Yet Another Scheme

Immediate measures

• the usual run-of-the-mill stuff: sell gear you don't need, purchase stuff you want. Build a few base facilities. All that stuff.

• Hire as many soldiers as possible

and mercilessly sieve them. This becomes much easier with XComUtil, where you can have statstrings displayed in your soldiers' names for a quick overview.

Personally, I consider reactions to be far and away the most important stat. Of course, the soldiers should have some firing accuracy as well. However, mediocre marksmanship can be mitigated to a great extent, and will become better almost automatically. But there's no way to fake reactions, and training is difficult or virtually impossible if your soldiers don't have high values to begin with. On Superhuman difficulty, the best you can hire will barely suffice.

Of course, you decide how good is good enough; but be prepared to spend well over a million in order to assemble a squad of ten. However, don't exaggerate: you definitely want a few purple shirt ensigns (a.k.a. "Private Expendable") because, well, some tasks are more risky than others. Gameplay becomes much easier if your squad is of a high overall quality; the inevitable KIA is much more bearable if the affected soldier happens to be one of the worse (although she may be still much better than the average recruit).

First steps

No matter where you build your initial base, you are guaranteed to have the first aliens show up right on your doorstep. Assaulting every landed UFO will easily provide four or five millions worth of loot. Enough to start another base, and to fill the initial lab with scientists as soon as the living quarters are done.

Initially, research is much more important than production. There's no point in mass-producing Laser Rifles while waiting until your scientists eventually figure out the secret behind alien alloys.