Briefly, games-wise, we’ve been playing Blood Bowl on PC. Lots and lots of Blood Bowl. How much Blood Bowl? An entire league’s worth of Blood Bowl, that’s how much. You can find all the details starting here.

The X-Com diary is set to continue at CG in the coming weeks too. What with Civilization V, Dead Rising 2 and Red Dead Redemption (hey, I just got it and it’s freakin’ great) I’ve been stuck for time to play Apocalypse. This will change.

Day Nine

Now things are starting to get interesting. And by interesting, I mean difficult. I’ve got a terrible man power problem right now, with way too many of my Agents injured and skiving off in the medical bay. I can’t deploy a full strength ground team on missions and what Agents I do deploy invariably get shot up which adds a few more to the wounded list. What’s worse, my living quarters at J-HQ are completely full and it’s going to be another day or two before extra capacity comes online, so I can’t even hire some rookies to bulk out the ranks a little bit.

The solution? Well, I need to give my Agents a break from ground missions. That’s going to be hard to do, seeing as how we’re getting alerts every couple of hours across the city. The last wave of Aliens that the UFO’s dropped in are still trying to cause havoc. We’re killing them steadily but it’s only a matter of time now until the ships return and bring with them another horde of extraterrestrial insurgents. I’ve got to ride out this wave of ground battles and then shoot down the next UFO wave in its entirety to stem the tide of invaders. I told you it was going to get difficult.

I decide it’s time to put some money into my fleet of vehicles, so I start having a poke around the equip vehicle screen to see what sort of equipment I should be looking for. It’s then that I notice, with a big smile, the Bio-Transport modules sitting quietly in the corner. My workshop has been beavering away at these and I’d forgotten about them. When you assign a bulk production job in Apocalypse items trickle into your inventories one by one, rather than in bulk when the job is finished. But the game doesn’t tell you production is complete until the whole job is done so a couple of those modules have been sitting here unbeknown to me  for who knows how long. I stick one in the J-Mobile immediately and check the market price of the module.

$950? Not bad. Not bad at all. It’ll be a while yet before I get the results of the research on the Alien weaponry we’ve recovered, so I can start hawking these modules on the side for a little extra cash rather than let the workshop lie fallow. More importantly, now the J-Mobile has got one, I can start hauling back corpses from combat zones for delicious research opportunities. Live captures will be needed too, but they can be extraordinarily dangerous to attempt.

Back to the vehicles. I want to get the monster rocket above. The Hawk Air Warrior is the hardiest human craft available, perfect for knocking out large UFO targets. It’s also way, way beyond my budget right now. I’d have to sell virtually every other vehicle I own just to afford the chassis, never mind the weapon systems and upgrades. It’s a pipe dream for now, but what cash I do have I spend on beefing up my hoverbikes and hovercars. Better guns and better engines are the order of the day, so my fleet can fly faster and hit harder. Investing cash in hoverbikes is always risky given their fragility. They make excellent attackers in groups, but one direct hit can swat a bike out of the sky and take all its expensive upgrades with it.

At least one diary reader emailed in to suggest I deploy my vehicles about the city in anticipation of a UFO attack, rather than have them wait at base. Deployment time from J-HQ is maddeningly slow when I send out the fleet en masse, so I’ve stuck my hoverbikes and hovercars up in the sky around the nearest dimension gates. They’ll sit there burning fuel and keeping watch on the gates, which will hopefully result in immediate intercept of any incoming hostiles. I’ve deactivated their weapons for now, in case they try and spontaneously engage any hostile civilian craft while they’re waiting. They’re parked over Osiron slum territory, after all.

It doesn’t discourage the Aliens from kicking up a fuss on the ground however. I’ve got six Agents combat ready out of a roster of fourteen, but I’m in an enthusiastic mood thanks to the knowledge that any invaders we kill this time we’ll be hauling back to base for dissection. Go go J-Mobile!

