X-COM: Apocalypse - Beginner's Guide
Index --- Next
X-COM: Apocalypse is a great game, but it can be hard for first-time players to figure out what to do. So I've made this little guide to help a friend get started.
When you start a new campaign, you can choose the difficulty. From what I gather, this mainly affects how quickly the aliens develop new technology.
After this, you will see the game's overworld window, which is called the Cityscape (this is likely a tribute to the previous games' Geoscape. In this game we only have access to a single city, not the entire globe, hence the name change).
You will be centered on your base. Whenever you start a new game, the base given to you is randomly chosen from a pool of possible base locations.
If you click the map view button (the second from the top on the left-hand side of the console), you'll enter a top-down view of the city.
Use this to get an idea of where your base is in relation to the rest of the city.
I find that the map view scrolls too quickly to be all that useful. Click the map view button again to return to the normal Cityscape. When you move your mouse to the edges of the screen, it will scroll and you can see the rest of the city.
If you get lost and can't find your base again, simply click the bases tab in your console (it's the tab open on default) and double-click your base and the view will go right back to it.
Click this button
to enter the base management screen. Here you can see what facilities your base has. You might want to think about what you plan to do with your home base. I tend to make at least two bases over the course of the game: one is a research base which houses my scientists and their huge labs, and another houses my soldiers. It's not really required to do this, but your starting base might not have enough room for the advanced research buildings.
First off, click the name of the base to rename it.
The bottom half of the screen shows you what facilities you can build. Mouse over to get information. I'm looking at a training area.
Drag and drop a building from the bottom half onto a free space in the base to start building it. If you change your mind, you can cancel the building by clicking on it and choosing to cancel it, and you'll get your money back as long as you haven't left this screen.
I've put up a new medical bay, and the big "4" in a circle means it'll take four in-game days before I can use it. You don't technically need a 2nd medical bay. This is just an example.
Each of the advanced research labs (which have not been unlocked yet) need a 2x2-sized area available in the base to build them. The same goes for the Vehicle Repair Bay. You might not have room in your home base for these buildings. Keep that in mind when thinking of what you should build in your base and where.
In fact, putting my medical bay right where I did was a bad move; I now have no room for any 2x2-sized building.
Research, research, speaking of research, let's assign our scientists to research.
Go back to the Cityscape. Click the Biochemistry tab. Then click the beaker icon.
This is the biochemistry research screen. Right now my biochemists are doing nothing. You see their names on the left? They are currently idle. Click each one until they are on the right.
Now they're working, but there is no project. Click the button on the upper-right to open the projects menu and select "Bio-Transport Module" and click OK. If you've got the following screen, then your scientists are now working on developing the module.
The research is at 0% because they just started.
Now that you're here, you may as well assign your quantum physicists, too. You could go back to the Cityscape and go to the physicists tab, or you can use the shortcut on the top menu here.
Right now I have biochemistry selected, and there is a 5 there because I have assigned 5 scientists in that lab. Click the middle one to go to the quantum physics lab. Assign them the same way, and get them to research Dimension Gates.
The last place in the research menu is the engineering workshop. You can assign your engineers, but there are no projects available yet.
Give it another day or two... then they can build that transport module that the biochemists are still researching.
Now, let's go shopping. Enter your base management screen. See all those buttons on the right?
(Oh. You could have gone to the research menu from here, too, by using the beaker button).
The first button is to hire (or fire) personnel. Click it.
People on the left, under the heading "X-COM Agents" are the soldier we already have working for us. If you want to fire someone, click on them, and they will move to the right, to the "Civilian" box. Hire new people the same way, by clicking them out of the Civilian box. You can mouse over people to get a preview of their stats.
You can see your money go down as you hire someone. You can cancel hiring them and your money will come back. When you leave this screen, you'll get a confirmation prompt.
Sometimes robots will be available for hire. You can tell a robot from a human by their 100% Psi Defense stat. There are also mutants sometimes, but they seem to be rare for me.
You can also hire and fire biochemists, physicists, and engineers by pressing the buttons on the right. People with higher skill will make your research go faster.
