The Official XCOM Thread

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With all the talk of XCOM around here, some of which I'm responsible for, I felt it would be a shame if people getting interested in it were put off at first. I know I was, when I got the game when it was first released. So here are some tips to get you going. Anyone who wants to is welcome to contribute.

Let me start out, though, by posting an exchange in another thread that got me motivated to make this post:

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It's the only really old PC game that can compete with anything modern, that's for sure.

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Not the only one, try X-Com for example. Pretty much a perfect game.

Swede

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I downloaded this. I find it difficult to get going. X-Com is fuggin' HARD.

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Yes, it is hard, especially without a manual or strat guide. But it is not really that hard in concept or once you get your feet wet.

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There's definitely a steep learning curve. For one thing use the save feature liberally so your best soldiers don't always die. The game won't let you load a save point during a mission, but it's still worth quitting a mission so you can reload to an earlier spot and retry your strategy.

Swede

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This is very true except for the loading a save point during a mission, which I did countless times.

But saving liberally is the way to go, especially when first starting out. Save at the beginning of every battle before getting out of the ship in case you run into those occasional terrible placements of the enemies or bursts of awful luck that can happen occasionally. And to test out how the game works; battles are very replayable at all sorts of points all the way through them, and it's a learning experience on how to do things better next time, too. Not to mention fun.

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X-com is way too hard, you have to do everything perfectly early.


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No you don't, but it will probably feel that way until you've played a while. Being without a manual in this game is a toughie.

Let me give some tips. Some might be called spoilers because they suggest a few clear specifics, but they shouldn't really spoil the game. Think of them more as starter ideas. Anyone with tips of their own is welcome to contribute.

MONEY:

Money is incredibly important. This game has some gamble in it regarding money, and bad luck can hurt. Not responding to a mission can be costly and lose you critical funding, but responding when you're weak and your soldiers are injured can kill soldiers you've built up all game, and lose tons of expensive items and supplies that can't be quickly replaced. Chasing ships you're not strong enough to battle can result in a lost ship, which can be very time-consuming and expensive to replace, and leave your squad helpless for extended periods of time, causing an avalanche of city losses and lost funding.

Nevertheless, there are things in your control.

For one, how profitable your research and building are. The greater part of your money in the game is going to come from items you build, not capture, and you are going to have to be aggressive about getting your money. Your funding will not come close to getting you where you need to go. You must sell!

This is a numbers game combined with a resource game. Some items are profitable to produce without using the alien's unique element, (etherium?) and some need the etherium. For the most part, you get the most value producing items that don't compromise your etherium supply, which can be used up in large amounts later in the game as spaceship fuel and other things. And of course, some items can be looted or captured, including live and dead aliens.

ITEM PRODUCTION:

Probably the best item to produce in the game, and worth devoting easily an entire room full of engineers to producing virtually non-stop, is the laser pistol. Ir is made quickly and cheaply and produces very nice profits, without using up vital etherium. Speed counts in this game, as if you do not have the money to pay for upkeep come the turn of the month, the game punishes you severely. Yet you need to keep plowing money into making things to make more money too. Liquidity counts. So even if you build other things, you should consider always having some laser pistols in production to steadily add to the store of cash on hand. This comes in handy when something must be bought, when you have a new room built for new scientists or engineers and want to rent some in the middle of the month, or when you are about to face the disaster of not being able to meet your monthly upkeep and will start losing assets.

The second best item to produce is probably laser rifles. They make only a tiny shade more cash, but produce slower. This is very often critical, so effectively they can be much less useful to sell than are laser pistols.

Next on the list come plasma pistols and rifles. When you are suddenly flush with etherium, they can bring you in a lot of money. But etherium comes and goes, so using it up for a fast cash infusion is usually productive only when you've made he bungle of not having enough storage space to put it in.

Etherium itself can be sold, but sells cheaply compared to what can be made from it. You'll also need some for ammo, and using it as ship fuel eats huge quantities of it. It's rarely a good idea to sell it.

