Yet Another Scheme

The way of the Privateer

Many players try to get a steady production of Laser Cannon off the ground as soon as possible, and fund further activities with the revenue stream from their factories. That's nice and fine and works a treat; however, it's cheesy. Besides, X-Com was founded in order to fight the aliens, not as an arms producer.

Your funding fathers provided you with a letter of marque entitling you to intercept, seize, and sell any alien vessel you might encounter. Prizes can generate quite an revenue stream, even a small scout will easily yield over one million. Unfortunately, privateering is not as easy to pull off as just building a number of workshops and (in effect) print your own money. This guide tries to point out some of the difficulties you may encounter, and how to deal with them.

Immediate measures

At the beginning of the game, do the usual run-of-the-mill stuff: sell gear you don't need, purchase stuff you want. Build a few base facilities. However, you should maybe be a bit more radical than usual about the abilities of the soldiers you hire. You will fight a great many battles, and this will be much less frustrating if you have good troops.

Personally, I consider reactions to be far and away the most important stat. Of course, the soldiers should have some firing accuracy as well. However, mediocre marksmanship can be mitigated to a great extent, and will improve soon enough. The same is true for Time Units and Strength. But there's no way to fake reactions, and training is difficult or virtually impossible if your soldiers don't have high values to begin with.

However, there will be casualties; and loosing one of your precious hand-picked squaddies will be even more frustrating. So it's maybe a good idea to have a few Ensign Expendables around.

Find the Enemy

No matter where you build your initial base, you are guaranteed to have the first aliens show up right on your doorstep. Strangely enough, they will only send small craft, and by the end of January they will cease. Even if you leave the early UFOs alone, there will be no follow-up missions with larger craft. So, after the first windfall (recovering every landed UFO through January will easily provide four or five million worth of loot), you're on your own. Getting your hands on more UFOs (=more revenue) after the initial batch is crucial.

Aliens may show up anywhere on the globe. However, anywhere is not everywhere: they will perform one or (at best) two missions like "Alien Research in Australasia" or "Alien Harvest in North America". There really is no way to tell where they will go. With the world so large and your funds still limited, you cannot afford to build bases just any old how.

Alien missions always follow the same basic pattern: first there will be a survey ship (that maybe doesn't even land), then small and large scouts (usually more than one each) until eventually larger craft show up, performing the actual mission. This can all take place within less than three weeks, but usually it takes at least five, sometimes up to two months. If you manage to intercept one UFO, the time until the next one arrives will increase a bit.

The UFO activity graph

With the world so large and your funds still limited, perhaps the best you can do ist to pay close attention to the Graphs. Much could be said about how to read it, but you will soon be able to see the difference between a simple flyby and an actual UFO landing. When you notice a landing in a given area, it's a clear indication that more can be expected to happen in that region in the next few weeks.

Patrols

Once you know the approximate area where the enemy is, send some of your craft to patrol the area for immediate radar coverage. If you think that sounds weird, you haven't tried. Example: If you expect UFO activity in North America, have a Skyranger patrol over the central US. Alright, so "North America" can be anything from Alaska to Cuba, and craft radar range is nothing to write home about. BUT: within it's limited range, craft radar is frightfully efficient. Given the tendency of UFOs to zigzag over the region before landing, you've got a pretty decent chance that it will at some time come into range of your vessel.

It's a good idea to decomission one Interceptor in favor of a second Skyranger, you may even consider to go without any Interceptor at all. Generally you don't want to shoot down alien craft as long as there is any chance of capturing them in one piece, and two Skyrangers taking turns can provide 24/7 coverage of all but the most remote areas.

Listening Posts

Eventually you want listening posts all over the world. However, at approximatly 2 million apiece, it will be quite some time until you've go the world covered. What's worse, they take a long time to build: you may have an idea where the center of alien activity is right now, but there's no telling where it will be by the time your detection systems finally go into service. There's no point in rushing the development of a Radar network, however, you should still try to somehow build at least one new listening post every month.

The February Famine

For some reason or other, there often appears to be a distinct lack of alien activity in February. Your mileage will vary, of course, depending on what the random number generator spills out. But it's not at all uncommon that there will be a grand total of two or three scouts (plus one terror mission) in the entire month. In short: don't rely on having a high income.

