NKF's X-COM Apocalypse: Starter's Guide

NKF's X-COM Apocalypse: Starters Guide

An article by NKF

Preface Preamble

NKF is aware that spelling/grammatical error are present in this article. They will be flattened out as they are come across, though the main content is the primary focus as this point in time.

Preface

Starting an X-COM Apocalypse game can sometimes be very difficult for first time players, even if they are veterans of the first two X-COM games, though the difficulty curve may not be as steep. So, where do we begin? Well, before we begin, I want to say what this guide is not.

It is not a complete start to end walkthrough. It is only a guide to get players up and running in a new game.

It is not meant to be a replacement for the game manual. While this guide may list a few keyboard and mouse commands, players are assumed to know most of the essential interface commands.

It does not tell you which is the best McGuffins are, since everyone will have different ways and styles of playing the game and what equipment, vehicles, troops, etc you choose to use will be up to you.

Also, this guide is not a technical guide and assumes that you can actually get the game to run.

Baby Steps: Starting the game

Starting a new campaign is generally a simple task of picking the right difficulty level and jumping right into the action. But then there are some nutters out there that make a real deal about it about starting with more ideal conditions.

Choosing a Difficulty Level

If you have absolutely no qualms in actually starting the game right away, skip ahead to the next chapter, otherwise read on.

The main reason to deliberate on what difficulty level to play is often an easy one to answer. Difficulty.

In Apocalypse, the difficulty level is more than just a simple number multiplier that increases the opposition. Here are a few things to consider when deciding on a difficulty level:

• Score Progression: The number of enemies you fight in combat directly influences your total score level. Score level is one of the major triggers that releases new technology for the aliens and city guards. On easier levels, less enemies equate to a slower score increase. On harder levels, it is the opposite and your score levels increase faster.

• The Map : Difficulty will ultimately influence the type of map you are to play on as each difficulty plays on a unique map, with different building layouts, road structure, aesthetics and most importantly the next point;

• Base Sites: The more difficult the level, the more base site locations you'll have open to you. Each map will also provide different locations and base types. On the easiest level, you can only build up to 6 bases, while the hardest level gives you 8 possible locations.

Your first base

You cannot officially choose your starting base or the layout of the pre-built base modules because base selection and initial module layout is random.

Luckily, you can meddle with fate somewhat by doing a base scrum. Restart the game on the difficulty level of your choice over and over until you get the base or configuration that best suits your needs.

Note: Don't spend too much time doing this if you don't get the results that are desired. The probability of getting perfect base site, the module configuration, and personnel will be very difficult if not impossible. You cannot get everything, so pick one that is acceptable and get on with it. You'll have plenty of opportunities to redecorate and rearrange later.

Real Estate

Bases are differentiated by the top-side building that the base is hidden under as well as its corridor layout. There is also the number of launch ports and the physical location of the base in the city, though these are the lesser aspects of the base.

There are only two types of buildings that X-Com bases can be built in. Slums or warehouses.

Slum

Structurally, the slums are massive but the segments are very weak and fall easily. When damaged or destroyed, if they attached to any other buildings, they can cause them to collapse in a domino effect. On the other hand, slum blocks often feature large building areas. This makes them more flexible, but harder to defend. Many slums are also very expensive to buy.

Warehouse

Warehouses are smaller than slums, but they are tougher and can withstand more damage. Layouts are variable by difficulty level, often leaning towards the small and constricted, though some can even match the slums for building space.

Corridors

The beauty of the various corridor layouts lie not just in how much expansion potential is available, but in how the layout can be used for base defense.

• Small layout examples
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Small layouts are easier to defend as you can set up choke-points. However they lack the space to allow for constructing a multi-purpose base that has a little of everything. They are limited to specialised roles. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

• Small layout examples
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Bases with large wide open layouts offer the opposite. With more space you get more room to build facilities, but your agents and technical staff will be spread all over the base, and it's not easier to control the flow of what paths the enemy will take once they leave the grav-lift or repair bay.

Grav-lift locations can also make or break your primary base as they are fixed. Take their locations into consideration as well when choosing a layout or when buying a new base.