Alien corpses can be sold. Note that this is an excellent argument for sparing use of the rocket launcher. The same goes for alien weaponry. Disintegrating them leaves you nothing to sell. More on the rocket launcher later.

STORAGE SPACE:

You lose when you get a live alien and have no place to quarantine and research him. A dead one uncovers far fewer secrets for your scientists. It hurts to build structures that don't directly produce money in this very tight money game, but you lose a lot when you don't. Some aliens are a lucky find and hard to take alive, so you really don't want to lose them. This is why multiple live alien storage facilities are often very handy. You will, as always, be taking a chance no matter how you make your build choices regarding this one.

This goes the same for places to store all your snagged weapons and etherium and dead aliens. Stuff you leave behind on a battlefield is a major loss. Stuff you can't build because there's no place to store it, while your engineers still cost money to employ and are doing nothing, is a huge loss too. You should ALWAYS be thinking about what will happen if you have a bit of luck and get a nice cache of alien goodies or need to stockpile more supplies. For instance, if all the engineers are building something important at one of your bases but that base needs plasma guns, you are going to have to build plasma guns for it somewhere else, and have storage space until the transfer. This kind of thing happens all the time. Never be caught with your pants down when it comes to money and thinking ahead -- build plenty of storage.

RESEARCH/ENGINEERING

It sucks to have scientists working on nothing. Learn the research trees that matter, so you can have multiple projects going at once. A tree that leads to one branch can waste scientists while one that leads to many things can get full value out of them. A tree choice that will lead, say, to laser pistols is one of the ones you should make a beeline for, as it will immediately help you start paying your way in the game.

You should also keep on the plasma trail, as plasma guns will be your main weapon later on. It's very handy to be able to pick up an alien's gun and start firing it instead of just sticking it in your backpack and staying defenseless.

ANd you face a huge loss if one of your own ships gets shot down. This is one of the most dramatic rolls of the dice in the game. Keep your research going so your whole operation isn't blasted to smithereens when you pit a weak earth tech ship against a tough alien one.

You will have to balance this out, like balancing any budget. You need quite a few engineers going on a nice juicy item before you can afford to pay for both engineers AND scientists, as well as everything else you need. This is a game it will help to have a scratch pad nearby on, and might make you use a calculator once in a while, especially when brand new to it.

WEAPONRY:

Laser pistols, and rifles, are ideal to equip your men with who have low resistance to psi attacks. You will find this out by them being successfully psi attacked and starting to turn on and kill your troops! This is when you do NOT want them to have advanced weaponry! Or a rocket launcher. Especially equipped. Lasers are still effective against many aliens but less likely to kill your own men outright. They can also be very accurate and do the wonderful service of saving your plasma ammo for the end of the mission, where you'll usually find the baddest of the bad guys. The rapid fire rate of lasers is an enormous help in boosting the accuracy stats of your soldiers, one of the most important stats by far that they have.

They are also light and ammo is no problem, unlike the plasma weapons, which carry limited and very expensive ammo.

Plasma weapons are your meat and potatoes later. I find the plasma rifle, because of its extreme accuracy, even better than the heavy plasma rifle. The plasma pistol is okay, but I find the laser pistol generally superior due to the reasons given above.

Rockets are great, but messy. When psi-controlled, they can cripple your whole squad. They can also knock stairs out that could be used for a relatively safe trip up into an unoccupied room, forcing your men to take another much more dangerous entry point into a trap. Rockets also cause smoke that is hazardous for your men to be in, but which of course they can't always escape, as when they're unconscious. This happens frequently when your rocket man sees an alien right next to your guy and blasts him, knocking your guy out and putting him on a death spiral because he can't out of the smoke.

Because of the problems with rockets, rocket men are often best kept at the back of the squad. They are also very good men to get movement bonuses on for precisely this reason. Strength bonuses are very helpful for a rocketman too, but you don't need too much accuracy. And accuracy will build fine with time.

