I beat X-COM2: Terror From the Deep on Superhuman

[oscar]

The man has "Lord" in his name and a 2006 join date. I'm inclined to believe him.

 

[el Supremo]

I have played the first UFO to the death during my Amiga days, at every difficulty. Alas, there was no sequels for Amiga.
Terror form the Deep, I have tried it about 2 years ago, on the dosbox, and got my ass handed to me. I have not read any tutorials or stuff.
I remember attacking an Alien Base with my solidiers equipped with gauss weapons mostly. The first stage, I have lost a half of my crack team. In the base proper, there was an alien I have never seen before. He recived about ten shots from gauss weapons, plus some explosives. Then he turned around and proceeded to decimate my solidiers. The only one, that have survived, have gone into panic mode.
I reloaded to the point before the attack, and decided that I'll leave the Alien Base alone, for a time being. The next Terror Mission, on a ship, there were the same guys, the ones who have been inside the base. Even after I have given up on my pride and started to save after every turn, no amount of re-loads could save my ass, as I hardly could have leave a scratch on the enemy.
Then, I started to play some other game, I still have that old save from TFTD on my HDD somewhere, I think. But if one day I give it an another try, I'll rather start from the begining, and ignore gauss weapons alltogather.
By the way, I am NOT asking for hints. If I want some, I'll know were to look.

 

[someone else]

Hey bro, didn't UFO have a difficulty bug where the game defaults to the easiest difficulty?

I remember my first mission was against lobsterman, took 16 shots from a rifle to knock one unconscious.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I remember attacking an Alien Base with my solidiers equipped with gauss weapons mostly. The first stage, I have lost a half of my crack team. In the base proper, there was an alien I have never seen before. He recived about ten shots from gauss weapons, plus some explosives. Then he turned around and proceeded to decimate my solidiers. The only one, that have survived, have gone into panic mode.
I reloaded to the point before the attack, and decided that I'll leave the Alien Base alone, for a time being. The next Terror Mission, on a ship, there were the same guys, the ones who have been inside the base. Even after I have given up on my pride and started to save after every turn, no amount of re-loads could save my ass, as I hardly could have leave a scratch on the enemy.

I'm guessing this new alien looked like a tiny floating UFO? (TFTD version of the Cyberdisk)

But more likely he looked like an orange crab. (TFTD version of the Muton)

Both of those alien types are jerks. Much tougher than their UFO counterparts.

 

[kyrub]

Blah blah blah. Your mileage may have varied, but the Mixed races didn't start on month 2 in my game.

OK, you are right and I was "blah blah". I checked the code and mixed crews come in 4-5 month. Moreover, no effect of game difficulty on alien race choice ( ). Fair play to you, Lord Chambers.
-- And your retaliation setup in that game? Now, if I'm right, this may happen from month 1 on superhuman tftd, no? And I have seen mixed crews early (I think). Not sure now, after my first miss...

 

[el Supremo]

Hey bro, didn't UFO have a difficulty bug where the game defaults to the easiest difficulty?

I remember my first mission was against lobsterman, took 16 shots from a rifle to knock one unconscious.

I thought that only PC dos version have had that bug. However, it did not have a day/night cycle, at the time I have been unable to figure out what the electroflares are there for. Also, there was no zombies. The Chrysalid's attacked person have been morfing directly into another Chrysalid. It have got me pretty supprised, when recently trying the PC version.

 

[Lord Chambers]

I'm frustrated.

My understanding was that the difficulty glitch only affected X-COM1, not TFTD. But I am playing a version with DOSBox, so I thought I should look further.

To investigate, I reloaded a game and played a few missions to check out the alien stats and compare to here. Were they 124% higher? No. But everything I MC controlled did have maximum stats in reactions and firing accuracy. There are two possible explanations for why they don't exceed the range, but are universally maxed: 1. The stat range provided on UFOPedia.com for each race represents the possible values rolled before being adjusted by difficulty modifiers, or 2. They represent the possible ranges you will ever see on any difficulty, therefore I'm playing on Superhuman because all the stats are at the top end of the range provided on UFOPedia.com.

Unsure, I thought I would go through the trouble of installing XCOMUtil to "fix" the bug that might be present in my game. Turns out that to use the latest version, the only one which supports my Windows 7, I have to install an older version of DOSbox than I have.

Okay, I went through the trouble. I'm installing Xcomutil and it starts prompting me if I want to install magic boots and give my aquanauts limited air supplies, the long list here. A new song comes over my Itunes and it's kind of loud so I start turning my volume down via a laptop key. And my screen is flashing because the little Xcomutil dos window is flashing. And I confirm with a few more taps that, in fact, the dosprompt receives a (y) or (n) keypress whenever I toggle the volume. So I'm halfway through the fucking list and I have no idea what I said yes and no to.

I'm pissed. Why should that happen? Now I have to spend even more time to try and restore my default settings, or give up frustrated. This post has not helped, but that's where we stand.

