nDervish

Each new tier of weapons is strictly superior to the previous tier (they're generally identical, but with higher damage output), so you'll want to have as many of the newest weapons as you can afford the time and funds to produce. By end-game, you'll probably have all mag weapons (the final tier). The aircraft progression isn't quite as linear as the hand weapons... but it's close. You'll probably want to phase out Condors well before the end of the game. Foxtrots are still useful until the end for dealing with smaller UFOs, but you'll pretty much require later-game aircraft to take out the larger ones. My general advice is to forget garrisons. Don't even think about them. Base assaults don't happen that often to start with and you can pretty much completely eliminate them if you can maintain a decent level of air superiority. Personally, I've had two base assaults reach their targets in over 200 hours of play (that's two games, each of which has had one base assault) - they're so rare that it's cheaper to build backup bases (or rebuild destroyed bases) than it would be to pay the troop salaries to maintain garrisons at satellite bases. I don't bother with base defense gun batteries either - again, I don't feel they're worth the cost. If you do choose to maintain garrisons, then, yes, you do have to pay the normal troop salaries for them. You have to build all weapons except the starting ballistics and improved explosives (grenades and rocket launcher ammo), so the only way to get new guns for your garrisons is to manufacture extras or to ship the strike team's hand-me-downs to the garrison troops. You'll also probably want to rotate troops between your strike force and the garrisons so that the garrison isn't composed entirely of rookies. (All the micromanagement of sending things to and from garrisons is another reason why I don't bother with them.)

As Dranak said, air superiority. Failing that, don't worry about it. Write the base off, build a replacement, and get on with it. Seriously. While it is possible to keep enough adequately-equipped troops in every base to ensure that you have a good chance of standing up to an alien counterattack, it won't take long for the cost of the troops' salaries to exceed the cost of rebuilding the base and base assaults are infrequent enough that, in my experience, it's far less expensive to build more, smaller, and relatively-expendable bases than to keep up garrisons while waiting for an attack to come (which may never happen anyhow). Plus, of course, more small bases help with maintaining air superiority by providing more radar stations, earlier detection of UFOs, and more ability to shoot them down before they can land a base assault (both because you detect them earlier and because you're likely to have interceptors based closer to the UFO when it's detected). And then there's also the hassle of rotating troops into and out of secondary bases (assuming you want your experienced troops to be spread around instead of all-rookie garrisons) and sending them your old equipment (assuming you don't want the rookies to be armed only with conventional ballistics), which I find to be tedious micromanagement that is completely eliminated by not bothering with garrisons.

Yep. I got sucked into Warband about two weeks ago and expect to see it eat more of my life than the Elder Scrolls series has. Currently playing with the Diplomacy mod, mainly because it didn't require me to start a new game. After I finish taking over the world, I might try another mod for my second game, but we'll see.

There's no point in fighters chasing transports anyhow, IMO, aside from adding micromanagement that has no effect 99+% of the time. (I'm near the end of my second play-through. In each play-through, I've gone out to over 100 ground combats. I don't escort transports and only one has ever been shot down. One actually needing escorts in >200 missions flown is >99.5% which didn't need escorts.) It's also not terribly practical, given that interceptors have operational flight times on the order of a few hours, while transports can stay airborne for something like a day and a half - I'll frequently have them stop off to clear 3-4 crash sites, sometimes making a full trip around the globe in the process, before returning to base. Coordinating ongoing fighter coverage over that entire trip would be tricky, at best, given the lack of tools available in the Xenonauts interface. (e.g., It won't tell you how far the current escort can get before running low on fuel or when to launch a new escort to take over at that point.) Instead, my strategy is just to prioritize intercepting alien ships that are anywhere near a transport and, if it looks dicey, try to buy extra time for interception by evading with the transport. If you don't wait until the absolute last moment before grounding the chopper, the troops would have plenty of time to ditch the chopper and scatter before the alien ships arrived. "Let's hang out in the chopper after grounding it to avoid interception" would be suicidally stupid. ooey: As hinted at by Max_Caine, it's fairly easy and straightforward to mod the game so that troops have a 100% chance of surviving the transport being shot down, and that's something you can do today without needing to wait for code changes.

It's in gameconfig.xml: <soldierRanks> <!-- Soldiers increase their ranking when they have a certain number of rank points. A rank point is gained each time an AP, strength, accuracy, reflexes or bravery progress is done. --> <Private rankPoints="0" /> <Corporal rankPoints="6" /> <Sergeant rankPoints="15" /> <Lieutenant rankPoints="30" /> <Captain rankPoints="60" /> <Major rankPoints="90" /> <Commander rankPoints="150" /> <Colonel rankPoints="200" /> </soldierRanks> (Note that this is my modded version where I've doubled the cost of each rank. Vanilla numbers are half those shown here. Note also that the display names of "Commander" and "Colonel" ranks are now reversed, at least in CE - the code still considers Colonel to be the highest rank.)

IMO, it's not just a matter of cost and capacity. (That's resolved easily enough with a mod that gives you tons of money.) My main reason for keeping all my troops at one base is to avoid the micromanagement of constantly shipping people and equipment around so that every base will have enough skilled troops with up-to-date gear to be meaningful. If you don't fiddle with that micro, then you just have a bunch of rookies in coveralls with ballistics in each base, which is barely even a speedbump when the androns and reapers come knocking.