Getting into the thick of things

So you've bought your base, and you're happy with it. Good. You've taken the plunge and are now able to actually start playing the game. Hurrah!

Due to the open ended nature of the game, there's any number of ways you can progress, so don't treat the order that things are discussed from here on as gospel.

Initial Housekeeping

The first thing you'll probably want to do after purchasing your new base is to inspect it and all of its assets. Start by opening up the base screen and have a look at what's there.

A look at the base

In the base screen you'll have access to the various other key trading and management functions.

For now, let's concentrate on the base. Look at how the existing modules are placed. Initial module placement is often as mess as placement is random, so it will not always be a very desirable layout.

You will have all the facilities that you need to get you through the first week or so at your disposal. You don't need to build any more at this stage, but you may want to plan ahead and think about what you would like to build and where you want to build it.

If you want to rearrange your base layout to something more manageable, such as moving the quarters and labs to one side of the base and the repair bay to the other, you can start building them now and then dismantle the old facilities when they are built.

With your present low profile, not having made many enemies of the aliens or other organizations, defenses aren't an immediate priority, but will be as the weeks go by.

Tip: hovering your mouse over your facilities will bring up additional information about them, such as current capacity.

A look at your vehicles

You can inspect your vehicles from the vehicle inventory screen or any menu that lists all the vehicles and agents in the current building. The vehicle inventory screen provides the most in-depth view of your ships, and should be used for all vehicle inspection and modification, while the building vehicle lists are very general and are mainly used to allow access to the vehicle inventory screen for a specific vehicle.

You'll have a small fleet of starting vehicles to play with. A non-standard Valkyrie Interceptor fitted with a weaker engine than what you would get when you purchase one. A pair of Pheonix Hovercars, a Stormdog and a Wolfhound APC.

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All the vehicles are divided into two classes, ground and air vehicles.

Ground Vehicles

Ground vehicles are vehicles that are restricted to traveling on the road. While blessed with an array of powerful weapons, they are severely limited by the road and cannot travel to off-road sites like UFO crash sites. They also suffer instantaneous death if the road directly underneath them is destroyed.

Air Vehicles

Air ships are not restricted to the road and will form the bread-and-butter of your anti-UFO fleet. Aircraft can fly at four different height levels in the city - which is useful to avoid friendly fire or to control the dispersement of misfired shots. They do suffer nearly instantaneous death if they are caught underneath any falling debris.

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Here are some of the author's thoughts on your default starting vehicles. While these are mainly opinion, do not let this stop you from making up your own mind about the discussed vehicles.

Valkyrie Interceptor

The Valkyrie interceptor is adequate but eventually makes for a poor interceptor due to its low expandability, weak hull, size and limited weapon mounts. It does have longer weapon hard points than a Pheonix Hovercar, allowing it to arm a pair of the more powerful Lancer 7000 laser. It does serve as a very good troop transporter until it is replace with one capable of interdimensional travel.

Pheonix Hovercar

The Phoenix hovercar can be thought of as a smaller variant of the Valkyrie. It is weaker, but harder to hit due to its size. It is also much cheap to replace if destroyed. Mixed with Hoverbikes, Hovercars provide budget-friendly air power for early UFO encounters.

Stormdog

The Stormdog isn't particularly noteworthy and is ill suited to combat despite its impressive standard weapon. The Stormdog can be used as a transport around the city, but there are generally better transport alternatives. If strapped for cash, you can scalp the Stormdog off by taking it apart and selling it for more than what it sells for.

Wolfhound APC

Because of its road limitation, the APC is not suited to combat. Because the first APC is free, the Wolfhound makes for a enconomy troop transporter for sending a second or even third team of agents to handle multiple alien drops around the city. APC's can be sent to target the drop-sites immediately the moment they are generated so that you do not lose track of it. As it is regulated by the road, the APC will arrive after the air skirmish is well and truly over, keeping its occupants safe.

A Look at your Staff

Roll call! Time to look at your staff that are battling the evil squiggly gribbly grabbly aliens that threatening humanity (and commerce) once again.

