NKF's X-COM Apocalypse: Starter's Guide

NKF's X-COM Apocalypse: Starters Guide

A work in progress by NKF

Preface

Starting an X-COM Apocalypse game can sometimes be daunting for first time players, even if they are veterans of the first two X-COM games. So, where do we begin? Well, before we begin, I want to say what this guide is not.

It is not a complete start to end walkthrough. It is only a guide to get players up and running in a new game. It is not meant to be a replacement for the game manual. While this guide may list a few keyboard and mouse commands, players are assumed to know most of the essential interface commands. And even if you don't, well, I'm not going to stop you.

Also, this guide assumes that you can actually get the game to run. It will not include tips on how to get it running on your current OS version. There are better sources for this sort of information.

Baby Steps: Starting the game

Starting a new campaign is generally a simple task of picking the right difficulty level and jumping right into the action. Fair enough. But then there are some nutters out there that make a real deal about it. If you file yourself under this category, this chapter will be of some assistance. And even if you don't, it can probably give you some insights that'll help you along the way.

Choosing a Difficulty Level

If you have absolutely no qualms in actually starting the game, skip ahead to the next chapter, or read on.

The main reason to deliberate on what difficulty level to play is often an easy one to answer. You just want to have an easier time, or you want a challenge. In Apocalypse, the difficulty level is more than just a simple stat increase for your enemies. Here are some things to consider when deciding on a difficulty level:

• Score Progression: The main reason is to decide how toned down your opposition will be. On easier levels, the sheer size of the alien forces you'll encounter will be much smaller, and their stats will be weaker. However, this also means that your score progression will be slower. On the other hand, on harder levels, you get points faster because of larger alien forces. Score controls the release of alien technology, so you tend to obtain technology a lot faster on harder levels, assuming you don't take an overly passive approach and avoid all combat.
• The Map : Difficulty will ultimately influence the type of map you are to play on. On easier levels Mega Primus is a small scenic city that is easy enough to manage, but as the difficulty is ramped up, the city turns into a sprawling Megapolis. This is more for aesthetics than for practical purposes. But it does control the next point.
• Base Sites: The more difficult the level, the more base site locations you'll have open to you. On the easiest level, you can only build up to 6 bases, while the hardest level gives you 8 possible locations. Unfortunately, not all bases locations are equally distributed around the city. While not necessarily a problem, it does mean refuelling and rearming ships and soldiers and then redeploying them to the right locations can become a bit of a hassle.

Your first base

You cannot officially choose your starting base or the layout of the pre-built base modules because base selection and initial module layout is random.

Luckily, you can meddle with fate somewhat by doing a base scrum. Restart the game on the difficulty level of your choice over and over until you get the base configuration that best suits your needs.

Note: Don't spend too much time doing this if you don't get the results that are desired. While you can eventually get any one of the base sites in the city, the chance of actually getting most of them beyond the set of the first four or so common base sites is very slim indeed. Getting the perfect base site that you want along with the module configuration, and personnel will be very difficult to get. You cannot get everything, so pick one that is acceptable and get on with it. You'll have plenty of opportunities to redecorate and rearrange your base. But most important of all, have fun. If you're not having fun, then what's the point?

Real Estate

Bases are differentiated by corridor layout and the topside building that the base is hidden under. The top-side portion of the base will also determine how many launch tubes your base will have. With a bit of pre-planning, the number of launch tubes are not particularly important, but we'll come to that later.

There are only two types of buildings that X-Com bases can be built in. Slums or warehouses.

Slum

A slum block can be huge, massive even on some maps. But they are very weak and any small section that is damaged can collapse other sections in a domino effect. In short, slums are very fragile. A section of slums can easily fall to even the lightest of mis-fired rockets, and if there are any other slum buildings that are connected, they too will fall. On the other hand, slum blocks often feature large building areas.

Warehouse

Warehouses are smaller, but they are tougher and can withstand more damage than a slum block. They are also more aesthetically pleasing to the eyes. Unfortunately, not many warehouses offer specious building areas.

Corridors

The beauty of the various corridor layouts lies not just in how much expansion potential is available, but in how the layout can be utilised in base defence. Each one is better suited for one purpose than another.

Small layouts are the best for defence as you can force attackers into choke points. However they lack the space to allow for constructing a multi-purpose base that has a little of everything - forcing them into specialised roles. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The main headache is deciding which facilities to decentralise and move to a new base.

