parties that would fight for control of the Government in elections but in practice one party, the Extropians, always wins.

The aesthetics are a strange mix of late 1990s early 3D artwork and 1950s aesthetics. Which to the modern viewer is quite literally one very dead art style imitating another much longer dead style. It goes without saying that I adore this and just about everything else about the game. The setting seethes with the kind of high tech dystopias I enjoy, and the civil rights struggles the robots and mutants face are much better realized than current day "people are opporessed because RAY-CISS" non-troversy shit like what Chimera Squad was eventually guilty of.

To give a basic idea of the kind of complexity I'm talking about, if you play your cards right you can actually ally with the seemingly evil Cult of Sirius when you raid the alien food production facility and find out they're harvesting Sectoids for food. If you rescue the Sectoids instead of just blowing them up along with the aliens, you get a huge boost to your relations with the Cult and they may call off their war with you, because the aliens they worship are the aliens of the previous game and not this new threat. The game does not tell you this outright, only saying that a different faction, the Mutant Alliance, would appreciate it if you didn't harm the Sectoid.

The whole game was at one point meant to be filled with little moments like that where the player could affect the city through certain actions. The city itself is highly detailed and things like traffic are simulated. When you hire a scientist, you can fucking watch them leave their apartment complex (by taxi, there are no pedestrians) and travel all the way to where your facility is based!

Its a damn shame we got what we did, but also something of that scope and scale just might not have been possible back then. It might not be possible now either, OpenApoc has languished in obscurity for the better part of a decade now and with it any chance that we'll get a game that lives up to what the original Apocalypse was supposed to be.

As long as this speal is, I actually haven't even come close to fully explaining the nuance of the game either.

In the mean time, if you want to read up on the lore and technology in the setting yourself, the UFOPedia is hosted here:

http://ufopedia.csignal.org/apocapedia/

 

[Super Sad Smile]

If anyone hasn't heard about it there's a game called Xenonauts, which is basically a modernized version of this. There's also a sequel to it which coming out sometime soon, but I have no clue how soon.

They're planning on releasing a public beta version on steam if you're interested in X2 and are willing to be free labor. I think full release won't be for at least a year though.

 

[Radical Cadre]

I died and none of you fucking faggots did shit. As usual I had to do it all myself. Got back up, kept walking, bled out, kept walking and died.

When I return I am selling you all out to the aliens and melting XCOM HQ with a laser beam. I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!!! Except you @Judge Dredd. You're cool.

Good game so far!

 

[Kane Lives]

You've opened up a can of worms with this one.

XCOM Apocalypse is the third game in the series depending on how you want to count Terror From the Deep which was mostly just a retread. It was supposed to update XCOM for the next generation by incorporating better sprite work. It also had drastically larger maps, and a more complicated alien menace to fight.

The larger maps introduced a problem though. XCOM is already a game that takes a long time to play, so maps that were between 4-10 times the size of the original means you could spend hours alone on a single regular mission. So the parent company insisted the devs switch to a real-time system, because Warcraft 2 was cleaning house only the year after UFO Defense was released. Fans of the original hated this change though, so the devs compromised by creating some kind of mutant hybrid system where you can toggle between real time and turn based during the same mission. If that sounds sloppy and difficult to understand to you that's only becuase it is sloppy and difficult to understand.

To add insult to injury, the game was rushed, so a large amount of content was axed from the game including an expanded endgame and most of the ambitious system XCOM would use to interact with the other factions in the game.

You see rather than the entire planet, XCOM Apocalypse concerns a futuristic mega-city called Mega Primus. And rather than funding nations, there are multiple corporations throughout the city that all have AI, security forces, assets such as structures and vehicles, and a complicated matrix of relationships with the five main factions. Government, MegaPol (the police), XCOM itself (now funded by the Government), the Cult of Sirius (an organization that despises XCOM and worships the aliens) and the unknown Alien menace, unrelated to the enemies of the previous two games and hailing from some other dimension.

Most of the rival corporation AI and behavior is gutted. Several of the companies are functionally non-existent, only there to fill space and own the utility buildings. Various espionage missions and stuff involving the kidnapping or tracking of important VIPs was cut, essentially all the life was sucked out of what was meant to be almost a third of the game. The three gangs that deal in psionic techno drugs do engage in gang wars and conflicts with the police though. There are both android and mutant rights organizations in the city vying for recognition, and there was supposed to be two competing and equally corrupt political parties that would fight for control of the Government in elections but in practice one party, the Extropians, always wins.

