Talk:Starting Your Shadowy Paramilitary Organization
Regarding base placement, one other good point of consideration (apart from money) is to place it in land mass that contains a generous amount of terrain that you're comfortable fighting in. Some players love to fight in desert or arctic terrain on account of it mostly being barren wastelands. Some may find it more tactically sound to fight in farmland, well, you're not going to get any short supply of these. If you want a base that gets a wide variety of terrrain types, the US has quite a lot of terrain types, and you only need to go south a bit to get jungle terrain. Europe unfortunately has lots of farmland. Africa has lots of desert. The far eastern end of Russia, or the coast of Japan is mostly forest. The polar caps are all polar terrain. Great for those that like to use flying suits and weapons that make really big bangs - preferably a long way away.
As for experimenting with the weapons, one point I'd like to add is to get to know the tactial strengths and weaknesses of the starting weapons, and to not be afraid of hanging on to some of them even after you've come up with a general weapon set. It's always good to have options available to you. You may not use autocannons much after getting the heavy plasma, but a single autocannon on standby can come in handy simply for its HE and incendiary shells.
Ah, but don't mind me. I've got this "must cover all play styles" approach to whenever I make any attempt at writing starters guide... which really does hold me back at times.
- NKF
You're right about the terrain issue-- I usually start in Europe, and consequently have come to hate farm buildings with a passion. (Where do you place if you want to fight in mountains? TibetCom? I didn't even know the mountain terrain existed until I had been playing for two years.) I don't know anyone that doesn't keep one or two pet weapons about for contingency or just because they don't want to live in a world without autocannon. I should tone down the talk of standardization-- it overstates the case somewhat.
However, I want to keep this thing brief and somewhat open-ended, and I don't want to spoil all the surprises. There are more detailed starter guides out there-- Warlock's comes to mind-- but I don't want to leave something open to player intitiative, instead of being an exhaustive checklist. That's why I'm not going to put my "Get an Alien Navigator As Soon As Possible" routine in, or all the other things I do on Day 1. I'm trying to keep a middle ground between getting the new player started, and micromanaging his gameplay.
--Papa Legba 08:10, 13 December 2005 (PST)
The battle tips are going to be tough. I want to keep it very general, but still useful. --Papa Legba 00:13, 14 December 2005 (PST)