Bases with large wide open layouts offer the opposite. With more space you get more room to build facilities, but your six teams of soldiers and technical staff will be spread all over the base. If the base has a repair bay, your defence modules will have to spread thin to cover both the repair bay and the grav-lift. As the game can only operate so many defence turrets at any given time, attackers will be able to break through the defence guns a lot easier and possibly infiltrate the base.

Grav-lift locations can also make or break your primary base as they are fixed. Take their locations into consideration as well when choosing a layout.

Weigh up your options and go for the base that you think would work best.

Getting into the thick of things

So you've bought your base, and you're happy with it. Good. You've taken the plunge and are now able to actually start playing the game. Hurrah!

Since Apocalypse is so open ended, I cannot possibly tell you what you must do next and where to go from there. This you must decide on your own.

Initial Housekeeping

The first thing you'll want to do after purchasing your new base is to inspect the goods. We'll start with the base screen. Bring it up and have a look at what's there.

A look at the base

In the base screen you'll have access to the various other key trading and management functions. For now, let's concentrate on the base. Look at how the existing modules are placed. It's a mess, isn't it? Initial module placement is pseudo-random, so it will not always end up in a very desireable layout.

You will have all the facilities that you need to get you through the first week or so at your disposal. You don't need to build any more at this stage, but you may want to plan ahead and think about what you would like to build. If you want to rearrange your base layout to something more manageable, such as moving the quarters and labs to a safer location, you can start building them now and then dismantle the old facilities when they are built. Defenses shouldn't be a major priority at the moment as long as you keep a low profile and not make too many enemies.

Tip: hovering your mouse over your facilities will bring up additional information about them, such as current capacity.

After you've done your tour of the base itself, let's head on to the garage and inspect the vehicles.

A look at your vehicles

You can inspect your vehicles from the vehicle inventory screen or any menu that lists all the vehicles and soldiers in the current building. The vehicle inventory screen provides the most in-depth view of your ships, and should be used for all vehicle inspection and modification, while the building vehicle lists are very general and are mainly used to allow access to the vehicle inventory screen for a specific vehicle.

You'll have a small fleet of starting vehicles to play with. A Valkyrie interceptor, curiously fitted with a different engine than the standard issue engine, a pair of Pheonix hovercars, a Stormdog and a Wolfhound APC.

All the vehicles are divided into two classes, ground and air vehicles.

Ground Vehicles

Ground vehicles are restricted to traveling on the road, and suffer from the limitations of the road, which means they cannot get to any off-road sites, like UFO crash sites. They are very limited for use in UFO combat and are severely outclassed by the air ships in this role. This is unfortunate as some of the ground vehicles come with very high class cheap cost weapons, such as the Anti Air Guard cannon standard issue mounts on Stormdogs and any one of the three turrets that can fit onto the tanks. This means pre-position of road vehicles is of great importance. Road cars are also susceptible to instant death when they go off the road, making them less than satisfactory as front line attackers as more often than not, the road under the car will be destroyed before any damage is done to the car. Road vehicles do excel at providing intercity transportation to and from terror sites, although a lot of players prefer to get an additional air ship to fill that role.

Air Vehicles

Air ships are the bread and butter of your Cityscape forces. Any ship you are assigned can provide multiple roles, from transport to interception. Air ships are not restricted to the road, but they can suffer almost instantaneous death if they are caught underneath any falling debris.

Here are some of the author's thoughts on your default starting vehicles. While these are mainly opinion, do not let this stop you from making up your own mind about the discussed vehicles.

Valkyrie Interceptor

The Valkyrie interceptor is built for intercepting UFOs. However, in actual practice, the Valkyrie starts off quite well, but in the long run is quite a poor interceptor due to its low expandability, weak hull, size and small weapon mounts. It does however have larger weapon hardpoints than a Pheonix Hovercar, allowing for larger weapons like the Lancer laser to be mounted. If used correctly, it makes for a great troop transporter or even a support fighter.

Pheonix Hovercar

The Phoenix hovercar is best thought of as a smaller variant of the Valkyrie. It may be smaller, but that's where its strength lies. Because it's a smaller target. it's able to dodge more incoming attacks than the Valkyrie and even if it's destroyed, it's easy to replace. Mixed with Hoverbikes, Hovercars can provide adequate air power for early UFO encounters.

