XCOM revived as UFO: Freedom Ridge!

[faded glory]

HELL YES!!!!!!




w00t

[Juggler]

My favourite past time in Apocalypse was to raid the cult buildings. They sometimes have good stuff for you to resell, and the practices are good for your soldiers.

Raiding them is an easy way to get more money but when you destroy their buildings they always seem to get the funds to rebulid them (over and over again) I think it's called the Cult of Sirius.

[moomin]

Originally posted by Grumbold
I loved the original UFO. The only bad thing I'll say about TFTD was that the multi level mission maps (like the tanker) were just too darn big.

Big yup. While UFOs only fault was it was too easy, TFTD went on to take the most boring parts and prolong them till you screamed. One of the sequels I've been most disappointed over ever.

Still, one up to date UFO clone sure would rock.

[Standup]

There was an X-com Collector's edition released a year of so ago consisting of 5 x-com games.
UFO was fun but felt dated and TFTD went on just too long. As Grumbold said those Tankers were an exercise in stamina especially as the last alien would hide. At least in Apocalypse they'd come find you and bring levels to a quick end.
I didn't get the chance to play Apocalypse again though as it needed a VESA card driver and my card seems too modern to need one. None of the emulators (mainly dos based) worked as they seemed to be aimed at really old cards. Did anyone else have this problem ? It was a TNT2 M64 card although i've since upgraded to a Geforce3 Ti but i figure i'll have the same problem ?

[Buck Birdseed]

Actually, the Gollop Brothers (founders of Mythos and original XCOM designers) are developing an entirely different XCOM-style game with their new development team at CODO games.

Laser Squad Nemesis is a rather nice on-line multiplayer variant of the original concept. Free to try, too.

[Skanky Burns]

The best way to play TFTD is to just plain ignore the tanker missions.
Also, a rather sucky bug is that whatever your not carrying with you to the 2nd part of the map gets lost. So if you stun a rare alien type for research purposes, then go to the second battle area, you wouldn't get the alien body back at your base. This made it really impossible to finish the game, as researching alien bodies was necessary before you could get other tech, like advanced subs or whatever.

[Urban Ranger]

Standup,

" I didn't get the chance to play Apocalypse again though as it needed a VESA card driver and my card seems too modern to need one."

Are you sure? It should run well under Windows 9.x.


Snappy,

I don't think it's the style (tactical combat) but the whole atmosphere and mystery mystique that made the original game great.


Grumbold,

Yeah, that's frustrating. Cult temples, here I go again.


Juggler,

That's why it's good. If their temples stay destroyed where would my soldiers get training?

[Grumbold]

I think all three games had annoying 'must find x to progress' hooks. If there's anything worse than trying to kill all the aliens for study its trying to capture them alive and keep them stunned until the mission ends. Especially when you get really close and face the alternative of letting the alien with the mega homing missile blow up your troops or **** up and blow up the high ranking aliens you need to capture.

I have played Apocalypse a few times on a '95 system and at least once on a '98. I may have had to use a DOS boot disk though.

The tendency for the aliens to come get you in Apocalypse was welcome, but in other respects I think the aliens themselves were harder. The worm pods were absolutely lethal since one "lucky" autofire could burst them and land you in a world of pain. It had me wishing for conditional autofire orders.

[Apocalypse]

The only possible problem I might have with UFO: Aftermath is the stat progression, which is quite a bit different from previous squad based games. It could turn out very good though.

[Urban Ranger]

I found the brain suckers in Apocalypse are the absolutely worst enemies. Not as bad as the Chryssalids in UFO, but the Chryssalids are only in the terror missions.

[Skanky Burns]

Both were easy to defeat, however.
Worm pods, stun. Just run up to the nearest one, hit if a few times with the stun gun, then use the rest of your movement points to fill it with MP fire. Send in the next soldier to repeat, and a third if necessary. No sticky mess, and researching it alive gives you its children alive too. All that with lowest tech. weaponry.
Another tactic, after getting acces to high-tech stuff, is to drop a vortex mine on the worm with the timer set to zero. From memory, it kills the bubby worms too. (The HE for sale from the beginning works too, but is expensive and difficult to handle)

Brain suckers were even simpler. Reserve enough movement points to get your soldiers lying down (crawling) at the end of their turns.
The lil suckers run up to your guys, jump on their heads, and then die of confusion as they land on the ground instead. Easy.

