Beltorn

On scientists - each additional scientist beyond the number required for excellent will give reduced output (say instead of point of research every hour it will give 0.9. The next one will give say 0.8 and so on. These are not real numbers AFAIK, but you get the idea), but still there will some additonal poitnts from those additional scientists and you'll get your research faster. Conclusion - not always worth it, but good for critical researches and when there is nothing else to research except the last tech. Otherwise it good idea to put at least some scientists after reaching excellent on some other research. On engineers - you can only fire them from engineering screen. So go to engineering screen, press hire/fire button and start clicking on the left button. After that confirm changes - i.e they will be fired.

Laser shotguns are called laser carbines - they are extremely effective as a weapon - by that virtue shotgunners are the most effective soldiers among my team. Good RoF - up to 3 shots, very high reaction bonus modifier - 1.5 - so less shots against soldiers when they are moving inside the UFO and rather high damage which is really good against all aliens except stronger androns - those can take rather a lot of shots, so be careful against robots. On dropships and keeping sites open - i haven't really tested this, but i suspect that if you have 2 dropships, you can send them at the same site. So if you keep alternating them just before they arrive at the site, i think you can keep a site open for very long. But there could be some sort of a limit - like only one dropship can be sent at the site at one moment and all other dropships won't receive an order - this will prevent such an exploit. One more interesting thing i discovered - you can add/remove soldiers and their equipment while the dropship is in flight. So if your soldier has just healed enough to get from med-bay into combat or you got some new items from manufacturing, you can freely change your dropship loadout, including switching soldiers between dropships. I guess guys from engineering are keeping secrets from head of research.

Basically having good radar coverage and air superiority is much more important than GC equipment. This is because aliens mostly damage your funding through air raids, so the less opportunities to do that they have, the better. All UFOs come in waves, so after clearing UFOs immediately in your coverage don't be afraid to send out search squadrons to shoot them down. Each crash site is basically a cash bag for you to recover. Scout UFOs deal minor funding penalties. Starting from Corvetters you'll get bigger events like "object strafed" - these will obviously deal higher funding damage. To down a small Scout you need 1 Condor. To down a large scout - 2 Foxtrots or 1 Fox and 1 Condor. Foxtrots are usually better as they can fly further and get to the UFO faster. After Alenium explosives research you need only 1 Foxtrot to down a Large scout. 1 Foxtrot and 1 Condor can down a Covette with Alenium. 2 Foxtrots with Alenium will reliably down anything till Cruisers (except alien fighters, use Condors and Corsairs against those). To down a Cruiser with 4 torpedoes you'll need plasma explosives (Alien Reactor research acquired from Landing Ships). Then come Carriers which get you Fusion core and respectively Fusion explosives. With Fusion explosives you'll be able to down anything with 2 Marauders, Foxtrots will requre some maneuverig to do that, but they are viable while you are building up your Marauder fleet. Tip: You don't need to airstrike last crash site, because events, like crash site will persist endlessly if there is a dropship going to it. This opens some extremely interesting exploits like a terror site which waits for monthes to be completed. Second - air superiorities start with one basic alien fighter AFAIK - so any Condor can deal with them. If it's the heavy fighters that get you - you'll need a Corsair to deal with them - it is easy in manual mode - turn on the afterburner and set a course somewhere where the aliens would have to turn to intercept you. When you'll be close to their firing range, roll to the opposite side of the aliens fighter turning -then your Corsair will easily shoot them down. Roll and use afterburn when required - to evade a missile or close distance quickly so as to get on their tail. My playstyle - first base near Tel-Aviv (to the south-west in direction of Cairo if you zoom) - its the best starting location in game, because it covers most regions. Build order: 1 hangar, workshop, laboratory and living quarters. Order 15 more scientists and research Foxtrot ASAP. Get engineers and construct more Foxtrots till you get 3 per base. Start bulding second base immeadiately - i usually put my second base either in Northern America (to south-east of Quebec) - to cover Greenland, Iceland, most of USA, Canada and Mexico or on almost the western coast of Papua New Guinea (north to Australia) - covers Indochina and Australia. Expansion bases are built this way 2 hangars and 1 radar, than 2 more hangars asap. Add up to 2 radars when you have free funds and need coverage. Closer to the end of second month - beginning of third i build 1-2 laboratories at second base + living quarters + scientists when available - this will hugely boost your research output - there even will be times when your scientists won't have anything to research. Third base timing - middle of second month. Fourth base - somewhere between December and January. Fifth base isn't required, but i put it somewhere in Siberia to cover eastern part of Soviet union and Alaska. Research priorities - Foxtrots, alien alloys, alien rifle/pistol -> alien plasma weapons, alien biology and stun weapons, alenium and alenium explosives ASAP when available. Then Alien alloys fabrication and wolf armor as it is more important than laser weapons, but laser weapons should come right after it. When researched - produce enough Wolf armour ASAP - by that time you'll have your interceptors - 3 Foxtrots + 1 Condor at each base. Then i manufacture laser weaponry for my squad - for me its 2 pistols, then 2 carbines or presicions and rifles last. When you'll have Heavy lasers don't forget to make a laser MG. When you'll get Corvettes - research Alien computers and Directional Thrusters then Shrike immediately. After that it's mostly free flight. I usually research Corsairs next and start replacing Condors with Corsairs as those are very good for air superiority. After that i research all alien weapons (pistols and rifles are done early to get to lasers - right after alien alloys) till i get plasma weaponry. Once again - pistols first, but then rifles and precision rifles, carbines last. Plasma MG as with all MGs is always last. I respond to every event i can and usually down all UFOs in my radar coverage plus some outside of it, but in combat range of my planes. Every crash site till i get totally bored, don't need the money and my squad has max TUs and accuracy. High Strength is achieved by always overencumbering your soldiers by 2-3 additional grenades (any 1kg item will do, but grenades are more useful) till 100 str(38 kg weight). I never use explosives on aliens and only sometimes on cover - it is faster to flank them in my experience. My squad - 2 doormen (shields), 2 shotguns, 2 rifles, 1 sniper and 1 MG. With Shrike +1 Sniper and +1 MG. With Valkyrie +1 Carbine and +1 Rifle.

