How do I not get rekt by the aliens before I can even see them?

>>3642134
toss some smoke grenades down before you let your guys off the ship

>>3642134
If you're fighting at night you're doing it wrong. If it's a terror mission and you don't want to use the always fight at day exploit (which you shouldn't), just land and take off again, you can make up the points elsewhere.

And >>3642142 is correct.

Also do nothing on your first turn so the aliens don't have full TUs for reaction shots.

>>3642134

Throw smoke grenades in a perimeter as you set up. Then throw flares past the smoke. The first part of the game is the hardest, as you have a big disadvantage in weaponry and armor, so play more carefully.

>>3642134
here's how you do it:
>use cover
>use smoke grenades, grenades and missiles
>use cattle prods [/spoileer]
>use expendable rookies

>throw smoke and pass first turn
>floater casually lobs alien grenade into skyranger

th...thanks

>>3642142
>>3642159
This.
Aliens don't get any penalties for fighting at night. Keep that advantage away from them.
Use your entire first turn laying smoke. Don't leave the ship until turn 2. This solves 2 problems:
Aliens likely won't snipe you out through smoke
and
Aliens have full TU during your turn 1. If you stumble upon one during turn 2 instead, they'll have less opportunity to shoot back.

As for other basic stuff, use rifles and kneel when shooting. Don't bunch up your troops incase of grenades or stray shots. Save some TUs for reaction fire. Use cover as much as possible. Make liberal use of grenades and high explosives. Lasers are a decent stopgap until you get good weapons. Medkits aren't useless. Keep your highest ranking soldier with the ship. Retreat is better than a total loss. (Also, showing to a terror mission and retreating on turn 1 is much better than not showing up at all)

You're going to loose a ton of soldiers in the early game, no matter what. Once your financial situation improves to the point where you can sac soldiers with poor stats, it improves significantly. Research laser cannons ASAP and spam them for sale. You can run the whole game on the profits alone.

Is OpenTFTD a thing?

>>3642134
Don't do night missions unless you have no choice.
Always drop smoke on first turn, via inventory if alium watches you unless you want reaction fire.
Also drop those electro flares and bring incendiary rounds.

>>3642134

Just become better, I'm serious. As in, don't do night ops. And if you still do, use flares or fire everywhere.

>>3642257

Luckily, this is not the new shitty Xcoms and you can just buy a second squad of rookies and keep on fighting.

>>3642257
Grenades are 1 level only.
If you throw 1 grenade on ramp and 1 in skyranger you'll be 100% safe

Don't commit if you don't think you can win the day, you can leave on turn one if you get bullshit in Brazil like chrysallids or seeing 3 cyberdiscs outside the skyranger on your first terror mission.

>>3644180
Also use a rookie to "spot" by moving him forward, and shoot with your other guys.

>>3642620
Latest builds of openxcom support UFO and TFTD

Use smoke grenades to cover yourself.

Avoid leaving the sky ranger too early. Early on in missions enemies will have more reaction time and be more likely to fire on your people who happen to stumble upon them. After the first turn or so they start to move so they lose part of that reaction time in favor of movement.

Sort your recruits into differing categories. Units with high accuracy with guns + reaction should sit in place and conserve TUs for picking off aliens from a distance. Recruits with lesser abilities should be used as scouts to check buildings and other hard to reach areas. If your scout stumbles upon an alien use the snipers to pick them off to avoid reaction fire from the aliens.

Always use a generous amount of HE and Incendiary rounds.

Also you should generally use the auto shot when the enemy is like <6 squares away and snap shot for most everything else. Aimed shot tends to cost more than it's worth but if your guy is across the map and safe from return fire then it can be useful.

>>3644184
This. High ranked units improve the morale of the entire group but they also severely affect your group's morale if they are killed in action so keep them out of harm's way. Probably best to leave them in the back of the sky ranger for the most part unless it's a terror mission.

Another option is to use a tank to scout. Tanks cover a lot of ground and are pretty resilient compared to rookies with no armor, downside is they're expensive. I recommend rocket tanks if you go that route.

>>3642134
>How do I not get rekt by the aliens before I can even see them?
You're supposed to get rekt at the start, the point is you're fighting a technologically superior force and your main initial advantage is you can deploy more cannon fodder than the enemy's small UFOs.


That said...
Toss a smoke grenade before you disembark the skyranger, and throw flares around the place/set fire to shit with HE or Incendary if you have to fight at night

>even if I do see them before the massacre starts my units miss every shot anyway.

You need to go through your units before the game starts, find the guys with decent accuracy (60+) and change their names so they are easy to identify. Appending /S for sniper works if you are lazy. These are the doods you want to (try to, perhaps not entirely successfully) protect, the rest are scouts/cannon fodder. You keep the sniper guys a bit behind the scouts when exploring an open area. As soon as a scout sees an alien, switch to the higher accuracy guy, who's hopefully far enough back that the aliens dont see him. Have him shoot if possible. This avoids the aliens reaction firing if you miss. If you can't get a line of sight, then consider grenades.