Jacqueline here has a lot of skill. 100 points is the max. Might want to hire her to replace someone with 60-70 points. But we only have so much money, so we might not want to go crazy hiring and firing people just for slightly faster research.
Also, the current research labs can only hold 5 people each, so don't try to hire more than that. Since you start with 5 of each researcher/engineer, you don't have to hire more unless you want to replace someone to get a person with more skill.
Also definitely don't fire your agents. They're probably gonna die anyway :)
There might not be anyone available for hire. Sometimes that happens. New people will be available for hire after midnight in-game time.
Oh yes, the top-left box has a % in it. That's how much of your living quarters are used up. If you plan to hire more people, you'll have to have room for them in your base. Construct more living quarters if you plan to hire more people.
With that done, go back to the base window and click the box with a dollar sign on it. Here you can buy and sell your vehicles and weapons and armor and tools for your soldiers. By default it's looking at your vehicles.
As you scroll down the vehicle screen, the numbers on the RIGHT are what you have already at your base, and on the LEFT are what the shops have in stock to sell to you. Move the bar from right to left to sell something you have, and the other way to buy something.
Since the Wolfhound APC is useless, I'm going to click the bar over to the left to sell it.
The Stormdog is also kind of useless so I sold that too.
Now let's look at the items for soldiers.
Names in blue are the ammunition for the gun right above them. The Megapol Lawpistol, for example, uses the Lawpistol Clip.
I recommend buying a ton of AP grenades. Their usefulness will be explain later, maybe.
You don't need to buy any armor unless you've hired some additional soldiers. You might want to buy a few more weapons and some extra ammo, just to be prepared.
Oh, and the % in the top-right is how much of your base's storage space is used up. Since it's only at 17%, we have plenty of room to buy new stuff.
Since we're talking about soldiers, maybe it's about time we did something with them.
Go back to the cityscape and click the Agents tab and you'll see how many agents you have and their general status. Click the Equip Agent button (Or, use the 4th button on your base management screen).
Everyone is already fairly well-equipped. But I'm kind of anal and have my own equipment set-up:
Everyone in my army gets 2 AP grenades, 1 stun grenade, a medkit, and a round or two of extra ammo.
Evelyn here has the laser sniper gun. It's powerful and sort of accurate and takes a lot of time for each shot, in my experience.
Oh, to move things around, just drag and drop. The box on the bottom is what you have in your storage reserves.
And you can rename your agents by clicking their name above their stats.
Patricia has the machine gun. You can get a lot of shots in with it, but the damage is a bit to be desired.
Neil has the Auto Cannon. Like the sniper gun, it takes a lot of time to use, and it's heavy so the soldier will not move that fast. But it's powerful if you can hit the enemy with it. It has 3 different types of rounds. AP for general purposes, IN for causing fires (which is not that useful since fire takes a long time to dissipate), and HE for explosives. Don't shoot an enemy near your own guys if you have the HE or IN ammo equipped! You can change the ammo type in a pinch in the middle of battle, too.
Yoko here has the Stun Grapple. This is perfect for the pacifist. It won't kill the enemy. It'll attempt to stun it, like a cattle prod. This is great for bringing live aliens back to base to do research on them. It's also useful just to keep a deadly alien down. Remember, though, that stunned enemies can suddenly wake up, so keep an eye on them (trick: you can stand on them to keep them down).
The motion scanner is useless. Unequip it and sell it.
The lawpistol is kind of weak, but you can get nice, accurate shots with it, and fire fairly often. Some enemies can't even be killed by it -- they'll be stunned instead.
The Mind Bender is useless. It attempts to mind control an enemy. Not to spoil too much, but your first run of aliens are gonna be immune to it because they lack higher brain function. I haven't really tried it on the aliens that it might work on, though.
To equip armor, click the guy-with-a-shield button and drag and drop armor onto your guy. You'll have to buy more armor and new weapons for any fresh recruits.
If an agent dies, your surviving members will recover the weapons and armor from the body, so you won't have to repurchase them.
