Talk:TFTD Strategy Guide

Starting Base Location

For a base location I would say that the mid Atlantic or Pacific might be better. Remember you are covering the oceans, not the land masses. M52nickerson 12:00, 28 September 2010 (EDT)

Thanks for the help on this, I'm really not sure what the right approach is. My thinking around the Med was that you want to be as close as possible to as many Zones as you can, because it's the Zones (countries) who control your funding. The same argument as would be used in picking an Enemy Unknown starting base location. So my objective in picking a location is not so much to maximise the sea area covered, but to maximise the number of Zones protected. I did try a couple of times placing my first base in the mid Atlantic, and not much happened. But maybe that was bad luck. Spike 16:08, 28 September 2010 (EDT)

Scientists or Extra Base?

I've pretty much decided in favour of Scientists, but for the record, here are both sides of the argument:

The quick-start procedure outlined in the article should give you about $1.7M of spare cash, $2.1M if you use an improved starting base layout or don't care about changing the standard layout.

The main two options for this money are:

• Hire additional scientists. Probably the best strategy.
• Build an additional base during the first month (wherever the Graphs show alien activity, or wherever there is Funding to be protected)

Adding a new base early can help you increase your intercept rate, which can give a big advantage to loot and research. It can also help to avoid negative score penalties that can place you in grave difficulty.

Ultimately, scientists win the game, by developing the technologies that will first resist, and then defeat, the alien menace. The faster you can acquire these technologies, the quicker the balance of power moves in your favour, and the more likely you are to survive and succeed.

For that reason, additional scientists is probably the best option.

On balance, it's probably better to build a second base from the proceeds of mission loot, rather than your starting cash. Apart from anything else, building a base can be done more or less any time of the month without major impact, whereas hiring scientists really should be done at the start of the month.

Sub Combat

There is one difference in the Geoscape that really sets TFTD apart from UFO. I'm always able to happily get away with arming fleets of interceptors with Plasma beams and they were the bulk of my air defenses in UFO, but with the introduction of the otherwise utterly annoying sub 'depth' in TFTD, your Barracudas are going to be stumped frequently by enemy subs ducking down to depths that the Barracudas can't reach.

This makes Mantas and Hammerheads a nice mid-game topic to put emphasis on. Luckily, the sub construction topic is a byproduct of two of the most important technologies anyway, the Transmission Resolver and Mag Ion Armor. Probably be worth mentioning that you should keep a sample of the store item. -NKF 01:55, 29 September 2010 (EDT)

Great point, I will amend the suggestion to reflect that. In general TFTD is just much more challenging, I'm really getting in to it for that reason. Spike 09:20, 29 September 2010 (EDT)

Instead of arming both Barracudas with DUPs in the beginning one might want to keep one armed with dual AJAX since a DUP hit destroys the smallest Subs. This is a real waste of easily earned early income and research material. Against anything up to Heavy Cruisers a single DUP armed Barracuda is sufficient and attacking anything larger is a gamble. Of course this messes up the picket ship strategy...--Tauon 18:13, 10 October 2010 (EDT)