Maybe I do. Maybe I don't. My point is that, either way, it has absolutely no effect on anyone else, so what difference does it make whether I do or not? But, no, I don't do anything that feels to me like an exploit because, by definition, anything that I feel is an exploit is something that seems unreasonable to me. That said, I can definitely see how some of the things I do to survive entering alien ships or getting through teleporters might register as "exploits" to other people. Assuming that putting a mag round through their skull or filling their backs with hot plasma counts as "abuse", yes, I abuse them constantly.

It's a single-player game. If someone wants to spend their days looking at the "loading ground combat" screen while they cycle into and out of an alien base, then why should I care? It literally has absolutely no effect on me whatsoever. And if I wanted to pump up my troops' stats to godmode the game, there are quicker and easier ways to do it. Like creating a mod that sets all ballistic weapons to do 1000 damage and makes the basic armor coveralls jack all my stats up to 200 and give 1000 armor that never degrades. Even if I didn't know how to mod Xenonauts and had to learn how to do that first, it would still be quicker and easier than repeatedly cycling into and out of an alien base.

The aliens have already been at the site for some hours (or even a day+ in some cases) before you show up. Why wouldn't they have explored the area? (Although that does raise the question of why they wait for you to arrive before they start killing civilians...) You can't? I flank aliens and blast them in the back quite frequently. Easily explained without need of clairvoyance: The ships don't have windows, so they obviously must have external sensors which will show them when you're massing just outside. If you've done any base assault missions, you may have also noticed that they have interior sensors - if your troops are the only ones inside the command center, you get vision over the entire base. That's actually one thing I would like added - an indicator showing where my troops have heard sounds. In the Silent Storm games, if you hear a noise coming from somewhere you don't have line of sight on, it puts a little "ear" icon in the approximate location so the player knows where unidentified sounds are coming from. Something similar would be very nice to also have here, although I realize that official development of the game is over, so no new features like that are likely to be added at this point.

Really? That's all? I was assuming I'd also need a MODMERGE on the <SingleShot> tag, which doesn't have a name to merge on, so I didn't know how that would be formed. Thanks! I've tried to make sense of the main docs before. I failed miserably, despite having been a professional programmer for the last 20ish years and having written similar configuration-merging algorithms myself. The docs seem to assume a level of pre-existing knowledge of the game's internals, as well as using a bit of unclear terminology (e.g., it's not stated what the difference is between "replacing" an existing entry and "updating" an existing entry; I think I can guess, but it's just that - a guess). Haven't seen your guide before, though. I'll definitely take a look at it!

I recently noticed that alien grenades cost fewer AP to throw than human grenades. This seems off to me, so I'd like to change it, but I do not grok MODMERGE attributes fully enough to see what I should use to achieve this. So, to change the AP cost of alien grenades from 40% to 50%, the actual changed setting is: <Weapon name="weapon.aliengrenade" bulletType="gasgrenade" emptySound="Empty Click 1"> <SingleShot delay="0.85" sound="Weapon Grenade Throw" suppressionValue="70" suppressionRadius="2"> <Set1 ap="50" accuracy="30" /> </SingleShot></Weapon> Where do I need to put the MODMERGE and what should it be set to? Also, will I need to include all the other attributes (bulletType, emptySound, delay, accuracy, etc.) in the tags or can it be stripped down to just <Weapon name="weapon.aliengrenade"> <SingleShot> <Set1 ap="50"/> </SingleShot></Weapon> (plus MODMERGE)?

Disregard; this was user error. I'd coincidentally made a change to gameconfig.xml on the same evening that HF2 came out and introduced a MODMERGE error which broke parsing before it got to the endTurnAutosave setting. Steam did a stealth update a couple days ago and I now have <PercentageCostsIgnoreBurden>1</PercentageCostsIgnoreBurden> as the last setting in config.xml's <AP> section.

Actually, no, it's not the sum of the individual hit chances. If it were, any time you had 34% or more with a 3-round burst or 10% or more with a heavy weapon, you would be guaranteed to hit (34% * 3 = 102%; 10% * 10 = 100%). The actual chance of at least one hit is 1 - ((1 - per-shot hit chance) ^ (number of shots)). So 3 shots at 34% is a 1 - (0.66^3) = 71% chance of at least one hit and 10 shots at 10% is 1 - (0.9^10) = 65%. If you run this calculation for the values in the original post's chart, you'll see that the chart shows the probability of landing at least one hit. The sum of individual hit chances gives you the expected average number of hits, after taking both the chance of a total miss and the chance of multiple hits into account. (10 shots at 10% is more likely to completely miss than 3 shots at 34%, but it's also more likely to score multiple hits, so the average number of hits ends up being approximately the same.)

No, I don't know whether it works. I've just seen the mod here on the forum (and now in Steam Workshop also), but not tried it. The mod thread is at http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/12525-X-CE-0-31-Building-and-Salaries-Overhaul

There's a buildings and salaries mod which says that it reduces the number of medbay beds (to match the number of beds shown during base defense missions) and increases the healing rate to make up for it. So the benefit provided by medbays is apparently moddable.