Weekend offline with XCOM

As the title suggests, i have been offline over the weekend. At least as far as gaming anyway. This was because one of the powerline network adapters i use to hardline my rig to my router went kaput. Thankfully Steam now gives the option to start in offline mode if it doesnt detect an internet connection rather than just locking you out, so i decided to continue my XCOM:EU Long War mod campaign.

I was ending my second month after what I thought was a good start, id even managed to do a terror mission without beam weapons. Then I get another terror mission, this time in Brisbane, on the military base map, with over twelve Chryssalids and still without beam weapons. You can guess how that went.

At this point I'd like to say something that will probably turn up some noses; I reloaded the last XCOM HQ autosave, adjusted the squad to be long range heavy then had another go. The Skyranger dropship landed at the police station instead and my squad got swarmed from the front door by the Chryssalids, again.

I remembered that terror missions give you a few days to do them so i decided to advance time & perhaps get some of my higher rank troops off of downtime. All i got was a bunch of my interceptors shot up, Australia withdrawing from the council and an abduction mission in Brazil.

On arriving at a fuel station somewhere Brazil, my squad deployed in good order while approaching the diner and kiosk. Next thing I know, I've lost 2 of my guys to Mutons, leaving the other four to crack at them with their guns. Now against Mutons, I may as well have given them Nerf guns for what it's worth. My guys were dead before they could reach the Skyranger for extraction.

 So I deleted that game, I'd got myself stuck in a corner that I couldn't get out of. Since Mutons had now shown up, they would be in pretty much every mission and I could not hurt them with what I had. I couldn't build laser rifles, despite researching them, as to do so required 15 engineers on staff and I had 12. I couldn't build a workshop as I didn't have the power and construction on my thermogenerator was still 3 weeks away from been completed. Those of you that have played the Long War will understand due to the extended construction times and the rate that jobs come up that my troops would be protein goop long before I could possibly begin to equip them.

I have started a new campaign which i will cover in a series of posts, each post covering a week or two of in game time. I will also be going through the different mechanics of the mod compared to vanilla XCOM. This time around I'll be rushing to 'pew pew lazor' beam tech and also, the steam vent is easier to get to.

If you would like your name, or someone else's, to be given to my soldiers when they have ranked up to squaddie then please list in the comments below. I'm not doing ironman due to the UI sometimes going a bit wiggy  and then I can reload should a misclick happen, however I will accept defeat when it happens for the good of the funnies.

Signing off.

Hello? is this thing on?

Hello and welcome to my first faltering steps into blogging. This blog is intended to be a place where I can have my say on the various aspects of gaming without being restricted to 140 characters. It is to be a place for me to practise my writing, never one of my strong suits, however, training, practise and all that jazz should help me improve. 

For those of you who don't know me from any of the games I play or Twitter (@MaxUrsa), i am the father of three small childerbeasts, husband to a non gamer, at Home dad/Carer and a White Rose Yorkshireman in Manchester (well Stockport to be more accurate but meh, it's all Bandit Country). 

As for gaming, I only really play on PC with some Mobile in there too. I do play a great deal of Planetside 2, I'm an officer in the PC Gamer Outfit (PLUG!) on the Miller server which I spend most of my game time on. I plan to be doing many a post about the game, my experiences and information as to its future.

Other than that I am currently mostly playing XCOM Enemy Unknown using the mod Long War which has added so many more layers of gameplay to the vanilla. Perhaps a post will come of it if I can get my game finished before I pick up the highly anticipated (personally) Enemy Within expansion. 

Talking of highly anticipated, I cannot wait for Star Citizen. I have my pledge, my ships, my hanger and soon be flying around when the dogfighting module comes this December. I can't help but hoover up up every detail I can pick up about it so that will be another thing I will hopefully be posting about at least semi regularly.

I am also dipping my toe into DOTA2, not played an actual live match (bots were enough so far) so I may well be posting as I go with that too. I am already finding it confusing to keep track of everything but like most things, I'm sure it will improve in time.

My rig system setup is as follows:
AMD Phenom II x3 B55 Processor 3.20Ghz
RAM 4GB
HDD 250GB (no not SSD, yet)
Geforce GTX 560Ti (recent upgrade, was a GTX260)
SoundBlaster XFI Fatality Edition
Win7 Home 64

Yes that is the correct processor, it's one of those duel cores that's actually a quad core with two cores offline. Turns out it's because one of the cores was duff so after a bit of trial and error, i managed to get the three good cores on-line, +50% performance is not something to sniff at. I know it is a pretty low end system, however with responsibilities come other, more urgent money sinks. Next thing on my upgrade list is an SSD, some may argue that I should do RAM but with monitoring I found that there wasn't any time where the 4GB was at 100% capacity even with Large Address Aware. For the games that do take a hefty bite of my memory *cough* PS2 *cough* I use Razer's Game Booster which makes a significant improvement to performance.

So there you go, a bit of background for you and a taste of writing a blog for me. I hope to one day look back at this post and cringe, then realise how far i have come and take pride in it. 

Until next time...