Err, i never liked that feature to begin with. If there is a switch for it, i would be glad to pull it. On the other hand, you do have a point and overall it would be better to have some consumables constantly draining resources. When i played v21.6 - i got till carriers and stopped as psionics was overpowered in extreme. Still my engineers were mostly busy with churning out aircraft - usually 3 Foxtrots +1 Corsair per base and in the lategame they slowly replaced everything with Marauders. In between the base expansions i had them make equpment for the ground team - 2x pistols, snipers, MGs and 3x carbines and rifles + 10 Sentinels and 2 Predators lategame or just 12 Wolfs, they just don't have anything to do. the question is of course are they even supposed to be busy?

It would be better to rebalance the usage of alien alloys. Like Corsairs using up to say 60 units and Marauders/Furies 100+. It is all very doable by modding game files though.

Most likely they are in your "username/my documents/xenonauts" folder. Also you can designate a savegame folder from the game launcher and find it that way.

Which difficulty do you play? How early do you start building additional bases? How many UFOs you usually catch? Do you do each ground combat site? GCs give a serious amount of money

When armor takes a hit, it compares the damage it received to its armor value. If the damage value is higher than the armour value, the difference goes through the armor and damages the soldier. Otherwise, the game shows a "resisted" tag. All the damage the armor has absorbed is multiplied by a certain (i think its 25, but you can find it in the game xmls) % value and then subtracted from the armor value. So when a new shot hits, it will be compared to this new reduced armor value. As you may have noticed the game handles a lot of menial tasks for you - so no, you won't have to order your engineers to make additional armors to replace the damaged ones.

There is a 50% cap. So you can heal only half the damage your soldier received. In earlier builds a soldier could heal only 5 HP per application, now the game attepmts to heal full amount. If you look carefully when you point the medi-kit reticle, you'll notice that the game shows how much HP a soldier has and how much a soldier can have in lower brackets. Also it shows how many TUS it wil ltake and how many HP it will heal.

A cheap though effective tactic against berserk and mind control is to drop weapons at the end of a turn. it costs 0 Tus and if a soldier berserks he/she won't spend any Tus on shooting an will be immediately available. And if they are a victims of mind-controll, they won't pose any danger. Also you still get bravery points this way. On money: you get around 200k $ for each massive ship, so taking only 90k for airstriking is rather limiting.

StellarRat, what are your thoughts on discarding the fusion upgrade? And how much do you want them to scatter - 1-4 tiles?