Grenades are quite handy, as they give the ordinary soldier the ability to mount many area attacks and do it without carrying heavy equipment like the rocket launcher. Unfortunately, like the rocket, smoke problems come into play and so does destruction of the alien bodies and weapons your finances and research need. Nevertheless, they can be quite handy, and a smoke screen is sometimes the only thing that will save your squad if they suddenly disembark into a squad of closely packed aliens or turn the corner of a building and run into the same thing. Get at least one or two of your men to get plenty of practice throwing grenades, even if they don't have to. Additionally, timed grenades are sometimes the only way you can get at an alien who won't come out until you retreat, and are very satisfying traps.

Vehicles: They take up a lot of space and are usually not worth it for the firepower they bring. What they are very good for is protected recon in an open environment, which can be very valuable toward the end of the game. For most of the game, though, you'll probably find vehicles more of a loss than a gain.

Last but not least, the cattleprod/stun gun type dealies. These are surprisingly great. Many aliens cannot be taken down by anything else at certain points of the game and your siuation. They also are the perfect way to capture live aliens or take out a psi-infected solider of your home team without killing him.

LOAD-OUT:

Rockets are heavy. Your rocketman will be sorely burdened with them, and but it is a mistake to burden him so much that he can't pick up a valuable alien artifact, or can't defend himself when using a rocket would blow him up too, or his squadmates. He needs something that takes less time to fire than a rocket too. So always equip him with at the very least a laser pistol, and when he gets strong enough, you can give him a rifle too. He should be able to carry at least three rockets even when pretty weak, and other squad members can carry rockets for him too. Managing to keep him in rockets is a cool part of the game. And remember, you might sometimes want to experiment with more than one rocketman.

I've mentioned that everyone will eventually be able to carry a laser pistol and laser rifle and should do so regardless of what else he is carrying even if he has no intentions of equipping them. All should have at least a smoke grenade and a regular grenade, and most can make do with several. But you also must treasure your empty space.

You'll need it to pick up a fallen comrade and carry him back to the ship. If you can't pick him up and he because your backpack is full, ouch! Could be a huge loss. You don't need all the space in the world, but your people should be able to collect lots of artifacts or dump out their backpacks and have others able to pick it up. Rescuing a comrade can call for picking up a dumped out backpack, and so can getting the goodies of a psi-weakling whose backpack you've dumped so he doesn't kill anybody.

Watch your ammo, particularly rockets, grenades, and flares. Get a feel for how many of them you tend to use in both normal and emergency situations, and do some thinking about how you can juggle a happy medium between carelessness and paranoia, as well as just unthinking wastefulness of space.

Everyone should also have a stunprod. Without exception. They are too valuable and powerful and useful in surprising situations. They can surprise you by winning you many missions.

Medikits and scanners are also important, but medikits moreso.

FIRING SOLUTIONS:

Take your rocket guy off auto-fire! Put guys with laser pistols ON auto fire a lot of the time, as they'll hit so fast that accuracy won't matter, and they'll light up the target for others.

Remember that it's often better safe than sorry. If you have everybody splat out their rounds inaccurately on autofire and do nothing, you may lose the battle. Always keep at least a few reliable sharpshooters on aimed fire so that when everything goes south, they can still pull your bacon out of the fire by refusing to miss. It's good to have at least one of these guys with a laser rifle so he can fire often and quickly, but eventually most of your sniper types will have plasma rifles, the most accurate gun and because of that only rarely worth going any heavier than.

A note: plasma rifle ammo seems to be the hardest to come by in the field, much harder than heavy plasma reloads. So be careful with it and treasure ones you find. You can move ammo from one clip to another, too.


