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 improve soon enough. The same is true for Time Units and Strength. 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 noticeably 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).

January: The Master Plan

Many players try to get a steady production of Laser Cannon off the ground as soon as possible, and fund further activities with the revenue stream from their factories. That's nice and fine, and really works well; however, the recommendations in this guide are aimed at fighting the aliens from the get-go, and funding expansion by loot and prizes. Call it the way of the Privateer if you like.

No matter where you build your initial base, you are guaranteed to have the first aliens show up right on your doorstep. Strangely enough, they will only send small craft, and by the end of January they will cease. Even if you leave the early UFOs alone, there will be no follow-up missions with larger craft. So, after the first windfall (recovering every landed UFO through January will easily provide four or five millions worth of loot), you're on your own. Getting your hands on more UFOs during February is far and away the trickiest bit of this plan.

Base development, research and production

In the early game, research is much more important than production. Early on, all you need to produce is a few laser weapons, maybe some body armour and (very maybe) a handful of medikits. The first major production task will be Flying Suits: with only one workshop, it will take about a fortnight to make ten of these. With two or three workshops, this will save you six or ten days, respectively. However, if you have more Scientists working on research, you will hit the technology several weeks earlier. Also, if you have a lot of technicians, you also want to keep them occupied. Producing Laser Cannon may generate a nice income, but you need to research them first. Which is yet another distraction, as you really need other technologies much more than Laser Cannon. Besides, you're tasked with fighting the aliens, not as an arms producer.

To cut a long tale short: the one workshop you begin with will last you well into march. No need to build another just now. Concentrate on Labs instead. Besides, one base is too small to house labs, workshops and your squad. The workshops should go to another base that will be dedicated to construction; you should spend the income from your first UFO on starting that second base. It doesn't really matter where, but personally I prefer the Gobi Desert in Central Asia because that's the cheapest real estate you will find (and once you have a Hyper Wave Decoder, it will cover all of Asia: India, Siberia, Japan, China...). Just build a string of General Stores during January. Also a third Lab in your initial base.

High-priority research tasks:

• Laser Rifles

These weapons will be good enough for about anything you will encounter well into March or even April. You really should strive to have most of your squad equipped with Laser Weapons (Pistol or Rifle) by the first terror mission.

• Psi Labs

Once you can screen your soldiers for Psionic abilities, you'll be forced to sack quite a few. There's no helping it, but you should strive to get this over with as soon as possible. The problem is that you probably won't find a psionic alien before March -- with research and construction time, it will usually become May or June until you find out which of your soldiers are duds. If your first terror site happens to be sectoid, consider yourself extremely lucky, and be reckless: try to stun every single alien on the map. You'll probably lose a good many soldiers that way, but getting you hands on a Psi-capable alien early is definitely worth it. Troops are cheap, especially early in the game when they haven't gained much experience yet. Possession of a sectoid leader by late January is priceless.

• Hyper-Wave Decoder

The latest and best in Alien Detection. You want it anyway; getting it early will save lots of cash you don't need to spend on soon-to-be-dismatled radar systems. It requires you capture a live navigator, but that's usually not that hard to do. It's possible to research Laser Rifles first and then get the Hyper Wave Decoder done by early February, which is a critical date (see below).

• Armour

Although armour is vital, it's not top of the list: getting it two weeks sooner or later really means only one or two more missions you will need to fight without. So you can relax – a bit. Although Body Armour is frightfully insufficient, you should hand out at least some of these while trying to get Flight Suits. I usually don't manufacture Power Suits, though.

• Mind Probe

Mind Probes take a long time to research, and are generally rather useless. After all, you can predict with reasonable accuracy that the interesting aliens will be on the bridge of any give UFO. However, there's one scenario where Mind Probes can make all the difference: when you try to pick out the leader on a sectoid terror site. This may never become necessary, though; and even if, it's not guaranteed that it will lead to success (with all those cyberdiscs around, the leader may die in an accidental explosion or whatnot). Research of Mind Probes should hence either be high on the queue or on the very bottom.

What you don't need just now

• Alien Weapons

A point could be made in favor of Small Launcher / Stun Bomb, but when it comes to killing Aliens, the Laser Rifle will go a long way. You can postpone research on Heavy Plasma until the first Smakemen or Mutons have been sighted.

• Motion Scanner and Medi Kit

Both can come in handy at times, but really, armour is more important. First things first.

