Exploits

Throw through ceilings

Most explosives (grenades, HE packs) can be chucked up through ceilings to land on the floor above. This is useful if you don't know where enemies are exactly, but you know where they are roughly. Use a big enough boomstick (HE rounds, pointed at ceiling) and you'll probably kill anyone in the vicinity of the blast.

Faulty Collision Detection: Corner Tile Tricks

Diagonal exterior UFO tiles aren't a well-defined boundary. A grenade thrown onto the same square from outside will detonate inside the UFO. An unconscious volunteer thrown onto the same square from outside will awake inside the UFO. (Except if he's sharing the tile with a live grenade.) A Flying Suit can sometimes fly up into a UFO from beneath a diagonal overhang.

Note: This trick will also work with any wall that occupies the entire tile - i.e. any tile with a wall that you cannot walk into. Almost all the sides of most X-COM troop transports consist of these, and all outer walls along the West and Northern sides of UFOs are made of these as well.

Faulty Collision Detection: Walk through wall Trick

This trick ties in with the corner tile trick, as it makes use of any wall that occupies an entire tile.

As mentioned, you can fly up into some walls. For soldiers that cannot fly, you can walk into these walls if your starting location is on a different elevation than the destination.

For example, if you're standing on the roof of a barn that's just to the West of a Large Scout. If you stay on the same level and move your movement cursor to a point that would walk your soldier (assuming you could walk on air) to a spot just above one of the UFO outer hull walls. Then walk. Your soldier will walk, drop and then step right into the wall. From here, you can either walk into or out of the UFO as you please - or you can throw a high explosive right into the ship and take one step away to get behind the safety of the hull.

Faulty Collision Detection: Moving a Large Unit Up Stairs and Sinking it into A Wall

Tanks are built up of four units, which make up each of the quarter. The primary quarter, the part that has all the vital statistics, is the upper left or north-west quarter when viewed from the overhead map, or the topmost when viewed in the battlescape.

When moving a tank up or down different elevations, mainly via stairs or dropping it off the edge of a wall, the game only uses the primary quarter for collision detection. So you can easily move a tank up narrow stairs (or through a narrow cave - but that's not related to this).

If you move a tank off a northward facing ledge, the rest of the tank will sink into a wall (if there is one), and cause the tank to get stuck. This won't happen if the tank moves off a south facing ledge as the primary quarter will fall after the rest of the tank.

Infinite Fuel.

This trick is great for saving Elerium-115. When you finish building a new ship, load it out with weapons (dual Plasma Cannons are recommended) and wait for it to have the "Ready" status. Then, transfer it to another base. Immediately after it arrives, tell it to go to a random point on the globe (preferably where you have no bases) and have it patrol in the area. Clicking on it will show that its fuel tank is 0% full. This ship will now have unlimited fuel until it returns to base. This works best on Firestorms, as they have the same number of guns as the Avengers yet cost less.

Note: After downing a UFO, this ship will automatically head back to base. Be sure to send it on patrol again before reaching base, or you will lose the unlimited fuel feature. Because of this, it helps to keep it patrolling as far away from its base as possible.

Free Manufacturing

In the Workshop screen, choose an item to be manufactored, but assign no engineers to it. Also, make sure it's set to produce 0 of the item. Click OK, then go back and assign as many engineers as you want (preferably as many as possible). This time, change the quantity to 1. When the production is finished, you will have gotten one of the selected items--for free! Doing this with tanks and then selling them works wonders on your finances.

Note: Although it may be tempting to create fleets of free Avengers like this, you must still have adequate hangers, severely limiting your options. Still very useful, though!

All Terror Missions During the Day

During the night, the aliens have a severe visability advantage over your soldiers. I'm sure every X-Com player has fallen victim to a night-time terror mission at least once. Those days are now over. When a Terror Mission comes up, simply equip a Skyranger with all the manpower and firepower you'll need to defeat the aliens, and have it patrol just beside your base. (Game) minutes before the hour changes (e.g. at 1:56), have the Skyranger target the Terror Site. After the hour changes (e.g. at 2:03), have the Skyranger patrol in place again. Repeat this before and after the hour changes until daylight. You see, Terror Sites only disappear on the hour, and they won't disappear if they're targetted by a craft. So if you make sure it's targeted as the hours change, you can stall for time until daylight!

Note: Or, you could just use Scott T Jones's wonderful tool known as Xcomutil. Running the RunXcomW.exe program allows you to make all missions in the light of day, regardless of actual game time. A lot easier to use Util. . .

Grenades: Pass the Experience Trick

(Or who gets the experience when you "drop" a grenade)

Some commanders may have noticed that a soldier that drops a primed grenade rather than throwing it will often not get credited for the damage or killed enemies.

There is a very odd explanation for this. The game attaches an ownership value to the grenades so that it can rememeber who last threw the grenade so that it can credit the right person with experience. Unfortunately, the game only assigns the ownership value to a grenade after it has been thrown, but not when it's dropped or picked up.

So who gets the credit? All X-COM owned Grenades, at the very start of the mission, default to the very first soldier on the transport - or the very first armoured weapons platform if you have one. This means that if a grenade is dropped rather than thrown, all experience goes towards the very first soldier in the list, or the tank.

Can we move the ownership around and pass the experience to soldiers of our choice? Definitely! Just have the person you want to get the experience throw the grenade then get someone else to deploy it. Just remember to not throw it again.

The method of deployment for these grenades will be left as a practical exercise to the commander. Be creative, or be heartless - it's all up to you!

The biggest advantage of this unusual pass-the-experience technique would be to provide training for frail soldiers that would prove to be more of a detriment in combat than out of it - yet another reason for commanders to not sieve troops based on poor combat statistics.

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Gaining permanent control of a Chryssalid/Tentaculat