Tips, Tactics and Cheese

[nicedayright]

I had the idea of a thread for sharing some of the more, less and more or less legitimate tricks we may have picked up for making life easier or more interesting. Whether that be special tactics, underrated items or cheeky exploits.


CQC Cheese
The nature of a turn based game means planning not just for your turn, but the enemies. You know that, when you click that end turn button, every enemy unit is going to get a chance to put one of your precious girls in the sickbay (or the morgue!). So what do you do? Kill them first? Sometimes you can't or don't want to. So what can you do? Park a gal in melee range of course. When it comes time to take the turn, the AI will usually try to shoot and most often send those rounds uselessly into the sky.

Trying to chase down and stun enemies with your last few TU's? Pay close attention to how those enemies are armed. If an AI unit has a gun and a melee weapon, the AI will prioritize shooting on its own turn, but melee holds priority when it comes to reactions. So if you run up on a guy armed with a gun and a knife, taking a swing at him can lead to him reacting and stabbing you back, especially if you're low on TUs. If you instead end the turn in melee range, he is *much* more likely to try shooting and whiff.

Training Cheese
If you're anything like me, one of the best things about this game is watching numbers go up training your swabbies up from zero to hero. But swabbies need to actually contribute before they can gain XP, and sometimes their stats are so low that getting those contributions is hard and risky. Don't worry about it, your more experience gals can help. Downed enemies count as valid targets, so if your gals manage to knock one out, you can let your swabbies stand on the body and aim straight down. Even the smoothest brained gals cannot miss. Using non-lethal shooters like bows with stun arrows, shotguns with rubber slugs or harpoon darts ensures this doesn't cost you hostages, but some enemies are pretty useless. I like to use holdout pistols for this, because they have a tendency of leaving targets alive but wounded so I can practice first aid for bravery training. Whips work for training throwing like this and hammers for melee (though hammers are depressingly non-non-lethal). For best results, combine with sailor uniforms.

The first few missions, XP is at a premium, especially at lower difficulties where you may not have enough enemies to go around. Plus you really want those first few enemies alive to help your cash flow and you lack a lot of good stun weapons. The solution is nudity! Sending your gals into battle naked gives them a huge reactions boost. One thing I've noticed with regard to training is that, if an enemy makes a move which would provoke a reaction from multiple gals, but gets knocked out by the first one to resolve, the rest of the gals still get experience for making the reaction check, even if they never swung. This is most noticeable on the first few missions, where I tend to naked dogpile isolated nurses and then end turn, letting them make the first move and then get gang-land stomped by naked amazons (in self defense of course). Even if the first gal to take a swing knocks her out, everyone still gets those secondary stat gains at the end of the mission. Reactions is a component of accuracy for unarmed attacks, so going naked makes you a better fighter. Guess the Greeks were onto something. Just pay attention to climate, because nudity and arctic conditions does not make for happy gals.

Prison space and how runts can help
With the game very focused on taking prisoners and what you can do with those prisoners, prison space is at a real premium. I tend to have two at my starter base and still end up running out of room more often than not. I want to hold onto them for research or slavery instead of ransoming them for useless money! Well, the workshop can help. See, whenever you start a work bill, the first batch of materials is consumed. On some bills, they let you refund your materials back if you change your mind. And people are materials. So once you've researched an enemy once, you can set up a bill to rob them, and they'll disappear from your prison. Refund it and they reappear. Where were they in the meantime? Doesn't matter! You can send one of each researched enemy type to limbo this way for each recipe they appear in. Set up a bill to rob them and never complete it, that's effectively one extra prison space per unit type. Ditto enslaving, recruiting, pit fighting or any other workshop bill that takes a live target. Just be sure it's refundable or you're deleting prisoners. If I can rob, enslave, recruit or work a unit type? That means I can store an extra four of them in workshop limbo any time I need to free up prison space. and this is repeatable for every base.

But wait, that doesn't help me if I just ended a mission and my prison is full! I *have* to ransom them or it doesn't let me out of the end mission screen! I hope you aren't playing on ironman, because this is solvable with the art of taksie backsies. See, the game autosaves as soon as you click OK on the end mission screen. But this happens *before* it  demands you clean out your prisons. So, sure, ransom whatever prisoners you need to in order to get back to the geoscape, then hit ESC and load your geoscape autosave. This leaves you free to interact with the geoscape, but if you were to check your prison, you'd see it was over capacity (don't do this, the game won't let you back out of prison until you ransom enough prisoners). This only lasts a few seconds, as the game will figure out you're over cap and bring it to your attention, but it's enough time for you to start work bills or go to another base to clear out prison space to ship them to.

Zero-G Tactics
If you're anything like me, early game 0-G can be punishing. Combine a small crew size with big open maps, limited armor selection and objectively quite deadly enemies, and it can be difficult to complete these without intensive save scumming, making "bouncing" the mission quite attractive. My advice? Dive for the deck. Turn one, step out of your craft and hit the descend level button just as many times as you can. The deep Z-levels of 0-G maps mean those pesky terminators have a hard time finding an angle on you. Approach low, rise up underneath the bottom of the satellite, making sure to check those annoying little tea cup structures the same way. If you're not confident on one-shotting the reaction-happy robbits, and you're wary of their deadly melee attack, parking your happy ass in CQC range and letting them waste their plasma skyward will net you a next turn where they don't have the TU's to return fire.

