Initial Deployment

Intent of Page

Stub. May be a redundant section - can be deleted later on if unnecessary.

This section is to include discussion of general battlescape strategies commonly used by players - and common goofs like the lemmings effect.

For example, the spotter-sniper stategy, the grenade/object relay, exponential mind control, leap frogging for deployment of flares or for general troop movement, suggestions on how to deploy from the Skyranger/Avenger and the Lightning, etc.

No explanations on sacrificial rookie strategies please. Sacrificial tanks are fine.

Other items to include could be discussion on behaviour of aliens in the battlescape to watch out for.

Oh, and pictograms. Plenty of pictures to show an example of the stategy in question. Most important.

Deploying from Skyranger

Rookies are often anxious to see (and take a shot at) aliens. This can result in them piling out of the Skyranger as soon as it touches down and charging right into an ambush. A more methodical exit from the Skyranger will maximize alien causalities while increasing the life expentancy of agents.

Tankless delpoyment

XCOM has shot down one of the first UFO's (crash-1 was in the ocean). Time to send a Skyranger full of rookies into action and see what these aliens are made of.

The soldier standing on the equipment pile tosses out a smoke grenade. End of turn 1.

The smoke grenade is right at the foot of the ramp to mask our troops deployment. Keep on eye on troops stun damage or they might pass out from smoke inhalation.

The smoke grenade goes off. Agent one jumps off the ramp and hunkers down behind the landing gear. Agent two does the same in the other direction. Agent 3, knowing the coast is more or less clear sprints out to get a good firing position with her AC-HE.

Each turn the scout agents only advance a few wary steps. If they spot an alien someone else will shoot at it. If it doesn't die the scout will retreat. This pictures shows the agents entire move for this turn.

Three turns into the battlescape and only a few agents are outside the Skyranger. Half the deployed troops are taking cover behind the sky ranger landing gear.

Once they have spread out a bit, more agents will debark. Keeping spread out is vital. Alien grenades can be brutal without armor.

(This game is with some custom maps from XCOMUTIL. It adds pyramids to the desert to give the aliens some cover) About 5 turns into the battle and the first group of agents has spread out into the field. An alien has popped out of the door at (1). The scouts (2) are moving cautiously and are carrying fast weapons (Pistols in this case). Troopers with heavier weapons are backing up the scouts (3). Their possible lines of fire are marked with the colored lines.

When a scout makes contact with an enemy, the scout retreats out of the line of fire and the back line troopers with HE weapons take some shots. In this case there were two troopers with a line of fire on the alien and one of them killed it.

Once contact was made with the enemy the scouts all froze for a turn, kneeling. Sure enough the first Sectoid had a buddy who came out the door on the next turn. The scouts got it with reaction fire. This battle ended then since the other sectiods didn't survive the crash.

Deploying with tanks

Deploying with tanks is fairly similar to deploying without them. You can often skip the smoke grenade. Since tanks can't advance in skills, they are cheap to replace in relative terms. Most aliens (save Mutons and Ethereals) will prefer to attack tanks over soldiers. So you can use them to draw fire away from agents. There are two goals when deploying tanks in the first turns. First, locate and prioritize targets close to the transport. Second, set up a screen around the transport exit to protect soldiers. In most cases you won't want to use the tank to attack enemies directly in order to allow soldiers a chance to advance. However, don't hesitate to kill aliens with the tank if there isn't a safe way to get an agent into position. Keep the tanks TU's in mind. It's best to keep about 50 in reserve to lessen enemy reaction fire. If the landing zone is very hot, withdraw the tank back to the transport and toss smokers.

The first tanks comes just onto the ramp. Then it looks left and right before going on. This will show any aliens that are right around the transport door. It also conserves TU's to prevent as much reaction fire as possible. If your tanks get blasted before you can locate the aggressors, pop smoke and see the section on tankless deployments.

A Sectoid is spotted. The tank stops moving.

Tank number two exits the transport and checks the other direction to make sure no sneaky aliens are waiting to shoot agents in the back. It then moves out past the end of the ramp to screen agents should aliens come in range. Tank number one also withdraws out of range of the Sectoid it spotted. (In this game the spotted enemy was mind controlled to throw a grenade to clear some brush).

The next turn tank number one re-aquires contact with the enemy.

Agents are deployed out of range of the spotted enemies. If this isn't possible they will take a snap shot and take cover. Tank number one then clears the shooting lane.

The sectiod is killed by an agent it can't even see.

The area around the transport is secure. Two more agents sprint out of the transport and don't bother to save any TU's. They take cover behind the tanks and the craft landing gear. The rest of the delpoyment goes just like one without tanks. Use the tanks to scout and move one to three agents out of the transport a turn until you are ready to move out.

Grenade Relay

The grenade relay is also known as the hot potato. The grenade relay best thought of in the same manner as a baton relay race where runners pass a baton to another until the last runner crosses the finish line with it.

In the grenade relay, a live grenade is passed between soldiers from one point on the map to another until it reaches its target destination.

The advantage of this strategy is that a front line soldier will not have to prime and throw the grenade.

The priming and throwing action alone costs 75% of your total TUs in addition to the inventory movement costs. This will often mean the death of a front line soldier where keeping a high Reactions level by way of high Time Units is paramount for avoiding reaction shots.

By being passed a pre-primed grenade, the scout will only need to pay the 25% total TUs for the throw and the TUs for picking up the grenade. Since this reduces the overall TU usage, the scout has the freedom of taking a few steps back out of the alien's visible range before throwing, or throwing the grenade and then running for cover.

While this strategy uses a lot more time units overall, the TUs are spent across a number of soldiers, keeping the reaction levels of all but the soldier that primed the grenade at a relatively high level. Soldiers at the rear are also less prone to being attacked by reaction shots.

A Short Example

File:Grelshot1.jpg

The soldier at location A starts the turn by spoting an alien at location B . The soldiers at location C cannot see the alien. The soldier at A has a laser pistol and isn't a particularly good shot with it, so there's no hope of acquiring a reasonable hit from this distance. A soldier at location C primes and throws a grenade to the soldier at A, who promptly picks it up, throws it to B and then backs up to get out of range.

Note that this strategy is not necessarily limited for the use of grenades. It can also be used to rapidly transfer weapons, ammunition, medikits, or other objects such as flares from one end of the map or to the other.