TACTICS:

Every man in my squads has a laser pistol, and most have a laser rifle. They are lightweight and don't take up much room. The pistols can be equipped very quickly and fired off within the same turn once you've built up movement points. Their rapid rate of fire makes them ideal to light up a monster for the other shooters due to getting a first shot off on him and his resultant usage of movement points. You'll often find a laser blast starts off everyone else firing at the alien and killing him before the alien can properly respond and kill the laser pistol guy. Because lasers fire early and quick, you'll often kill an alien from multiple laser blasts before having to use any plasma ammo, saving not just money but the ammo you'll find critical later. They are also excellent for burning through walls on the cheap.

I've already commented on the value of psi-infected soldiers not having something as powerful as a rocket or a plasma. Here's another tip: Put the stunprods in the hand of a soldier who is being constantly psi-attacked and if he goes bad he will not be able to shoot your guys.

Also consider dumping the backpack of someone psi-sensitive. It's best he have not quite nothing, so he doesn't die out right to an alien, but not something that will kill your guys either. Laser pistol and prod time.

Remember that rockets don't need to be accurate to do damage. If you cannot target an alien, you can still wound or kill him by firing next to him if smoke obscures him.

Try to kill aliens from outside the room if you can. Slice the pie by putting soldiers at angles to the doors so they can see inside at a slant before you plop them right in front of a door. You can stack them in a diagonal line behind each other in some doorways, giving you multiple soldiers able to fire at various points in the room as soon as the door opens. You can also throw a grenade inside to obscure your entry or stun an alien. Watch out that your rocketman isn't set to fire on an alien if he suddenly appears and winds up wiping out half your crew gathered around the door.

Move your soliders like soldiers move in the real way, not all in a knot. That would render them vulnerable to grenades and limit what they can visually uncover. Keep some looking in directions the others aren't. Enfilade them, making them approach an object not all in the same line, but so their fire overlaps. Think of moving them in a way that if an alien bullet misses the guy in front, it won't hit the guy in back. Remember than aliens can sneak up behind you in territory you've already covered, or come through doors from rooms you checked then left behind.

SOLDIER DEVELOPMENT:

If you know a mission is about to end, get your guys to do things like walk out their movement points so they can have a further chance to build movement and strength stats. Do the same with a grenade once in a while, if you can, to boost throwing stats. Fire a laser. Lift stuff they can only carry a few steps before being paralyzed with exhaustion.

Keep careful track of your soliders' stats, as this is key to their development. A strong soldier is an obvious one to carry rockets, and weak ones need to be built up and stressed a little more. Accurate ones need that precious skill nourished, so let them be snipers rather than reactive guys up front. Psi weakness is incredibly critical, so get weak guys out of your squads as soon as possible, as they're not worth developing.

Keeping track of all this in the heat of battle is near impossible. So what I do is use the naming system. I may have a soldier named after his stats. I may have Pam125337 to denote, say, three stats I consistently want to keep track of. Say strength, psi, and accuracy. It takes some busy work that is well worth it, so at the end of a mission, I note each of their stats and edit their names so that they now reflect their new stats. This way I will always have their most important capabilities at hand.

I also keep a steno pad with everyone's name on it and all their changing stats. In depth knowledge of your soldiers is very handy in this game, and the quickest easiest way by far is having it on paper.

When you're at the point in the game where you can train soldiers to find out their psi weakness, do it. At that point, building up the stats of a useless soldier is a big loss, much bigger than the waste of money paying to test their psi abilities in the laboratory. You'll find psi weakness can be one of the most important considerations in the game.

SQUAD DEVELOPMENT:

As you start building multiple fire teams per base, and getting multiple bases, you will be faced with the choice of always building from scratch or seeding your rookie teams with a few ringers. You also get the chance to go through a lot of rookies really quickly to see if you have guys with enough psi strength to be worth keeping, and dropping them before you've made heavy stat investments in them or taken serious risks with them.

In this way you can have experienced and novice squads reinforcing each other for the benefit of both.

