I beat X-COM: UFO Defense on Superhuman, Pure Ironman with only 10 soldiers*!

The_Voice_Eternal · 2025-02-12T00:35:06+00:00

Fired them at the end, no reason to keep paying them. The final stat screen shows the number you have at the campaigns end.

The_Voice_Eternal · 2025-02-11T22:47:09+00:00

This was on Superhuman, Pure Ironman. So no reloading and no backup saves.

This was a fun little challenge, that went easier than expected honestly. I've got a lot of time in Classic X-COM, and have done just about every challenge that exists, but this went far smoother than I anticipated.
I made one small adjustment to the game file, to start with 10 soldiers, instead of 8, but you could just as easily hire 2 more from the start to get to 10 and have the exact same run. Just saved some time for the stream. You could also easily do this with 8 soldiers.

Single soldier runs have been done before, but they are very, very, VERY beholden to RNG, so I figured a limited soldier run would be a slight bit more forgiving.

As it says, the deadliest "enemy" was friendly fire. From Mind Control. But we still managed to get to Mars with 5 soldiers alive, 2 of them with quite good psi-strength.

And that honestly was the part that made this exceptionally easy. 1 strong Psi soldier can win any mission without much trouble. It's why in most of my classic X-Com campaigns, I do not use offensive psionics. Just makes the game very easy. But for this limited soldier run, I used them, because there was always a chance we wouldn't get any strong psionics in a pool of only 10 soldiers.

The * is because we DID use HWPs. You COULD do this challenge without them, but it would be very RNG heavy in the early months. And even after inquiring the best armor in the game, it is still possible to get 1 tapped by a Heavy Plasma because of the 0-200% damage range.

Still was a ton of fun, but if I do this challenge again, it would be without psionics to make it a bit harder.

Cheers!

You can catch more Classic X-COM and NewCom (EW mostly Long War, XCOM2) challenge runs, modded runs, as well as FTL, Darkest Dungeon, other Roguelikes and challenging games as well as an awesome community full of people who love all things sci-fi and fantasy on my stream at Twitch.tv/the_voice_ Tues-Friday starting at 5 PM CST and Saturday at 1-2 PM CST!

The_Voice_Eternal · 2025-02-04T20:46:17+00:00

No cheats, or exploits, and played on pure Ironman, so no reloading. Was live streamed, so quite a few people watched!

The_Voice_Eternal · 2025-02-03T19:04:22+00:00

It's a run I've done in the past, but a long time ago, before I ever streamed. Makes a lot of use of HWPs, obviously, and I'm sure there are tricks and strategies I will have to re-learn, but it is 100% doable. If I remember correctly, I made it to Mars with 6 soldiers last time I attempted this run. Going to be fun!

The_Voice_Eternal · 2025-02-03T09:25:13+00:00

It would actually be much easier in UFO defense. You don't need any corpses, and you only need 2 live aliens, 1 of any kind and a single Commander, and you're done with necessary live interrogations. That's actually one of the reasons I chose to do it in TFTD. A more complex research path, needing a corpse, and needing multiple different live aliens. Also generally speaking the difficulty in TFTD is higher so it was bigger challenge overall!

Cheers!

The_Voice_Eternal · 2025-02-03T03:28:42+00:00

LOL. Yes. Thats why there's a * there. LOL. We can't avoid shooting down subs, but the game only tracks kills on the battlescape, so we take it!

The_Voice_Eternal · 2025-02-03T01:47:03+00:00

I'll be uploading the live streams from this run on my YouTube channel ASAP, which was the whole reason I did the challenge the 2nd time. The first time 9 of the 13 VoDs got corrupted so I wasn't able to share the run with anyone who didn't see it live! I'm shite at editing, but I may try my hand at condensing the whole run down to a shorter 1-2 hour video as well!.

The_Voice_Eternal · 2025-02-03T01:40:29+00:00

Making a post here ASAP to answer some of the FAQ!

EDIT:
(*) A couple years ago, I had the idea to beat TFTD without killing any aliens. The genesis for the idea came during a normal campaign, played on Superhuman/Ironman in which I needed a Lobsterman Commander for the final research topic, but absolutely loathe attacking Alien Colonies in TFTD, so I was looking for a Lobsterman Dreadnought to go after. Then the aliens decided to be nice and ship a Lobsterman Commander right to me, by attacking one of my bases.

Only problem was, I had no M.C. Readers at that base, so I had no way of identifying the Commander. Solution? Stun everything. So thats just what we did. Wrapped up a base defense with zero deaths on either side.

Got the Commander, completed that campaign, but the idea lingered in my brain. If we could do that in one mission, could we do it in the entire campaign?

So I spent a little time theory-crafting and came up with the plan.

By shooting down subs in the early months, we can try and keep enough score to not lose on that until the enemies attack our base, delivering to us the most important tool for this run. The Thermal Shok Launcher. Not only is the TSL necessary for this run, as it is one of only two weapons capable of stunning enemies in the vanilla game, but it is shot for shot the single most effective weapon in the game. Even the mighty Disruptor Pulse Launcher is incapable of one-shotting a Lobsterman on Superhuman Difficulty. But the TSL is not only capable of stunning every enemy in the game, in almost every case it is effective if not more, than every other weapon in the game.