Stormdog

The Stormdog, like most road vehicles, isn't particularly noteworthy except that it comes with a standard issue anti-airguard cannon, which provides fair firepower against most of the early UFOs. The Stormdog can be used as a transportation vehicle, but it cannot carry any storage modules. For actual transportation of soldiers and goods by road, the Wolfhound is far better suited to such a task.

Wolfhound APC

The Wolfhound suffers from the same fate as all road cars, so there's little to say about it except that it's designed to carry troops and haul equipment from terror sites. The Wolfhound provides superb intercity travel, making it a great secondary or tertiary troop transporter at the start of the game.

A Look at your Staff

TODOs:

• Insert brief intros to agents and techs - quick description of tects
• A brief note about hiring/firing

Moving on, we head to the barracks to inspect the motley crew of ne'er do wells that'll be battling the greeblies, squigglies and squishy squashy aliens that threaten Mega Primus.

(Lots of stuff missing here that needs to be restored)

This is best done after your purchase of new equipment and any new agents you've hired have arrived.

The agent equipment screen shows you your agent's vital statistics, combat history and the agent's inventory and whatever is in storage.

First you'll want a quick overview of your agent's stats. Take particular note of the agent's strength levels, as this will determine what sort of load the agent will be comfortable with. The actual levels of most of the other stats aren't particularly important at this stage of the game - they'll improve with combat.

You can now move onto kitting your agents.

One suggestion is to remove the equip of all of your agents and then start building your kit up from scratch. To do this, select all of your agents by using ctrl+LMB on their portraits until all of the agents are selected. Start removing items from the visible agent's inventory. Since not all of the agents will be equipped the same way, you'll have to fill some gaps with a random item and then unload it to clear the slot for the other agents. You can check other inventories by using ctrl+LMB on the other agents.

Equip your troops as you see fit. At the very least kit your main team that'll be going out on the missions. A good mixture of weapons along with stun grapples is always a good way to start out.

Your First Mission

TODO:

• Quick introduction to TB/RT.
• Some basic controls like walking, formations, shooting, priming grenades and jumping.

After you've had your fill inspecting and setting up your operations, the only thing you can do next is wait since you have no idea where the aliens are at this point in time. Hit the ultra-fast time setting and relax.

Let time pass and you'll get a distress call alerting you to an alien presence somewhere in the city. You'll get to choose to launch your ships at this point. This will send the ships directly to the distress area. You can also access your inventories to change soldier equipment at this time.

If you choose to skip launching your ships at this time, you can track down the investigation area by going to your overhead map display and locating the building that's marked with a big red circle. This circle only appear when alerts are made, and will slowly shrink with time.

Unless you save/reload, there's no way to avoid the first mission announcing itself with an alert siren. Later on you'll be able to go to alien infestation sites the moment the aliens are dropped into the buildings.

The very first mission itself is a doozy with little opposition beyond the dreaded brainsuckers. You'll meet a small number of anthropods that'll launch brainsuckers at you and not do much else.

But don't get complacent. If you are careless and a brainsucker latches itself onto an agent's head, get if as quickly as you can otherwise your fellow agent will start shooting at you with live rounds. To remove the brainsucker, shoot at it or hit it with an explosive round.

As soon as all the anthropods and brainsuckers are either dead or have fled the combat zone, you'll have won the mission.

To completely confound the aliens on this mission, you could opt to send a lone android.

Your First Air Skirmish - or Not

• TODO: Brief introduction to ship controls. Difference between ground/road. Also a mention of the spacebar.

After your first mission, there'll be no more alien sightings. You can then rest up and let time pass until the alien's make their next move.

This will involve sending in a series of probe and scouts through the three dimension gates that you've probably noticed floating about the city.

Launch your ships and engage the UFOs in aerial combat. Again, this fight is generally a doozy since the probes and scouts are not very strong and do not have much firepower. The problem will come from the distance between gates and where your ships are launching from. More on this later.

While fighting, be absolutely sure to keep track of the three probes, especially if you aren't able to go after all three of them. The scouts act as escorts, so need only be destroyed. The probes however intend to fly to a set location, drop alien troops in it and then flee back to the dimension gates.

If the transporter makes its drop, keep track of the building and send a team there to clean up the mess immediately. Whether the UFO escapes or is destroyed at this point is meaningless.