DON'T YOU DARE GET BETWEEN ME AND A SENSELESS BLACK CROSS DEATH, YOU FUCKING FAGGOT!
Let's Sperg Let's Play XCOM UFO Defense (Completed) - Heavy casualties expected.
- Thread starter L50LasPak
- Start date
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Sister services, email, and search will continue to be negatively effected by the attacks. I made a thread to talk about it, if you're into networking.
Radical Cadre
kiwifarms.net
Don't worry - I'm sure that after that initial showing, both of our deaths will be hilariously ignoble.
wtfNeedSignUp
kiwifarms.net
I know I'm risking instant karma by saying it, but goddamn my clone is still alive, got some kills and might get to the final mission. The only thing I can say is the X-Com motto: "MORITURI NOLUMUS MORI".
Everyone get really close to me, all our dreams can be achieved.
(Edit - I'm a clueless faggot that fucked up multi-quoting, and my avatar deserves to die horribly for that.)
Radical Cadre
kiwifarms.net
I think we found our team leader!!
Mary the Goldsmith
kiwifarms.net
now I want to get back on the action just to die by your side
Under my command, it will be less Imperial Army, no change in Black Flag deaths, and more explosions. Survivors get extra rations, though!
Primed ayy grenade alongside a Blaster Launcher, last one down the ramp's a dirty egg!
Not grimdark enough. You'll probably get mind fucked by an Ethereal and chuck grenades on everyone.
Radical Cadre
kiwifarms.net
CAME TO EARTH IN A SILVER CHROME UFO
TO PROBE YOUR ASS AND SEE HOW DEEP IT CAN GO
GAIN A BOOST WHEN I MERGE MY MIND WITH MY BRO
AYY
TO PROBE YOUR ASS AND SEE HOW DEEP IT CAN GO
GAIN A BOOST WHEN I MERGE MY MIND WITH MY BRO
AYY
That's the plan.
19. Slaughter in the Skies
I swear to you we're not finished yet.
We are getting pretty close though. The only mission that I am required to do to complete the game is the Cydonia mission, but before this LP ends I would like to show off the Base Defense mission and assault an Ethereal base just to say I did. I originally considered also doing one of every UFO type but that would require getting the notoriously shy Cruiser to spawn.
If an alien Battleship spawns with the mission "Alien Retaliation", which should happen at least twice during this update due to me researching The Martian Solution and Cydonia or Bust the previous month, then my plan is to let the Battleship land and assault the base. That should take care of the Base Defence mission. In the mean time, I go after this Harvester to give the troops some practice.
The Avenger gives us the ability to deploy an almost unfair number of troops.
Speaking of unfair, three of our soldiers are capable of performing three psionic attacks per turn, and the other three aren't too far off from being able to do so themselves.
Needless to say this utterly mops the floor with Mutons.
Once the Mutons outside have killed each other off or been disposed of by our patrols, its on to the UFO.
This is what UFO breaches look like now. Mutons are so plentiful and our psionic troops so powerful that we can have one available for each soldier performing the search, effectively reducing the risk of these missions to pretty much zero.
The mission doesn't even end with a shootout anymore.
With no casualties of course comes little to no promotions.
There's a scout recovery after this that is of little note.
Our second Avenger completes. since the Avenger is also the fastest craft available in the game as well as the largest, I elect to name this one Sonichu. Sufficent weaponry to outfit both craft is completed shortly afterwards. An Avenger equipped with dual Plasma Beams is supposed to be able to take down an alien Battleship, but I've never tried this myself to be honest.
Its still a few hours before the Chantal and Sonichu will be armed and prepared for use as interception craft. At this point there's hypothetically no need to keep the Jace and Chrischan operational, but they excel in taking down just about every other type of alien craft and they don't expend Elerium when flying around so I see no reason to dispose of them.
These are literally the only three screenshots out of a total of 12 for this scout recovery mission that don't contain the "Mind Control Successful" message box.
Not gonna lie, I'm getting a little impatient waiting for our alien callers to show up.
Even though those dirty bogans have surrendered to the aliens the Chantal takes down a Terror Ship headed straight for them.
Using an Avenger to intercept means you can go on a recovery mission right away if you want to. Eh, why not?
Sectoids, which means Cyberdisks.
I spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to Mind Control a Cyberdisk to demonstrate an entertaining quirk of the original XCOM. It doesn't work even when I pour like two entire turns of psionic attacks into it of course.