The Grunts

Now to inspect the heroes of the game. Your X-COM agents.

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Agents are divided into three races. Humans, Hybrids and Androids. Each has their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Humans; Humans are numerous, have average starting stats and they generally make the bulk of your agents. Their only limitation is that they have very low psi stats.

Hybrids; Are a crossbreed of Sectoids and humans. Their potential is identical to humans, and they have high psi abilities. Their only limitation is that they have very low starting stats, especially in strength, requiring them to spend time in both training facilities.

Androids; These are robotic humanoids. Their main weakness is that their stats can not be improved beyond their starting values. However, they make up for this by having very high starting stats available. Enemy psi users and brainsuckers are also blind to Androids, and will never actively attack them.

When you start the game, you will have 10 humans in your employment. To adjust this lineup, go to the hire/fire screen and add and remove agents of your choosing. Note that you have to be in non-hostile relations with the Mutant Alliance and SELF in order to hire Hybrids or androids respectively.

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To inspect them, bring up the agent equipment screen. This screen shows your agent's vital statistics, combat history and the agent's inventory and everything in storage at current base that the agent is in.

Have a quick glance at the agent's stats. The actual levels of most of the other stats aren't particularly important at this stage of the game - they'll improve with combat, so don't worry if you don't see a marksman amongst the team. To get the actual values, hover the mouse cursor over the bars you want to inspect.

Of course, agents are useless without their equipment. The 10 agents you start are equipped for battle. Depending on how you approach the first few missions, you may find the initial setup to be quite inadequate. Therefore, you should spend some time in the buy/sell screen. Buy some new weapons for your arsenal, wait for them to arrive, then come back here to put them onto your agents.

One suggestion is to remove the equip of all of your agents and then start building your kit up from scratch - all at the same time. To do this, select all of your agents by using ctrl+left click on their portraits until all of the agents are selected. Start removing items from the visible agent's inventory. Since not all of the agents will be equipped the same way, you'll have to fill some gaps with a random item and then unload it to clear the slot for the other agents. You can check other inventories by ctrl+clicking on the other portraits.

Once all agents are unequipped, you can use this very same method to arm all of the selected agents with an identical setup to speed up the arming/rearming process. This is useful for rearming all agents with common items that you use often, such as grenades or ammo. Or if you want the whole squad to swap between Megapol torso plates or Marsec Torso plates all at the same time.

For your main weapons, equip your troops as you see fit. At the very least arm the main team that'll be attending the missions. Keep in mind that there is a finite supply of ammo in X-COM Apocalypse, so finding means of saving ammunition is something you must deal with. One suggestion is to use a good mixture of weapons, so that you don't exhaust one type of ammo too quickly, and mix in unlimited ammo weapons like the Stun Grapple (and later Power Sword and Mind Bender).

You may want to single out agents by the strength levels to decide what equipment to arm them so you do not over-encumber them. The Speed/TU meter will show how affected each agent is when you add or remove equipment. You will always be encumbered to some degree, so you will want to minimize it as much as possible.

The Techs

The fighting forces dealt with, lets look at the brains of the operation. The support staff made up of quantum mechanics, bioengineers and engineers. Each type will work in their specialized work spaces where they study, design or build new tech for you to work with.

Techs and engineers have skill levels that determine how fast they can work.

At the start, or later when you create new tech facilities, hang onto as many workers as you can to fill available spaces. Even if you're stuck with a team of minimal skill workers, if there is work to be done then it's better to have the work flowing than to not have any workers at all.

With time, you can start hand picking the best techs as they become available.

Your First Mission

After you've had your fill inspecting and setting up your operations, the only thing you can do next is wait since you have no idea where the aliens are at this point in time. Let time pass and you'll get a distress call alerting you to an alien presence somewhere in the city. You'll get to choose to launch your ships at this point.

Unless you save\reload, there's no way to avoid the first mission announcing itself with an alert siren. Later on you'll be able to go to alien infestation sites the moment the aliens are dropped into the buildings.

