Part 2 of my tips
35) Learn weapon silluetes, or atleast this one.
This is heavy plasma.
This thing will one hit KO most of your units in most cases and it has really large damage output, pretty much only tanks, sectopods and juggernaut power armour users can even think about surviving a single hit. This will be the thing massacring most of your troops and you will encounter it alot.
36) Damage and armour numbers
This is really important to remember so you know if your soldiers can take a hit from the enemy or not.
Lets look at heavy tactical suit
Due to how armour works in old XCOM's compared to XCOM 1 and 2, if weapon cannot hurt you, it wont. It wont cause chip damage.
You also need to know that weapons have a RNG damage spread. So weapons always do more or less damage than is written in ufopedia
Tactical suit will be the first armour where you will see constant bullet reflections and 0 damage taken. Cult missions will become extremely easy with this.
It has 32 frontal armour, so a weapon that does 32 or less damage per hit wont do any damage (No matter the type) unless it rolls for higher damage. But it also has 65% kinetic resistance so the actual treshold for bullet damage is higher. You can safely say that only sniper rifles, rocket launchers and armour piercing weapons like cannons can punch through. Pistols, smg's and shotguns wont even dent this thing.
37) Quickdraw and belt slots on the inventory requires the smallest TU to draw from.
Backpack has alot of space, but taking stuff from it takes more TU than from belt or quickdraw. Quickdraw is perfect for pistols, clips or melee weapons. As it leaves you with enough TU to shoot, or reload and then shoot.
38) Sanity
While for most of the game, if you dont take too long to finish a map. You shouldnt have a problem. But in case of low sanity but your troops are still needed. There are ciggies (Golden Dragons) or combat drugs (Nobelons) you can give to your troops to boost their sanity. But this takes a toll on their health so use this only in emergency. Low sanity degrades combat stats and makes them more vulnerable to panic, you dont want that when facing aliens who can one shot your troops from behind.
39) Stay a while...and listen
Do you hear doors slamming , UFO doors opening ? The wooden door slamming means that there is alien outside somewhere....
40) Mechanical units are repaired instantly when you return from a base.
Since tanks and drones arent living being, repairs are done by XCOM mechanics extremely quickly. So even if you bring home a tank with 10 HP remaining, mechanics will weld it back together within hours. This really means that you should use your tanks as cannon fodder since they are reusable.
41) Alot of armours and vehicles can be repaired in workshop if you lose them in combat.
Most high-end armors and vehicles if destroyed/soldier is slain in it will leave a broken wreck of whatever remains. You can, for a small fee repair them to fully functional state in the workshop.
42) Force fire
In case you dont know, if you hold CTRL before you order an attack. The soldier will shoot, even if there is something (or someone) in the way. This is useful if you are shooting at somebody in cover under the idea that your weapon will destroy the cover. Furniture can be destroyed with most firearms, trees and stumps can be blown away with high caliber weapons and walls, doors and sturdier stuff can be destroyed with lasers or plasma weapons (depending on damage output). This is useful for full auto since it tends to be slightly more effective with time units than trying to use snapshot.
43) Miniguns
While miniguns may look crap, they are not. You might be put off when you see that your attacks have like 15-25% chance to hit but few things to consider
A) Miniguns fire in large volleys
B) They only take 5% armour damage reduction. So they pretty much ignore armour up to the heaviest foes.
C) To put it bluntly, in this XCOM, you can miss +100% hits, but you will also hit low chance hits more often that you would expect. Especially miniguns seems to make it the most noticable when you mow down 4 dudes on the other side of the map Minigun is, despite being a large weapon god-tier close range weapons if you shoot it one title away at enemy since you will hit and it will hurt alot. Majority of the game's enemies will die in one volley, only the toughest and largest can think of walking it off. The blackops minigun for example does 35 damage a bullet, multiplied by 15. So thats 525 damage if all bullets hit. (But it will be more or less due to damage scattering).
44) Orange, stationary dots
At some point you will encounter them. Intel says its large and at 0 speed. This "UFO" wont lift off and you can assault it with no problem.
Though, if you do, depending your tech level, prepare for one of the hardest fight in the game.
Why ?
Spoiler:
Well this isnt UFO, but rather MiB base. Once you will go down the assault ramp you will be assaulted by rocket launchers, psionics, tanks, Sectopods, laser weapons, plasma grenades and accelerator weapons. Well thats quite alot so lets go through that all
Well if you havent fought flying enemies before, then you will encounter them here. Men in Black stormtroopers will hover around the map, often armed with rocket launchers. Make sure to get their corpse in one piece since you can use it for your troops.
Since Men in Black are Ayy helpers they will be armed with plasma grenades
Tanks ? Yes, MiB will deploy 0-3 tanks around their base. They are the same as XCOM's laser tanks. So that means they will one shot most of your dudes and will easily wreck your own tanks.
Sectopods are just a cherry on top, also MiB version of it. Prepare for absolute hell if one of them just stomps out of a garrage and one shots your tank and 2 other guys. Use rocket launchers or miniguns to attack their backs where their armour is the weakest.
Psionics, base can have a psi-trooper who even has a shield.
Accelerator weapons are step up from blackops weapons you been using. They do more damage. Sucks to not have the heaviest armour to tank it. And most of the enemy here will be armed with Blackops weapons or Human-grade laser weapons so unless you have heavy tritanium tactical armour for your whole squad. Dont even bother.