Go back to the Cityscape screen and click directly on your base (not like the tab in the console, click the base itself) to assign your soldiers. All my people are in the base right now. You can click a few people to toggle them (I have toggled Patricia, Niel, and Marcel).
Click and drag the PORTRAIT (not the name) to move them into a vehicle.
It's up to you how you want to use your men. A Hovercar can only carry 4 people, so you could send 2 cars with 4 people each for 8 total to a mission. Your Valkyrie can hold 12, so you could do that too. Some people hate the Valkyrie and sell it right off the bat. I don't have any problems with it and I prefer to use it to carry my men.
There's not much else to do... dare we ... unpause the game?
Time is managed on the right side of the console in the Cityscape.
This speed is the slowest. The 2nd to last speed is what you'll want to use while waiting for your new recruits and purchases to arrive at your base.
You can watch cars and ships go about their daily business in the city. I clicked on a police car that I saw on patrol.
The last speed... is called Ultra Fast. Use this to get things going.
First, though, we ought to save the game. Press the ? on the Cityscape to go into options and do that.
There are 2 things that could happen at this point when you put on Ultra Fast speed. You may get an alert.
This means aliens have been spotted somewhere in the city. Click on a MANNED vehicle to toggle it. Then press the pink alien head to send out your vehicle.
The game will go to the Cityscape on the slowest speed and you will see your ship head off.
To follow it easier, click it in the vehicles tab. Then the ship will be centered on the screen. Make sure to have the camera mode toggled so that the camera will follow it.
When you reach your destination, you'll enter combat mode. I'll talk about that later.
The other thing that could happen is this...
Click the pause button to center on the UFO. It's never just one, though...
See that red pyramid-ish thing with the blue stuff flying around it? That's a dimension gate, what our physicists are researching. The two pods flying out of it are alien ships. Notice on the UFO tab I have 5 ships listed. Tthere are multiple gates and the UFOs can come from different ones during the same attack.
To attack a UFO, click the vehicles tab, select a vehicle, and click the "attack hostile unit" button.
The game will prompt you to select a UFO.
So, go to the UFO tab, double-click the one you want to center onto it, and then click it proper.
If you allow the auto-pause feature (toggle it in the options menu), the game will pause when your ships are hit by enemy fire. If you think they are damaged too much, you can tell them to return to base with a button on the vehicles tab.
Pause often and keep an eye on all the UFOs. If you see them doing this:
See the white stream coming down out of that alien ship? It means the ship is depositing aliens into the building. As soon as the UFO attack is over, you will want to take your manned ship to this building, click on the building, and investigate for aliens. If you don't, the owner of the building may start to become under alien control and, if it goes that far, even ally with the aliens and start attacking you.
You don't want to wait for an alert to come in. Be pro-active, not reactive.
This UFO crash-landed here. Recover the UFO by selecting your Valkyrie (hovercars won't work) and clicking "Go to map point" and clicking the UFO. It'll pick it up and bring it to the base.
Our physicists are still working on the Dimension gates, but after that, we'll make them work on the UFO.
Now that the UFOs are gone, you're supposed to eliminate any aliens that have been deposited into buildings as mentioned above. If you don't remember or don't know which buildings the aliens have been dropped into, now is a good time to make a new game save. Then, fast-forward an entire day, ignoring all research notifications, and wait for an alert. When it comes, send your guys there and watch the ship fly there. Now you'll know what building the aliens are in! Reload the save and manually send your ship there to investigate before the alert comes in.
At midnight you'll get a report on how you're doing.
Obviously, aliens attacking is bad. Also, damage to the city is bad. You can't really help it, though.
When research is done, the game tells you and you'll be taken to the lab screen to reassign the scientists. I set my engineers to make this. Once made, I went into the equipment window for the vehicles.
And drag and dropped the module onto the Valkyrie.
Now my men can bring specimens from their missions to the base. This is vitally important so that your researchers can create new weapons and defenses.
Oh, and you can also name your ships.
Always, always ignore the Cult of Sirius. They're crazy and in love with aliens.
