New to the Series with a few questions Options

[Decepticons]

I picked up the three UFO:(x) titles over the weekend and started playing in order, starting with Aftermath. It's a fun game so far but after starting a game on easy/easy and playing through mid-February to get a feel for the game, I'm ready for more of a challenge. A few questions, if I may:

1. Difficulty settings: Do the difficulty settings have any impact on the rate you find new weapons? After three or four tactical missions and a base mission I seem to already outgun pretty much everything I run into. Also, the feeling of getting a cool new long range-high powered rifle was dimiished when I had 50 of them (in various forms) by the end of January, along with a few functional alien weapons. Does the difficulty level effect the AI at all? Most aliens seem to use only one tactic; close to firing range and start firing. That's not very exciting, especially once I aquired longer range weapons.

2. Expantion: From what I've read here so far, expanding at the maximum rate is not usually a good idea. In my first game, i controlled all of the US and Canada, Mexico and some of South America by mid-February, and that was probably not as fast as I could have accuired territory. What is a "good" rate of expantion?

3. Various launchers, particularly gerenade: The first gerenade launcher seems to be very, very powerful. I have two of my seven soldiers outfitted with them and excpet for inside bases where quarters are often too close, they're devestating with their ability to hit for high damage and near 100% accuracy even at long range. Is there any drawback to this seemingly very powerful weapon?

[Gorre]

Sorry for the late reply, I haven't been around lately. And belated welcome to the forums.

I should probably start by saying that this is in the wrong forum. It should be in the UFO:AS forum, this one's for UFO:AL. I'll let a mod know so that they can move it to the appropriate forum. Unless of course this post is indicative of all 3 games, in which case I guess it's not too out of place.

1. I can't remember exactly how the difficulty changes gameplay. It may or may not increase research times. If you asked me two years ago I'd probably know, but alas, It's been too long since I knew the inner working and details of the game.

2. IMO, the faster you expand, the better. You acquire access to more resources faster, more space to build buildings, and more battles to loot equipment from or level up your troops. Only real 'problem' I can think of is that you need to move Laputa around more. No biggie. The faster you expand, the less likely enemy factions are to expand to a sizeable state, unless you want to fight a large empire of enemy territories. That sounds like fun, actually...

3. To be honest, I rarely bothered with grenade launchers. My enemies always tended to move out of the way before the ordnance would reach them, resulting in minimal, if any, damage. I do remember that there were a few times that I thought of them as extremely useful. I just tended to use sniper rifles and long range assault rifles, with shotguns as secondary weapons for those indoor-battles against the cultists.

You can learn a lot looking through the older threads in the UFO:AS forums. The community made some really insightful discoveries into the game coding, to the point where you could play the game confidently, knowing what worked and what didn't.

[shadowkeeper]

this seems to be mostly about AS so I'll move it