Hey, everybody else has started a let's play and abandoned it. Lets Play X-Com!

[tyckspoon]

Alrights! So, a little off topic but, I finally installed X-Com and started playing it aaaaaaaand.....I'm terrible....like...rocks fall, everybody dies, terrible. Any advice? I can't seem to get through a ground assault with at least half of my troops dying...


-Suzuro

More gathered X-Com experience:
Explosives are your friends. If in doubt, blow it up. Buy enough grenades, demolition charges (load up whoever has the combination of highest strength and worst shooting accuracy- demo charges are very heavy and will kill this troop's TUs unless he is very strong) and missiles/explosive autocannon rounds to level any normal structure that looks at you wrong. I favor rockets.

Terrain can be shot out of your way. The starter rifles can take out vegetation and fences pretty quickly and will clear normal construction with enough shooting and some luck on damage rolls. Laser rifles will clear any human construction. Heavy plasma can cut through anything up to some UFO interior walls. It takes a blaster bomb to breach UFO hulls, and by the time you can do that you should be well on your way to winning. Shoot down anything that is blocking your lines of sight or just preventing you from going where you want; it's much faster to burn some TUs clearing a pathway than to walk around it. If you have a very large section you want to clear, like a warehouse wall in a terror mission, refer back to paragraph 1.

Take at least one HWP with you. Two is possible, but I prefer to have that space for more soldiers. HWPs have massive TUs to scout with, heavy firepower, are the only things that have any chance of surviving being hit in the early game, and are expendable; they don't count for morale among the rest of the team.

Don't sweat capturing aliens too much; psionics and the hyperwave decoder are important (and completely gamebreaking for psionics) but taking down aliens with stunsticks and then devoting time and money to researching them and building the new equipment is a distraction you probably can't afford while getting yourself oriented in the game. You can pick up as many aliens as you want when you have a Small Launcher around easily.

-- upgrade to personal armor as soon as you can, then laser rifles.
That's the reverse of what others here recommend, but rifles work just fine on sectoids while personal armor protects well.

Good reasons the traditional order is traditional:
Laser weapons are 'native' technology. You can begin research and potentially have them in production before you ever recover a UFO. They're easy to make, requiring no rare alien resources. They're a funding source once you have enough for your own use. They're like a million times better than the normal rifles (just being freed from the consideration of packing extra ammo clips is worth it, and a good reason to keep some laser rifles around even after you've managed to loot a good supply of heavy plasma.) In comparison, personal armor requires you to capture some Alien Alloy before you can begin on it, it requires more alien alloy to make, and in the face of plasma/heavy plasma attacks it's really not notably better than no armor at all.