Let's Play UFO - Aftershock : Victory!

Azira said:

After these two image heavy updates, it might be wise to bump the thread to the next page..
But maybe I'll cram in just one more update on this one. A short update explaining the combat more in-depth p'raps?

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Why not? And bump.

Alright, this will be a short update, detailing some of the buttons and options during combat.
First off, at the top of the screen, next to the "map" button and below the "LoS" button, is where you can switch between different vision modes. At the beginning, you only have normal to choose from, but now that we have a psionic on the away team, a new mode becomes visible. Here are what the two view modes look like.




The different view modes becomes more useful later, when the recruits who have them increase their observation (and in the case of psionics, psi power) skill, enabling them to detect enemies farther off. Some vision modes lets us detect enemies at the other side of walls for instance, which can be extremely useful in setting up ambushes.
Next up is different stances, or movement modes.



Here we see eklektyk prone, JoKa crouching and the rest of the team standing. The rate of movement is of course fastest when standing, but crouching and going prone offers better accuracy and lowers the accuracy of enemies shooting at you, as you prevent a smaller target. Beware though, that enemies using unwieldy weapons will have better accuracy against a stationary target than at a moving one. So if someone has a bead on you with a missile launcher, it's better to start running rather than going prone.
Now, for different firing methods.




In these two screenshots, I have eklektyk switch between aimed shot in the first, and snapshot in the second. Aimed shots take longer to ready, but offer better accuracy.




Here I am again alternating between aimed or snap shot. But I've asked eklektyk to switch to burst fire, which is done by clicking the bullet icon in the lower right hand corner of his portrait. At this range and wielding a shotgun, you might as well go for burst fire on snapshot, to more quickly down the enemy. Which is what he does.
Finally, there's the LoS button.




It alternates between viewing the whole terrain unobstructed, and overlaying it with what's in your line of sight. This serves to give you an idea of where a critter might be hiding from you, but I mostly play the game without the LoS button toggled.
This mission was a succes. eklektyk ran straight into melee range of a Brainman and took a swipe from its claws before he felled it, and JoKa was hit by a Muckstar. All in all though, mutants are quite pathetic at this point. Reticulans and human opponents are much more dangerous. I hope to show you this soon.

Re: Roster

Nice!

Azira said:

Bee just started on the first tier of sniper training. In 1 day and 12 hours of gametime, she will know how to operate a sniper rifle. Definite on her part. 3 enemies killed in 5 missions. This is bound to change once she gets some proper firepower.

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Yay!

You're as fast as lightning, mang. Bump and I'm looking forward to Afterlight

R.I.P.

I didn't expect to give you another update so soon, but there are grievous news!
eklektyk, brave man that he was, ran afoul of a reticulan ambush and was lost in combat!



Here he lies. He turned a corner and was spotted by two reticulans. One wielding a missile launcher, the other a laser rifle. He nearly got the missile launcher wielding one before it let loose its rocket, but only nearly. The blast knocked him off his feet, and before his comrades could rush to his aid, the laser rifle wielding gray lunatic killed him. He will be sorely missed!




Home in the HQ, we got some other disturbing news.



They were nice enough to put a countdown timer on the geospace. I wonder what it is, and if it will be friendly? (fat chance)

bump for the bump god!
also: eklektyk, you were so far ahead in kill count, something had to happen :greyconspiracy:

and i see that my training as a stalker is done, very nice...

eklektyk

Congrats, your first casualty, let's hope it will not be the last one :twisted:

First blood!



(Man, this game looks like shit...)

[/graphicswhore]

cultists!

Can't resist. Just one more.
We received a distress call from the cyborgs. One of their territories is under cultist attack!
We scramble a team and make our way to their territory ASAP, and once we land, we receive a message from the cultists' leader apparently. He's a bit batty about the approaching astronomical body..



The mission itself is a "save the stranded NPC" one. Good for us, as those NPCs are often quite powerful. This one is no exception.



First Desmodus runs to the NPC, then he exits the building in the wrong direction and comes face to face with 3 cultists.. Fearing he'd join eklektyk, I have him retreat inside again immediately after putting some bullets in a cultist psionic.



Here we have a nice ambush set up. The AI in this game isn't exactly bright, so the cultists we alerted all come running through the doorway, into our loving crossfire.



The results speak for themselves. A truckload of loot, and new research topics are unlocked! Unfortunately, I still need to capture an 0.50 cal weapon before I can research and produce armour piercing ammo.
On the Laputa, the eggheads have finished researching Earth Politics and Reconciliation, which increases the odds of af friendly territory joining us after a help mission.






