Other Geoscape Exploits

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Other Geoscape Exploits

This page covers Geoscape Exploits apart from those covered under "Exploits: For Free".

All Terror Missions During Daylight

At night, aliens have a visibility advantage over your soldiers. An Xcom agent can only see so far as the player. Aliens are not limited in any way from the darkness. The Aliens visible distance during a day mission is the same for a night mission. Xcom players obviously would want to do all their tactical missions during the day, however, during the limited time that a terror site is active, daylight may not be an option... not anymore!
When a Terror Site mission appears, save your game, then immediately launch your transport craft as per usual. Once your craft is in close proximty to the city under attack, you'll be able to see if the terror mission is going to be at night or in the day. If it is going to be dark then immediately make your transport craft patrol its current location. However, if you patrol for too long, then the terror site will just disappear and your score will suffer. Do not let the terror site disppear.
Terror Sites disappear on the hour BUT they will not disppear if an Xcom craft (of any sort) is targeting the mission. To take advantage of this fact. Only target the terror mission with your craft (any will do) when the hour changes. Patrol once again for the remainder of the hour, then once again target the terror mission just before the hour changes. If you do this, then you'll be able to stall for time until daylight.
Advanced Tactics:

• just after a terror mission appears, save your game and let the time pass by at a fast rate. You will see the terror site disappear on a certain hour. This hour is your time limit before you must do something to stop the terror mission from disappearing. Reload your game and try and work out when would be the best time to launch your transport ship to land in daylight hours. Remember, the act of targeting the site will now alter its expiry time. You can keep checking the time it disappears as long as you save/reload.
• if you guesstimate that you wil NOT win the terror site mission, DO NOT ignore it. Land at the site, then immediately abort the mission. Your score will be pathetic for that mission, but you do not get penalised for ignoring the terror mission outright.

Note: If you want to play every single mission in full daylight, use Scott T Jones's game enhancer, XcomUtil. Just remember that playing in full daylight is cheating, since you are removing one of the only advantages that the aliens had over your troops.

Teleporting Armor

Armor can be assigned to a soldier one of two ways: On the dropship equipment screen, or the Soldier stats screen from the main base interface. When a soldier is in a dropship going to or coming away from a mission, the former interface is not available, but armor can still be equipped via the Soldier Stat screens. This can be used to swap a set of Flying Suits between the soldiers on two dropships, or to recall heavy armor to the base garrison to help in a Base Defence mission while the main cleanup crew is away.

"Attacking" with transports

Air to air combat is entirely under your control, the aliens will never force an engagement. This means you can safely order your transports to engage enemy UFOs, simply keep the battle range open and they'll never be hit. Of course they have no ability to shoot down the UFOs but most UFOs will land somewhere and when they do your transport will promptly land with them and start a ground mission.

This is actually superior to shooting them down as you recover an intact UFO instead of one with one or more engines (and their fuel!) blown up. It also saves you money on fighters. It is possible to win the game without ever having any air-to-air craft. (Obviously you start with them--I'm talking about selling them on day 1. The transport for the final mission will of course be capable of carrying weapons but it need not actually carry any.)

Note that scouts will often not land and retaliation missions only land at your base--the transport won't participate.

IIRC this also works in TFTD. I never had the collectors version so I don't know if it works there.