Limiting equipment with engineering won't help anyways, because it is easy to manufacture equipment right now (as it should be). As I've written in an earlier thread about shields, it is easy to set up manufacturing of specific equipment. Building an additional workshop at one of the bases is cheap and another 15 engineers will take only 75k per month. Then you will have to pay for grenades which can't really cost too much or take too long to manufacture - they are expandable equipment after all and making them costlly either in money or manhours is a direct statement to players - do not use this item. It just adds tedium to the game, which frankly is not a solution at all. Best would be to reduce their damage, either directly or by increasing armour on aliens troops - afterall aliens already have access to super alloys, so high temperature resistant armour can't be too much problem for them. In similar vein, disabling fusion variants of grenades and rockets could be a solution for endgame grenade spamming. AFAIK, rockets are superseeded by singularity cannons so no real reason to have them upgraded 4 times (Alenium-Plasma-Fusion - Singularity Cannon) instead of 3 (Alenium- Plasma - Singularity Cannon). I do know that singularity cannons are much less versatile - you need a soldier in predator armour and can't stun, but stunning in endgame isn't on my priority list and there are better tools (electroshock grenades) to do that job. By the way, are fusion grenades in lore stated to be mostly thermal in effect or they produce both a shockwave and a ball of plasma, like a normal nuke would?

Yep, grenades only depend on strength stat, both for weight allowance - i.e. how many grenades soldier can carry and throwing accuracy, but using grenades doesn't train strength stat (at least i didn't notice, because my soldiers always carry 2 or 3 kilos more than their strenght allows). Using grenades gimps the player quite a bit: less money from missions, no training of important stats like accuracy and reflexes. I don't really think that reaction fire from aliens is an additional danger factor because when soldier expends all his TUs on shooting, aliens still reaction fire at that soldier, unless they are dead of course.

To add: in V21 and V22 stun gas grenades also act as smoke grenades and as somebody found can save a soldier from reaperification (a major feature). If a player uses mostly stun gas grenades to battle aliens, he also loses out on developing accuracy stat of his soldiers. Currently gas grenades are a bit too good, because they make alien AI run closer to you (due to smaller hit chance - same behavior as smoke grenades), make dealing with enemies easier (aliens can run into the cloud and lose consciousness), have very wide range - same as concussion grenades. Making them producible wouldn't work, because currently your equipment replenishes after every mission, though this could be true only for unlimited equipment. I haven't tested what happens if one soldier loses a weapon and returns to base - i assume he gets an identical weapon. As i understand basically the player would only need to produce overall around 20-30 grenades for his squad to not require any more during the game. Definitely not hard to do. My suggestion: reduce strength of gas by 20-25% and reduce its area of effect by 1 (to 3 tiles from center). To help with AI tell it to run away from smoke. Players would require to throw at least one more grenade of this type and throw a concussive grenade of either type to make aliens stay in gas longer (due to concussion). While we are at it: Electroshock grenades should have small area for stun - 2 tiles from center and 3 tiles for concussion, but higher chance concussion thyan concussion grenade and higher potency stun effect than gas grenade. Smoke grenade could use a different change - smoke should linger longer the closer it is to center of explosion - currently it is a bit random in distribution. I haven't used RPGs yet (don't want overkill), but i think that stun rockets should definitely be more potent and have higher gas area than grenades, but at the same time they should have a small area of medium damage (around laser pistol values) (the rocket explodes to disperse gas afterall).

Reapers can be gassed like most aliens. I usually try to wound them and then throw 3-4 gas grenades.

i'd prefer radius instead of LOS. Besides aliens do have psi-radar power. MC can have smaller radius than psi-radar. Radius-based limitation would allow for such an alien to be effective without entering combat, but still close enough to be located and eliminated in a turn or 2.