The aesthetics are a strange mix of late 1990s early 3D artwork and 1950s aesthetics. Which to the modern viewer is quite literally one very dead art style imitating another much longer dead style. It goes without saying that I adore this and just about everything else about the game. The setting seethes with the kind of high tech dystopias I enjoy, and the civil rights struggles the robots and mutants face are much better realized than current day "people are opporessed because RAY-CISS" non-troversy shit like what Chimera Squad was eventually guilty of.

To give a basic idea of the kind of complexity I'm talking about, if you play your cards right you can actually ally with the seemingly evil Cult of Sirius when you raid the alien food production facility and find out they're harvesting Sectoids for food. If you rescue the Sectoids instead of just blowing them up along with the aliens, you get a huge boost to your relations with the Cult and they may call off their war with you, because the aliens they worship are the aliens of the previous game and not this new threat. The game does not tell you this outright, only saying that a different faction, the Mutant Alliance, would appreciate it if you didn't harm the Sectoid.

The whole game was at one point meant to be filled with little moments like that where the player could affect the city through certain actions. The city itself is highly detailed and things like traffic are simulated. When you hire a scientist, you can fucking watch them leave their apartment complex (by taxi, there are no pedestrians) and travel all the way to where your facility is based!

Its a damn shame we got what we did, but also something of that scope and scale just might not have been possible back then. It might not be possible now either, OpenApoc has languished in obscurity for the better part of a decade now and with it any chance that we'll get a game that lives up to what the original Apocalypse was supposed to be.

As long as this speal is, I actually haven't even come close to fully explaining the nuance of the game either.

In the mean time, if you want to read up on the lore and technology in the setting yourself, the UFOPedia is hosted here:

http://ufopedia.csignal.org/apocapedia/

Man, Apoc is my absolute favourite of the three, even in its flawed form, and it's a real shame that it turned out the way it did.

Cut features and gutted AI aside, I can honestly tell anyone here that the atmosphere of the game is incredible, from the artwork, to the sprites they used and even the music. It definitely evokes the popular 90s dystopia ala Judge Dredd or Cyberpunk 2020. Combat, while clunky, isn't bad at all. Real-time mode gets a lot of shit from turn-based purists, but it's also one of the strongest feature imo. Everything, and I mean, everything is supremely overpowered in that mode. You're not helpless against aliens; you ARE the reaper god of death there.

Have you ever wondered how it was like to dual-wield machineguns? Well, in Apoc you can. Duelwield that Marsec machinegun and gun down ayys like Rambo.
Have you ever wondered if you could blow up an entire building in X-Com? You can, in Apoc!
Have you ever wanted to level a city? You technically can in Apoc too! MegaPrimus doesn't have shit against you in the late game.

Also, if I'm not already on your list of volunteers, I'd like to be drafted too!

 

[The Valeyard]

I may be out of regenerations, but sign me up for the XCOM project.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Alright, guys. Since we were (somehow) missing one, I made a general X-Com/XCOM discussion thread so this one can focus more on the LP itself.

Still waiting eagerly for my death the moment I step off the Skyranger ramp!

 

[Megatardingo]

Hey guys is there room for one more retard in the S.S. dissapointment? I'd love to be shot for the xcom project.

 

[Spunt]

You've opened up a can of worms with this one.

XCOM Apocalypse is the third game in the series depending on how you want to count Terror From the Deep which was mostly just a retread. It was supposed to update XCOM for the next generation by incorporating better sprite work. It also had drastically larger maps, and a more complicated alien menace to fight.

The larger maps introduced a problem though. XCOM is already a game that takes a long time to play, so maps that were between 4-10 times the size of the original means you could spend hours alone on a single regular mission. So the parent company insisted the devs switch to a real-time system, because Warcraft 2 was cleaning house only the year after UFO Defense was released. Fans of the original hated this change though, so the devs compromised by creating some kind of mutant hybrid system where you can toggle between real time and turn based during the same mission. If that sounds sloppy and difficult to understand to you that's only becuase it is sloppy and difficult to understand.

To add insult to injury, the game was rushed, so a large amount of content was axed from the game including an expanded endgame and most of the ambitious system XCOM would use to interact with the other factions in the game.

