Making the Game Harder

This page is destined for players who finish the game frequently on the highest difficulty and would like to keep the challenge alive.

Naturally it is quite easy to handicap yourself while playing the game: using only conventional weaponry, no armor, fighting only on night missions, etc. However, the idea here is not to go those extremes but to identify a number of exploits/cheats/tactics that make the game easier.

Fell free to try any of these ideas (or all of them!). Some may make the game very hard but not impossible to win.

Don't use game exploits

All strategy guides for UFO have plenty of mentions to Exploits. Their influence on Tactical/Geoscape varies, here's a list of those that you should avoid and their consequences.

Alien Inventory Screen

Although you are not supposed to be able to access an alien's inventory screen when you mind control it, there is a way to do so. This allows for nasty things like priming grenades and dropping them at the feet of the alien. Another thing to consider is to stop using Psionics all together (see below).

Faulty Collision Detection

A full description can be found on here. This exploit allows you to bypass map chokepoints (such as UFO doors) which can be used by the aliens to ambush your soldiers.

Free Wages/Manufacturing/Fuel

These exploits are commonly used to prevent your finances from going negative at the end of the month or to keep your planes flying for free. The Free Wages avoids having to pay your scientists/engineers/soldiers' salaries. Most of your monthly expenses are made of those, so having to pay for your 250 scientists makes financial matters more hard to deal with.

Excessive Firepower

Heavy Plasmas

Don't equip the majority of your squad with Heavy Plasmas.

Blaster Launchers

To put it simply: the weapons are too powerful and thus the temptation to overuse them too great. Completely destroying a map is fun at start but butchering the aliens gets boring after a while. Either do not use the weapons or only bring 1 on each mission.

Enlarged Squads

Restrict your squad regarding soldiers and tanks. Never bring more than 20 units into a battlefield.

No Psionics

Psi-Amps completely unbalance the game towards the human player. Even 1 Psi-Amp is bad enough for the aliens, but to bring a squad full of psi-trained soldiers will mean that all the aliens will be mind controlled during the first turn (including even Cyberdisks or Sectopods. Once you start, the uncertainty and the risk will go down, and so will the fun.

The same applies to Mind Probes since those devices can be used to screen aliens for their rank or to check if they will reaction fire.

Finally, the use of Psi Labs should be restricted to screening troops but not training them, since they can't use Mind Probes or Psi Amps. A harder setting would be not to use them at all and only find out during a fight who are the psi weaklings.