MiB troops are quite tough (endurance wise) but the powerarmour operative takes the cake. These bulky guys in black have one of the best armours in the game (Only Juggernaut power armour is better) and after you will see them eat laser tank blasts one after other you might panic. But if you do kill one of them with explosives or hits from behind you can retrofit the armour for XCOM.
You might see enemy dogs around the base, though they are nothing when compared to the Human troops you face.
And then comes the base itself. The welcoming party is quite something already but you might find the base daunting too. Especially if you discover that the basement has a tank like doing circles in the hallways. Its also made as a maze but i said fuck that and i use explosives to make my path. And then the final room with more enemies (usually the commander and some guards).
You do get alot of loot from this and alot of ratings for the council. Also btw, dont really bother that much with live captures because at this moment, you cannot permamently destroy MiB.
45) Speaking of curve balls the mod can throw at you, here some more
"Clinic raid"
"Early visitors"
Hunting party
Arctic Horrors
Your first cult HQ
HQ of the other organisation
X Ship
46) Kitsune, Osprey and Ironfist have unique advantages over other landing vehicles
Ironfist is heavy infantry transport with staircase, so its possible to shoot explosives through that to the outside.
Kitsune though takes the cake because you can walk under it. This means you are protected against grenades and other explosives thrown in arc. Osprey has this too.
Skymarshall also is slightly better at dealing with landing zone ambushes because it has side doors you can camp or use to scatter your troops.
47) Training your troops
At some point you will realize that you have a bunch of really good guys and gals but the ever looming threat of losing them is ever present. But the rest of your units are quite crap. Like 30-40% chance to hit someone standing in front of them with something like Blackops rifle. To prevent disasters you need to constantly train new units with "Milk runs". Missions against monsters are a really good way of training firing accuracy because they are melee (most of the time atleast) so its just you taking potshots at them from safe distance.
This is also why you should reconsider researching
To add some safety, you should spice up the rookie squad with few elite troops acting as sergeants, just in case...
Creatures will be a good way to grind up aim and throwing accuracy, cultists will be a great practise with melee weapons because you can actually survive melee attacks from them.
Training should be done either with Blackops weapons (Cheap and effective) or turbolaser weapons (Infinite ammo). Once you have access to Stormtrooper armour (Or any flying one) creature missions will become impossible to lose.
Dont forget to have the gym occupied, making 2 gyms so you can have 20 agents (And dogs) training at the same time can help and you can demolish them once their training is complete. Also check out possible upgrades for your troops so they have the best stats possible.
48) Enemy/Allies will pick up weapons if they lost them for any reason.
They will either try to pick up their own weapon but they can grab anything on the ground. Civilians will pick up weapons off the ground too. If you want to save as many civilians as possible, you can, pack up a backpack with weapons you will drop in a city so civilians can pick them up and shoot. Oh and civilians will pick up stuff from the pile in XCOM's craft if they wander in it. I saw a woman picking up a rocket launcher and walking out of my Kitsune to one shot 3 cultists across the street. Or a engineer who walked to Kitsune and walked back out with Blackops SMG in hand. Not sure if there are any preferences or random. Not enough data to make any claim yet.
49) Sectopods
Sectopods have the highest armour in the game. So much so that if you get one, he can pretty much solo Alien base missions because not even heavy plasma can even touch his health pool. The only thing that can destroy him are heavy gauss cannons or flank shots from strong laser weapons. One way to quickly destroy a sectopod are Laser tanks, because laser does whooping 120 damage a hit, you can destroy a sectopod from behind in one burst fire.
And yes, once you get a wreck, you can rebuild it and slot your AI to it. Game will become extremely easy.
50) Some robotic enemies will explode when killed, destroying their loot/corpse.
Certain robotic enemies will self destruct when shot to pieces. Most notable are cyberdisks who will happily take out all of its comrades that are standing nearby.
But, if you destroy them with explosives, it will drop a wreck instead.
51) You can toss weapons, bodies and items across distances.
Well how is that even useful you might say ? Its very specific
- You can reinforce your men with supplies at different elevation's quickly, iek Marius, throw that magazine at me
- You can throw away confiscated weapons somewhere inaccessible, like when you are fighting sectoids you can either stuff their weapons to your backback or just toss them on the top of the UFO or top of the tree
So its abit specific and gimmicky way to skip some TU's steps
52) MAGMA Corporation quests
You will meet this corporation one way or the other and they can provide XCOM some of the harder hitting weapons in the game and cool gadgets in general. Though some live captures and particular items researched are a needed for these "quests" to spawn. These missions are, once you research the outcome of the mission, one of a time. But they are bitch hard and require good gear and manpower to pull off.
The first mission you can get is by researching live infestor (And the 2 lesser variants) you can catch one in major infestations. This will spawn mission at some point. Dont bother with this mission unless you can haul atleast 8 dudes here armed with miniguns and shotguns and atleast armoured vest /w vest with a shield. This mission gives 2 rewards, tactical implants and heavy shotgun. The tactical implant is the important thing here.
This is a producable item that can be used to upgrade your troops (Sort of like bio upgrades) but most importantly it lets you build Cyber Armour,
which is pretty much an upgrade of Tritanium Suit which has no penalties to movement and gives a slight boost to reaction fire at cost of being only slightly worse at stopping bullets (by 5%) and this armour will be probably the longest used across the game because its just good. Before you whip out power armours for everyone. Your entire squads will be composed of Cyber Armour troops. Oh and also Cyber armour only takes 80% plasma damage (Tritanium suit takes full 100%).