You see rather than the entire planet, XCOM Apocalypse concerns a futuristic mega-city called Mega Primus. And rather than funding nations, there are multiple corporations throughout the city that all have AI, security forces, assets such as structures and vehicles, and a complicated matrix of relationships with the five main factions. Government, MegaPol (the police), XCOM itself (now funded by the Government), the Cult of Sirius (an organization that despises XCOM and worships the aliens) and the unknown Alien menace, unrelated to the enemies of the previous two games and hailing from some other dimension.

Most of the rival corporation AI and behavior is gutted. Several of the companies are functionally non-existent, only there to fill space and own the utility buildings. Various espionage missions and stuff involving the kidnapping or tracking of important VIPs was cut, essentially all the life was sucked out of what was meant to be almost a third of the game. The three gangs that deal in psionic techno drugs do engage in gang wars and conflicts with the police though. There are both android and mutant rights organizations in the city vying for recognition, and there was supposed to be two competing and equally corrupt political parties that would fight for control of the Government in elections but in practice one party, the Extropians, always wins.

The aesthetics are a strange mix of late 1990s early 3D artwork and 1950s aesthetics. Which to the modern viewer is quite literally one very dead art style imitating another much longer dead style. It goes without saying that I adore this and just about everything else about the game. The setting seethes with the kind of high tech dystopias I enjoy, and the civil rights struggles the robots and mutants face are much better realized than current day "people are opporessed because RAY-CISS" non-troversy shit like what Chimera Squad was eventually guilty of.

To give a basic idea of the kind of complexity I'm talking about, if you play your cards right you can actually ally with the seemingly evil Cult of Sirius when you raid the alien food production facility and find out they're harvesting Sectoids for food. If you rescue the Sectoids instead of just blowing them up along with the aliens, you get a huge boost to your relations with the Cult and they may call off their war with you, because the aliens they worship are the aliens of the previous game and not this new threat. The game does not tell you this outright, only saying that a different faction, the Mutant Alliance, would appreciate it if you didn't harm the Sectoid.

The whole game was at one point meant to be filled with little moments like that where the player could affect the city through certain actions. The city itself is highly detailed and things like traffic are simulated. When you hire a scientist, you can fucking watch them leave their apartment complex (by taxi, there are no pedestrians) and travel all the way to where your facility is based!

Its a damn shame we got what we did, but also something of that scope and scale just might not have been possible back then. It might not be possible now either, OpenApoc has languished in obscurity for the better part of a decade now and with it any chance that we'll get a game that lives up to what the original Apocalypse was supposed to be.

As long as this speal is, I actually haven't even come close to fully explaining the nuance of the game either.

In the mean time, if you want to read up on the lore and technology in the setting yourself, the UFOPedia is hosted here:

http://ufopedia.csignal.org/apocapedia/

Man, Apoc is my absolute favourite of the three, even in its flawed form, and it's a real shame that it turned out the way it did.

Cut features and gutted AI aside, I can honestly tell anyone here that the atmosphere of the game is incredible, from the artwork, to the sprites they used and even the music. It definitely evokes the popular 90s dystopia ala Judge Dredd or Cyberpunk 2020. Combat, while clunky, isn't bad at all. Real-time mode gets a lot of shit from turn-based purists, but it's also one of the strongest feature imo. Everything, and I mean, everything is supremely overpowered in that mode. You're not helpless against aliens; you ARE the reaper god of death there.

Have you ever wondered how it was like to dual-wield machineguns? Well, in Apoc you can. Duelwield that Marsec machinegun and gun down ayys like Rambo.
Have you ever wondered if you could blow up an entire building in X-Com? You can, in Apoc!
Have you ever wanted to level a city? You technically can in Apoc too! MegaPrimus doesn't have shit against you in the late game.

Also, if I'm not already on your list of volunteers, I'd like to be drafted too!

These two posts mostly cover it, but I fucking LOVE X-Com Apocalypse. I personally think that the real-time-with-pause missions work well. They speed up large maps and avoid ludicrous situations like your guys standing around and watching as their comrades get their brains sucked out because they've got no AP left. (The game is also significantly easier in RTWP than in Turn-Based, as enemies like BrainSuckers and Poppers are much less dangerous and you can set up proper 3-rank firing lines to mow down waves of aliens). I love the art style, I love the depth of the mechanics and systems, and I love the HUGE amount of customisation you can do to your base, your vehicles, your squad, and more. If you like games with loads of toys to play with and a million different ways to approach any situation, you'll love Apoc.