One of the worst things to do was to kill an alien, and then have all the pods he was carrying pop open after your turn was over.
Why did they always ignore civilians?

I think my solution to Chryssalids was HE

NOTE: I'm assuming turn-based combat. Real-time is a whole differnet kettle of fish.

[child of Thor]

The Chryssalid's were evil nasty sob's - i hope if we ever actually meet aliens they are not the ones!
I think it's those first few missions in UFO i like best(and the first time you played it was awesome), for a few reasons:

1. You are really poorly equiped to deal with space fareing aliens with nothing more than 'bang-sticks' and rubbish soilders!

2. The horror was real as you crept around the maps praying to god that you weren't going to bump into the evil grey 'experimenters'(or worse), they might drive you crazy!

3. The first time you get some alien salvage and take it back to study.

I played this game first on an Amiga and the graphics were much higher resolution than the PC version, i think this is why i was extra dissapointed by TFTD - i played it on a PC and it looked very blocky(it also just wasn't the classic the first game was). Is it worth me tracking down 'Apocolypse'? I liked the turn-based phases of UFO and the world scale - i feel i might find Apocolypse to fast and claustrophobic in comparison.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
I found the brain suckers in Apocalypse are the absolutely worst enemies. Not as bad as the Chryssalids in UFO, but the Chryssalids are only in the terror missions.

What's worse is when you are playing in real time and one of your soldiers gets the bright idea of shooting a brainsucker off his friend's head with a rocket launcher.

[moomin]

Chryssalids - the nastiest customers in any game ever, as far as I'm concerned. I used to play UFO all alone at night with the lights off... that sure was scary.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Worm pods, stun. Just run up to the nearest one, hit if a few times with the stun gun, then use the rest of your movement points to fill it with MP fire. Send in the next soldier to repeat, and a third if necessary. No sticky mess, and researching it alive gives you its children alive too. All that with lowest tech. weaponry.

Isn't that a little dangerous? Stun guns are pretty lousy, and you run the danger of killing the thing when one (or more) of your soldiers is (are) standing right next to it.

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Brain suckers were even simpler. Reserve enough movement points to get your soldiers lying down (crawling) at the end of their turns.
The lil suckers run up to your guys, jump on their heads, and then die of confusion as they land on the ground instead. Easy.

Now that's a good trick What I used to do is to move my forward soldiers to places where their heads touch the ceiling. When the suckers appear they'll come charging up to the forward people, finding no room above their heads, so they just stand their confused. Next turn they'd be easy targets.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by child of Thor
The Chryssalid's were evil nasty sob's - i hope if we ever actually meet aliens they are not the ones!
I think it's those first few missions in UFO i like best(and the first time you played it was awesome), for a few reasons:

1. You are really poorly equiped to deal with space fareing aliens with nothing more than 'bang-sticks' and rubbish soilders!

2. The horror was real as you crept around the maps praying to god that you weren't going to bump into the evil grey 'experimenters'(or worse), they might drive you crazy!

As I said before, it's the excellent atmosphere that grips you.

What I found to be silly though is in each new game in the series you get to start from scratch. You don't get the research results from the previous game, let alone the high tech items. That's just bogus to me.

[Skanky Burns]

Isn't that a little dangerous? Stun guns are pretty lousy, and you run the danger of killing the thing when one (or more) of your soldiers is (are) standing right next to it.

Not generally, with two or more soldiers hitting it with stun guns, thats 6 or more hits total. Then pumping it with an MP gun, you only do a very tiny amount of damage per hit. Once their health drops below their stunned amount, they are stunned - and they have quite a bit of health.

Although one mission I stunned one of them, did the rest of the mission, and spent ages trying to find a hidden alien. The worm bled to death (while still stunned), and a few little worms popped out. Its mostly safe though.
Provided you can stun the worm the same turn you have your soldiers running right next to it.

Child of Thor: It probably would be a good idea to track down Apocalypse. While you can play the combat in real-time, you can still choose to play it turn-based (which is what I mostly do). Most of the basic ideas from UFO made it into Apocalypse, and although you are limited to a single city, its a fairly detailed city with a nice variety of building styles to kill aliens in.