Consider giving your A team a substantial amount of rest at some points so the rookies can get their stats built up taking on lesser ships. You wouldn't send them into the serious battles, but they're no good to you if you don't build them up and find out their capabilities. And there's never a better time to die than in the beginning. Ultimately, you would like to be able to afford an A team, with some solid back-ups waiting in the injury wards, and a complete lesser squad. And a few guys under psi checks. And ultimately, having many teams in the field means many looted items to pay possibly not just for the one base but for other bases too, and to build more bases still. You can start hauling in some serious loot this way.

This is very necessary for the ongoing production of bases that can protect themselves, too. Alien invasions of bases aren't all that common, but they happen. You want to start a base with soldiers that have a little strength and won't be a walkover for the aliens. So think of soldier development as something that's never really "over," but an ongoing commitment. Eventually you'll have a favorite squad that could have members from many different bases, and send them against the aliens for the final battle.


SHIP DEVELOPMENT:

You can get by with weak ships that have strong weapons for a while. You can also get by well with ships that have one fast weak weapon to get the initial shots in plus one more deadly weapon. Having one fast weak weapon can be very important, because it keeps you from obliterating small ships and the prizes within them entirely, as well as all the stat boosts your guys might get from fighting it on the ground. It also helps keep your from killing off so much of the alien crew and destroying so much of their stuff that you get minimum value out of the battle. Remember, it's not just about what you kill, but what you capture, research, and get a chance to sell. And all the stats you build along the way. This may lead you to deploy multiple ships to increase your chances of downing a ship with a few weak blasts from each instead of obliterating it.

Eventually, ships will just outrun you even if they don't outfight you. Upgrading ships can feel near catasrophically expensive, but everything regarding ships is near catasrophic. Be prepared to upgrade and upgrade in a hurry if you have to. Just a couple of ships running around that you can't handle will destroy your worldwide support.

BASE DEVELOPMENT:

I've touched on the need for alien quarantine chambers, and labs, and the need to have plenty of engineers working away, as well as storage. Here's some more.

Build so that if your base is attacked, the aliens cannot come through the middle and into every room, wrecking up the place. Keep your vulnerabilities off to one side and build out.

Always have space for at least two vehicle bays. If a ship is down or being equipped, you still need to be able to do your job. A second hangar is vital. You can also build extras for your other bases if you have empty hangars in one.

Build short-range radars without hesitation. Long range radars are not enough, and will miss ships sometimes. You need the overlap! Don't skimp on radars at any point in the game; make them a priority.

META-ISSUES RE BASES.

You will need to get multiple bases up, or whole sections of the world will go down without a fight. You will also want some overlap here and there, as when the game gets going you will get so many calls you can't handle them all. Being able to handle a call with another base because of slight overlap can be a big boon. This is especially so because when you are very busy, your soldiers will constantly be getting injured and need to recover. It's nice to have a helping hand from another base sometimes.

Considering trying to build your bases in a networked triangular pattern. You may find that a base in Europe goes great with a base in the North Pole, and that the perfect compliment to that is one in the eastern part of the U.S. All three of these bases may be able to share targets and detection, giving a lot of safety and offensive ability over a broad area.

You will also have to put bases up without support sometimes, leaving them in busy areas vulnerable to alien attack. Tough beans. Be sure you get soldiers, radar, storage, and defenses in them as soon as you can, as you will not be able to leave them up and empty forever, and sometimes not long at all. Unfortunately, having to rapidly drain your supply of experienced soldiers, weapons, vehicles, and cash to get another base going can make for some nail-biting decisions and some real hardship, like occasionally going on missions at less than full squad strength. This is why financial management and timing of resupply is so important. You will occasionally have to do things that strain your resources to the utmost.

Okay that's enough for now and should give people new to XCOM a pretty good fighting start. A lot more than I had when I started anyway. Give the game a fair try, being sure to optimize your income, and you'll have tremendous fun with this, one of the best games ever.

And just let me emphasize again - save plenty. Not only are decisions important in this game, but better still, battles are randomly generated. This means you can start off better if you save just before landing. And some battles are so outrageously fun that it's a real joy to save them and play them over and over again, so saving right after landing is cool too. This game rewards saving highly.