Hold on just a freakin’ minute. We were just here! Our last handfull of combat missions have taken place in that damaged recycling plant, that bloody warehouse and that damn factory. We killed every Alien in that god damn area and now we have to go back in again? Man, talk about doing a job half-assed the first time.

I decide to try and do something rather silly during the engagement. The J-Mobile can carry back live Aliens, so I resolved to try and bag the big worm in that screenshot above alive. This thing spits green goo that will melt armour and if killed a bunch of little worms will explode from its corpse to avenge it, but It came at us alone, without the support of any of its buddies. It was practically asking for it.

Clever girl. The worm tried to keep out of the way of the knockout gas that my Agents laid down with stun grenades. The gas dissipates quickly, at which point the monster would turn around and come at my squad again. This back and forth went on until for a few minutes as we gradually tried to coax the worm further out, the damn thing spitting goo at us the whole time.

Finally, with stun grenades running out, we got lucky and caught it. The creature was knocked cold. And then the panic set in. I had absolutely no idea how long that thing was going to stay under, and I still had the rest of the combat zone to sweep and clear. If it woke up before the mission was finished I’d just have to kill it, as I’d very few stun grenades left and it was tricky enough trapping the thing once.

I press on quickly to mop things up. My haste gets another Agent wounded as I rush the squad around the building without keeping to cover (leaving a total of four Agents in the whole organisation that aren’t hurt), but we kill the last few Aliens easily and we claim our new prize for research.

A multiworm, eh? Soon we’ll have your secrets.

And now, a brief announcement: Starting with entry eleven, I’m planning to move this diary to Citizen Game. Our new Staff  Blog feature is designed to accommodate exactly this kind of thing, and I’d like to bring the diary to a broader audience. I’ll still post about updates here, but going forward expect to see the bulk of the diary on Citizen Game. Thanks for reading and for the support, and I hope you’ll follow the diary to its new home.

I’m over three months into the diary. Personally, I didn’t think I’d get this far. I was certain, given my laziness and predilections for things other than a 13-year old strategy game, that I’d let the thing die on the vine or that the actions of my X-Com Agents within the game would bring the organisation to ruin long before I lost interest in playing. This hasn’t happened. Instead, I’m steadily rekindling my passion for this game and getting more and more invested in what becomes of X-Com this time around. Several people have gotten in touch via email (and you can too) to say they’ve enjoyed reading the diary and it’s encouraged them to check out the game, which is quite nice. If you’re enjoying it too, please spread the word. I’ll love you forever*.

Expect updates to come a little bit quicker in the future, at least through the month of September before my trip to Citizen Game HQ this October. Speaking of which, I’ve got some plans for the diary with regard to the re-relaunch of Citizen Game. Stay tuned.

And now, onward to Part 9…

When last we left our “heroes” they’d just been surprised by the most horrific weapon in the alien arsenal they’ve yet seen.

That is; a speedy, blue, two-legged creature that can explode catastrophically at will. It is, essentially, a very ugly suicide bomber. And a bastard.

Luckily the first agents to be on the receiving of this creature’s unique assault survived relatively unscathed, managing to shoot and detonate the little git before it could cover the final few feet and explode all up in their grills. If it had made it to its destination I’ve no doubt the resulting detonation would have murdered the entire squad.

As it was, my ground team survived with a few minor injuries, but I’m starting to get very concerned about the casualty rate. I don’t necessarily mean the body count, you understand. There’s one school of thought when it comes to commanding your forces in X-Com which basically says you’re doing it wrong if you don’t lose a couple of dozen Agents to enemy fire. There’s a spirit to playing X-Com that’s almost Dwarf Fortess-esque in its grim humour. That is, losing can be fun. It can suck getting people killed, but man, commanding the clusterfuck can be very entertaining.

