Need tips for Golden Academy Tower

[MoonKid]

Puh. I discovered my first Golden Academy Tower. It is damn hard. All my units can fly. I have UAC rifles and some alien laser weapons and a lot of TNT.
It is to hard.

What is the goal here? Do I have to kill all enemies? Or can I steal something and then run away?

Any tips?

[Stone Lake]

It's basically highest tier manor. Kill everyone. There's weird doohicky at the top, as description says, but it does nothing, which may be an oversight. There are two kinds of academies - witches & ninjas (couple assassins), and witches & osiron. Which one do you have?
It's probably better to have your own tanks for this assault. Ignore it until you're comfortable dealing with it if you can afford to.
Witches are kinda sturdy against lasers. They work, but not especially good. I'd probably take macro SMG against them, or sonics. EMP grenades one-shot Stormclouds. I'd keep tank or two in the main hall and flew up with the infantry. The windows allow you to make some hit-and-runs on witches, and there is some decent cover in the rooms (keep handy the motion scanners).

[psavola]

You may also need to review your weaponry. UAC rifles are a low-tier weapon. It is effective against unarmored targets (dmg 3x0-30), but as the armor increases, it becomes more and more useless. While it may still work against some ninjas, for example against BL War Witches, Elite soldiers, etc. you're in trouble. I'd suggest something that packs enough punch and/or ignores or degrades at least some of the armor (e.g. sniper rifles, UAC chainguns). I'm actually a bit surprised how you've managed so far and not upgraded to something more effective against armored enemies than UAC rifles.

[MoonKid]

Thanks a lot for your thougts. Not sure if there are witches or ninjas. I see black lotus soldiers in white and blue dresses.

About the weapons. This is often an overwhelming topic for me. I try to compare the values of the weapons but at the end it is to much for me. To much weapons. To much to compare. I also know the Ufopedia wiki which is easier to navigate then the in-game ufopedia.

What is SMG? There are a lot of weapons with SMG in their name.
What values do count?

What I currently use is
 - UAC Rifle
 - BlackOps Rifle
 - Sometimes alien lasers if I have collected them.
 - and a lot of TNT

Everything else seems to be to heavy or have disadvantages in the values (TU costs, range).

[Stone Lake]

Not sure if there are witches or ninjas.

There's witches AND ninjas, or witches and osiron.

I see black lotus soldiers in white and blue dresses.

These are the war witches. Who are they are accompanied by? Ninjas are fragile, but osiron troopers are fairly tough, around same as witches themselves.

What is SMG? There are a lot of weapons with SMG in their name.

I specifically wrote macro SMG. It's admittedly rare, though. Smartgun is sorta good, but also rare. Lacking that, I'd use blops CAWS with AP ammo. Or UAC chaingun. Rifles kinda suck for most of the game, it's usually more reliable to just come close and unload an auto. Laser ones are fine, but still sorta meh. However if you like range-der, try blops sniper/galil/fn fal, but only for 95+ accuracy soldiers. So, basically anything with 35+ power and decent amount of shots.

Overall, in situations like this, use gun simulator on the wiki to minmax against an enemy. Select your unit type, weapon or two, and enemy. And compare the damage values at various distances. Three-ten-twenty tiles is distance where most encounters happen (or should happen).

[psavola]

The weapon effectiveness can be an overwhelming topic, but you must know at least the essentials to survive, let alone succeed well. But you've already found out the trigramreactor wiki so you're on a good start. Take for example BO auto-sniper rifle: https://xcf.trigramreactor.net/master/article/STR_BLACKOPS_AUTO_SNIPER_RIFLE

The key things to look out for here are:
 - what is the damage type, i.e. KINETIC. This is what most 'classic' guns do. If you compare the effectiveness of various guns against enemies, you should  check if some are particularly weak or strong against some damage type.
 - how various stats affect accuracy (ie. you need good accuracy, at least 90 to use it effectively, preferably 100+)
 - how accuracy boosts the damage (ie. with 100 accuracy you have the base damage of 50, and with 50-200% damage spread you could get more - this is among the best with easy access KINETIC weapons)
 - how the weapon penetrates armor (armor efficiency of 0.75).

