Tactics (Long War)

General Advice & Tips

This section covers anecdotal or general concepts and tips that might not fit into any of the above, usually just player specific styles or advice that might help you set up the perfect team.

Medics A medic is one of the most useful classes to have around, they can keep your soldiers healthy during battle and they increase the survivability of friendly (and enemy) soldiers with their smoke grenades. They may lack the killing power of the other classes, but when you get poisoned by a thin-man or strangled by a Seeker, you'll be glad that you have them with you.

Divide and Conquer. Usually it is never a good idea to split your team into two, but on urban maps, there some merit in doing this. When you have both your Squad upgrades, you can split your squad into fire teams of four people. Why is this a good idea? Because it lets you breach buildings and other structures much more efficiently and sets you up for more flanking maneuvers. It also lets you get out of deadlock situations where you are in a prolonged fire fight with Alien opposition, without any opportunity to move forward.

S.H.I.V all the things. Liberally use S.H.I.Vs, they are much better than the standard rookie, can take more damage and can create moving cover. They might not get any experience and be less effective than a regular soldier, but they can be outfitted to oblivion due to the much expanded S.H.I.V tree, present in Long War. They also add the benefit of making me feel less sad when checking out the memorial wall, which by the end of the game is quite big.

Battle Scanners. Seriously. Battle scanners become a requirement when seekers start coming into the enemy squad rotation as they can seriously wreck any well laid plan. Seekers have had many shackles taken off their AI, so 4 seekers can decloak and strangle you in one turn unless you do something about it.

Mister grenade is not your friend. You might have a juicy HE grenade Target hiding behind a wall. You have the perfect throw with a grenade, but think before you throw. You might remove his cover, but you might also add line of sight to the three other aliens that was on the other side of the wall, now you have to content with more enemies and you are caught in a very bad position. As such, always throw the Grenade as the first thing, not the last.

Meld doesn't matter While not true, it is not worth potentially losing valuable soldiers to recover it. If it's in a good place to grab, then by all means. If not don't waste a soldiers well-being on it. Also, the better you are doing, the less Meld you receive, so don't worry about missing it.

Explosive Terror solutions The most dangerous part of terror mission are the roaming chryssalids. However, they tend to stay clustered in small groups, which makes them excellent targets for Grenades and/or Rockets, you might not get any carcasses, but that is a small price to pay.