Don't worry about the time delay waiting for the siren. The first site has very minimal infiltration levels that any spread in the infestation will have little to no negative side effects.

When you arrive at the site and start the mission, you'll be given a choice of turn based combat or real-time. This is a major topic that often schisms the X-COM community. The game appears to be developed more towards its real-time combat aspects but it does play well in turn based mode, and each mode has its quirks. The only true solution to this is to just experiment with both modes until you find that you are most comfortable with. Alternately go with the complete opposite of what you're familiar with. If you like real-time gaming, go for turn based. If you're a veteran of turn based games (such as X-COM UFO and TFTD), go right into real-time. Experiencing the culture shock early and masting the system will be beneficial in the long run.

The very first mission itself is a doozy with little opposition beyond the dreaded brainsuckers. You will meet a small number of anthropods that'll launch brainsuckers at you.

That said, don't get complacent. If you are careless and a brainsucker latches itself onto an agent's head, have another agent shoot it off quickly. If the brainsucker succeeds in its attack, you will lose the agent and will have to contend with live rounds. Responding to brainsuckers in this manner is difficult in Turn Based mode.

To completely confound the aliens on this mission, you could opt to send a lone android. As you will be able to walk about unhindered for this mission, it's a good way to practice the various interface controls and how to move the agents.

In real-time, you should also take the opportunity to adjust the auto-pause settings to your liking.

As soon as all the anthropods and brainsuckers are either dead or have fled the combat zone, you'll have won the mission.

Your First Air Skirmish - or Not

After your first mission, there'll be no more alien sightings. You can then rest up and let time pass until the alien's make their next move.

The alien's next move will be to launch a small fleet of probes and scouts through the three dimension gates that you've probably noticed floating about the city.

Skip the next lot of pre-amble if you're already familiar with how the UFOs are organized.

Roles of the mushroom saucers

Though these are not official game terminologies, and are just some the author has made up, UFOs can be classified into several distinct roles. Escorts and dropships.

Those are the two most common ship roles you will encounter. Later you will als encounter aggressive UFOs that will come into the city just to attack some targets.

A dropship is a UFO that transports and drop aliens into a building. They are the ones that pop into the city and fly to a building, drop their payload and make a mad dash for the nearest dimension gate. The payload often consists of aliens. Later in the game, on rare occasions you will get a sparkly blue beam which has been coined 'Micronoid Rain'. No aliens are dropped but there's a chance the organization will get infiltrated instantly. Later on, the larger capital ship will also drop Overspawn to inflict damage to the city.

Escorts are fighter type UFOs that function solely to protect Dropships. Escorts (the role, not the UFO type) typically consist of very heavily armed UFOs that make mincemeat out of your starting vehicles and equipment. They attack nearby enemies. When the dropship has fled or has been destroyed, they will flee to the nearest dimension gate.

Later in the game you will get the two capital ships. The Battleship and Mothership. They are quite variable in their roles. These typically fill the dropship role but also have some serious offensive capabilities to protect themselves and have minimal or even no escorts. When they appear together, the battleship escorts the mothership.

The entry point of each UFO is unpredictable, as each time a UFO materializes, the game will call on the random number generator to decide on which gate to come through. This can lead to UFOs appearing all over the city. No matter where they materialize, the escorts will attempt to link up with the dropship they're protecting.

For Great Justice!

So your first bunch of UFOs have been spotted. The only thing to do now is launch your ships and engage the UFOs in aerial combat.

Like your very first mission, this should also be a doozy since your opposition will consist of the type 1 and type 2 probes and scouts. They are unmanned vessels with very minimal hull strength and limited firepower. Just pick your favourite ships and they'll do fine.

A few things that can be helpful prior to the actual event is to set the pause settings in the option menu to pause the game every time a UFO enters the city. This is useful for keeping track of the dropships as they enter the city. Scattering your forces at strategic points around the city is also fairly helpful at casting your net wide to catch most of the UFOs if you're not sure where they'll enter the city from. However try to balance it so that you don't end up thinning your forces too much. Try to keep them within a short flight distance of each other so that several ships can come to the aid of another if it is outnumbered.