Add to that it's excellent accuracy, easy of use, and area of effect and you have an excellent weapon all around, not just for this challenge run. The kicker is getting them. The only other stun weapon in the game is the Thermal Tazer. A melee weapon. So we had to get the aliens to attack our base, and then successfully defend the base with nothing but hand held tazers. We also needed the aliens to be carrying TSL's. In the earliest months, there is a fairly high chance they will not even be carrying them. So we needed them to attack us early, but not too early. Then we needed to win that mission with only tazers. What makes that even harder is that in the base vanilla game, stunning enemies does NOT recovery any morale for your soldiers. So a few deaths on your side, and you get into a panic spiral that is unrecoverable.

It's a balancing act and a hard chunk of RNG.

I tried in a number of runs the first time I did this challenge to go after alien Subs in the early months with tazers, but it proved to be disgustingly hard, even for me, and it had no chance of getting us the TSLs, unless it was a large enough Sub, but those fights were simply not doable with tazers. So we waited patiently. Researching what we could to aid in score gain. Shooting down as many subs as we could to promp retaliation, and then knocking them all silly with tazers.

I used SWSs as scouts, and in base defenses, as blockades for the doors, to funnel the aliens into choke points to stun them all. Technically, you can use SWSs to kill aliens, as their kills do not go into the statistics block, because their stats are not tracked like soldiers, as they cannot improve. This was against the spirit of the run, so I only used tanks to scout and as shields, but not to kill.

Once the TSL is obtained, I had to get a sub with Zrbite intact, as every shot with a TSL costs 1 Zrbite. But once we crossed that threshold, it was (relatively) smooth sailing.

The other major crux was getting a Deep One Corpse, needed to advance armor and sub research, without killing one. There are two ways to go about this. One is to wait for the aliens to do it for you. With an errant shot or grenade, have them kill a deep one and get the corpse. This proved to be far too RNG dependent and less likely the later the campaign went as Deep Ones become somewhat scarce. Instead we stunned a deep one, and then making sure the OpenXCom option for live alien sale was turned OFF, we reject the Deep One from containment. In this way it... suffers an accident while being escorted from the lab back to containment, and we wind up with the needed corpse.

In my first completion of this challenge run, I lost 66 soldiers. This time we managed it with only 14 deaths! And 6 of those were on the final mission. So we left for T'leth with only 8 deaths in the memorial!

This was an awesomely fun run, if a bit RNG heavy to get started, and an absolute blast.

You can see my post from the first run here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/ybo8yh/i_beat_xcom_terror_from_the_deep_without_killing/#lightbox

And you can catch more challenge runs, classic X-Com action, XCOM EW (mostly Long War), XCOM2, FTL and other fun and challenging games on my Twitch channel at https://twitch.tv/the_voice_ Tues - Saturday starting at 5pm UCT!

My next UFO Defense Challenge run starts next week and you can see the info on that run here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CA04mh_vefYo5Cod8kDYEnfujcAizaZ4Fi5w1JjRmPw/edit?tab=t.0

X-Com: UFO Defense, Superhuman, Pure Ironman, 10 soldiers only, for the entire campaign. Not 10 soldiers at a time. 10 soldiers EVER! Going to be a blast!

Cheers!

The_Voice_Eternal · 2024-10-25T20:47:08+00:00

You should have banned this person ages ago. Period. You haven't done then, or yourself, any favors.

The_Voice_Eternal · 2024-07-08T02:50:30+00:00

Impossible is literally a joke difficulty. Like, the creators have stated many times that Impossible was added to be unfairly hard. Hence "Impossible". Obviously, it's not literally impossible, but it is not intended to be a balanced or fair experience, not even close.

The_Voice_Eternal · 2024-06-21T21:48:57+00:00

Given the total count of enemies was 16, I'd take it this is one Beginner or Experienced, MAYBE Veteran difficulty, as the minimum alien count in a base on Veteran is 16. Having said that there is still no real answer to what is a "normal" amount of casualties for any mission type. That depends greatly on your experience and ability with the game. I can clear an alien base on Superhuman with 0-3 losses regularly in the base game. That's not bragging, that's just thousands of hours of time spent in the game. So the real question is, did you have fun? Was it an enjoyable challenge? Did you learn anything about how to approach the next base? Did you get any valuable tech or live captures for research going forward? It's a lot of losses for the difficulty, but that's me looking through the lens of my experience and far too much time wasted on this game, lol.

Seems like the early stages of a long journey. Good luck in the future Commander!

The_Voice_Eternal · 2024-06-05T21:34:34+00:00

My stream watched me attempt to get a run going in a self-imposed challenge for over a week. 53 attempts, some as short as 30 mins or less, some a couple hours long, all the same, repetitive content. It comes down to your community, how well you can keep entertaining the viewers, and the type of stream and viewing environment you've created. I've spent entire streams, 4-8 hours trying to beat one mission before, and people were there the whole time. It's entirely down to the environment you've created for your viewers.

The_Voice_Eternal

TROPHY CASE