Size four units cannot be mind controlled as easily as the regular units because they behave a lot like four small units stuck together, but somehow they all share the same pool of time units. If you perform a psionic attack on one part of the unit, only that part of it expereinces a morale loss, and if you succeed in a Mind Control attack, only that one part will fall under your control. This can result in some amusing moments where you'll order a Mind Controlled unit to move, but it will draw reaction fire from itself, onto itself, at which point it will usually kill itself.
The Cyberdisk being a purely mechanical unit has a ridiculously high psionic defense though, and while my troops have excellent psionic strength at moment they're nowhere near good enough to take control of it. I order it destroyed and start picking off the Sectoids around the Avenger.
The alien psionic attacks are still effective, but only enough to make axfaxf panic. The rest of the team has little trouble advancing into the desert. Sectoids are somewhat unpredictable as they seem to get a boost to avoiding Mind Control after getting taken over for several turns in a row. Its mostly random, but I usually need to kill my slave units every 3 turns or so to prevent them from falling back into enemy hands. Unless they're Mutons, who are so stupid I never need to worry about this problem.
GrammaNazi and AmpleApricots have a close encounter with a Cyberdisk that somehow doesn't end with the two of them getting blown up. Its a good thing that the AI doesn't try to use the explosive nature of the Cyberdisk to its advantage in this game. Terror From the Deep on the other hand is a story for another day.
We've pretty much outstripped every alien faction except the Ethereals at this point.
Still no raider Battleship yet.
We catch this Harvester over the Saharan Desert.
I'm a bit worried about sending our best troops out when that Battleship could appear at any time but I figure we're fairly close by if anything goes wrong.
Of all of the alien tactics, their blind ambush on the first turn remains effective. @Megatardingo is killed.
Down one member, the team sets about the task of clearing the map with the same efficiency as before.
A bout of overconfidence on my part leads to AmpleApricots taking some fire during the alien turn. He doesn't sustain a mortal wound though, just a direct hit.
Most of the aliens appear to be outside.
This proves to be correct. I skipped past the stats screens by accident, you guys will have to trust me when I say they were of little note.
I switch about half of my scientists to researching random alien technology for the hell of it.
I'm not completely certain why, but I decided to take this Scout recovery mission.
It goes alright until I lose one of my minions inside the house because I forgot to leave him in a visible spot.
That's remedied fairly quickly.
UFO breaches ain't what they used to be.
Its about this point where I decide that, as fun as leveling private property with mininukes is, I'm sick of UFO recoveries and just going to grind out air battles until a Battleship with our name on it appears.
Our scientists and pilots seem to be the only ones having any fun right now. Dear Leader and the directors can barely contain their yawning when the scientists excitedly show us that they've figured out how to cut up a cow with a laser.
Finally some action. Raider Battleships are always preceded by two or three Scouts who scan the area first looking for the base. To my dismay the Battleship is targeting North America even though our primary base is in Europe and the aliens should have become aware of it for sooner than the other one.
The Battleship makes its arrival... flies around a bit... and then leaves. Seriously. We've been stood up!
Apparently those Scouts that appear beforehand aren't just for show, they're there to actually help the Battleship figure out where your base is. Since I impudently shot them all down, the Battleship is apparently too stupid to find the base on its own, so it just leaves. This also flies in the face of what I thought I knew about the game, which was that the aliens will automatically become aware of at least one of your bases past a certain point and will definitely become aware of a base once you trigger a Retaliation mission.
I'm fine with admitting I savescumed here, since if the Battleship was too shy to come to us, we'll have to take the fight to them.
Its a bit weird to think of an object that's only about 30 meters in diameter and three decks tall as a Battleship. Still, I'm a little worried that we're not up to this.
Turns out I was worried about nothing. The Chantal doesn't just win the battle, it wins easily, with less than 10 shots fired!
To rub it in, the interception took place right over the Black Sea, so the UFO sunk and all the dipshits onboard died in the landing.
I'll be honest, at this point in the screenshots I was seriously considering just launching the Cydonia mission right here, but I did make that last call for names and wanted to give people a little time to sign up for that. Which turned into two weeks, whoops, but hey, its the thought that counts!
Our pilots tear shit up while our science team cuts shit up.
You'd think this Battleship would know where to find us this time, but I save and let it wander around again only for it to fly off.
While this amount of damage is pretty small in the scheme of things, it leaves our Avengers laid up in the hangar for something like 3-4 days while they undergo repairs.
What follows is nothing short of aerial butchery as I take on every interception I can target while compeltely ignoring ground operations.
We even shoot down another Battleship on its way to conduct an Alien Base mission in Oceania.
The month ends with an overwhelmingly positive score. Just as an experiment, I decided to conduct the entirety of the next month while flat out ignoring all ground operations to see if our score would suffer at all. There are over 100 screenshots between this one and the following; all of interceptions and unimportant research topics. I figure the interceptions are getting samey at this point and the research is all available at the CSignal site, so I say lets skip the crap.
