User:Mannon

About Me

Total Dork... ;p

I'm a detail oriented, methodical, obsessive geek that absolutely LOVES X-Com.

Introduction

I originally came to the game because I purchased a magazine with a floppy disk of the TFTD demo. (I still have the disk.) I played the demo with no prior knowledge of X-Com or tactical games at all and was instantly hooked! Of course, having zero exposure to such games initially I found it to be just about the hardest damn game I ever played! lol

I did not have the internet or friends that played the game so I learned the hard way... I played that single mission over and over, obsessively, until I mastered it. (Pretty much until I could do it in my sleep, heh.) I even developed my main tactical strategy that I still use to this day on that demo mission. It's something I think of as The Clock.

Later I found X-Com on the shelf and wanting to start from the beginning I had to have it! I was totally surprised at the strategic metagame and all it's implications. That's when X-Com went from great demo to one of my all time favorite games, and it remains so even now. To date I still prefer X-Com over every other tactical game I've played, though I actually hesitate at playing them because I've yet to beat X-Com. ;p (Did I mention I'm obsessive?)

You haven't beat it! What kind of a fan are you?

Yeah yeah... Just because I haven't beat X-Com doesn't mean I haven't played the hell out of it. In a sense I refuse to beat it because I'm not done playing it. heh heh I probably could take an avenger up to Cydonia and manage to beat the game. I'd be weak vs Psi so it might take some doing. But I've faced Ethereals and beat them. (Actually once I've beat the game I may come back to an old save and see if my non-psi using squad can do it, just for fun.)

Okay, here's the longer explanation... First off, I'm sentimental and nostolgic... What does that mean? It means I'm still using most of the same soldiers I've had from the beginning of the game. The very first squad I had. Some of these have been with me from the start, like my ultimate soldier Barbara King who got cheeted out of being commander by an unfortunate savegame mishap. (She was my first commander, but I lost the save and next time around it was Dmitri Maleeve. I had to do some finagling to get her back in the job. heh) So, anyway... I haven't been too keen to start a fresh game.

I also initially made an error that cost me quite a bit. You see I hate the mind probe. It's big, and bulky, and you have to equip it which basically takes one guy off the front lines while he's using it, so it's a huge TU sinc. So when I was capturing aliens for research I was basically just stunning whoever I could get and letting the chips fall where they may. I was also unaware that certain aliens hung out in certain places. Hey, at the time everything was going great anyway and I didn't really need more research projects, but I bet you can guess where this is leading.

Eventually I started to wonder what I'd done wrong, because I still couldn't build a Psi Lab and it didn't seem to matter how many more aliens I researched, either. What I needed, of course, was either a Sectoid Leader, or Commander. So I started looking for the bastard. Let's just say I had quite poor luck finding one, particularly because Sectoid UFO's were becoming quite rare as the Mutons took up the war effort. It was extremely frustrating. I was stuck in that phase of the game a long time, fighting all my battles the old fashioned way.

The upside of that is I learned a lot. I learned that Power Armor, while good is NO replacement for Flying Armor, even if you don't fly. I learned to whip my soldiers into shape so they could all carry Heavy Plasmas. And I learned how to fight cautiously even if it took longer.

Somewhere along the way I also decided to end my age old practice of loading a previous turn if I lost a soldier. I HATE losing soldiers. I don't care what the mission briefing says if I lose even one then the mission was not a victory, it was at best a draw. (Though my opinion on this has been somewhat modified and I now consider rookies as semi-expendable. In other words I still feel bad for their families, but but the squad has about 2 minutes of silence when they get home before cracking open the beers and celebrating their victory, and that's about it.) I eventually decided it was holding me back to always revert like that, on top of being semi-cheating IMO. It's certainly not breaking the game, but it does make a difference.

Let me go into that a sec... If you've never played X-Com without allowing your soldiers to die in combat then you probably will not fully appreciate the difference. I did not. I never allowed it to totally corrupt the way I played. I didn't send soldiers on suicide scouting runs, for example. The problem, however, is on what happens after the soldier that would have died, doesn't. You may not have intended it to be a suicide scouting, but it was, and now you know exactly what not to do. Even if this is infrequent it still colors the game. The other major thing I noticed was that it made me play far more cautiously ON EVERY SINGLE TURN, because the price of a wrong move is just too high. It changed my reaction from "Ooops! Guess I should have used a grenade." to "OH S#$%! F&$# NO! Nooooooooo!" followed by more cursing. ;p That may not sound like a good thing, but it is. It makes you care more about the results. It makes those soldiers lives more precious and the aliens more scum sucking evil pricks! lol I actually hate the aliens now, I can't help it. They have wounded me and I hate them, but I love hating them. Giving the aliens the ability to hurt me instead of just being targets has transformed them into a much better and scarier enemy. It made all the difference.

Anyway... back on topic...

I also tend to be pretty scatterbrained... I got the ADD and I move from project to project, without finishing them between. So it is sometimes years between sessions of me playing X-Com, complicated all the more by the need to reinstall it and make it work on a yet faster computer. heh heh

I also really want to ramp up. I want my coverage to be dominating and my soldiers powerful and fully equipped and trained before I goto Cydonia to finish off those bastards. I'm not done playing X-Com, not at all. Eventually, but not yet. When I'm finally ready to move on I'll take out Cydonia and let Barbara King fire the final shots that end the war. Until then I'm going to build out my bases, hire and equip an army of soldiers and kill all the aliens I see.

When I'm done with that, who knows... Probably start over on Superhuman and/or begin TFTD. Those games will probably progress more easily given my much expanded experience.