While fighting, the UFOs that you want to keep the most attention on are the dropships, in this case the Probes. Theses ship will drop enemies into a building and then flee to the nearest Dimension Gate.

Keep a very close close eye on the three Probes, especially if you aren't able to go after all three of them at once. Keep a thumb hovering over the space bar to pause time and double click on the UFO icons in the UFO tab to switch between the three probes frequently to keep an eye on what each one is doing.

If the transporter makes its drop, keep track of the building and send a team there to clean up the mess immediately. Whether the UFO escapes or is destroyed at this point, the site must be cleaned out.

Beginner Mistake

One mistake that some new players might fall into is to send fighter aircraft into battle with agents riding them. Vehicles in X-COM Apocalypse, though it is never disclosed how they function, fly by themselves and do not require pilots. Or to put it another way, agents are only passengers.

Later, when you get much more powerful ships that offer lots of protection and firepower, you can safely have a team tucked away on the ship so that you can immediately initiate a recovery mission after shooting down a UFO. Early in the game, the safest method is to only keep troops on a designated troop transport, and send out fighter aircraft unmanned.

Recovering the UFOs

You've shot down the UFOs, you'll want to send a vehicle with a team of agents to recover them. At this early stage you will not have to worry about attending a ground mission as these ships are unmanned. You will still need a team (minimum one agent) on board the ship to initiate the recovery.

Later in the game, once larger UFOs start appearing, they will generate UFO crash sites that you will have to battle your way through in order to secure the UFO. Unlike building sites where you can send multiple transports and pool all the agents at the site, you will only be able to send one transport in to recover these sites, so make sure you have a large transport on standby to send your agents into this type of mission.

The I-Can't-Defeat-Them approach

Okay so you may not always have the resources or firepower to deal with the UFOs. Another way is to just leave the UFOs alone. That means don't attack them. However do keep your eyes peeled and track of the dropships and note where they deposit their troops. Once the escorts are clear, send in a ground team and clear out the ground missions.

This will most definitely not by the case for your first encounter with the UFOs, but is included for future reference.

This method is a less aggressive approach that doesn't cause as much damage to the city. It does mean your agents will be busier.

If you do attempt to take this approach, remember that still need to capture at least one of several key UFO types to be able to build an interdimensional troop transporter in order to reach the alien dimension, and ultimately win the game.

Your Day Job: Bug Extermination

So you weren't successful at keeping the dropships from dropping some troops into a building. No matter - that's where your agents come in.

Load them up for any event, pop them on the transport and send it to the mission site. For normal missions, you have the luxury of splitting your teams up into any number of transports and bases and have them link up at a mission site to clear out the mission together. The one difference is for grounded UFO assaults, only one transport can be sent in at a time.

Once the transport arrives, select the team and start the mission by 'investigating'. Raiding will cause building guards to appear that you must fight. this will make the organization hostile towards you - so do not use this option unless you clearly wish to initiate hostilities while fighting the aliens at the same time.

Note that the main drop-sites that you investigate will often be the hardest and have the most enemies. There are exceptions to the rule, but the main site will often be the strongest source of alien infestation. It's imperative that you clear these out as soon as you can or else you'll have a major headache cleaning out the smaller sites through the rest of the day.

By now the aliens might be slightly better armed than before with the introduction of some non-humanoid enemies with built-in ranged attacks. Start using better tactics and make better strategic use of your weapons' various strengths. Be sure to make your agents wear a full set of armour too - if you haven't.

End the mission by either clearing the map of enemies either by killing them all or letting them flee. Other methods include getting all your agents killed, or have all your agents leave the site via the exit pads.

Get used to this bit as you'll be doing this for the rest of the game.

Beginner Mistake Another beginners trap is to get into the habit of of unload troops into a building prior to investigating it. Do not do this - agents only need to be highlighted to put them into the mission.

The reasoning behind this is simple: At the end of the mission, your ship auto-launches. Since your troops don't climb back on board the ship, they'll be left behind. In the city this isn't an issue as you can just have the ship set down and pick up the troops, or have the troops march home on foot.