Downsides are that the game was rushed and the endgame is much too short (and probably too easy) as a result. Also Apoc was one of that last generation of DOS games and used some weird memory tricks (DOS4GW Protected Mode) to run such a complex game on such a basic OS, making it an absolute pain in the ass to run on modern systems because most DOS emulators choke on it because they don't emulate Protected Mode as well as the game needs them to. The Open-Source port seems dead in the water, so I don't know if we'll ever get the widescreen support and expanded endgame that it's been crying out for for years.

Oh and sign me up to die unmourned in a flash of plasma, thx.

 

[Allakazam223]

Sign me up. Respecfully asking for permission to carry the biggest gun possible. Failing that, is it a bad idea to load a soldier with a ton of Medikits? I don't mind being support.

 

[Pinainas]

Have you ever wondered if you could blow up an entire building in X-Com? You can, in Apoc!

of course this shows the slums getting leveled
I am not even mad

 

[Polyboros2]

So far the number of volunteers makes resurrecting people unneccesary. I'm almost up to 10 more volunteers again, which will bring us up to a total of 50 or so people. Then again we already have a fifth of that number dead and we haven't even encountered the real alien resistance yet, so I'll think about how I want to put that together when the time comes.


Xenonauts is a strange animal. I get what it was trying to go for, but I ultimately feel like it was a largely uneccesary remake. Discussion for the game imploded around the time OpenXcom hit the scene and its not hard to see why since OpenXcom allows you to do just about everything Xenonauts did without having to switch to a newer game.


That's essentially the best option you have in the original DOS version. OXCE is improved by giving you better readouts so its possible to inject a lot more nuance into your early game than it originally was. Hell, just the load times between turns often made me forget what the fuck I was doing half the time in the DOS version versus the plain old OpenXcom port.


Flawed though it is Apocalypse has a dedicated group of die-hard fans. Including me, even though I've probably played 10 minutes of it in my entire lifetime. The game is an agonizingly slow, schizophrenic wreck but its art and setting are so alluring I still count it as one of my personal favorite videogame settings.

Interceptor is the other tie-in game you might have been thinknig of, which is at best a mediocre Wing Commander clone. Enforcer is undoubtedly the worst though, just look up any gameplay video and you'll see how much of a sloppy mess it is. GuavaMoment, the Something Awful guy who played probably the archetypical XCOM forum LP claimed he was going to get to it some day, but the LPArchive never catalogued it and I'm not paying $10 to comb through SA's archives to look for it.

I only played Enforcer for like 45 minutes from that bundle I got, and yet, years later, the way that pencil dick scientist that won't ever shut the fuck up says "Enforcer" every 15 seconds is still burned into my brain.

 

[A Proud Black Woman]

Sign me up as a diversity hire!

 

[L50LasPak]

6. Laser Squad

Matt Furniss - Laser Squad Title Theme (Amiga Version)

The first batch of laser rifles is ready to be equipped. It appears that our engineers didn’t realize the red paintjob was a stylistic choice and not a design requirement, because all of the laser rifles they have manufactured share it now. Our soldiers have no complaints though, except perhaps the colorblind ones. (Pictured here is Kane Lives by the way, I added you a little while ago.)

The laser rifle is the only laser weapon in the game to have that red MarSec color scheme. The XCOM community being what it is, somebody eventually did create a graphics pack that changes the Laser Pistol and Heavy Laser to resemble the Laser Rifle more, drawing inspiration from the original depictions of the weapons in Laser Squad. Conversely, somebody else created an absolutely heretical mod that changes the laser rifle to be a dull beige/metallic color scheme so it resembles the other laser weapons more.

Screenshots of the modified Laser Pistol and Heavy Laser are above as well as the nasty modified Laser Rifle. These are actually shots taken from XPiratez as I can’t locate the texture packs easily and I’m not going to hunt them down for this random piece of trivia.

I shot this UFO down earlier instead of tailing it because a few of them got away and I didn't want it to hurt my score too much.

Little of importance happens on this mission aside from some irritating deaths. The laser rifles are supposed ot have superior accuracy to the regular assault rifles, but in practice this means that our troops have gone from being occasionally accurate to slightly less occasionally accurate. Forgetful Gynn shoots @Ponchik in the back attempting to hit an alien with reaction fire. He's not only killed instantly, you'll notice his autocannon is lying on the ground with no corpse in sight. This means the laser did enough damage to vaporize his dead body completely. @FAT_KHAZAR_MILKERS takes a hit during the alien turn and is knocked out. I don't have time to do anything about it since he expires immediately when my turn begins.