And finally, we finish research on adding two more seats to the landing craft! This will help greatly, both in dealing with the enemy as we can bring more firepower, and also in getting our troops nice and experienced, so they can get their training started.




The current away team is Desmodus, Storyfag, JoKa, chzr, K.Slips, korenzel and Bee. They will go visit the nice cultists soon, and I hope they will encounter one or two cultists with a Barett sniper rifle... :twisted:

Sad to hear about eklektyk.

Make sure to pay those xeno bastards back tenfold!

Re: R.I.P.

Azira said:

I didn't expect to give you another update so soon, but there are grievous news!
eklektyk, brave man that he was, ran afoul of a reticulan ambush and was lost in combat!



Here he lies. He turned a corner and was spotted by two reticulans. One wielding a missile launcher, the other a laser rifle. He nearly got the missile launcher wielding one before it let loose its rocket, but only nearly. The blast knocked him off his feet, and before his comrades could rush to his aid, the laser rifle wielding gray lunatic killed him. He will be sorely missed!

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...
..
.

fuckfuckityfuck

xeno how I HATE them ...


everything was going to smoothly ...

Commissar will be missed :/

on a related note if U ever need another Commissar im sure that eklektyk's DNA can be somewhat recovered and cloned for further use on the battlefield
til then

PS.: BumpAN

Enraged at the death of the proud patriot known as eklektyk, a nameless man has arisen from the masses, sharing a remarkable resemblence with the deceased.
He goes by the callsign; Commissar.



eklektyk, you shall be avenged!

can i call dibs on barret after i finish sniper training?



also i guess you can put my trooper training on hold and focus on medic/sniper... might change it depending on late game equipment.

i was wondering if abilities from trainings stack? if you have sharp senses from scout, sniper and leader, does it make +3 or still +1?

@chzr
I'll be producing Barrett sniper rifles as well as the others. The Barrett is great for taking down large, slow-moving targets. Less so for smaller, more mobile ones.
But fret not. You will be using a Barrett rifle later. You just might start out with the SR-25 due to the reasons I mentioned when I talked about the weapons.
As to trooper training, yes. I'll focus on medic and sniper first. I don't necessarily think trooper's a bad choice for third training though.

i'm baffled that i seem to be the highest leveled char now - that doesn't bode too well.

update asap!

I sometimes use close combatants to ambush behind corners as the enemies charge in on the snipers.

bump da funk

edit: I somehow got to this page before reading the last update, and thought that it was the same page, was in a hurry, hence the bump, also nice to see that my tank is coming along, looks like cyborgs have more hp than others so they are better for close quarters.

RIP eklektyk

Nothing too exciting has happened in the time I've managed to play since the last update. Except for eklektyks successor, Commissar nearly dying in his first mission. But he survived, as Desmodus and JoKa were there to back him up.
Currently assaulting cultist territories, in the hopes of advacing the tech. I might do an update tomorrow, concerning the new equipment now available to the troops.

Ah, we decided to attack another cultist territory and one of the buggers was carrying a Barrett sniper rifle! Fortunately for us, said cultist decided to start inside a building, so we could ambush him easily. Here's a screenshot from another building ambush, to give you the general idea.



JoKa has played the spotter and bait, and is now waiting around the corner. The 5 cultists inside the building spotted him and are rushing to the attack. Outside, I've posted three snipers armed with the burst-firing SR-25s, and they've already felled two cultists as they went through the door. Desmodus is running up, trying to get a piece of the action. Unfortunately, he ends up in a position where the cultists can see him without exiting the doorway, thus obstructing the line of fire from our snipers. Desmodus retreated behind the same wall as JoKa and this mission was quickly over.
The result is that we got our final piece of the puzzle and can now research AP ammo. This will help greatly against armoured targets such as some cultists, the flatsters and later enemies.



Research is quickly completed, and an assembly line is started.



Now I'll show you what new armament has become available. Grenade- and missile launchers first.





I don't use grenade launchers very much, for the same reasons I don't use grenades. I prefer direct-damage weapons, and the missiles and grenades travel too slowly for my tastes. Maybe I will make an exception in this LP. Time will tell. :mystery:
We've also captured some human-made laser weapons from the cultists.





The laser pistol and rifle are inferior to the reticulan counterparts, but the sniper rifle is unique in that it doesn't have an alien counterpart. It also sports an insane accuracy.. We will stick to regular sniper rifles for now though, as we have plenty of ammo for those, and none for the laser variant yet.
We also have some new grenades to showcase.