Much later into the game, when you assault the alien home dimension, the consequence of your ship taking off after a mission are extremely dire. This is because the buildings get obliterated when you complete the mission, along with the launch tube that leads to the building. Since you can no longer land at the site, any agents that survived the collapse of the building will be forever stranded and can not be recovered.

After the mission: Monitoring Infiltration

Congratulations, you've cleared a site! Now you've got to deal with the other sites you've marked off. Before you leave each site, be sure to remember where they are. This can be done easily by just parking an unmanned vehicle at the building such as a Hoverbike.

Once you've cleared all the sites, your job won't be over just yet. Now you have to monitor the infiltration levels for rest of the day. Even though you cleared the main sources infestation, some aliens will will have already spread to surrounding areas.

Let the day pass in short bursts of time, of say 10 to 30 minutes. Pause and go to the graphs screen and update the top-10 infiltrated organization chart. This will be your major source of information on where the infiltration is occurring. It won't tell you exactly where, but it will let you know who is being infiltrated so that you can narrow down the source.

If you see any rise in infiltration levels, note the company that is being affected. If the rise in infiltration is very gentle, then you can probably ignore it for the time being. If it's a very sharp rise, then you must do something about it. Graph lines with hardly any rapid increase will generally peak and drop off naturally after a few hours. If they rise above the half way line, then the organization will be taken over by the aliens.

Time to sort them out! Go back to the cityscape view and open up the top-down display of the city. Open up the organization tab and select the icon of the company you wish to investigate. This will highlight all the buildings on the map that they own on the top-down map. Locate the buildings belonging to this company that are closest to the drop sites that you cleared earlier that day.

Send your team there and investigate the site. If it wasn't a mistake, then a mission will start. Clear out or chase off any aliens in this mission. Once you've cleared the site, go to any other sites that are having rising infiltration levels.

Repeat the whole process over again by letting time pass, checking the top-10 graph and investigating suspected sites. .

Once the graph lines have stopped rising, then you can start relaxing a bit as you have cleared the alien menace for the rest of the day.

Now, you might be wondering why you are doing all this active patrolling when you could just be waiting and let the authorities throw an alert at you to notify you of any threats. You can do this, however the alerts are sporadic and tend to occur late into the infestation, where it has become too widespread to the point it us unmanageable. In a sense, the alerts are indicating that you are neglecting your duties to the city and have let the infiltration spread. Ideally, apart from the first mission, you don't want to ever hear an alert again.

Before the clock ticks over to midnight, make sure any injured agent in your employ is at a base with a medical facility. 12am is when any healing is done. Any agents studying will also get the benefit of their training labs if they are at full health at this time and assigned to either lab.

Defeating the aliens, with bigger guns, and science

Well, probably not with bigger guns as the aliens haven't got any of the good stuff yet at this point. For that to happen, you need to do more missions against the aliens and build up your activity points. Or go and attack someone like the Cult of Sirius or any other organization of your choice and build up those activity points. Time is also a factor in controlling the tech level of the city guards.

At the start the only project with immediate practical value will be for the Bio Transport module. This is needed to capture aliens, which are in turn required to get bigger and better labs where you can build bigger weapons to defeat and capture bigger and badder aliens. And so goes the cycle!

Start the research on the bio transport module. When that's done, put one onto your troop transport. Capture some aliens then bring them back to the lab for analysis. That will give the bio-engineers something to work on. Tip: Invest some time in the Mutliworm as it will lead to both a better lab as well as the useful Toxigun.

The Quantum mechanics generally will not have a lot do at the start, but they eventually get very busy as the aliens bring in new advanced weapons.

Until the Biochemists and quantum mechanics have more technology researched, the Engineers will probably be the worst off in terms of work at the start of the game apart.

Looking towards Future Air Skirmishes

Or getting more advanced with the air battles.

Beyond the first air battle, the aliens will gradually start sending bigger and more powerful UFOs in as you clear the technology hurdles.