[Vakrug]

I also ended up with the conclusion that "reaction fire" and "unconscious body humiliation" is the best way to safely trigger "contribution" for rookies.
I also tried "lowering morale below 50" method. Dog barking at you is not particularly effective because in XPiratez even rookies can have high bravery. I tried use drugs like "Combat Drugs" and "Kaltes-Klares" without much success. Main problem with such methods is that a soldier must start the next turn with low morale and not finish the current turn. And a lot can happen in between. Also there is a lot of clicking involved.
I also tried hurting Hyena Riders to heal them afterwards. Hyenas has +125 HP and full regeneration once mission ends. Sadly I still managed to kill one in the training process...

[nicedayright]

An underrated weapon for training rookie accuracy is the police shotgun. I know it's despised for being slow, but it's got a frankly ridiculous accuracy bonus. Had really good luck with it for that purpose alone. Tempting to use the stun slugs, but frankly even civilians can take three or more shots to put down, so it's not a reliable stun weapon.

I tend to set up "training loadouts" which consist of the most accurate shotgun and the best medkit in my inventory, under the assumption that rookies will be doing all the healing.

I have had *very* little success with morale as opposed to medical as a trainer for bravery, but if you're determined to try, I've had luck with stressful outfits like the savage armor and spamming its voodoo attack.

[Vakrug]

Shotgun is not as good for training as it looks at the first glance. Shotgun has low range, which means your rookies must be relatively close to the target and thus be in danger. When training there are 2 major tactics: either you can deliver an unconscious body to rookies or not. If you can, then rookies should use whips or sprays. If not, then rookies should use any long range rifles to fire a reaction shot from safe distance. In eight cases shotgun is not very useful. Police Shotgun with rubber pallets is actually useful in situation when all you soldiers ar rookies an you actually want to stun some civilian like enemies.

[greattuna]

If you do your missions at night, you can kill multiple birds with one stone, or rubber slug for that matter. Since the fighting at night happens at the shotguns' effective range, you can stay out of enemy vision and pelt them with stun slugs safely for both captures and training, and the fact it does such low damage even plays to the benefit there, since the more hits you have to make, the more experience you'll get. Though I'm using domestic shotguns for this, as firerate > accuracy in these cases.

Even very early on, there are outfits that provide night camo, and personal computers to provide some light.

As for dedicated bravery training, I don't really bother with it until I get hallucinogen gas grenades, and even then it's only occasionally I drop one to hotbox my own gals.

[nicedayright]

I think it might surprise you how much of a range advantage the police shotgun has over other weapons of its class, but I'd have to explain the overall situation.

A *lot* of my early game "training" missions these days are splashed bandit craft. Small maps, hot landing zones and dogs. If you wait out turn one, most likely a dog makes it in the craft and bites someone. Which leaves the door open for some really unfortunate situations involving molotov cocktails, among other things. If you open the doors, you're likely to have one or two bandits facing you with full TU's. The tight spread of the police shotguns meant I was *significantly* more likely to achieve a one shot kill with a snap shot on targets that would have been iffy with any other weapon. Which meant, if I was careful with my angles, two swabbies with police shotguns were usually able to remove the overwatch before it could fire, allowing me to then hunt for dogs. While there are more efficient training weapons, I had to balance combat effectiveness with efficiency. They're just really good at taking a 50~ accuracy gal letting her still score kills at a reasonable distance. 15 tiles on the aimed before dropoff.

Absolute efficiency on training which results in sick-bay time is inefficient on the back end if you get my meaning.

Using the darkness is also a really important factor, though obviously it depends on the faction you'll be facing. I wouldn't try it against the academy, for instance, because dem drones mang.

[greattuna]

I know that police shotgun has a very good effective range both due to better accuracy and range, it's just I find it not really necessary. Though if I'm shooting to kill and not to stun, I'm using something other than a domestic; military shotgun or a heavy or combat shottie, they all work.

In my current run I've done a lot of splashed bandit craft in a V8 of all things (since I've got too greedy and lost my airbus in late feb '01). Yes, dogs loved this, and I didn't even have doors, but in response I've learned to strike first, strike fast, deploy camo paint (4 night camo almost halves regular human night vision; this propels peasants into usefulness by itself, and makes gals even more scary) and pre-prime smoke grenades. If the bandit can't see you, he can't react to you filling him with buckshot, and if the dog can't see you, the dog can't rush you; after T1 you'll have a lot easier time dealing with them. Bringing a lokk'naar helps a lot, too; they have both great night camo, night vision and thermal vision.

I didn't use the missions for "training" training, but after you deal with dogs you can set off a bandit or 2 to whip to death.

[nicedayright]

props to you for keeping with it. I don't save scum for much, but losing my airbus month two would do it.