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UFO ( recap)


THE SCORING SYSTEM

Scores a kept for both sides the enemy and you!(doh) POSITIVE SCORES come
from a number of things, but mostly from: Conducting Successful research

Capturing aliens
Killing aliens
Shooting down and / or destroying ufos
Destroying alien bases
Collecting alien equipment.
NEGATIVE SCORES come from:
Losing your soldiers
Losing your crafts and hwps
Civilian deaths.

ALIENS score points by:
Overflying earth,
Landing on earth (for whatever purpose)
Building and keeping bases on earth
Conducting terror raids - especially if you ignore them
Signing pacts with funding countries (who no longer finance you)
Conducting harvest and / or abducting missions on earth.

YOUR NET SCORE (the score shown on your monthly report) is calculated as so:
Your score, minus the alien score. The funding changes are affected by your
total score.


MANAGING YOUR BASE

1) Always try to hire scientist and engineers in the hours of a month.
This way they`ll arrive in the early stages of the following month,
ensuring you get maximum research from them but no additional salary cost.

2) Dont forget that in a workshop, the object being manufactured will take
up a bit of space, so dont be surprised if you can`t fit all fifty
engineers in at once.

ATTACKING UFOs

1)Sensibly you should only attack ufos over land , if you want to salvage
any wreckage and capture or kill alien survivors.

2)If your ufo lands before your fighters can capture it, keep a fighter over
the area untill your soldiers can get there . Should the ufo take off agian
you you will instantly intercept it.

3)Because the more powerful ship weapons will totally destroy small ufos it
a good idea to keep one fighter armed with more basic weapons for salvage
reasons

LOCATING ALIEN BASES

1) Though it is possible for external x-com agents to locate alien bases ,
dont rely on them too heavily. Its far better to watch for alien activity
on the graphs, Looking for locations where there are reports of high alien
activity without any interception.

2) Strangely a slow craft like the good old skyranger actually has excellent
scanning range, nad it is therefore perfewct for spotting alien bases.

3) You should also watch UFOs` flight patterns. If you should lose tracking
during a chase, rather than just heading for their last known position and
patrolling, try to guess where they were heading and follow that course for
as long as you can.


THE MANY WAYS TO LOSE!!!

1:) If you remain in debt for more than $1,000,000 for a period of two
months, your sponsors will indicate how impressed they are with your
performance by terminating the X-COM project, and your life. And needless
to say the aliens will win!!!

2:) If you have two consecutive bad months, (i.e. two months with very
large negative scores) your sponsors will again terminate the X-COM
project.

3:) It`s game over if you lose all your bases to the scum sucking aliens.

4:) And, similarly, it`s bye-bye if you get to the big "FINAL MISSION" but
then fail to complete it. (In which case your strategy must stink and you
deserve to die!!!)

GETTING AROUND THE GEOSCAPE

1) Clicking on the UFO icon will display all known information about a
craft. If you have detected a craft with the Hyperwave Decoder, this could
provide a considerable amount of info.

2) Once shot down, the UFO Crash Site usjually remains for a couple of
days, so if you haven`t enough soldiers available at the time, you can often
allow it to sit unattended for a couple of days.

3) UFO`s that have landed voluntarily will never remain for more than a
day.

4) Terror Sites never appear for more than a day., and considering how many
points the alien side score if you don`t go, you should always respond ASAP
(even if it means abandoning other missions or taking night missions).

5) Information such as craft size can still be called up from crashed or
landed UFO`s.

6) Check your graphs regularly. As well as helping to determine where
additional bases might be located, you can also monitor countries with high
alien activity and how well they pay for good defending.


CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

1) When intercepting a ufo, try to launch from the base closest to the ufo`s
intended target ( if you can suss this out by watching the ufo`s flight path
for a minute or two).
2) Tail chasing is the best way to lose a target ( not to mention wasting
time and fuel), so try to intercept from the front or from the side rather
from the behind.
3) If a ufo lands on the darkside of the earth, Yo might find it better to
patrol nearby and wait for daylight and a slightly easier mission. Needless
to say, If the ufo takes off before this accurs, you will need to react
quickly or lose the craft.