 

[Lord Chambers]

There are two possible explainations for why they don't exceed the range, but are universally maxed: 1. The stat range provided on UFOPedia.com for each race represents the possible values rolled before being adjusted by difficulty modifiers, or 2. They represent the possible ranges you will ever see on any difficulty, therefore I'm playing on Superhuman because all the stats are at the top end of the range provided on UFOPedia.com.

This table shows the base stat levels for all aliens. That all the aliens I encountered in my survey of their stats have 124% more juice in the relevant stats confirms I was playing on Superhuman.

http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Alien_Stats_(TFTD)

 

[kyrub]

I was still regularly fighting Gillmen crews all the way up to August. Tasoth were more frequent in smaller USOs at the time, but I had previously only faced them on an Artefact Mission and a Tanker Ship Terror. My other Cruise Ship Terror (there were only two, on months 4 and 5 IIRC) was a Mixed crew.

OK, I was doing some more research on TFTD settings, mostly in wiki and the code. I was really surprised by several things that make probably the game much easier, if played quickly (the way you did). Also it makes the game very boring (tedious).

--- First and foremost: half of the alien bunch are crippled. We all remember Lobstermen, Tentaculats and Tasoths, right? They gave us the creeps. But the rest? I always thought TFTD had decreased number of aliens, which seems to be wrong. Where are they?

Bio-drone... is horrifying until you know you can drill it from vicinity. It will then try to attack with melee, which is bugged = 0 damage. Still, a threat.
Hallucinoid... has ranged attack similar to Sectopod (!) from X-com EU so it's frightening to behold one... wait! Its ranged attack does not work (bug). Next.
Deep one... cannot spit beyond 7 squares. (So they did not learn from Celatid??) Next.
Xarquid... rarish. And very poor as well, since it has few shots / turn and it makes a big target. Easy kill.
Triscene... is less frequent than tornadoes in my country. Probably bugged. Has comical weapons he never uses.
Calcinite... the movement of every melee alien in the game is bugged. They are shy. This guy does not look like frightening alien and indeed he is not one.
Gillman... Isn't he worse than his flying counterpart from EU? He's just same useless guy minus flying. Should not TFTD be harder than EU? If you played most of your mission against this crop and avoided bases, it probably was easy.

--- Second: The mixed crews I was referring to can be found very early (yes, even month 2) on the Cruiser ship missions. These are irregular Terror-site, so they have special set-up. You were lucky to get them on 5th month, methinks. Still, only 7 casualties is incredible, if you did it without reloading. I find mixed-crew Cruiser + ironman unwinnable even with top weapons. Two stages are just too much.

--- Third and last point: TFTD really becomes boring quickly, quicklier than EU for me. The alien variety is missing (75% races are poor or very rare), and the terrain variety is broken. TFTD has so much better terrain and maps than EU. Sadly, 50% of the time you get two most frequent terrains... so for all the cool bunch of TFTD terrains, you have to fight through coral and sea-bed. Grrrr.

 

[Lord Chambers]

First and foremost: half of the alien bunch are crippled

Yep. Particularly when you run up on a Biodrone and don't have the TUs to drill. It's always refreshing when they spend their whole turn trying to scream you to death. Still, they can't be moved upon since you cannot tell what direction they're facing, so unless you happen to open a closet and find one there without any TUs, you have to shoot them, and they can take 1-2 sonic cannon shots. Basically Biodrones are flying Tasoths that explode but cannot do MC attacks.

Xarquid... Would be fearsome due to their armor, but they suffer from the same flaw all large creatures do: area effect explosions damage all four squares. Therefore one shok cannon shot, and one or two sonic pulsars will kill it.
Triscene... I think Triscene can only appear on Mixed crew terror missions. I'm pretty sure they will happily reaction-fire you with their weapons. Still, you just need to throw one nade somewhere around one and it'll die.
Calcinite... They are so rare and so vital to success in the game. Without a Calcinite you cannot access the drills. But yes, they demonstrate the vacillating behavior all aliens do when attempting melee, which usually means some half-assed compromise between hiding and charging--and, another turn to take shots at them.

If you played most of your mission against [Gillmen] and avoided bases, it probably was easy.

Yeah, but even the advanced aliens aren't a challenge with advanced technology. So it seems like the only real threat of failure on tactical missions is encountering an advanced species without Sonic Cannons and drills, Cruise Terror Missions without Armor and medikits, and getting MC-fucked or Tentaculated without willingness to abort. And none of those seem particularly difficult to avoid if you're willing to do enough crashed USO missions to pay for 100 scientists.

 

[Lightknight]

Xarquid... rarish. And very poor as well, since it has few shots / turn and it makes a big target. Easy kill.

Not to mention very shy. They always sit in the corner of the map or in some closet...never saw it actually advance in my LOS and attack.

Anyway, no matter how exploitive you get, its still very much possible to land near a USO, and get a disruptor round in the open Triton doors on the second turn.