DEFCON or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

[Centra]

As you may have gleaned from some PL posts we have pretty much been playing DEFCON 24/7 for the past week. It's $10 on Steam or you can get the Demo and still play with us - http://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/

If you don't have a PL Other Games Mumble account you should make one because laughing at the guy you are dropping nukes on is great:

1) Make a PL.com forum account: http://www.pandemic-legion.com/forums
2) Go to Settings > Permission Groups > Other Games
3) Go to Services Access and click "Save"
4) Set up Mumble or just click the link

How to play and not get fucked 10 minutes into DEFCON 1

The game has counts down from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1:

DEFCON 5 - Set up phase, you figure out who your ally should be and place your structures and fleets. We usually play variable unit count, so each structure or unit costs a certain amount and you decide how to spend it. You can still place fleets in DEFCON 4 so get your structures up first. Your fleets can start moving once placed, but no hostile action.

Structures:
a) RADAR - provides you vision and allows your air defense to track incoming missiles and bombers - dies to 1 nuke
b) Silo - switches between ICBM launch and air defense - dies to 3 nukes
c) Air Base - houses your bombers and fighters - dies to 2 nukes

Units:
a) Subs - carry 5 SRBMs (short range ballistic missiles) will get owned by carriers in anti-sub mode. You must surface to launch, so you can die pretty easily.
b) Battleships - own carriers and do pretty well against fighters and bombers
c) Carriers - carry 2 bombers and fighters and can go into anti-sub mode
d) Fighters - good at shooting down bombers and scouting
e) Bombers - carry 1 SRBM and can also go into Naval combat (conventional combat) mode and own ships

DEFCON 4 - RADAR will provide vision in neutral and hostile territory, units can move, and no hostile action.

DEFCON 3 - conventional warfare begins.

DEFCON 2 - basically start thinking about who to nuke

DEFCON 1 - Time to go full retard - Set condition 1-SQ

This game is all about TIMING. As you select units and structures you will notice that each one takes a certain amount of time to switch modes. Then you have to take into account travel time, with bombers you also need to add in arming time.

The general idea is you are trying to land all your nukes on the targets at the same time to overwhelm any air defense. So you need to manage your launch queues.

Also, if you get caught in ICBM launch mode with your silos you have no way to shoot down incoming ICBMs.

How to win -

You get points for blowing shit up and lose points for getting your shit blown up.

Here are some hints for the new guys -

Alliances - you share structure, RADAR and ~surface~ fleet vision, but you will not see your ally's subs

Cease-fire - your units won't auto engage anyone you have a cease-fire with.

Planes: have a limited fuel range, shown with a blue circle around the plane. They will instantly rearm/refuel at an air base or carrier, so you can launch them right away. And air bases and carriers have several nukes to reload bombers, so keep your bombers alive.

You can manually target areas with nukes by clicking on the area (this is great for nuking soon to be ex-allies).

Seriously, come play with us, we have 2-3 games up at any time. And I probably forgot some stuff.

[July]

Trying to setup mumble again now. :3

[Tayler Derden]

Yeah it's a lovely game for the whole family to? play.

[July]

I setup mumble and nobody is playing. No fair when everyone knows the winning move.

[Galtiner]

I'm downloading the demo now to give it a go. How badly does ping effect gameplay? Playing from NZ could be a problem.

[Centra]

I setup mumble and nobody is playing. No fair when everyone knows the winning move.

Uh, by 24/7 I meant we don't really play in the Moon TZ, but you can get on our IRC with the same PL.com account and you can find dudes to play with.

I'm downloading the demo now to give it a go. How badly does ping effect gameplay? Playing from NZ could be a problem.

Ping isn't a huge issue, you can slow the game down to real-time and plan your moves; then listen to everyone cry about real-time speed.

[Slycat]

Anyone else found it runs very slowly on their system? I can run eve fine (high detail in smaller battles with 60fps) but Defon crawls for me even with everything off.
Laggy mouse pointer, the works.

[Rer]

Okay so, if you have an air base, can you transfer those fighters/bombers to carriers to be more mobile after you've exhausted some during the later game, or are they just stuck in that base and you just have to use them to hit targets within that range?

Or in other words, I downloaded the demo and just got stomped, but the game is fun

[Ricky]

ive had that game on steam for years, always funny to go back and drop some nukes once in a while might look by

[jimmychrist]

Still one of the best looking games ever made

[Fartman]

everybody dies

[Centra]

You have to manually move fighters and bombers between air bases and carriers, they will always path to the nearest one, generally. To transfer between air bases/carriers you need to launch them then manually tell them to land at the other airbase, it's kind of annoying.

[Rer]

Oooh okay, thanks. I'll play a few more times versus a bot just to get the hang of it then maybe poke you guys and watch myself get nuked.

[Galtiner]

I bought it last night and it's great so far although I suck balls at timing my nukes to land all at once. I've only been playing against bots but I will probably try and do some online games and get slaughtered later tonight.

[Wusti]

Fuck you Galt - we have Internet Spaceship pixels to blow up! Blow Defcon :P

[Galtiner]

I was seriously thinking of skipping your fleet fort his game last night. In hindsight I probably should have, all you did was get yourself killed

[Wusti]

D'oh!

[Slycat]

BTW, if anyone else gets the poor FPS problem seems windows7 default open GL drivers blow (who knew?). Updating ATI drivers fixed the problem.

Also noticed theres a linux build of this. Runs fine on my low spec Umbutu box.

[Christos Hendez]

Europe is OP with placing all 6 lancuhers next to each other

[Aurora148]

Still one of the best looking games ever made

truth, the soundtrack is also extremely fitting (ie creepy and depressing as fuck)

got this when it came out originally, probably have the disk sitting around somewhere.