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@LagannPM Further comments: 1. Beware of the mission ending with one or more of your troops unconscious, as you'll lose whiffle sticks (a.k.a. stun batons) as a minimum. 2. It eventually becomes mandatory, and since changing the loadout takes a long time, you'll more or less have to have it. You can still use the old Foxtrot bomber after UFOs sporting homing missiles show up, but only against those that don't have those weapons. Thus, you may send the more modern craft after the fancier UFOs and the old ones after the ones they can take on (since upgrading takes a long time, so you'll constantly changing out older aircraft for newer ones). 3. I've use one wing of repurposed alien interceptors for smaller UFOs, one wing of human interceptors against alien interceptors, and 3 bombers (typically sent individually) on each base. However, by the time the Asierus becomes almost useless, and a replacement becomes available, the repurposed alien interceptors are probably superior to the human interceptor as it's capable of fulfilling two roles, so if I was to play a new campaign I would replace the Asierus with repurposed alien interceptors rather than the Contrail. 4. Gas works if you apply enough of it (which may be an enormous amount for some aliens). Improved whiffle sticks are fairly reliable against the smaller Xenomorphs, but as Svinedrengen said, priming aliens with damage may be required (in practice) for the tougher ones. I've use a missile as softening up tactics against the biggest Xeno... 7. The only doors I blast are the exterior doors of some UFOs, but for those I use vehicle machineguns early on (requires a fair number of blasts) and minigun blasts from my heavy soldier later, which is essentially what Svinedrengen said. Also note that a nasty side effect of stun grenades and rockets is that they somehow open ordinary doors, so the aliens get a free line of sight at your soldiers (they also trigger very delicate alien equipment to blow up). 10. The aliens that are straight replacements of earlier tier ones unlocks the interrogation research of the replaced unit as well, but that doesn't go for other operators, as mentioned, so you can miss out on some things, although it usually doesn't matter when you get better tech later on. Similarly, some UFOs unlock specific tech.

@LagannPM A few corrections and extensions to @Dagar´s post. If the mission is succesful, most things get collected which includes ALL your guns, if it can shoot it gets collected whether or not they are equipped or on the ground (watch out for grenades when your weapons are on the ground). What doesnt get collected are grenades, explosives, rockets and melee weapons, but only if they are on the ground, if you have it in your inventory when missions ends then everything is fine. All alien stuff gets collected. In case of retreat, then you have to pick up the stuff you want to bring back. 2. You will need them when you encounter ships that uses drones against you, which acts as homing missiles. 3. Alien figthers are a direct upgrade to your F-17´s. Aserius are pure dogfighters. 4. You can also try using the ceasans ligthning weapons on the xeno´s. And your shotguns are great against reapers, look at the tooltip for shotguns, they have some unik stats other weapons dont have. 5. All units in X-Div are affected by smoke. 6. You can only collapse the building by destroying enough walls on the ground floor. 7. Miniguns works great against alien doors, explosives too. 8. You only need to worry about civilan casualties and completing the mission. The rest doesnt really matter.

@LagannPM Welcome to the community: 1. Yeah, that one is actually pretty bad Edit: see posts below for correct and detailed answers 2. Try it out I'd say. If the missile screen of a UFO is too much for aircraft without Antimissiles, you'll know when you need them. 3. Not completely sure (I am not that far yet), but I think Alien Fighters are slower but sturdier and thus better suited against medium sized targets, while Asierus are the pure Anti-Fighter plane. 4. Understand the stun system. A unit's stun threshold is as high as its max HP, so that many stun damage you will have to do. At the same time, each HP damage is halved and applied as stun damage as well. That means hard tu stun enemies should be damaged first. Note that some units regenerate HP, but nothing raises its stun threshold again. That means you can essentially stun Sebillians with conventional force if you wait for enough regenerates. 5. Nope, that's an artefact from the base game (that was not even present there I think). Sebillians are affected by smoke and fire as any unit is: smoke blocks sight, fire damages. Smoke stacking is a thing. 6. You can collapse any building if you do enough damage to it. 7. Not sure if better, but you can damage doors with gun fire also. But improved Alenium explosives do pretty good damage. 8. That I don't know. 9. Yeah, try not to destroy the stuff inside the UFO. 10. Yep. And they are two different aliens, so Scout Op does not necessarily unlock everything Light Scout Op would have.