Randall Fragg gets a chance to try out his grenades. He thankfully does not suffer from girly throw, but his accuracy leaves something to be desired.

HumanHive takes a hit but is left reasonably intact. Here's the Medikit screen. NerdShamer patches him up while Randall, Gynn and HumanHive storm the UFO and end the mission shortly after.

Certainly not our best outing. I suppose it was suited for the purpose of shaking down the new equipment though.

Repairs are far enough along on the Jace interceptor that I'm notified that we don't have enough 50mm cannon rounds to reload the plane with. Money is getting a bit tight and the cannon barely seems to tickle any of the UFOs so I don't bother purchasing any more to replace it.

Since Ponchik is dead I elect to hand the autocannon off to Lemmingwise, who has an abundance of extra capacity to carry it and two spare ammo belts. New soldiers arrive not long after.

@Dark Edea, @JongleJingle, @Mary the Goldsmith, @Forever Sunrise, @mr.moon1488, @Penne Dreadful, @ditdatdot, @A-Z0-9, @GrammaNazi, @Tactical Wizard

Spoiler: Stats

Personal Armor completes research and production starts right away. We can always manufacture more alien alloy if we really need it, but its almost unheard of for a player to run out of it unless they start building a lot of craft. Constructing the armor eats up almost all of our budget for the rest of the month, so we're limited to only 15 suits at the moment.

Command is confident that with our new laser weaponry we can take down even the tough Reapers from afar.

A Sectoid. That means Cyberdisks. Our troops may have laser weaponry and the alien grenades, but it may not be enough. Its not uncommon for an entire squad to be wiped by Cyberdisks this early in the game.

@Affluent Reptilian gets sniped from an alleyway as I try to spread my troops out.

Once again we're surrounded, and this time the aliens have a nasty surprise for us; a stun bomb. Far more effective than our puny stunrods and with a much wider radius, a stun bomb hit will never kill anything that isn't wounded but a good hit on a bunched up group of soldiers can knock all of them out in one blow. I nearly pay the price for clumping my soldiers so close together, but luckily the bomb hits off center from the party and only Dear Leader and Randall Fragg go down.

Sectoids have the advantage in night vision but they're still fragile creatures. Our new laser weapons make short work of their little ambush. Friend Computer takes the fight to the north with NerdShamer as his backup.

Events are sort of happening out of order to what these screenshots show, but NerdShamer is hit by psionic attacks. Psionics happen very quickly so I somehow doubt I'll ever catch the little visual effect that appears, but you'll know them by the distinctive sound they make. There are two types of psionic attacks; those designed to make a soldier panic and direct mind control.

XCOM being one of the many videogames inspired by the movie Aliens, one of its most infamous and interesting features is its morale. Morale is calculated based on the soldier's bravery, though I'm not sure of the exact ratio. Soldiers can lose morale from being wounded, the deaths of other soldiers, and sometimes nothing at all as morale may decay if you go too long without killing something. When a soldier's morale gets low enough, one of two things happen. Either the soldier will panic, in which case they will drop their weapon and run away, or they will go berserk and open fire in a random direction. In both scenarios, the soldier wastes all of their time units before the start of your turn.

NerdShamer's berserk episodes at least happen far away from the rest of the team. However he does waste a civvie who snuck up on him.

Friend Computer is a one man army on his own with his fairly high accuracy. He kills two more Sectoids to the north. No Cyberdisks yet, oddly enough. On top of that I notice this map is quite small. I've never heard of a Terror Mission with no Terror Units, so I speculate this mission is flagged as an Alien Abduction mission. More than one alien was probably armed with stun weaponry, but we've already killed several before they get the chance to fire a shot. NerdShamer is still being affected by psionic attacks though.

Only two types of aliens have psionic powers, the Sectoids and another alien that I won't spoil for the moment. Sectoids do not have psionic powers across the board, only high ranking ones such as the Sectoid Leader and Sectoid Commander. Realizing this map is only so large and I've already killed a fair number of Sectoids, the continued psionic attacks must mean that the leader in still alive.

I spot a Sectoid hanging out in this alleyway and get an idea. A Sectoid Leader, if brought back alive, can unlock psionic research much earlier than encountering the final alien race. The final enemy is almost entirely psionic and miserable to deal with as a result, so you practically need psionics to level the playing field against them. If we can unlock it early, this would be huge. The question being though; is this the only alien left on the map?