• Laser Cannon

The sole use of Laser Cannon is to give your engineers something to do while you have no other assignments; as long as you have only comparatively few technicians, you won't gain or lose much if you busy them with (say) Laser Pistols instead.

February: taking Stock

Towards the end of January, it's time to take stock. In your initial base, you should have one lab fully staffed, another just built, a third to be finished soon. In the one workshop, there's like 10-20 technicians who probably still are busily forging Laser Rifles. Research on a Navigator or even the Hyperwave thingy itself should be well underway. The second base consists of two stores, with a third in the makes.

January 29, 01:00hrs is a key date. Any staff hired at that time will arrive bright and early on February 1 without costing you any salaries; also, the workshops you order will be built just in time for the turn of the next month. If you have anym money in the bank, now is the time to spend most of it -- you need to keep a few bucks for ongoing production, but anything else should be spent. Ideally, you want to:

• build two workshops and one living quarter in your second base
• increase the number of technicians in your starting base to about 40
• hire as many scientists as you have lab space available

Probably the funds won't suffice for all of that, it's your call to come up with a weighted average.

Come February, your funding fathers will (hopefully) tell you just how happy they are; give and take some funding increase and maintenance, you will find yourself in possession of well over two million currency units. Don't spend them just now.

Base development, radar coverage and interception

As said above, starting in February, Aliens may show up anywhere on the globe. However, anywhere is not everywhere: they will perform one or (at best) two mission like "Alien Research in Australasia" or "Alien Harvest in North America". There really is no way to tell where you will need a listening post. With the world so large and your funds still limited, perhaps the best you can do is to keep like 2.5 million in the bank at the beginning of February. About a week into the month, it should become obvious from the Ufo Activity Graph where the Aliens are, and then build a base in that area.

You will be late on the scene, of course, but not too late: Alien missions usually last two months; so the listening post will still be finished in time to pick up the later vessels when they eventually arrive during march. What the base should look like depends very much on how far it is from your initial base:

• if it relatively close, you can just build the Hyper Wave Decoder and be done with it. Until it's finished, you can regularly send your Interceptor there and let it patrol a bit. That may seem like a lot of micromanagment for little radar coverage, but you'll be surprised at how many UFOs you will find that way. If you like to gamble, you can also send the Skyranger; however, this comes at the risk that it may just run out of fuel the moment it detects an UFO. You may also consider hiring a second skyranger for patrol duty. Yes, that's a lot of dough. But don't forget that looting a single small scout will return more than a million.

• if the area is too far away for Interceptor patrols, you should definitely start a small radar system. The reason is that it will build sooner and provide at least some coverage. The investment will pay off even if you only get a single small scout.

• in case the area is too far from your initial base, you will need to relocate your squad, or assemble another one. That means you will need a Hangar there, as well as living quarters, stores...

What is too far?
If you detect an UFO early (a given with HW Decoders), it will be several hours until it has landed twice and eventually returns whence it came; a lot of time for the skyranger to reach the site. Europe is an excellent place for your initial base, because from there you can provide coverage for the better part of the world: South America or Japan are about the outer limit where you still have a chance to arrive on time.

March, and the infinity beyond

How many UFOs you can round up during February is mostly a question of luck. Maybe you can already start building listening posts all over the world, maybe you'll be hard pressed to hire any more technicians and scientists at the beginning of March.

Income during early February should be spent, in that order, on staffing your existing Labs, building one more Lab and starting more bases. Income during the second half of the month should be saved for new construction on or around the beginning of March. Don't hire unless you've got really lots of cash.

Be aware that even if you had little luck in February, this only means that the Aliens will now send larger craft to perform the actual mission. And your Listening Post is ready. You will have quite a revenue stream in March, allowing you to hire all the staff you need and then some. As a safety measure, you should hold back enough cash to build a fourth base wherever the activity graph goes up, just as you did in early February; but chances are that you will get to take at least one juicy prize already very early in March, and then a few more in short succession.

Actually, your main concern probably won't be money, but how to deal with all the UFOs. You may want a second squad and skyranger; but really, what you need is the Avenger to take your one squad to every site, and a number of Firestorms so you can down Excess UFOs. Research on improved craft probably is well underway at the beginning of March, you should see to it that you have enough workshops (and hangars!) for production.

Playing so many battles can become really tedious; you probably want to check out Xcomutil, if only for it's "AutoCombat" feature.