From here on, you'll want to start putting more thought into preparing yourself for the future air battles, and developing strategies to cope.

One of the problems you might have found at this point is the limited coverage your base has over the city. You're stuck in one spot, yet the gates amble around all over the city.

How to solve this dilemma? Well, you can buy a new base. That has its fair share of problems, such as cost and its own positioning in the city.

The best way to clear your coverage problem is to make use of one of biggest perks X-COM gets: free parking.

Your ships can fly to and land in any building in the city. They can stay docked at the building for as long as they like without burning any of their fuel. Then when they are needed, launch and attack UFOs as they appear. When they need to be repaired, refueled and re-armed, send them back home for a few hours. Once repaired, they can be redeployed around the city.

That solves one problem, but the next problem is the increasing strength of the visiting UFOs. You can't even think to shoot them down with the few ships you have at the beginning. This means you have to start increasing your air force size and start upgrading its firepower.

A popular practice that players employ is to buy Hoverbikes and Hovercars and arm them with lots of cheap weapons like Bolter lasers, 40mm Auto Cannons, Janitor and Prophet missiles. Or if you've got the cash to spare: Lineage Plasma Cannons, the most powerful beam cannon on the market. This is a cheap way to bulk up your forces fast and it's easy to replace each ship if they get destroyed. The large numbers allows you to spread them out into small squadrons all over the city. Be aware that with lots of aircraft they they are susceptible to friendly fire. One way to avoid this is to have the aircraft fly at different elevations. Every four aircraft in a squadron can fly at a different elevation. This keeps them out of each others' way and it allows four aircraft to occupy the same city tile.

Another practice is to buy a small number of strong ships with heavy firepower like the Hawk Air Warrior, however their cost can be quite prohibitive in the first couple of weeks. Small wings of Hawk Air Warriors armed to the teeth with missiles, Lineage cannons, Lancer lasers and a missile evasion matrix can prove to be very formidable against a fair number of mid-level UFOs. Their limited numbers limit their ability to cover most of the city.

Yet another practice is a combination of the swarms and heavy hitters. A swarm is first sent in to distract a UFO, and then the heavy hitters swoop in with their heavy guns firing. This is even more costly to maintain, and a strategy that may be more viable towards that mid to late portion of the game.

Looking to Future Ground Battles

As with the UFOs, you will start noticing an increase in enemy performance on the ground. To combat this, start using your head.

You begin the game with a lot of powerful weapons, mid-level protection (by way of Megapol Armor). You get access to a wide range of advanced weapons and goods that introduce more functions such as flight (by way of Marsec torso plates) during the first few weeks into the game, or you can even pilfer them off enemy organizations. There are other useful gadgets like the mind bender and motion scanner. Use everything you can get your hands on to your advantage.

New weapons and shiny armour are good, but none of this means anything if you don't start coordinating your agents in battle. Remember: you are the center of communications for your agents. You control everything that they do and you keep an eye on everything that happens around them. If you fail in this role, your agents will only be able to do so much to protect themselves and eventually succumb to the enemy.

Get them all moving - watch what they are all doing, make sure they are always aware of what's happening around them and always take your time during any pauses/turns to issue orders. Use cover in the form of walls or smoke clouds. Think of how you can use this cover to your advantage and fight the enemies on your own turf.

Naturally all this comes with time and the more you practice. Don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that the strategy will work all the time. Be flexible.

Future Technology Research

One of the most important tasks that you need to do in research is capture the type-3 Transporter UFO as quickly as you can as they are critical to wining the game, but only appear in a limited time frame. Missing out on them could that you will be unable to complete the game.

Beyond that, there's not a great deal of strategy needed for research beyond prioritizing your research to get you better offensive and defensive technologies to keep the playing field level.

Tip: For transporting stuff to be researched, storage capacity for equipment and the bio-transport module is infinite. You only need one of each type to gather everything in the field. Even base storage for equipment is infinite. However, being over capacity will prevent you from buying or transferring equipment into the base.

Future Base Expansion

As you play, you will need more room to build some of the larger tech facilities like the workshops.

(more to come)