Combat will be addressed in another post.
Index --- Next
X-COM: Apocalypse is a great game, but it can be hard for first-time players to figure out what to do. So I've made this little guide to help a friend get started.
When you start a new campaign, you can choose the difficulty. From what I gather, this mainly affects how quickly the aliens develop new technology.
After this, you will see the game's overworld window, which is called the Cityscape (this is likely a tribute to the previous games' Geoscape. In this game we only have access to a single city, not the entire globe, hence the name change).
You will be centered on your base. Whenever you start a new game, the base given to you is randomly chosen from a pool of possible base locations.
If you click the map view button (the second from the top on the left-hand side of the console), you'll enter a top-down view of the city.
Use this to get an idea of where your base is in relation to the rest of the city.
I find that the map view scrolls too quickly to be all that useful. Click the map view button again to return to the normal Cityscape. When you move your mouse to the edges of the screen, it will scroll and you can see the rest of the city.
If you get lost and can't find your base again, simply click the bases tab in your console (it's the tab open on default) and double-click your base and the view will go right back to it.
Click this button
to enter the base management screen. Here you can see what facilities your base has. You might want to think about what you plan to do with your home base. I tend to make at least two bases over the course of the game: one is a research base which houses my scientists and their huge labs, and another houses my soldiers. It's not really required to do this, but your starting base might not have enough room for the advanced research buildings.
First off, click the name of the base to rename it.
The bottom half of the screen shows you what facilities you can build. Mouse over to get information. I'm looking at a training area.
Drag and drop a building from the bottom half onto a free space in the base to start building it. If you change your mind, you can cancel the building by clicking on it and choosing to cancel it, and you'll get your money back as long as you haven't left this screen.
I've put up a new medical bay, and the big "4" in a circle means it'll take four in-game days before I can use it. You don't technically need a 2nd medical bay. This is just an example.
Each of the advanced research labs (which have not been unlocked yet) need a 2x2-sized area available in the base to build them. The same goes for the Vehicle Repair Bay. You might not have room in your home base for these buildings. Keep that in mind when thinking of what you should build in your base and where.
In fact, putting my medical bay right where I did was a bad move; I now have no room for any 2x2-sized building.
Research, research, speaking of research, let's assign our scientists to research.
Go back to the Cityscape. Click the Biochemistry tab. Then click the beaker icon.
This is the biochemistry research screen. Right now my biochemists are doing nothing. You see their names on the left? They are currently idle. Click each one until they are on the right.
Now they're working, but there is no project. Click the button on the upper-right to open the projects menu and select "Bio-Transport Module" and click OK. If you've got the following screen, then your scientists are now working on developing the module.
The research is at 0% because they just started.
Now that you're here, you may as well assign your quantum physicists, too. You could go back to the Cityscape and go to the physicists tab, or you can use the shortcut on the top menu here.
Right now I have biochemistry selected, and there is a 5 there because I have assigned 5 scientists in that lab. Click the middle one to go to the quantum physics lab. Assign them the same way, and get them to research Dimension Gates.
The last place in the research menu is the engineering workshop. You can assign your engineers, but there are no projects available yet.
Give it another day or two... then they can build that transport module that the biochemists are still researching.
Now, let's go shopping. Enter your base management screen. See all those buttons on the right?
(Oh. You could have gone to the research menu from here, too, by using the beaker button).
The first button is to hire (or fire) personnel. Click it.
People on the left, under the heading "X-COM Agents" are the soldier we already have working for us. If you want to fire someone, click on them, and they will move to the right, to the "Civilian" box. Hire new people the same way, by clicking them out of the Civilian box. You can mouse over people to get a preview of their stats.
You can see your money go down as you hire someone. You can cancel hiring them and your money will come back. When you leave this screen, you'll get a confirmation prompt.
Sometimes robots will be available for hire. You can tell a robot from a human by their 100% Psi Defense stat. There are also mutants sometimes, but they seem to be rare for me.
You can also hire and fire biochemists, physicists, and engineers by pressing the buttons on the right. People with higher skill will make your research go faster.