Again, utility items I tend to neglect. :blush:
The next batch of weapons though, those I use occasionally.





These require commando training, which JoKa and Storyfag has. They have both been issued a katana, but are currently relying on regular firearms. I want their speed to reach heroic before they start depending on their katanas, except for when they go up against reticulans. The grays drop like flies before angry humans wielding ancient blades.
Now, over to psionic weaponry.




Honestly, I don't remember if these things require a line of sight, or you can use them on any detected enemies within range. If it's the former, they're rather useless. If it's the latter, then these babies will be issued ASAP for Phoenix and Bee! But first, I need to research psionic equipment so we can manufacture a couple of these vambraces the devices seem to need to operate..
For the finale of the armaments show, there are some weapon add-ons that have been salvaged from the fights with the cultists.






I've stuck recoil compensators and gyro stabilizers on the machineguns, and they are now instruments of pure death. The accelerators I've captured I've issued to our snipers, to further improve their kill rate as well. Once I can start to produce more on my own, every troop will be issued a fully customized weapon, but I need to research a few more topics before this happens.
I've yet to use the under-barrel grenade launcher, but I intend to explore its uses in this LP. Stay tuned for more.
Now, with the missions I've played, we've managed to expand nicely. I'll provide you with a snapshot of the globe and our base overview.






As you can see, we've limited the cultists to two territories on this side of the atlantic ocean, and we are building some psionic laboratories. We already have some implant labs in place, and I hope to soon be able to provide our cyborgs with better, stronger and faster limbs.
Speaking of research, here's a look at what we currently have cooking.






Research is progressing nicely in our basic weapons labs and our laputa lab. Those are the ones we've had running since the start of the game. The advanced weapons labs and implant labs are newcomers though, so not much to see in their research line.




The advanced weapons lab in particular will see much use in the near future, whereas the implant lab has a more limited selection of research topics.
The final screen depicts our current diplomacy standings.



As you can see, our relations with the human faction isn't as high as it's been earlier (the green bars next to the slider). It had been maxed out, but we were running low on alien tech, so we beggared some from the humans, and with the amount of help missions we're accepting, the relations are quickly repairing themselves. If you look back to our geospace screen, you will see that we have no problems whatsoever with low-tech and high-tech income, and our stockpiles are frankly huge. I expect the same will never be said about our alien tech income nor stockpile, but that's how it usually is in this game.
At this point in the game, I'm starting to think that korenzel might have been right about the difficulty, but later we will be swarmed with random attacks all over the globe, and that's the exact thing I hope this normal difficulty will reduce the rate of.

On to a different, but related topic. What do you think of the screenshot size? Is it OK? Too large, too small? The reason I ask this, is that Afterlight, the game I intend to LP once this is done, I can choose a resolution as large as I'd like, but I'm thinking I might be better off keeping it around this level, for purposes of legibility.

Screenshots are perfect for my setup.

And while the series isn't nearly as deadly as XCom, just had one of my troops (in Afterlight) get hit with a 170 damage critical...when he only had 75hp total. Sad part is that the creature that did that got into melee range of my two heavily armored troops (ignoring them completely), turned to his right, and shot the poor bastard as he was hiding in a corner a good ten meters from where it was standing.

Should've just left the poor bastard at base as he made an excellent backup scientist (For when my primaries were going through training).

to our dead comrade.

Screenshots are big enough if you ask me.

Damn, you work fast I'm interested about how will Afterlight's lp proceed, considering not only there are limited resources but personnel as well (except the robots, that are crap anyways).

Also, I recommend you to install some mods prior playing Afterlight if you want to preserve your sanity, such as the ones that reduce the incoming attacks, because the aliens here are more ferocious than rabid consoletards on steroids (I remember back at my first playtrough I was attacked by every 2 minutes, for real).

@lightbane

I am considering that. I am also considering setting the geospace difficulty at easy, while keeping the combat difficulty hard, to increase the odds of blowing up an incoming raiding party with missile-radar. I just need to make a bee-line for that research..
And as to the personnel situation in Afterlight, the limited recruits will mean I will be extra careful with my troops, and I will probably not be playing pure Ironman. Afterlight also lacks the option to give your troops new nicks, so there will unfortunately be no volounteers needed for that game, unless some mod exists to easily change nicks in-game?

No idea about the name changing.

Just how limited is the recruitment pool? The only thing I'm concerned about running out of are the soldier/tech and soldier/medic troops as my recent soldier/medic was replaced by two straight soldiers (That I can't even send on training runs due to high solar activity).