Got myself a new computer at home with a Core i7 CPU under the hood, matched tri-channel RAM, a 64-bit operating system, and what am I doing with it? Playing a game I bought at a yard-sale back when I still lived with my parents. X-Com: UFO Defense is the first and best of a line of tactical games that pit a secretive international conspiracy against brutal alien invaders.

Like many games hailing from the early 1990’s, X-Com is a hodgepodge of minigames. By juggling the pace of your research and manufacturing resources as well as shooting down and investigating alien ships, the game does an excellent job of keeping you on your toes. There’s always something just around the corner for you to take care of, or so it seems. You can dialate or compress time in the main interface, giving you a great deal of control over the passage of dead time.

An important exception to this is when you’ve got your soldiers on the scene repelling an alien terror attack, or checking out a grounded alien ship. This interface is entirely turn-based, and has a strick fog of war. You are presented with a “hidden movement” screen whenever the bad-guys (or unseen civilians) are doing something you can’t see. Noting how long this screen stays up can be a pretty good indicator of how many bad-guys you’re dealing with.

These ground deployments make up a majority of play-time, with each of your soldiers capable of a small set of options that can lead to a rather broad variety of tactics when applied over a strike team of up to 14. I find myself using basically the same setup when I first hit the landing zone:

• It all starts by equipping your craft, so I get 10 soldiers and one heavy weapons platform. I keep a captain and a sergeant on each personel carrier, and rotate in rookies to season them up a bit.
• I designate one person to carry a heavy cannon with high explosive and incendiary rounds. Once I have them, I equip one person with a small launcher and stun bombs. Everybody else gets a rifle (of whatever flavor I have researched). Two people get high explosives (for clearing out sand mounds that sometimes block a craft’s doors), and everybody else gets a single grenade. Everybody gets an electroflare and a med-kit. This keeps matters very flexible, as everybody can lay down an area-of-effect blast and nearly everyone has a weapon suitable for close combat.
• Check the map. Always check the map before moving anything. You’ll often be able to tell right off the bat that you’re at one extreme or another of the play area, which is important; you don’t have to worry about enemy fire coming from off the map.
• Once landed, the HWP goes out first. These things are expensive but basically disposable; they don’t benefit from on-the-job experience, and are quite speedy. The HWP flushes out enemy reaction fire, which has saved many a rookie’s life when a barrage of plasma rifle fire greets the first thing out the hatch.
• The game plan generally shifts a bit by the time the HWP has finished its turn, but the first two soldiers out the hatch tend to do the same things anyway: one breaks left, one breaks right. This gets a pair of eyeballs looking each of the cardinal directions — somebody’s looking out the windshield when the map loads — so I’ve got a pretty good lay of the land by the time my third trooper activates.
• The next four troopers split up to provide back-up to the HWP and the two troopers that went out first, favoring whichever has an enemy in its sites, the direction of a downed UFO that you’ve already spotted, or simply away from a known edge of the map.
• The last four troopers generally won’t have enough time units to get out of your transport and squeeze a shot out, so don’t hang them out in the wind. I move them up to the exit but not quite to the ramp. This puts them in a good position to by my second wave.
• By the third turn, the fur is probably already flying. I’ll have two or three 3-man fire teams actively shooting up the xenos, attempting flanking maneuvers, and behing useful, with the HWP mostly just running around trying to draw fire and flush out more bad-guys. The remaining two or three soldiers keep their back to the action, looking around for a chance to lay down some reactive fire if anything tries to sneak up.
• Once it’s time to actually kick the doors open and raid a grounded UFO, the cannon-toting soldier and the HWP stay outside. I burn a turn or two setting up my entry, lining the boys up outside the door so they don’t have to spend too many time units getting inside. Two preferred tactics:
  • Have a rookie prime a grenade on turn a. One turn b, run him in, rifle a’blazing. If he sees a bad-guy, have him take his shot. Worst-case scenario is that the alien counterattacks and you’re short a rookie. When he dies, he lets go of the grenade, and you’re probably short an alien now, too. The downsides outweight the brutal elegance of this method. Obviously there’s the callous expenditure of human life, but this also risks destroying valuable alien artifacts. Waste not, want not.
  • Far less grisly is to send your first person in with no intention to actually shoot. You get the door open, see where any aliens are, turn the heck around, and get out of the line of fire. Happily, turning doesn’t seem to provoke reaction shots, though moving sometimes does. With the door open, a barrage of fire from outside can generally take care of business.

TL;DR – If you haven’t playing this before, you are missing out. Don’t let the graphics fool you, X-Com: UFO Defense is one of the best video games available today, a steal at $5.99. That’s not a typo; this is an old game.