Jacqueline here has a lot of skill. 100 points is the max. Might want to hire her to replace someone with 60-70 points. But we only have so much money, so we might not want to go crazy hiring and firing people just for slightly faster research.
Also, the current research labs can only hold 5 people each, so don't try to hire more than that. Since you start with 5 of each researcher/engineer, you don't have to hire more unless you want to replace someone to get a person with more skill.
Also definitely don't fire your agents. They're probably gonna die anyway :)
There might not be anyone available for hire. Sometimes that happens. New people will be available for hire after midnight in-game time.
Oh yes, the top-left box has a % in it. That's how much of your living quarters are used up. If you plan to hire more people, you'll have to have room for them in your base. Construct more living quarters if you plan to hire more people.
With that done, go back to the base window and click the box with a dollar sign on it. Here you can buy and sell your vehicles and weapons and armor and tools for your soldiers. By default it's looking at your vehicles.
As you scroll down the vehicle screen, the numbers on the RIGHT are what you have already at your base, and on the LEFT are what the shops have in stock to sell to you. Move the bar from right to left to sell something you have, and the other way to buy something.
Since the Wolfhound APC is useless, I'm going to click the bar over to the left to sell it.
The Stormdog is also kind of useless so I sold that too.
Now let's look at the items for soldiers.
Names in blue are the ammunition for the gun right above them. The Megapol Lawpistol, for example, uses the Lawpistol Clip.
I recommend buying a ton of AP grenades. Their usefulness will be explain later, maybe.
You don't need to buy any armor unless you've hired some additional soldiers. You might want to buy a few more weapons and some extra ammo, just to be prepared.
Oh, and the % in the top-right is how much of your base's storage space is used up. Since it's only at 17%, we have plenty of room to buy new stuff.
Since we're talking about soldiers, maybe it's about time we did something with them.
Go back to the cityscape and click the Agents tab and you'll see how many agents you have and their general status. Click the Equip Agent button (Or, use the 4th button on your base management screen).
Everyone is already fairly well-equipped. But I'm kind of anal and have my own equipment set-up:
Everyone in my army gets 2 AP grenades, 1 stun grenade, a medkit, and a round or two of extra ammo.
Evelyn here has the laser sniper gun. It's powerful and sort of accurate and takes a lot of time for each shot, in my experience.
Oh, to move things around, just drag and drop. The box on the bottom is what you have in your storage reserves.
And you can rename your agents by clicking their name above their stats.
Patricia has the machine gun. You can get a lot of shots in with it, but the damage is a bit to be desired.
Neil has the Auto Cannon. Like the sniper gun, it takes a lot of time to use, and it's heavy so the soldier will not move that fast. But it's powerful if you can hit the enemy with it. It has 3 different types of rounds. AP for general purposes, IN for causing fires (which is not that useful since fire takes a long time to dissipate), and HE for explosives. Don't shoot an enemy near your own guys if you have the HE or IN ammo equipped! You can change the ammo type in a pinch in the middle of battle, too.
Yoko here has the Stun Grapple. This is perfect for the pacifist. It won't kill the enemy. It'll attempt to stun it, like a cattle prod. This is great for bringing live aliens back to base to do research on them. It's also useful just to keep a deadly alien down. Remember, though, that stunned enemies can suddenly wake up, so keep an eye on them (trick: you can stand on them to keep them down).
The motion scanner is useless. Unequip it and sell it.
The lawpistol is kind of weak, but you can get nice, accurate shots with it, and fire fairly often. Some enemies can't even be killed by it -- they'll be stunned instead.
The Mind Bender is useless. It attempts to mind control an enemy. Not to spoil too much, but your first run of aliens are gonna be immune to it because they lack higher brain function. I haven't really tried it on the aliens that it might work on, though.
To equip armor, click the guy-with-a-shield button and drag and drop armor onto your guy. You'll have to buy more armor and new weapons for any fresh recruits.
If an agent dies, your surviving members will recover the weapons and armor from the body, so you won't have to repurchase them.