The amount of UFOs isn't really that troublesome: building 3 foxtrots per base asap has become standard for me. The trouble is the algorithm - sometimes it is 5 around the world and sometimes its 5 in the Southern America - last place i would decide to build my first base. Most of money for development in my game (on Veteran) comes from clearing UFOs. I'm in middle February and have 4 bases around the world: Middle East, Northern America. Australia and Southern America. Each base has 3 Foxtrots and at least 1 Condor which was already replaced with Corsairs. Middle East is the main base and has already replaced 2 Foxtrots with Marauders and is building the third Marauder and replaced both Condors with Corsairs. I have 60 engineers, 60 scientists and 14 soldiers. Overall, i have: 6 Corsairs, 11 Foxtrots, 2 Marauders and i'm building third and 1 Shrike and 1 Valkyrie - so i pay 1900k for interceptors and another 100k for Dropships, that's half of my upkeep not counting Hangars. Trouble is funding from countries is too small - it is barely enough to pay upkeep for 4 bases with Superb and Excellent relations all over the world and few goods in regions which have lower funding. I have cleared almost every UFO i crashed and only by clearing UFOs i have enough money to build new bases and new equipment and planes. Also, i dislike that from every 4-5 UFos that have spawned i had to clear 80%. Solutions: It would be great if the amount of combat UFOs increased (i mean fighter wings, bombers and strike cruisers), while decreasing the amount of landing capable UFOs and we were payed for them a bit like 10k for fighter, 15 for Heavy Fighters 25 for Interceptors and 30k for Bombers and 75 for Strike Cruisers. Europe funding level increased to rival USA and Soviet Union, i.e. starts at 400k . Overall funding increased by 25%, but negative modifiers from UFO activity were increased by 25% too. Adding an additional paycheck for capturing a fully intact UFO - this would be a nice bonus, but rare.

StellarRat, another way is to make aliens cluster 0,5-1 turn away from ufo and on a map you spot actually a couple of scouts/marksmen. Their positions are highly variable (i. multipe spawnpoints). A similar idea is that the enemy groups of 3-5 aliens are actually starting closer to your dropship (1,5-2 turns of movement) but instead they move toward UFO, killing civilans if any on their way and all alien troopers who got to the UFO make their stand there. If you wipe one group others learn that that direction is dangerous and relocate accordingly. If the fight is near UFO, UFO guards run out, except non-combatants. Btw, i consider 1 turn is 100 TUs..

Had an equally impressive mission with Andron terror team - i downed just another cruiser. Turned the dropship was slowly surrounded by Andron soldiers. Then Harridans opened fire with volleys of sniper fire and plasma cannons. As team weathered the first wave, the second wave brought more androns with an officer and a team with heavier weapons. A pair of medium drones kept at the distance, drawing fire from my 2 machinegunners. Cover from smoke grenades kept my soldiers from being singled out and everyone (including two rookies with laser carbines among all plasmas) barely alive. What i liked most is the actual sense of having to defend the drop point as i've met my first andron in range of 1 turn. After that the clean-up of a cruiser was rather anticlimactic - same 5-6 androns and 1-2 harridans. Shame there are no guard turrets (half-life 2 style) inside UFOs. Minor gripe: shouldn't all the robots (both androns and drones) have gotten immunity to smoke grenades? I mean advanced cameras and other sensors and all... This would make them seriously deadly. Possibly at least reduced effects by half, while lizard-trolls keep full immunity?

Well, it loads battlescape okay. Also i really doubt it will crash - it worked fine with 101. I suppose the team just put in a check to limit stats going more than 99 (why not 100, but that doesn't matter). Also i've heard that players can change max values themselves, though i don''t know if it's true yet.

Near Tel-Aviv, Israel - seems the most appropriate place in Middle-East to me.

Does anybody know how to edit saves? i've got a whole pack of soldiers with 101 stats and want to change them to something smaller.

Actually you can - when you are on the soldier equipment screen, there at least two groups in the lower left part. Unassigned and the ones in a Dropship. When you click on one of those groups it brings up a list of soldiers assigned to the group. If you look slightly higher (under the medals -there is a line - dropship assignment) you can reassign a soldier there. I mean its not ideal and some rework for "soldier equipment" and "barracks" panels would be welcome, but you can actually do most things from "soldier equipment" panel. Manual air combat allows you to do certain cases of aircombat without damage and without losses. An example 2 migs vs Cruiser - autoresolve leaves both planes around 30-50% of HP. In actual aircombat planes just fly in, launch torpedoes and fly out . In most cases no damage to the planes, though this depends on initial placement. On manual i was able to win with 2 Condors against a Cruiser, so my point is that you actually can get better results on manual. Autoresolve is better because it doesn't pay attention to fuel, which is a limiting factor in manual combat.

Not really, think it this way - these guys get ranks they would be assigned if they were in actual army not some semi-secret special forces. Also ranks don't always mean commanding rank- in soviet union rank was more like how long or how well that person served (generals excluded).

which game version? V21 Stable? Should be available with researching Alien Assault Plasma.