Cutting out ground missions altogether actually increased our score by about 1000 points. Its safe to say the game is over at this point, aside from the final mission. I still want to do an Ethereal Base Assault though.
I've decided to try and make this last batch of soldiers reflect an accurate mix of the people who have been active in the thread since the last two updates. I felt like that would be a bit more inclusive than just cycling through a list of a bunch of random people who may or may not still be interested, plus it would give people who want to get back in the fight right away a chance.
If you're dead and you don't see your name in this latest batch of recruits and feel left out, well, just have faith that this won't be the last XCOM Let's Play I do on here.
@Polyboros2 was supposed to be ressurected in the last batch so I put him in first. @RIPRhongoBongo is our only new addition. The rest are @White Devil, @McMitch4kf, @Fougaro, @Mary the Goldsmith, @Radical Cadre, @Tactical Wizard, @NerdShamer, @Megatardingo, @Overcast
This will put us only a few soldiers over the limit for what the Avenger can carry, but I'll be damn surprised if I don't lose a small handful of people against the Ethereals. If I still somehow have too many troops in the end I'll send them on missions unattended by the psionic team until enough people get killed off. I kept a few unnamed extras incase I really need them; I'll just pull from the dead people list if I need to.
Next Time: Ethereal Base Assault, and likely Cydonia.
I swear to you we're not finished yet.
We are getting pretty close though. The only mission that I am required to do to complete the game is the Cydonia mission, but before this LP ends I would like to show off the Base Defense mission and assault an Ethereal base just to say I did. I originally considered also doing one of every UFO type but that would require getting the notoriously shy Cruiser to spawn.
If an alien Battleship spawns with the mission "Alien Retaliation", which should happen at least twice during this update due to me researching The Martian Solution and Cydonia or Bust the previous month, then my plan is to let the Battleship land and assault the base. That should take care of the Base Defence mission. In the mean time, I go after this Harvester to give the troops some practice.
The Avenger gives us the ability to deploy an almost unfair number of troops.
Speaking of unfair, three of our soldiers are capable of performing three psionic attacks per turn, and the other three aren't too far off from being able to do so themselves.
Needless to say this utterly mops the floor with Mutons.
Once the Mutons outside have killed each other off or been disposed of by our patrols, its on to the UFO.
This is what UFO breaches look like now. Mutons are so plentiful and our psionic troops so powerful that we can have one available for each soldier performing the search, effectively reducing the risk of these missions to pretty much zero.
The mission doesn't even end with a shootout anymore.
With no casualties of course comes little to no promotions.
There's a scout recovery after this that is of little note.
Our second Avenger completes. since the Avenger is also the fastest craft available in the game as well as the largest, I elect to name this one Sonichu. Sufficent weaponry to outfit both craft is completed shortly afterwards. An Avenger equipped with dual Plasma Beams is supposed to be able to take down an alien Battleship, but I've never tried this myself to be honest.
Its still a few hours before the Chantal and Sonichu will be armed and prepared for use as interception craft. At this point there's hypothetically no need to keep the Jace and Chrischan operational, but they excel in taking down just about every other type of alien craft and they don't expend Elerium when flying around so I see no reason to dispose of them.
These are literally the only three screenshots out of a total of 12 for this scout recovery mission that don't contain the "Mind Control Successful" message box.
Not gonna lie, I'm getting a little impatient waiting for our alien callers to show up.
Even though those dirty bogans have surrendered to the aliens the Chantal takes down a Terror Ship headed straight for them.
Using an Avenger to intercept means you can go on a recovery mission right away if you want to. Eh, why not?
Sectoids, which means Cyberdisks.
I spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to Mind Control a Cyberdisk to demonstrate an entertaining quirk of the original XCOM. It doesn't work even when I pour like two entire turns of psionic attacks into it of course.
Size four units cannot be mind controlled as easily as the regular units because they behave a lot like four small units stuck together, but somehow they all share the same pool of time units. If you perform a psionic attack on one part of the unit, only that part of it expereinces a morale loss, and if you succeed in a Mind Control attack, only that one part will fall under your control. This can result in some amusing moments where you'll order a Mind Controlled unit to move, but it will draw reaction fire from itself, onto itself, at which point it will usually kill itself.
The Cyberdisk being a purely mechanical unit has a ridiculously high psionic defense though, and while my troops have excellent psionic strength at moment they're nowhere near good enough to take control of it. I order it destroyed and start picking off the Sectoids around the Avenger.