That wasn’t how I felt about the base attack, if I’m honest with you. It felt very… unfair. I don’t think it was because the arsenal Osiron were packing was way in advance of mine, but rather how they employed it. The Osiron troops basically charged in with no heed for their own safety. They had superior numbers and nothing to lose. They acted like suicide bombers, as opposed to how you’d normally expect human ground troops to fight. I was keen to get stuck in with the shooty shooty, no doubt, but when deploying and moving my Agents I was always trying to keep them in cover and stagger their fire to minimize the risk of them getting killed. I had to play that way, because if I got everyone murdered it was game (and diary) over. Osiron had no such concerns, and acted like it, and that pissed me off a bit.

Anyway, casualties. They’re piling up. Every mission another Agent or two takes a minor wound which results in them being packed off to the medical bay when we return to base. This causes me four problems. One, it overloads my medical facilities and slows down the rate of recuperation of all injured Agents. This brings me to problem two, with that effect meaning it takes those Agents that are seriously injured that much longer to get back to one hundred percent. Problem three, all those injured Agents lying in hospital beds aren’t in the training facilities improving their skills. And problem four, I can’t risk deploying any Agent on mission who isn’t up to full strength given how lethal the Alien arsenal is rapidly becoming. Agents on full health rarely survive direct hits now. Putting an injured Agent in the field is just asking to get him killed.

Man, this game is hard.

What able bodied Agents I do have are sent back out into the field just as they return from their last mission. I can only assume I’ve got a medic running about frantically forcing stimulants down all their throats, because no one seems to need any sleep. Regular readers of the diary may well be familiar with the above screenshot featuring that most common of combat locales, the warehouse. I’ve forgotten who it belongs to but I do know it’s next door to the building where our last mission took place, which probably reflects poorly on the clean up job my Agents did before wrapping up their previous sojourn.

You’ll see from the picture that I’ve a grand total of eight Agents uninjured in the entire organisation. They’re mostly rookies brought in to plug the holes in X-Com’s line up, but Sergeant Admiral (the Agent whose very name is a rank actually unattainable to all within X-Com) is my senior Agent right now and he’s got the experience to back them up. Mind you, given how things are going as long as he walks out of there alive I could care less about the rest. I hate losing experienced Agents.

Warehouses, as I’ve previously lamented, are a tactical nightmare. There’s no room to lay down nice, wide fields of fire to keep potentially explosive two-legged alien motherfuckers from sneaking up on you, for example. Ground missions in X-Com also have the potential to be astoundingly creepy. The Aliens make sounds as they move about the building, growing louder as they approach your Agents. Squelches, the odd moan, other noises best left unidentified. You always hear the buggers before you see them, and in a place like this you won’t see them until they’re right on top of you. All of which means those noises have a chance to get incredibly loud and unnerving. You’ll chuck grenades around blind corners convinced something is lurking there, only to have a monster burst out of the lift behind your squad.

Blocked lines of sight plus tight corners equals nasty surprise, which Admiral’s squad find out very early.

Most of the Aliens came pouring out of this grav lift during the mission. Lots of little worms backed up by laser-toting blue Aliens. I was just about to order them up the lift, as it happens, so you can imagine the shock when the door opened and the squad was rushed. Agent Xzalander took a critical hit to the face from a worm barely taller than his shin, which makes his wound the most embarrassing injury of the week. Quick application of a medkit meant he survived but with a hefty chunk taken from his health, which is yet another body I’ll be packing off to sick bay when we get home.

Admiral’s squad spend most of the mission with their guns blazing scoring plenty of kills and some minor property damage, as is now our custom. Another injury to the second squad causes some frustration (they’d been flanking in support and ran smack into one of those pink, spitting aliens) but I’m just relieved when I see the mission complete screen and can call it a day. Aliens dead, X-Com alive. Result.

Then it’s back to base for tea and biscuits. And hopefully a bit of a rest. I’ve got some changes to make and projects to check up on.

Stay tuned for Part 10…

*Not a guarantee.