GROUND ASSAULTS

1) If possible, attack landed ufos rather than shot down craft as these will
contain more artifacts, not to mention an extra fifty units of E-115 for
every intact engine. The obvious downside is that you`ll encounter more
aliens. Bugger.

2) Though only sending troops to shot down ufos make for a easier game, it
also results in a slower progression as items for research and raw materials
present themselves more readily when attacking landed craft.


LOOKING AFTER HOME BASE


1) Theres a tricky decision to be made when selecting a location for your
home base as, because its likely to be your only base for a while, you want
the best overall coverage while maximising the covered countries `total
payments. It appears that the USA pays the most, JAPAN coming in second, and
EUROPE third with a large amount of sponsoring countries in a cluster.
However considering that the covered, raise their payments by a random
amount following positive action, you have to decide whether you'd rather
receive 10% of 50,000 or 10% of 70,000. Get it

2) While northen US is a good starting place, in the early stages on the
game (ie when you only have a small radar and one base) you'll only really
be able to cover US and CANADA, whereas a base in central EUROPE would be
able to cover the UNITED KINGDOM, FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY, SPIAN, and
even a little bit of RUSSIA.

FIRST THINGS TO DO !(In your base)

1) Because of the time it takes to build extra base facilities, you need
to order these buildings as soon as possible and, one would suggest, in this
order:

1: Alien containment - for holding your live alien prisoners.

2: General stores - for stashing ammo and salvaged artifacts.

3: Long range radar - with improved detection range.

Later, when you have more money to spare, add living quarters, labs,
workshops, and defences - in that approximate order.
NOTE : Though it won`t occur until much later in the game, once you have a
Hyperwave Decoder you won`t need any other radars, so get rid of the rest.
The Hyperwave Decoder detects about 100% of the UFO`s within it`s range
(which is a hell of a lot better than the large radars).


DEFENDING YOUR BASE

1) Defending against alien raids is by no means easy. The good news is that
unless your doing particularly brilliant, those scum sucking Lizard looking
aliens won't bother approaching your bases for a quite a while. However once
those alien battle ships start hovering towards your base, Its knee knockin
time.

2) To defend a base affectively, you need to do everything possible to
raise your defence rating. If you prefer not to fight in your own base,
you need to be looking at something like 3000-3500 plus grav shields.
Three fusion ball defences and grav shields usually do the job, defending
the base completely.

3) If you dont have the equipment to fight battleships as they fly in, your
going to have to fight them on the ground once they penetrate the bases
outer defences. If so you can expect to see tons of aliens on such a raid.

PS, You'll normally find that before a raid small UFOs scout ahead. If you
can destroy these before they can detect your base's location, you can
prevent the main attack.

4) Should things get too sticky, you can dismantle your base completely by
first removing all facilities and transferring all your staff and equipment
elsewhere where possible ( unless you've finished with them obviously). The
final act in leaving a base is removing the access lift itself.


HUMAN & ALIEN CRAFT

1) An important thing to remember is that, as well utillising conventional
jet engines, the standard craft also incur a monthly rental charge.
UFO-based crafts, however, do not.

2) Try to replace your skyrangers and Intercepters as soon as you can, to
save on this monthly lease. The only thing you might want to consider, is
that the Intercepters actually have a longer range than the Firestorms, and
with twin plasma cannons, can attack anything except battleships.

3) Dont bother with the lightning as it's best part of useless ( with four
one-space doors meaning no HWPs can be used ). Just go straight into
researching for the Avenger.

ARMOUR:

1) Its very Important to start reseach on personal armour as soon as you
possibly can, and for this you'll need good old "Alien Alloy"

2) Once researched get your engineers churning suits out for everybody as
soon as possible (supplies permitting), as this cuts down those "one hit
wonder" rookie events.

3) When you perform the research for "UFO Power Source", you can then
manufacture power suits.

4) Finally, by finishing a hovertank, you should be able to start work on
flying suits. NOTE: Its been said that powersuits are actually more
efficient because, the flying suit use a lot of Elerium-115. As such, the
flying suits should only be given to the select few, for flushing out aliens
from multilevelled buildings ect, ect.