The alien psionic attacks are still effective, but only enough to make axfaxf panic. The rest of the team has little trouble advancing into the desert. Sectoids are somewhat unpredictable as they seem to get a boost to avoiding Mind Control after getting taken over for several turns in a row. Its mostly random, but I usually need to kill my slave units every 3 turns or so to prevent them from falling back into enemy hands. Unless they're Mutons, who are so stupid I never need to worry about this problem.
GrammaNazi and AmpleApricots have a close encounter with a Cyberdisk that somehow doesn't end with the two of them getting blown up. Its a good thing that the AI doesn't try to use the explosive nature of the Cyberdisk to its advantage in this game. Terror From the Deep on the other hand is a story for another day.
We've pretty much outstripped every alien faction except the Ethereals at this point.
Still no raider Battleship yet.
We catch this Harvester over the Saharan Desert.
I'm a bit worried about sending our best troops out when that Battleship could appear at any time but I figure we're fairly close by if anything goes wrong.
Of all of the alien tactics, their blind ambush on the first turn remains effective. @Megatardingo is killed.
Down one member, the team sets about the task of clearing the map with the same efficiency as before.
A bout of overconfidence on my part leads to AmpleApricots taking some fire during the alien turn. He doesn't sustain a mortal wound though, just a direct hit.
Most of the aliens appear to be outside.
This proves to be correct. I skipped past the stats screens by accident, you guys will have to trust me when I say they were of little note.
I switch about half of my scientists to researching random alien technology for the hell of it.
I'm not completely certain why, but I decided to take this Scout recovery mission.
It goes alright until I lose one of my minions inside the house because I forgot to leave him in a visible spot.
That's remedied fairly quickly.
UFO breaches ain't what they used to be.
Its about this point where I decide that, as fun as leveling private property with mininukes is, I'm sick of UFO recoveries and just going to grind out air battles until a Battleship with our name on it appears.
Our scientists and pilots seem to be the only ones having any fun right now. Dear Leader and the directors can barely contain their yawning when the scientists excitedly show us that they've figured out how to cut up a cow with a laser.
Finally some action. Raider Battleships are always preceded by two or three Scouts who scan the area first looking for the base. To my dismay the Battleship is targeting North America even though our primary base is in Europe and the aliens should have become aware of it for sooner than the other one.
The Battleship makes its arrival... flies around a bit... and then leaves. Seriously. We've been stood up!
Apparently those Scouts that appear beforehand aren't just for show, they're there to actually help the Battleship figure out where your base is. Since I impudently shot them all down, the Battleship is apparently too stupid to find the base on its own, so it just leaves. This also flies in the face of what I thought I knew about the game, which was that the aliens will automatically become aware of at least one of your bases past a certain point and will definitely become aware of a base once you trigger a Retaliation mission.
I'm fine with admitting I savescumed here, since if the Battleship was too shy to come to us, we'll have to take the fight to them.
Its a bit weird to think of an object that's only about 30 meters in diameter and three decks tall as a Battleship. Still, I'm a little worried that we're not up to this.
Turns out I was worried about nothing. The Chantal doesn't just win the battle, it wins easily, with less than 10 shots fired!
To rub it in, the interception took place right over the Black Sea, so the UFO sunk and all the dipshits onboard died in the landing.
I'll be honest, at this point in the screenshots I was seriously considering just launching the Cydonia mission right here, but I did make that last call for names and wanted to give people a little time to sign up for that. Which turned into two weeks, whoops, but hey, its the thought that counts!
Our pilots tear shit up while our science team cuts shit up.
You'd think this Battleship would know where to find us this time, but I save and let it wander around again only for it to fly off.
While this amount of damage is pretty small in the scheme of things, it leaves our Avengers laid up in the hangar for something like 3-4 days while they undergo repairs.
What follows is nothing short of aerial butchery as I take on every interception I can target while compeltely ignoring ground operations.
We even shoot down another Battleship on its way to conduct an Alien Base mission in Oceania.
The month ends with an overwhelmingly positive score. Just as an experiment, I decided to conduct the entirety of the next month while flat out ignoring all ground operations to see if our score would suffer at all. There are over 100 screenshots between this one and the following; all of interceptions and unimportant research topics. I figure the interceptions are getting samey at this point and the research is all available at the CSignal site, so I say lets skip the crap.
Cutting out ground missions altogether actually increased our score by about 1000 points. Its safe to say the game is over at this point, aside from the final mission. I still want to do an Ethereal Base Assault though.
