Dranak

I have shears and a window punch on my rig, I have no need for carrying a knife. Plus it would make calls at the prison even more of a pain.

/clap But yeah, I build three bases. Main in Saudi Arabia, second in Cuba, third (eventually) in Japan (because Australia is generally lost by then). Only my main gets troops in it, the others are defended by air dominance. If I have money to waste later in the game, I'll throw down 4-5 turrets in my secondary bases. Shooting down UFOs over water gives relations with the closest region.

I liked rifles in the early to mid game, but in the end game I have 0 equipped because who needs rifles when you have the Predator/Magstorm combo.

It depends on the fight, but I use autoresolve a lot because I'm lazy. And also because I abuse its mechanics by killing escorted craft with Foxtrots.

It's been on my to-do list for a while, just haven't gotten around to it.

Different tiers of aliens have unique appearances. IIRC officers wear black helmets, leaders are red.

You can manually plot flight courses for your planes, they just default to collision courses. If your plane is faster than the UFO, you can start from behind by telling your plane to tail the UFO instead of engaging, and then engage a few minutes later.

Pretty much every aspect of the air combat system is unrealistic, but works as a game mechanic.

Batteries (assuming you aren't in a window where you're behind on tech) have enough damage to kill the relevant ship outright, but only a 50% hit rate. If I build them, I build 4 at a base which gives a 1 in 16 chance of failure. Or just take control of the sky, and kill the UFO before it reaches your base.

Maybe I'm weird, but in my Veteran playthrough Sebs are actually my race of choice for Carrier farming. No psionics, and Reapers are generally less threatening than Harridians (although their worst case scenario is worse). They die fast enough the regen normally isn't a factor there, although I may feel differently on Insane.

Get the Lore+ mod, this has been rolled into it.

Is it possible to adjust the length of time a crash site remains for? It would encourage more night combat if it sites didn't last for 24 hours.

Missiles will only fire at the UFO that is selected for that plane. It sounds like you just need to select the UFO for your Fox to engage, which just means selecting the Foxtrot and then clicking on the UFO. It'll then fire once the target is in range.

It does, but the two radars cost $250k each, for a total of $1M.

I think it will, but here's the latest thread on it. http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11088-Mac-Steam-Build-Needs-Testing!

I'm not trying to be overly nitpicky here, but as a former army medic/current critical care paramedic the ideas of CPR that get perpetuated by Hollywood just annoy the heck out of me. Traumatic cardiac arrest in a prehospital setting is not a survivable event, especially in the setting of any sort of gunshot/shrapnel injury. Assuming 0 HP in game means death, that person would stay dead no matter what you do (from a realistic medical perspective). It doesn't matter what you do to a corpse to stop fluids leaking out of it/adding more, it's still a corpse. There's maybe a little wiggle-room if we think of the game as using DND-ish rules of unable to keep fighting at 0, but not dead-dead until -10 (-20 in this case), and really at that point it's starting to get a bit silly trying to rationalize a game system to be consistent with reality instead of just going with it. And speaking of rationalizing game mechanics, I always rationalized this game's medkits as being like performing Buddy-Aid. Even if every member of your team was a full fledged medic, they still wouldn't really do any more than that during a fight anyway.

Am I missing something? Two radars on day 1, plus a second base is $1M. A radar and two hangars is $300k. Two foxes is $400k. That build requires $1.7M in the first 16 days and you only start with $1.5M. Wouldn't you need to cut the 3rd radar from your initial base to actually afford it?

If they do it's a bug, they're set to not do overdamage in weapons_gc.xml

You're not blind, there isn't one.

In the world of trauma, dead is dead. Generally speaking you don't do CPR on them, evac them, or even do any bandaging, and I would have never performed any sort of recussitative measures on a corpse on a battlefield. But this is a video game where you go from okay to dead with no middle ground, so the mechanic mostly works.

Personally I wait until an hour or so after a wave spawns before launching interceptors frequently. I also prioritize anything near a base for destruction.

No alien weapons are flagged to have overdamage in the game files, only all forms of human explosives.

I think there are two viable paths here, either spending month 1 further fleshing out your first base and dropping a second base on day 1 of the second month, or going for a very limited base building in month one. You can build a base, two Foxtrots, two hangars, two radars, and hire 5 more scientists with your starting funds, but you'll be completely broke and rely on funding from missions/airstrikes for any soldier hiring. You also probably won't be able to build a med center or any living quarters. But you would have a main base with two radars and a secondary base with one radar, both with one Condor and one Foxtrot which should be enough to take early sky control. Either way, I'd want to pump both bases to three radars and two Foxes in the second month. Just don't be like me and try that build, and then space out and halfway through go on autopilot and build another radar in your main base, it really screws up your progression.

Explosives may be a tad weak, but you're using situations that don't exist in the game to make your argument here. There are 0 enemies with 50 armor, 2 enemies and 40 (Andron Elites and Heavy Drones), and only a handful with 30 armor. In fact Androns and medium/heavy drones are the only enemies with any amount of kinetic armor. Rockets do Incendiary damage, which there are 0 enemies in the game with armor against. It also does quad damage against props, making them very good at destroying cover. So rockets will pretty much always do significantly more damage against anything, especially when armor is in play. Grenades are kinetic, but the only enemies in the game with kinetic armor are Androns and Medium/Heavy Drones with values that range between 20 and 45. The first enemy with 30 armor (34 actually) is Andron Warrior, which a single one can appear on a Landing Ship but they don't really appear in numbers until Cruisers. With laser weapons that would make your first hit with a rifle do between 0 and 33 damage (Laser rifle base damage is 45). An Alenium grenade has a base damage of 75, so it would do at least 3 and up to 78, giving it a much higher average result than a rifle shot. The numbers shift even further towards grenades outperforming bullets as you go up in tech. Armor values don't really "creep" as you mention. Over the course of the game, Andron armor values increase by 24 while weapon base damages increase substantially (rifles increase by 75, and grenades by 110) which actually makes armor much less relevant as the game goes on. Whether this is good or not may be debatable, but that's how the game works currently.

You should only actually lose equipment if you use explosives and blow up your own soldiers/their corpses.