Compare this to UAC rifle. Against 30 armor, in average UAC rifle does only a couple of points of damage. But BO auto-sniper with 100 accuracy deals in average about 30 points of damage. So while you might not one-shot heavily armored foes, typically at most two shots with a sniper rifle will kill most enemies.

There are also many other parameters, but these should get your started.

I've myself found the gun simulator way too cumbersome to work with (you need to input too much information) and haven't bothered with it.

[MoonKid]

Thanks a lot for your help. I just want to play and do not become to scientific about weapons. I still have pen and paper with notes about weapon skill values etc. I don't want to get further.

I will check out the weapons you mentioned.

It seems that I am currently not able to buy a BlackOps Smartgun. Some dependencies might be missing, e.g. Advanced Robotics Prerequisite.

About the other guns I found out that their names are translated. I am not sure if this is for purpose or if I can open a bug report about that?
The original name is also not present in the debug output. There is only the macro name (e.g. BLACKOPS_CAWS). I needed to change the UI language.

[Empiro]

Smartgun gives you Advanced Robotics Prereq. You don't need it to research it. You do need Promo3 to acquire it, but I assume you have that already.

The main challenge is getting a copy of the Smartgun to research it. You'll only find it occasionally in Syndicate crates. You can get it for free too from high-tier Syndicate agents.

I highly recommend the Smartgun if you can get your hands on it. It's probably the best generalist weapon in the game.

[Chuckebaby]

The mission itself is fairly easy. it is the reinforcements which bring the challenging portion to full front.
I typically keep a few able bodies near the front entrance because reinforcements will spawn from the front corners or the rear corners. If the rear corners, you have a chance to open the main front door and the reinforcements will enter the rear doors (there are 2 of them on each side of the main stairwell). A few will linger and surprise you on following turns so keep eyes peeled.

Flying gear helps you enter through upper levels but this can sometimes potentially trigger reinforcements. This will be a learning process.

[SickBoySid]

It's definitely pretty easy to get trapped on the black ops rifle because of it's reliability in its snap shot overwatch spam but it just lacks the pen and damage like others said I think notable promotion 3~ weapons would be

- BlackOps Macro SMG
One of the few heavy guns with a Cqc bonus, dose 40 damage, a decent bullet spam in Cqc on weaker targets, is sadly two handed unlike black ops SMG

- BlackOps Smartgun
35 damage .85 armor mult able to put out 10 rounds at a long range fairly accurately, this gun is also a decent overwatch gun with its snap fire / auto fire range

- BlackOps Auto-Sniper Rifle
This gun is very stat dependent but on 100 aim it's 50~ damage
With .75 armor mult. It has burst potential, Something you put on your best aim and reaction soldiers

- Heavy Machine Gun
Imo my pick for most op gun ( better then miniguns overall imo) because how early you get it
55 damage .85 armor mult 10 shot burst, 100 range
Trit ammo is 70 damage with .85 mult (one of the guns i go out of my way for better ammo) , this gun pairs well with black ops smart pistols in quick holster, basically needs all your tu to fire and a strong soldier but is nearly allways a guarantee kill at long range, you can try to set up 2 shooting way points for multi kill or nuke one target

- BlackOps Assault Cannon
45 damage .75 armor multi, needs a quick draw side arm, is generally a worse auto sniper but it's not stat dependent. A gun to give to lower tier soldiers who just barely got the bio enhancement

- Recoilless Gun
125 damage with .6 armor mult, has a 100% acc aimshot for 75% of your units, it's ment to be an AT weapon but it has 50-150% random damage unlike 0-200% so it's can be a very reliable humanoid remover

- M82 Barrett
70 damage with .7 armor mult on 100 aim soldiers, Is aim skill dependent and needs a lot of TU to fire

Btw I think there's Several ways to play the game, that's why I return back to it every year but I feel like the bio enhancement is near mandatory