Also near the start consider using the large weapons with HE shells if the guys have enough strength to carry them. This lets you kill without a direct hit. HE grenades work too, but that levels up throwing accuracy rather than shooting accuracy. Though be careful, you can destroy the aliens bodies/guns if you
land HE on already dead aliens. And those guns/bodies can otherwise be flogged for a ton of cash in the early game (keep one example around for research)

>>3644214
Alright, thank you.

bump?

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>>3644323
>find the guys with decent accuracy (60+) and change their names so they are easy to identify. Appending /S for sniper works if you are lazy.

I think OpenXCOM has an option to do something like this automatically fyi

Would you play an X-Com style Metal slug TBS?

File: Fucking Lobstermen.png (107KB, 640x480px)

107KB, 640x480px

Filename says it all

>>3646443
It does?

>>3646497
>Feel you're doing ok
>researching sonic cannon, got gauss while waiting for USOs to show up
>Shoot down a very small USO
>This should be an easy enough mission. There's like one alien, right?
>Exploring, soldier goes down to opportunity fire
>Send second soldier in to get visual, have bunch of doods ready to fire their new badass GAUSS RIFLES from good positions
>"I CAN SEE AN ALIEN" indicator lights up
>...It's a lobsterman
>there's no cover on the seabed, I cant close distance to taser him
>everyone fires guns, multiple hits but gauss is utterly USELESS
>Alien decides to chuck a grenade, one dood is kill, one has fatal wounds and is on 5 hp
>dies next turn along with another guy who's struck by sonic fire
>another guy goes berserk, guns down a trooper
>try to evac squad
>berserk guy is shot himself the following turn (no TUs to retreat since he went crazy)
>get remains of squad back to triton and evac
fucking lobstermen...

>>3642142
>>3642164
Fuck that. Throw grenades and shoot explosive in every fucking direction before you even fan out. Worried about civies? Who cares?

>>3646497
Underwater-only weapons are bullshit btw. And the research tree in TftD is bullshit too.

>>3646970
>...It's a lobsterman>there's no cover on the seabed, I cant close distance to taser him
If it's only one. Go at him from ALL sides. It can't shoot in every direction. Expect losses of course. But if ALL your men start going berserk, you're screwed anyway. Just accept it and bail out.

>>3642620
yes and it's great

>>3642134
use auto shot in most situations. there are no range penalites in the game unless you are using mods, so auto shot will give you the best chance of a hit at all ranges. also spam explosives.

If you're using OpenXCOM, having a rocket team helps. Get one guy to haul the rocket launcher and another to ferry spare rockets from the ship. It's cheaper and more effective than using a rocket tank.

Grenadiers also work in the early game. Load several grenades on guys with high throwing/strength, and have them chuck them where your scouts see aliums.

Both can be phased out later on when you fight tougher aliens and can access blaster bombs.

>>3646970
>make common enemy grunts invulnerable to everything but sonic cannons and drills
>make every heavy alien unit go down after most basic grenade explosion
Did they even bothered playtesting the thing?

>>3649195
except those fucking dinosaurs. they take some serious damage. lobstermen are not fun to fight, i agree

>>3649197
>except those fucking dinosaurs
I never encountered one during 2 or 3 playthroughs
why they even bothered adding them to game
>lobstermen are not fun to fight
It would be understandable if they at least made heavy gauss viable stopgap weapon to fight them. But the game literally grabs player by hand and forces one specific research tree.

>>3642134
Always place rookies at the front. Yes, I know you can't change the order of your soldiers without mods, but there is a trick. You can change the order of your soldiers by transferring them between your bases. The rookies leave the skyranger, get rekt, and nothing of value is lost. Rookies are cannon fodder and meat shields until they prove themselves.

>>3649195
Given they managed to bugger the tech tree, so it was possible to research the 'wrong' thing and make the game unwinnable... Probably not.

You also had the dye grenade rendered utterly useless by them setting the power too low so it hardly spread any smoke/dye. Exceptionally stupid when they try to emphasise melee combat and you have nothing to use to cover your charge. Rushing the lobstermen under a thick smoke/dye cloud would have been much better.

Though to be fair there were some positive aspects to its balance compared with UFO:EU.
The sonic weapons lack auto shot and the cannon has high TU cost and weight to compensate for its superior accuracy and damage. It's nice to see some disadvantages compared with heavy plasma from the previous game, which autoshot rapes everyone and renders every other gun except blaster launcher and small launcher useless.

I also liked them changing the 0-200% damage spread to 50-150%. That plus removing auto shot from the alien weapons made armour somewhat more effective.

>>3649189
You can also improve the strength of your soldiers by loading them up with a lot of equipment on easier/safer missions. Too much equipment will cause them to run out of energy and TUs faster though so it's not advisable on difficult missions.

Why didn't Earth keep Plasma and Laser weapons after UFO handy just in case? Would have made TFTD land missions much easier.

>>3653275
i think there's something in the lore about humans being unable to duplicate elerium so it was all used up within a few years of the alien invasion.