Forgetful Gynn just so happens to be in the right spot to come at the alien from the other side. Can I pull off the same trick twice?

Polyboros2 is hit with psionics himself and panics. He drops everything and runs straight into the alleyway. The Sectoid tellingly does not have any reaction fire on him, implying it may have used up all of its time units conducting psionic attacks. While the alien is distracted, I move Gynn up to block the alien's only other means of escape.

The alien's turn is next though. @Polyboros2 manages the herculean feat of taking three plasma shots at point blank range and somehow not dying instantly from his wounds. He still bleeds out when my turn comes around again though. Lets hope his death was worth it. I didn't catch a screenshot of it, but the alien tries to run out of the alley in the opposite direction; where Gynn is waiting for him. To my surprise, the game decides the stun rod is the dominant weapon and Gynn's reaction fire uses that instead. We're about to see how this alien feels about getting probed.

My hunch was correct; a Sectoid Leader! I have Gynn and World of Shit camp the alien in case it gets back up. Sectoids have a very low stun value so I rather doubt this will happen though.

I make the mistake of sending NerdShamer as Burning Bridge's backup. Still frazzled from the psionic attacks, NerdShamer goes berserk again and wastes his time units. @Burning Bridge circles around to try and get the alien from the front door but is shot and killed. Kane Lives arrives on the scene shortly after and takes care of the alien.

Three deaths on a mission against only 8 aliens is somewhat costly, but I don't care. The Sectoid Leader is a precious find this early in the game. Later on when we encounter them, they will almost certainly be accompanied by Cyberdisks. Promotions go around. Though Gynn was the one who captured the alien, @Friend computer is recognized for his leadership and ability to keep soldiers clam under pressure. He makes the coveted rank of Commander, XCOM's highest possible rank. There can only be a single Commander in each base, and only if there are at least 30 or more soldiers in the roster.

Much to my irritation, the abundance of corpses has filled up my storage space yet again. I sell all but one of each off as I would still like to research them. Yes, there are indeed alien autopsies in this game. They provide no tangible benefit but all successful research contributes to your score at the end of the month. I dislike the idea of selling something XCOM hasn't examined yet because it ruins my sense of immersion a little, but the storage issue is serious enough at the moment that I really have no other option.

Our troops now stand somewhat of a better chance when they take a plasma hit; the first 15 suits of armor are complete and issued. The armor is unlikely to protect against explosions and heavy plasma, but its certainly better than nothing at all.

As I sit down to balance XCOM's finances I wonder if perhaps the difficulty of this game is set too low, or if the fact that I'm using a version of OXCE optimized for The XCOM Files is affecting the alien behavior. There's really nothing I can do about it now unless I want to figure out how to save edit. Though perhaps I'm growing optimistic and complacent like the fictional directors in the last post were.

Then again, there are still threats we aren't quite ready to take on yet. A large UFO could be several different types. I send the Amberlynn Reid to patrol western Russia for a few hours to see if perhaps the aliens have a base in the area that would account for this kind of activity, but it turns up nothing.

After examining the tech tree, it appears I was under a set of false presumptions. The Plasma Pistol and Rifle do not need to be researched before the Heavy Plasma. I also thought the Mind Probe needed to be researched to begin psionic research, but you need only start with a psionic alien. Going forward though I'm going to act as if my presumptions were correct though to drag out the research a bit. I'm blazing through this game so much quicker than I expected, and my casualties have been relatively light all things considered.

I also can't research the Sectoid Leader yet even if I wanted to. The first alien you research is flagged to unlock another tier of research that is the stepping stone to the endgame research. If I research the Sectoid Leader now, it may not set off the flag for the Psi-Lab research properly. I'm almost positive OpenXcom fixed this bug, but I want to be sure. In addition, my headcannon version of XCOM has no reason to take psionic technology seriously at the moment as few of the aliens we've encountered even have psionic powers.

Next time, will the dreaded Cyberdisks make their appearance?

 

[White Devil]

Goddamn, that's the luck of the draw bagging a psionic so early. I'd say it was worth the casualties.

 

[Ponchik]

x-com rookie training day is a very dangerous day

 

[Corn Flakes]

Bagging a Sectoid Leader this early? For only 3 casualties? Nice. This should make for an interesting run already!