Grenade

The humble fragmentation grenade. Although useless against, say, Cyberdiscs at higher difficulty settings, it is a cheap area-effect indirect-fire weapon. It can hurt or kill several closely-grouped weakly-armored aliens at the same time. It is a thrown weapon that can clear obstacles or be thrown from behind cover.

For a more general overview of how grenades function see Understanding Grenades.

Stats

Power: 50 High Explosive Size: 1 high x 1 wide Weight: 3 TUs: Transfer from shoulder strap to hand: 3 TU. See Inventory TU Table Priming: 50% Throwing: 25% Cost: $300 Sell Price: $240

Tips & Tricks

• Timers are most commonly set to 0 (end of your turn) or 1 (end of alien turn)
• Are less likely to trigger reaction shots from aliens than direct fire (particularly when they are facing away from you) and have a high chance of a kill against weaker aliens, particularly Sectoids
• Can often be thrown from a position hidden to the aliens, completely avoiding the risk of reaction fire
• Can be thrown up through ceilings, exploding on floor above (HE rounds also do this) - see here.
• Can be thrown into diagonal walls, exploding on the far side
• Will explode before doors close at the end of a turn (catching aliens with doors open) [Zeno]
• Primed grenades will not explode when it's in your inventory when the timer runs out. It will only detonate when it's on the ground. If you fall unconscious, it will be counted as being on the ground.
• Grenades improve normal Firing Accuracy as well as Throwing Accuracy when used for a kill. All enemies (if not mind controlled) caught in the blast will give experience toward firing accuracy, even if undamaged (i.e., their armor absorbed it) - see Experience.
• If several explode on the same turn, the lowest, most north-east grenade will explode first [Zeno]
• Grenade Relay allows soldiers with more TUs to prime grenades and throw them on to front-line soldiers with less TUs, who then only incur (pickup cost+throw cost) TUs to put the grenade on target. You actually spend more TUs overall, but the important point is that the front-line soldier (the one who suffers the most from reaction shots) will not lose 75% overall time units (plus item move costs) just to arm and throw a grenade.
• The last person to throw the grenade gets experience points for the hits; soldiers that only drop or pick it up do not get attribution. If no one threw it, your first unit gets the experience - which means it's wasted if your first unit is a tank or a dead soldier! (Your tanks always come before soldiers in the unit list, but enemy "tanks" such as cyberdiscs do not.)
• Kneeling allows you to throw grenades farther under ceilings, landing craft, doorways, etc. Kneel to deploy smoke grenades at the base of your landing ramp on the first turn without exiting the craft.
• Grenades and Alien Grenades are excellent for destroying cover in farm and jungle terrain. Farm buildings, hedges, and trees that may be concealing aliens are readily destroyed with a single grenade. Another trick is to remove the roofs of buildings using an agent in a flying suit to reveal aliens on upper stories.

See Also

Understanding Grenades Grenade Relay
Alien Grenade
High Explosive
Explosions
Inventory TU Table
Throwing Distance
Field Manual: Grenade

NKF's Notes

[ NKF: Oy, this article is a bit old, and it needs to be seriously reworked and meshed seamlessly with the rest of the wiki pages.]

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• There's so many ways you can use grenades. I'll only be touching a small portion of what you can do with them in this post.

• Just arming them and tossing them is the easiest way of using them. Since priming your grenades is quite time consuming (50% TUs!), pre-arming your grenade is a good idea, but it has its drawbacks. If your soldier dies or falls unconscious, the grenade will go off and wipe out equipment and your soldier. So if you want pre-armed grenades, protect that soldier!

• Just FYI, TFTD's Sonic Pulsers are nigh indestructible, so you can have multiple explosions if you're carrying multiple pulsers. But X-COM explosives are destroyed by, rather than add to, an explosion.

• Learn the grenade relay. This is just having one soldier in secure area arm a grenade and tossing it to a nearby comrade, who then picks it up and tosses it to the next. Repeat until you get the grenade to where you want it to be.

• When throwing grenades, make sure that there are no obstructions above you, like the Skyranger wings, or tree tops. You can still throw them (the grenades), but not at any reasonable distance.

• If your game hasn't got the skill caps in (i.e. pre Col. Ed. or 1.4), soldiers with more than 70 strength have a lot of trouble throwing anything, possibly because they are so strong the arc of the grenade intersects the battlescape "ceiling". They do not make good grenadiers. Period.

• A patched up critically injured soldier might not be able to shoot straight, but he or she can still throw grenades just as well as the next person (even though the throwing stat may have decreased). Might as well rack up plenty of experience (and a bit more firing accuracy) with grenades before hitting the month long stay in the infirmary eh? ("Hits" by grenades count toward increasing Firing Accuracy skill points.)

• Grenades, especially armed ones, are best stored in your shoulder or belt slots. The shoulders are expensive to move items into, but it's very cheap to move items from your shoulders to your hands (3 TUs). Store ammunition in your pack, as they'll still cost 15 TUs to load in a gun regardless. Keep the slots clear for your grenades.

• Be crafty when using your grenades. Make use of their splash effect. Around corners are nice, like before going around the bend to the command room in the alien Supply Ships. Or maybe if you see a Floater floating at roof level but not standing on it? You can toss a grenade onto the roof, and the splash damage will get the floater. Oh, and toss them into the tile of a large terror unit. They'll receive roughly 4x more damage. Cyberdiscs and Sectopods need hi-explosives or alien grenades for the best results. Reapers will die from a regular grenade.

• As for quantity, bring as many as you want as long as its within the 80 item limit and your soldiers are strong enough to carry them. I like taking plenty of regular and Alien Grenades, maybe two or three per soldier. One High Explosive per soldier, or more if a lot of my soldiers are above 40 strength (soldiers under 30 strength do NOT get them, for obvious reasons). One Smoke Grenade for the first fellow to leave the transport. And a couple of Proximity Grenades randomly distributed. I'd take more, but the collectors edition has this funny bug that makes random and potential harmful things explode if an armed proximity mine isn't used.

[NKF, Oct 30, 2002, copied from forums by --JellyfishGreen 08:54, 4 May 2005 (BST)]