Research and Production

If you do not want to build Laser Cannon for for money, you will only need a small number of technicians to provide necessary equipment for your troops: a few laser weapons, armour and (maybe) a handful of medikits. The one workshop you begin with will suffice for a long time, up to and including the production of Flying Suits: it will take about a fortnight to make ten of these. You only really need more production capacity once you have found out how to build your own craft.

Research is more important, though. Weapons, armour, Hyper-Wave Decoder, Psi Labs: you want all of these as soon as possible. Any spare penny should go into the construction of more labs and hiring more scientists.

However, that is "any spare penny": detection is even more important. The best equipment will do you no good if you can't find any aliens to use it on. The decision wether you can afford scientists because the current radar coverage should do for a while is part of what makes privateering fun.

High-priority research tasks:

• Laser Rifles

You really need that firepower.

• Psi Labs

If one of the early terror missions is Sectoid, capturing the leader becomes the primary objective. Then drop all other research and try to get Psi Labs researched and built in time for the next 1st.

• Hyper-Wave Decoder

The latest and best in Alien Detection. You want it anyway; getting it early will save lots of cash you don't need to spend on soon obsolete radar systems. It requires you capture a live navigator, but that's usually not that hard to pull off.

• Armour

Although armour is vital, it's not top of the list: getting it two weeks sooner or later really means only one or two more missions you will need to fight without. So you can relax – a bit. Although Body Armour is still insufficient, you should hand out at least some of these while waiting for Flight Suits. I usually don't manufacture Power Suits, though.

• Mind Probe

Mind Probes take a long time to research, and are generally rather useless. After all, you can predict with reasonable accuracy that the interesting aliens will be on the bridge of any given UFO. However, there's one scenario where Mind Probes can make all the difference: when you try to pick out the leader on a sectoid terror site. This may never become necessary, though; and even if, it's not guaranteed that it will lead to success (with all those cyberdiscs around, the leader may die in an accidental explosion or whatnot). Research of Mind Probes should hence either be high on the queue or postponed until your scientists haven't anything else to do.

What you don't need just now

• Plasma Weapons

The Laser Rifle will go a long way. You can postpone research on Heavy Plasma until either: a) you have the Avenger and want Plasma Beams or b) the first Smakemen or Mutons have been sighted.

• Motion Scanner and Medi Kit

Both can come in handy at times, but really, armour is more important. First things first.

• Laser Cannon

The sole use of Laser Cannon is to give your engineers something to do while you have no other assignments; as long as you have only comparatively few technicians, you won't lose much if you busy them with (say) Laser Pistols instead.

Bases

Placement

South Italy, Crete, or east Turkey rank high among the best places for the starting base. For starters, a base there will cover Europe, North Africa and a large part of Central Asia – that's three out of the eleven areas. In addition: provided you detect an UFO early during it's mission, a Europe-based Skyranger can reach any point in Africa, much of the Americas and almost all of Asia before the aliens take off and leave for good. Alaska, Chile and Malaysia mark about the outer fringe where you may still reach at least some UFOs in time.

If you're unlucky the Aliens will schedule a mission in Australasia. Your only chance is to build a base complete with hangar, quarters etc and either relocate your squad or hire a wholly new one. Yes, that's a lot of dough, but ultimately worth it. If you manage to take a single Harvester that way, the bill is paid.

Development

Most bases can be mere listening posts, consisting of nothing but the acess lift and a small radar at first. You certainly want to add Hyper-Wave Decoders as soon as possible, but those cost a lot of money and it may take a while. However, you should build a string of general stores at your first listening post: when the time comes you can quickly expand this to a large production plant. Research is best left at your initial base.

Later you may want to station a number of Firestorms at every base, but that's beyond the scope of this document.

Random Tips

• You really need that cash from the umpteenth small scout, but playing so many battles can become tedious; you may want to check out XcomUtil, if only for it's "AutoCombat" feature. Although I found Statstrings invaluable, too.

• Sell the loot! For every item in storage, you shouldn't ask wether you will need it someday, but if you will need it anytime soon. The habit of keeping "one of everything" ties up a lot of cash; money that could buy you another listening post, hire more staff, or whatnot.