Exploits
Alien Inventory Screen
When controlling an alien through Psionics, you can't directly see their inventory by clicking the inventory button. (Where DO Sectoids keep their grenades, anyway?) However if you switch to a human soldier, and check his inventory, you can use the arrows in the top corner to cycle through your units. The alien will appear as one of your units. Be careful though as the game will often stack all the equipment in one location which can lead to further bugs.
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
The mystical art of moving solid object through other solid objects.
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.
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.
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!
NKF Quick notes:
- It doesn't matter if you assign engineers to a 0 item build project, because the engineers will be taken off the project anyway.
- In a similar but completely opposite vein, if you start a project with a certain number of items to build, the required cash for the first item (and perhaps materials) will instantly be taken from you. And if you cancel the project before the job is done, you will not be refunded. It's mainly a loss if you're low on resources, otherwise most players won't even notice the fact that the resources for the first item were never refunded. This doesn't happen if you start a 0 item build project, and then assign staff and a build amount later. This in effect makes the first item in the build list free.
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 to the grenades. It will rememeber who last threw the grenade so it can credit the right person with experience. Unfortunately, the game only assigns the ownership to a grenade after it has been thrown, but not when it's dropped or picked up.
So who gets the experience if its dropped? 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 carry and drop it to where it can be useful. 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.
Mind Control Madness
Gaining permanent control of a Chryssalid/Tentaculat
Fire
Just how does it work?
NKF quick notes: (I might be duplicating something here, but I'm just jotting these down quickly before I forget)
- Fire does two types of damage to units. Impact and damage over time.
- Damage Over time: Standing in fire or actually being on fire.
- Impact damage: The weirdest and most unusual damage of all.
- Anyone standing in fire: Receives hit-point damage every time an incendiary shell explodes
- Anyone standing in smoke: Same as above, but take stun damage instead of hit-point damage.
- Fire does a fixed amount of damage. The damage of an incendiary weapon only determines how large the spread of the fire will be. So an autocannon incendiary shell is just as powerful as an incendiary rocket -- the only difference is the blast area.
- Fire and Smoke use the same object table, and being limited, can get used up very quickly and attempts at producing more fire or smoke will not work. Incendiary impact damage will still work on any units in fire/smoke.
JFG adds: Please see my Incendiary topic