[Raion]

The version I bought of Apolypse did not need anything. Upgraded with DX6.1, it even runs from Windows or Dos, I have Windows 98 SE though.

The Super VGA VESA Driver is already built in to newer video cards, automatically, its the old cards that you had to use an additional driver for the graphics card, sometimes to get to work.
Usually, well, all my ATI cards, already could work Super VGA without anything, I have a GeForce type card now, but it too should run a SuperVesa 2 Dos game, I think.
No additional drivers needed.
Yes, I have some old V4V WWII war games in dos, and they also use Super VGA, and run fine without any drivers or anything else with newer video cards -- its all built in.

I'll have to try and stun the little brainsuckers, but then my squadie would already be taken over, and the other squadies only had the machine gun to shoot -- too much to have both guns in both hands for the most part, I always grenade the aliens and I hate the worms or the watch dog that splits into 4 worms when shot, and they are hard to stun.
I guess the aliens were using biological weapons created into life forms.

I love the music though or sounds, especially at night, playing the game.
Eeerie!

[Raion]

About the game:
http://www.avault.com/news/displayne...=5222002-21711

[Raion]

Yeah, the first one was out in the open, but the third one in buildings is scarry, especially when the aliens come out of nowhere and in enclosed hallways, or one has to go up to the ninth floor and hunt for the aliens, who were on the 5th floor.

[Skanky Burns]

I'll have to try and stun the little brainsuckers, but then my squadie would already be taken over, and the other squadies only had the machine gun to shoot -- too much to have both guns in both hands for the most part, I always grenade the aliens and I hate the worms or the watch dog that splits into 4 worms when shot, and they are hard to stun.
I guess the aliens were using biological weapons created into life forms.

Sounds like you were playing in real-time mode. You could always pause and swap weapons around on your soldiers. However, the easiest way would still be to just have your soldiers crawling. Provided they don't turn to fire at an alien, and have to stand up (or else they would be lying through a wall) the brainsuckers won't cause you much trouble again.

Toxi-guns are always fun when you get them. Shoot a brainsucker off your mates head from long-range, and even if you miss it won't hurt your soldier much

[Tuberski]

You know, it's kind of sad, but actually NEVER played any of the X-COM games. Now I wish I had.

I hadn't played any Fallout games either, until they had both games at Wal-Mart for 9.99.

Here's wishing they will do that for X-Com.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Tuberski
You know, it's kind of sad, but actually NEVER played any of the X-COM games. Now I wish I had.

I hadn't played any Fallout games either, until they had both games at Wal-Mart for 9.99.

Here's wishing they will do that for X-Com.

Heh, X-Com is way too old for that, you should be able to easily find it on the 'net ... if not, I think I still have a "gold version" (which works under windows) lying around that I can give to anyone who wants.

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by Osweld


Heh, X-Com is way too old for that, you should be able to easily find it on the 'net ... if not, I think I still have a "gold version" (which works under windows) lying around that I can give to anyone who wants.

That would be excellent!

[Urban Ranger]

SB,

What's MP gun again?

[Skanky Burns]

Communism at work!

[Skanky Burns]

MP is that crappy machine-gun available from the start.
I think its full name is MP 2000 in the game.
It couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, does pathetic damage, but I highly recommend it.
Its major advantage is only taking 1 movement point each time you fire it, so enemies die quickly when you get to point-blank range. Turn-based only. (as its hard to get to point-blank range during real-time play).

[Urban Ranger]

Okay. It has been so long.

Do you use any androids at start as shock troops or do you just use use humans and hybrids?

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Its major advantage is only taking 1 movement point each time you fire it, so enemies die quickly when you get to point-blank range. Turn-based only. (as its hard to get to point-blank range during real-time play).

They are even better in realtime, provided you have enough ammo to keep them firing. (A squad of men each holding two machine guns on auto-fire... )


Speaking of which, the realtime combat stinks... it seems to always be reduced to lining up a bunch of your men in a firing squad outside a choke point in the map and waiting untill they come out to die, then slowly moving your firing squad through the level, killing any straglers.

But for some reason I always played on realtime, anyways.

[Urban Ranger]

Maybe that's easy to do?