Go back to the Cityscape screen and click directly on your base (not like the tab in the console, click the base itself) to assign your soldiers. All my people are in the base right now. You can click a few people to toggle them (I have toggled Patricia, Niel, and Marcel).
Click and drag the PORTRAIT (not the name) to move them into a vehicle.
It's up to you how you want to use your men. A Hovercar can only carry 4 people, so you could send 2 cars with 4 people each for 8 total to a mission. Your Valkyrie can hold 12, so you could do that too. Some people hate the Valkyrie and sell it right off the bat. I don't have any problems with it and I prefer to use it to carry my men.
There's not much else to do... dare we ... unpause the game?
Time is managed on the right side of the console in the Cityscape.
This speed is the slowest. The 2nd to last speed is what you'll want to use while waiting for your new recruits and purchases to arrive at your base.
You can watch cars and ships go about their daily business in the city. I clicked on a police car that I saw on patrol.
The last speed... is called Ultra Fast. Use this to get things going.
First, though, we ought to save the game. Press the ? on the Cityscape to go into options and do that.
There are 2 things that could happen at this point when you put on Ultra Fast speed. You may get an alert.
This means aliens have been spotted somewhere in the city. Click on a MANNED vehicle to toggle it. Then press the pink alien head to send out your vehicle.
The game will go to the Cityscape on the slowest speed and you will see your ship head off.
To follow it easier, click it in the vehicles tab. Then the ship will be centered on the screen. Make sure to have the camera mode toggled so that the camera will follow it.
When you reach your destination, you'll enter combat mode. I'll talk about that later.
The other thing that could happen is this...
Click the pause button to center on the UFO. It's never just one, though...
See that red pyramid-ish thing with the blue stuff flying around it? That's a dimension gate, what our physicists are researching. The two pods flying out of it are alien ships. Notice on the UFO tab I have 5 ships listed. Tthere are multiple gates and the UFOs can come from different ones during the same attack.
To attack a UFO, click the vehicles tab, select a vehicle, and click the "attack hostile unit" button.
The game will prompt you to select a UFO.
So, go to the UFO tab, double-click the one you want to center onto it, and then click it proper.
If you allow the auto-pause feature (toggle it in the options menu), the game will pause when your ships are hit by enemy fire. If you think they are damaged too much, you can tell them to return to base with a button on the vehicles tab.
Pause often and keep an eye on all the UFOs. If you see them doing this:
See the white stream coming down out of that alien ship? It means the ship is depositing aliens into the building. As soon as the UFO attack is over, you will want to take your manned ship to this building, click on the building, and investigate for aliens. If you don't, the owner of the building may start to become under alien control and, if it goes that far, even ally with the aliens and start attacking you.
You don't want to wait for an alert to come in. Be pro-active, not reactive.
This UFO crash-landed here. Recover the UFO by selecting your Valkyrie (hovercars won't work) and clicking "Go to map point" and clicking the UFO. It'll pick it up and bring it to the base.
Our physicists are still working on the Dimension gates, but after that, we'll make them work on the UFO.
Now that the UFOs are gone, you're supposed to eliminate any aliens that have been deposited into buildings as mentioned above. If you don't remember or don't know which buildings the aliens have been dropped into, now is a good time to make a new game save. Then, fast-forward an entire day, ignoring all research notifications, and wait for an alert. When it comes, send your guys there and watch the ship fly there. Now you'll know what building the aliens are in! Reload the save and manually send your ship there to investigate before the alert comes in.
At midnight you'll get a report on how you're doing.
Obviously, aliens attacking is bad. Also, damage to the city is bad. You can't really help it, though.
When research is done, the game tells you and you'll be taken to the lab screen to reassign the scientists. I set my engineers to make this. Once made, I went into the equipment window for the vehicles.
And drag and dropped the module onto the Valkyrie.
Now my men can bring specimens from their missions to the base. This is vitally important so that your researchers can create new weapons and defenses.
Oh, and you can also name your ships.
Always, always ignore the Cult of Sirius. They're crazy and in love with aliens.
Combat will be addressed in another post.
Index --- Next
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