oh...great !!

Has anyone here managed to win the game on "superhuman"? The best I could win it on was the middle difficulty.

ahhh Wolf welcome to the world of X-com,

Theres dozens of strategy guides & tip sheets around that are relativly simply to find. You will probably discover like many of us did that the game has a HUGE learning curve and continually learn small tricks that make missions easier.

I initially played this game on the PSX so no net help and before I played to completion I musta did 6-7 full restarts from the beggining, sometimes due to glitches and sometimes due to just not wanting the adventure to end each time armed with better tactics and strategys.
Still to this day more than 7 years later I learn a new trick now and then.

Enjoy it theres really nothing like X-com and if you have to play 4-5 months into the game to learn some good basics? oh well thats just part of the fun.

I envy you...your adventures just begun

I am not sure. I think I won the superhuman level, but that was probably before they fixed the difficulty bug (there were more aliens, but they were, individually, no tougher than easy level aliens).

I am now having fun(?) playing at the superhuman level, while cheating shamelessly about money. Combining the difficulty of the game with my disdain for reloading makes for apalling body counts. Assaults on medium ships with MC capable sectoids typically incurr 100% casualties and the loss of the transport. While successful (after 90% casualties, 24 dead, three wounded, out of thirty defenders), defending my main base, before I could manufacture my first laser pistol, was an experience that I am not keen to repeat. The crashed, sectoid terror ship where eight of the cyberdisks survived the forced landing makes me leery of repeating the exercise.

At superhuman level, the ideal base defence setup makes for a really long mission, or really high casualties. To get to the sectoid commander to halt MC attacks, you have to assault the aliens in the hangars, but the choke point of the access lift means that you must attack the aliens in a situation that gives them the upper hand.

I am currently in MC hell, as I do not have enough elerium to mass produce stun bombs and even if I had them, assaulting the likely locations of sectoid leaders/commanders is unlikely to succeed.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded the windows version. I have discovered that the game makes noises. The happy feeling of hearing an alien groan its last has been added to my emotional lexicon.

For those who thought invisible aliens are bad, try invisible cyberdisks. Because I seldom bother to save often enough to make reloading practical, I just grit my teeth and kill invisible aliens. Figuring out where the plasma fire is coming from is a pain, but reconnaisance by high explosives will often deal with the issue, and killing visible aliens usually reveals the invisible ones.

I am still alife without any cheat, just avoiding ethereals.

Yeah, by Mc ther half your men get killed by aliens and other half by yourself. In my main base i got near 40 solds + 3 lasertanks and any base with trasport got 25 people + 3 tanks. And i lost one of that bases recently to an ethereal´s attack
About sectoids MC, only a few of them can MC u so try to disarm the people how start to get problems. Use tanks well backuped but the tanks as scout. These are the harder missions avoiding ethereals.

Just a quick note guys...

How long does research into heavy plasma take? I've got a hundred scientists on it for a month already and it's still on poor.

Wierd, 100 scientists should be enough for the whole game. When I had 100 scientists on Heavy Plasma it was average, and no research item was poor. :blink:

It does take some time to research, but definately not more than a month! Are you sure you allocated all the scientists from the moment you started research on it? Also, check if you have enough lab space (i.e. 2 labs).

U can´t alocate scientists if they didn´t got the space, maybe u are researching the plasma cannon...

Albeit its tedious but if you are having difficulties with MC then quite simply arm your soldiers with 1 weapon no gernades & click "save enough time units to kneel" this will leave you 4 time units then move out to assault the ship/terror/alien artfiact etc etc. At the end of each soldiers turn simply access his weapons screen and gently place the rifle etc on the ground (2 time units). Next turn pick up your rifle ...repeat prior instructions.

O.K. theres the disadvantage of losing opprtunity-fire and not having any gernades on hand but these are obviously replaced with not losing soldiers to MC controlled troops killing your own men. If your lucky enough to have a blaster launcher by this time then who even needs gernades 4 blaster boys back on the ship using this same approach are just what the Doc ordered and if your early on in the game and dont have blaster launchers then eventually you will gain control by either killing off a pile of aliens or taking out the bugger doing the MC then you can just pillage a body or if need be return to the craft for supplies.

Heck even if its the mighty ethereals and you don't have a blaster launcher eventually you get to know who they are "picking on" and can just use him/them as a decoy to make em spend thier MC points while you grab up a guy or two who seem immune to carry a couple gernades etc.

Oh don't carry gernades cause Aliens will access your belt for one...they wont pick up anything off the dirty nasty ground though...too many germ ya know.

Negative 2 million eh? easy enough to remedy without using a money cheat add 2 workshops 2 living quarters and 94 engineers to one of those bases..added costs will be under 3 million a month so now your app negative 5 million a month.

Have your Engineers manufacture and resell Lazer Cannons they will make app 7 a day for a profit of app 200k a day or 6 million a month.

There now you got an extra million.

PS don't get greedy if you go past the 255 limit of engineers (per base) you will have some nasty bugs creep into your game say you build 6 workshops in one base and buy 300 engineers well as soon as you buy your 256th engineer they turn into negative 254 engineers, each one bought afterwards will count towards reducing your defecit so another ten will be -244 etc.
I would assume that this goes for scientists and soldiers too but never bothered testing it, the old 256 limit had hit me before on other games crashing on 256th level of Galaga :)