PROFIT THROUGH MANUFACTURING

1) Theres a fair bit of dosh to be made from manufacturing items that can
actually be sold for more than their production cost. You can experiment
to find which items you prefer to peddle, but as far as the profit to cost
ratio works out, the fusion ball launcher is on the top of my list, just
above laser Cannons.

2) If your looking to exploit this early in the game ( ie, before your
engineers get busy with some real work) you can build and sell motion
scanners to keep the funds rolling. Dont turn you nose up at any amount of
profit, because every grenade helps!

3) Only ever manufacture Items that you *really* need ( ie. essential
crafts ). Try to avoid having to manufacture your own ammo as most deplete
your treasured amount of ELERIUM-115. A better tactic is to capture as
much ammo as possible during missions.


CRAFT WEAPONS

1) Without a doubt, the Plasma Beam is the best weapon to equip your craft
with. With a range of 52km and 100 shots at a possible 70 damage per shot,
this gun can out-distance all but the battle ships.

2) Though some might argue that the Fusion Ball launcher can cause more
damage per shot, you can only have two shots for each launcher ( think
about it! )

3) If your attacking very large ufos with Interceptors, you'll most
definitely need a number of crafts attacking at once, all armed with Plasma
Beam and / or Avalanche weaponry. Even with this set up, you can still
expect heavy losses as even a single hit from a Battle Ship will cripple an
Interceptor at the very least.

4) If you want to attack Battleships without risking everything, only use
Firestorms and Avengers with twin Plasma beams. However, you can still
expect serious damage, up to 20% to 60% per hit. So you might prefer to let
them land and then attack them on the ground.


PSI COMBAT

1) To gain access to psionic powers you must first capture a live Sectoid
leader, a Sectoid Commander, or any Ethereal. By carrying out successful
research on them, you can build PSI LABS and send your soldiers into be
assessed and trained. All being well and groovy, you should then be able to
use you PSI powers in combat with psi amps.

2) If you put an alien under mind control and then stun them, they will not
count as being captured at the end of the mission. If you're trying to stun
aliens with smoke, a better tactic is to use mind control to keep the alien
in the smoke untill it passed out.

3) To get more ammo, mind control the alien, and either get it to throw all
of its weapons to you, or drop everything on the ground!

4) Panic actually has a better chance of success than mind control.

5) PSI strength is ultimately more important than psi skill, as it
determines the soldier's resistance to psi attacks as well as their
potential for psi training.

6) If during the course of a mission a soldier is mind controlled more than
once ( and still survives the mission ) its best to sack that soldier
immediately after that mission as they probably have low bravery / or low
psi strength rating.


STUNNING

1).If you dont have stun weapons, you can keep dumping smoke grenades on
them untill they drop - something thats especially good to do if you have
power or flying suits( they're immune to smoke, duh )

2) Though the stunning weapons have an obvious use in capturing aliens, they
can also be used to bugger up Chrysalids at terror sites. Though these
enjoy turning civilians into zombies, if you can get to the innocent first
you can stun them, making them useless to the Chrysalids. The only problem
with this tactic is they tend to wake up "mad".


ENGAGING ALIENS

1) Chrysalids, Reapers, Silacoids, and Zombies are all limited to
hand-to-hand combat. If you posses a flying suit, take to the skies and
shoot them from here ( duh ). {:�[)

2) Its also worth remembering that, when fighting Reapers, they can't attack
through single-wide doors as they themselves take double width.

3) When at a terror site, try to kill Chrysalids as soon as you can
otherwise you'll have tons of Zombies to deal with as well.
NOTE: Kill Chrysalids even if it means taking the penalty for killing
civilians along the way. If you have to, just use rockets or blaster bombs
and grenades as much as it takes.

4) If you're really concerned about the Chrysalids, get all of your soldiers
to carry primed proximity grenades. This way if they get turned into a
Zombie, the first they do is drop everything, at which point the grenade
will blow up and put an end to a sizeable amount of your problems.




P.S,   If you have any questions concerning UFO, please e-mail the
newsgroup, and in the subject box type "UFO ( question )", its as simple as
that...