🚀 go-pugleaf

Shaun Green wrote:
> 
> What with me being off ill from sixth form with shingles, I've been playing
> TFTD. 

Shingles?  It's adult chickenpox y'know.  Comes from poxy chickens it
does! :P

 Lots.  It's the only X-COM game I've not cracked (in the completion
> sense) yet, so here we go...

You've *never* finished it??  It was superior to the original in many
ways....
 
> Okay, usual stuff, blah blah, toddling around shooting down UFOs, having my
> DUP-armed Barracudas chewed up by large UFOs, and so on.  Then came the
> first TFTD cool thing (tm) - my first terror mission!  Hmm, tricky.
> Fortunately, gillmen and deep ones are a pushover compared to later
> nasties...

Quite right.

I think the best sub weapons are the sonic cannon thingies, IIRC.  It's
been a while.

> My first shipping mission was a passenger liner.  I think I saved about 75 %
> of them, with a single casualty.  But that was only against feeble shit like
> gillmen, calcinites and other pansy-assed stuff.  It was much, much worse
> taking on Tasoths on a cargo ship.  But I still did it, albeit with more
> civilian deaths (about 40 % dead), and four casualties.

Yikes.

 
> I had to pull out of a third ship mission.  I cleared the first deck with
> only two men down, but the turn before we went down below one of them got
> controlled and I lost him... additionally, two of the seven who went down
> (I'd left the coelacanth on board and so only had ten men; d'oh), had
> panicked the turn before and had no weapons.
> 
> Incidentally, I can't emphasize enough how damn useful that coelacanth was.
> First thing out of the sub, pick off a few bugs, soak up incoming fire, and
> so on.  Also accounted for many kills, and scouted out many others during
> night missions...

Wont fit anywhere but the starting room on the 2nd level of the ship
terror mission, but it's worth taking for the additional firepower in
there.
 
> Moving on, I did wax my first alien base today.  The upper level was
> delicious.  First turn, disruptor pulse launcher out of the triton - greased
> two tasoths and two aquatoids who'd been standing *inside* a building!  I
> love TFTD and it's windows / vents.

I used to blow a hole in the middle of the roof where the lift/transport
squares are.  follow up with a few more and taking the building is a
whole lot easier.

> I  also got shitted up on turn three or four when two of the vast jellyfish
> things (still don't know what they are; don't tell me :-)  ) 

They're called....T......Te.....Ten.......Brain Thingies. ;)

burst out of a
> building and BOTH finished right next to some of my troopers.  Still, on
> that first level, I lost... hmm... NONE of my fourteen aquatoids, although I
> confess to reloading saves (never did that before on TFTD) when disruptor
> pulses blew five or six of my core aquanoughts away.

Use liberal amounts of explosives on these things.  Worse than
chryssalids they are.
 
> Down below was weird.  I was expecting an undersea citadel packed out with
> hundreds of aliens (I killed 23 bugs on the surface alone, for heaven's
> sakes - whilst all of my guys 'n' gals got to the lift, the last two alien
> soldiers - somewhere on the map - kept panicking <g>)... but for the first
> thirty turns, I found nothing.  Then I found one brain-thing (uhrm...
> <thinks>... nope, can't remember what they're called; no weapons but
> powerful psis) and grenaded it (out of boredom <g>).  By this time 80% of

No psi....but very powerful weapons...better get it straight or you're
going to be toast.

> the map was uncovered.  Then I ran into my first lobsterman.  TWO disruptor
> pulses and *it was standing*!  Fricken' hell.  Fortunately, it missed the
> guy it shot at since it's accuracy had been bitten deeply into by fatal
> wounds.  My 'naught shot back, killing it.

My first lobsterman was encountered by a group of lightly armed and
armoured troopers....<ctrl> <alt> <delete> <reload>
 
> Then, things went mad.  About eight lobstermen erupted all over the map...
> three of them I found in the synonium (sp?) device.  They were easy to kill;
> I even captured one of them (the Commander, woah).  But the others... one I
> greased with my Commander (Shaun Green; how convenient that the trooper
> named for me got promoted.  Shame he's a crap psi; he's gonna become a
> liability)... before the others tore into my troopers.  Lost three or four
> aquanoughts before I turned things around and splatted them.  My 'naughts
> were all over the map when they burst out, you see, so my troopers were
> going in there in ones and twos... <shudder>.

I always travelled in threes at least. One with grenades, one with a
heavy rifle, one with a dpl.

> From there, it was a cake walk... just had to find the last cowering
> brain-bug and the last lobsterman.
> 
> I think four or five casualties and one wounded is a fair exchange for one
> base's worth of equipment captured intact, one alien colony knocked out, and
> one captured lobsterman commander, hey?

Awfully dark down there, though.
 
> On the subject of characters from the group, I named the original crew after
> AGX regulars.  A few notables:
 
> Me.  Still going, as the Commander.  But not for much longer; he's a below
> average psi.  Not a liability yet, but he's not going on the T'leth mission,
> I'll tell you that...
> 
> Off the Rails.  You miserable f*ck.  Damn fine soldier, but the courage and
> psi-strength of a toad.  You were lost on a shipping mission - you got MC'ed
> on the turn we went to the second level.  MIA...
> 
> Robert B - woah!  Best psi of the starting lot.  Plenty kills, plenty
> experience.  Bright future ahead...

What else would you expect? <g>  Wouldn't it be a lot easier to call him
Dr. B.?
 
> Andy.  You were doing great, but unfortunately you were one of the fellas
> chomped up by the first few lobstermen.  On the bright side, you killed two
> of them and wounded another, and had 20-30 kills to your name beforehand...

<taps>
 
> There were others of you named in the first crop, but nothing notable
> occured to those troops.  There's only me and Bob left now.  <sniff>  No
> save-reloading for me!

Just don't get me killed. :)
 
> Wow, I just wrote all that?  Blimey.

See how Det got that way?  TFTD did it to him!