User:Magic9mushroom

Hi.

1) It's a pun on my interest in fantasy novels and fungi. I don't use, sell or possess hallucinogenic drugs.

2) "The big move", if you saw that as an edit reason, was my changing every instance of "USO" to the official term "Alien Sub". I would be highly gratified if we could keep it that way - there were over 70 pages with it and I don't want to have to spend 2 1/2 hours on it again.

Battleship Farming

I'm not sure whether this deserves its own page, so I'm putting it here.

There's a little trick I discovered to obtain huge amounts of money and points and fair amounts of Elerium in UFO (it should also work in TFTD but Leviathans and Bombardment Shields are much harder to obtain). You will need: 1 or more Avengers, Plasma Beams, Fusion Ball Defences, Grav Shield, Hyper-Wave Decoder.

How to execute:

1) Intercept lots of UFOs. You were doing that anyway, right?

2) When scouts start appearing with the mission (obtained via Hyper-Wave Decoder) of "Alien Retaliation", leave them alone.

3) Build six or more Fusion Ball Defences and a Grav Shield. Don't build a Mind Shield at the base that you're using for this trick.

4) When Battleships start appearing, shoot them down and recover them with Avengers.

5) Enjoy your points (likely just shy of 1000), money (2 million or more), and Elerium (around 50)!

The reason I call this a "trick" is that it's a way to generate artificially high UFO numbers in order to give you something to shoot at. Alien Retaliation missions that have found your base will not ever end until a Base Defence mission is forced - they will not end on Battleship interception and they will not end if the Battleship is destroyed by your base defences. Here, the Battleships will be turned into confetti by your defences even if they are not intercepted (12 shots of Fusion Balls vs. 3 required to kill it gives 0.0009% odds of making it through - less than 1 in 100,000 will survive), so you're guaranteed a constant and plentiful supply (this is necessary because Avengers are usually damaged by fighting Battleships and as such all of them might still be damaged when a new Battleship appears). It's probably a good idea to keep a lot of Avengers in the base if you want to keep this up for a while, since a single Avenger will be in repairs for almost a month after destroying a Battleship (remember to transfer the crews to undamaged ones).

I find this to be a valid alternative to waylaying Supply Ships for Elerium (allowing the prompt destruction of the associated bases). By the time you have Avengers and Fusion Ball Defences, money and points are largely irrelevant, though it can still be fun to see five-digit scores at the end of a month.

Good trick. It highlights the fact that Retaliation mission logic is dumb and inflexible, which is a design flaw. Also that Battleships are too weak (I made some suggestions on my Talk page for making them tougher )

Would you add this to the Exploits section do you think? Spike 20:25, 11 February 2012 (EST)

It's a much more minor exploit than most of the ones on that page. Supply Ship piracy is just as exploitative, it's just better known. Where would it go, anyway? Magic9mushroom 01:53, 12 February 2012 (EST)

My UFO Masterplan

Figured I might as well post it. Feel free to criticise.

Initial base goes in Europe (Czechoslovakia). I immediately build a second in the USA (around North Dakota). Layout of the second base (and all later bases) follows:

(The Living Quarters obviously have to wait for the General Stores to complete.)

Note a few things about this design:

1) The key facilities for an interception base (hangar, radar, general stores) are all available to construct immediately, with no delay.

2) This base design supports perfect base defence - a single choke point between alien spawns and X-Com spawns, and all firefights in indestructible modules - though it may not, at first, appear so. See, the Base Disjoint Bug blocks the Hangar/Large Radar, Large Radar/Access Lift, and Access Lift/General Stores doors, so the only route the aliens can take is through the door between the Hangar and Living Quarters.

3) A design like this has fewer squares left empty than any other base supporting perfect defence. When fully decked-out, it looks something like this:

Note that only 4 squares are left empty, but there's still a single choke point. You can't do that for 2 hangars without using the BDB (a similar design has only 2 squares left empty for a single hangar).

Initial base gets overhauled with a second hangar up top replacing the two at the bottom and living quarters moved out of where it is. I also immediately build Alien Containment and a Large Radar there. Initial Skyranger load is 10 soldiers, one tank, using the weapons you start with (preference for those with autofire). Interceptors are immediately upgraded to twin Avalanche loadouts. Build laser weapons as they're researched.

I transfer one Interceptor to my US base as soon as the hangars and large radar complete. As soon as I get a significant cash injection I build a third base in SE Asia with the same loadout. After that cash goes into setting up a two-lab or three-lab research station so I can start crunching through the tech tree.

My research order is something along these lines.

Laser Weapons

Laser Pistol

Laser Rifle

Mind Probe

Small Launcher*

Stun Bomb*

(Alien Navigator) ->Hyper-Wave Decoder

(Sectoid Leader) ->Psionic Laboratory

Alien Alloys

Personal Armour

Medi-Kit

UFO Power Source

Elerium-115

Power Suit

UFO Navigation

Flying Suit

Heavy Plasma

Heavy Plasma Clip

Plasma Cannon

Psi-Amp

Heavy Laser

Laser Cannon

UFO Construction

New Fighter Craft

New Fighter/Transporter

Ultimate Craft

Blaster Launcher

Blaster Bomb

Alien Origins

(Alien Leader) The Martian Solution

(Alien Commander) Cydonia or Bust

Filling out the rest of the UFOpaedia entries

* These are skipped if/when I manage to nab both required aliens with Stun Rods. () Obviously aliens can't be researched until they're captured, so these may be delayed.

Note the extreme beeline for Hyper-Wave Decoders and Psi-Labs. Hyper Wave Decoders are absolute gold. Psi-Labs have to be gotten as soon as possible thanks to the long lead time from their discovery to actually getting Psi.