Sentinel

You only get 1 skill point per battle, so doing it more than once per soldiers is redundant. To answer your question about line of sight? I don't know. The range is the only thing I know for certain.

The target needs to be within x1.5 the maximum range for the weapon to count.

Scaramouche! Scaramouche! Will you do the Fandango? (sorry, I couldn't resist)

That's right. If it's a landed UFO, then successfully performing a ground mission will net the same relationship bonus as though you had shot it down.

You clearly never asked me then! Here is but 1 example of many where I found the basistic machinegun to be a life saver. The very first time I encountered androns. My riflemen were almost useless against their dtrong armour, the only weapons i had that reliably took down an andron in a single action? The balistic MG. My snipers enjoyed success too, but they needed more than one action to do it.

I had 2 teams on my first game. It worked ok for a while but building weapons became prohibitivley expensive pretty quickly so the second team was mothballed.

I never said the door openeing caused the reaction shot. usually my naut's are 8-10 tiles away and kneeling when the alien walks through the door. It's them taking that extra step (usually to get in range to throw a grenade at my shield guy) that makes my 2 snipers, 2 heavy gunners and 4 riflemen shoot the xeno down. Yeah, sometimes they just shoot. That's why everybody's on thier knees. often their shot will miss. If not then the armour usually saves the life of the poor naut who was hit.

I must be the only guy who approches ufo's carefully and slowly. ensuring my soldiers have roughly 70%-80% of their TU's when approaching the doors. Yes I developed this tactic to thwart the "Oh look, the humans are right outside our door and exhausted. Let's blast them!" quirk they gained in recent updates. Now generally there's just one alien who opens the door and gets murdered by my reaction fire.

I believe i read that the flamethrower caused lag problems. The "missing plane" was superfluous. The mechs had no definte roll that wasn't being played by something else. The rest are bugs, and bugs is something the devs are working on fixing.

Reactions are based on your reflex stat and the percentage of remaining TU's you have left, then modified by the weapon in the soldier's hands. A soldier with most or all his Tu's is a lot more likley to react than a soldier with only just enough to fire his gun. Also, opening doors does not cause reaction fire.

Yeah, I had to tell my brother about that too. Maybe there should be a pop up about it ...

That was a little bit harsh. But yes, you will eventually be able to build terrestrial plasma weapons. The alien weapons are ergonomically unsuitable for human soldiers. You can still pick up and use alien weapons (you don't even have to research them) but there's a 50% negative accuracy modifier due to the difficulty of wielding the weapons effectivly.

Unless you have the building that tells you what a UFO's mission is, it can be difficult to determin if a UFO is on a Base Assault mission or not. If you shoot down every UFO you see then there's a strong chance that yes, you've shot down all the UFO's trying to blow your [stuff] up. Edit: this can also cause you to see very few alien bases for similar reasons.

I wish i could "like" posts. This made me do a spit take

You have a bad habbit of multi-posting. If you feel the need to add something less than a minute after you post something use the edit post button.