I've decided to try and make this last batch of soldiers reflect an accurate mix of the people who have been active in the thread since the last two updates. I felt like that would be a bit more inclusive than just cycling through a list of a bunch of random people who may or may not still be interested, plus it would give people who want to get back in the fight right away a chance.
If you're dead and you don't see your name in this latest batch of recruits and feel left out, well, just have faith that this won't be the last XCOM Let's Play I do on here.
@Polyboros2 was supposed to be ressurected in the last batch so I put him in first. @RIPRhongoBongo is our only new addition. The rest are @White Devil, @McMitch4kf, @Fougaro, @Mary the Goldsmith, @Radical Cadre, @Tactical Wizard, @NerdShamer, @Megatardingo, @Overcast
This will put us only a few soldiers over the limit for what the Avenger can carry, but I'll be damn surprised if I don't lose a small handful of people against the Ethereals. If I still somehow have too many troops in the end I'll send them on missions unattended by the psionic team until enough people get killed off. I kept a few unnamed extras incase I really need them; I'll just pull from the dead people list if I need to.
Psionics/Scanner Team:
Commander Dear Leader
Colonel Dark Edea
Colonel The Valeyard
Captain Affluent Ectotherm (Affluent Reptilian)
Captain wtfNeedSignUp II
Captain HumanHive II
Ordnance Team:
Captain Genichiro II
Sergeant Frosted Flakes (Corn Flakes)
The Farmers:
Sergeant Penne Dreadful II
Sergeant GrammaNazi II
Sergeant Spunt II
Sergeant axfaxfaxf (axfaxf)
Sergeant Allakazam334 (Allakazam223)
Sergeant Sailing the Salty Sea
Sergeant TerribleIdeasTM
Sergeant Mooger Meng
Squaddie PlentyPears (AmpleApricots)
Fresh Meat:
Rookie Polyguurl (Polyboros2)
Rookie RIPRhongoBongo
Rookie Y Diafol Gwyn (White Devil)
Rookie McMitch5kf (McMitch4kf)
Rookie Fougaro The 3rd (Fougaro)
Rookie Mary the Tungstensmith (Mary the Goldsmith)
Rookie Infinite Radical Cadres (Radical Cadre)
Rookie Tactical Sorcerer (Tactical Wizard)
Rookie GeekHumiliator (Nerdshamer)
Rookie Gigatardingo (Megatardingo)
Rookie Couvert (Overcast)
Commander Dear Leader
Colonel Dark Edea
Colonel The Valeyard
Captain Affluent Ectotherm (Affluent Reptilian)
Captain wtfNeedSignUp II
Captain HumanHive II
Ordnance Team:
Captain Genichiro II
Sergeant Frosted Flakes (Corn Flakes)
The Farmers:
Sergeant Penne Dreadful II
Sergeant GrammaNazi II
Sergeant Spunt II
Sergeant axfaxfaxf (axfaxf)
Sergeant Allakazam334 (Allakazam223)
Sergeant Sailing the Salty Sea
Sergeant TerribleIdeasTM
Sergeant Mooger Meng
Squaddie PlentyPears (AmpleApricots)
Fresh Meat:
Rookie Polyguurl (Polyboros2)
Rookie RIPRhongoBongo
Rookie Y Diafol Gwyn (White Devil)
Rookie McMitch5kf (McMitch4kf)
Rookie Fougaro The 3rd (Fougaro)
Rookie Mary the Tungstensmith (Mary the Goldsmith)
Rookie Infinite Radical Cadres (Radical Cadre)
Rookie Tactical Sorcerer (Tactical Wizard)
Rookie GeekHumiliator (Nerdshamer)
Rookie Gigatardingo (Megatardingo)
Rookie Couvert (Overcast)
Next Time: Ethereal Base Assault, and likely Cydonia.
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I didn't ask to be put back in to give someone else a chance, but thank you for letting me take part in the final mission!
I love how X-COM just snowballs into wanton alien slaughter in the skies once you get to the right tech level. It's like the game is telling you to stop faffing about and go kick in the gates of Cydonia.
I'm ready to coooooom, I mean, prime my entire bandolier of plasma grenades!
McMitch4kf
kiwifarms.net
let’s go! Here’s hoping to great success or miserabke failure, as there is no other option for an X-COM soldier!
JongleJingle
kiwifarms.net
Been a long time since I checked this thread out...
Boss, I beg of you, lemme in one last time! I must see the gates of Cydonia and kick some ass myself! Even if both of my clones died lol
Pretty please? With sugar on top?
Boss, I beg of you, lemme in one last time! I must see the gates of Cydonia and kick some ass myself! Even if both of my clones died lol
Pretty please? With sugar on top?
"Good. Goooood. Now prepare the anus."
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