John Smith

I've never found rifles to be any good, as they're too weak or consume too much TU's to be useful. Given the slow nature of machine guns, and the high TU consumption, I typically only have one of these. While I adore the raw power of the machine gun, typically the only thought that goes into my machine gunner is strength; can they carry the weapon and ammo? Accuracy and everything else is pretty much pointless, since the machine gun is so powerful and just 1-2 hits hitting the target will usually kill them that I don't bother with stats on that. I typically only have one or two riflemen, just to fill in a vague niche role. The basis of most of what I do comes in on my snipers, shotguns, and my shield. The Shield serves as a scout, but also as a damage soak. I'm not sure how many of my guys were saved just by a well positioned shield, but to begin with my shield is usually a higher ranking dude. Although the pistol is weak, I've noticed it doing a lot more damage than I expected, and even killing aliens in 1-2 successful shots, so they tend to get a lot of kills. Later in the game I put my least favorite guy in the position as a damage soak/to level them if they survive. Shotguns and machine guns are GREAT at clearing out UFO's; shotguns do a ton of damage, like three shots on the same guy for virtually no TU's. I typically found that since their actions cost the least TU's, I can afford to put in guys with lower TU's, however typically they have the most average stats, with slightly above average accuracy. Snipers are fantastic since they can basically ignore all range restrictions. I typically have at least 2; if your scout for instance discovers an alien but used up all his TU's, a correctly positioned sniper can usually pick them off. I typically replace one riflemen or other crappy soldier with a guy with a rocket launcher and use him mostly to stun aliens, predominately in early UFO missions before good armor/high accuracy to incapacitate as many aliens as early as possible. You not only recover all the items you want without damaging them, but you also tend capture your alien enemies, so you achieve your objective. From my experience, later in the game stun rods are the only reliable thing that will take down an officer and such, so you may put one of those are on your stun rocket man. Bear in mind, I play on easy and normal, so Idk if the health is that much higher on aliens. I don't really like having a rocket since they're essentially wasted man except in the right situations. So, 1 machine gun, 1 shield, 1-2 riflemen/or 1 rocket mansz, 2 shotgun, 2 snipers. The purpose of my tactics are to be rather aggressive. The maps are relatively small, compared to say real life, and the furthest enemy is likely less than 150 tiles away, so the game is almost all close combat. Thus, things like shotguns can move in real quickly and take people out. If you kill the enemy, the enemy can't kill you, so getting in close and taking powerful shots with the shotgun is really nice. I often have shotgun guys kill 2 guys in a single go, just because the TU consumption of their shots are pretty low. Aliens tend to cluster, so you often find them near enough to exploit that. Always travel in 2's except for sometimes shields (who can absorb enough damage to not die), with one man covering the other. I typically use my slower guys, machine gunners and rockets, to be put on guard duties. If you look at the map, there is typically that one area that a bad guy could sneak up on you on from behind or come out of nowhere and flank you, so, by putting a machine gunner and rocketer there, who tend to work fairly well together, or a sniper, you can also make sure no-one is sneaking up on your main team, and thus always focus on what's ahead of you. Basically, you block off a bottle neck area where either your team or aliens would have to travel through and have troops there monitoring what's going on, or that can kill the enemy if need be. You can typically move your machine gunners and stuff to new positions as you clear more areas and come across new "crossroads" that are finnicky to clear, but due to the high TU consumption and the danger of moving you typically have to commit with these guys. This allows me to focus as much fire as possible on the aliens by concentrating my forces without leaving them open to another attack. AS compared to say, a rifleman, machine gunners and rocket guys can handle themselves when it comes to killing aliens, so if they're relatively still but in ideal shooting positions should an enemy walk by, they are full on TU's and can typically kill the enemies in one go without a lot of assistance. My machine gunner/rocket team once took out a wave of 3 reapers, and it wasn't even all during my turn. The main objective is to move cautiously, opening up new areas, and then to act aggressively when I see a new alien. Obviously you want to move tactically and behind cover, but, shotguns can typically kill alien in 1 turn at close range, so if you can get them within range, and kill the alien, you don't have to worry about return fire. I.E. your offense is your defense, you kill aliens to prevent damage to yourself. While I like machine gunners, I find them too cumbersome to have in large amounts. Because they can only move short distances and are powerful, I find them very useful in room clearing or UFO stuff. They ironically have a long range though, so in a wide open area like a road or desert they are also particularly useful. Shotguns can travel long distances in short periods of time, so they're typically very useful. I like to go all out, I suppose. I focus fire all my troops on a small amount of aliens to try to get as many kills as possible, since damaging two aliens is worse than killing 1 alien, since 2 damaged aliens that are still alive means double the damage to yourself. I've only typically found rifleman useful in a support role; that is, every now and then, a guy will be at half health or lower, and my riflemen has a long enough range to pick them off, instead of leaving them alive and having one messy alien to deal with. With burst fire, if caught unawaresz, a rifleman can typically kill an alien in one turn, so they have some degree of defense, but otherwise do too little damage to do anything else but provide support for another troop, I find. I imagine with larger sizes (above 8, for instance) you could get a lot more help from support units, but with the small sizes I mostly go for broke and focus on all out strategies, with lots of snipers and shotguns. A shield is a must have, since you will just have guys get shot or die a lot without one. I imagine it's worse on later levels, although the shield itself wears out a little too quickly. I'd love to have two shields, but they tend to be rather weak the pistol (although stronger than I would have thought), so you lose quite a bit of power by having more than one. With more than 8 guys though, they'd be one of the next guys I'd add.

That information was all classified; it only technically came to public knowledge at later dates, and since Xenonauts is intended as a conglomerate of the most advanced technology from all nations and rapidly fields prototypes developed by extremely versatile scientists and engineers, it's possible they had simply had access to said prototypes long before they were even publicly acknowledged by the government, just like the Iceland incident itself! Also this is before the real invention of the F-17, so the next one made from alien tech was just classified as such in order.

Oh. What if they're already in flight, is there a way to combine them?

How do you form a squadron? So, I'm finally at a point where I need two fighters to take down a team of UFO's, and now, I can't seem to find the right button, and I've looked all over the place; all it says is that you can form a squadron up to 3, it doesn't explain how. Does any body know what the button looks like?

Omg, this all sounds like amazing increases! I know you guys have been hard at work, and I really thank you for all the work you've put into the game and all the suggestions we made; also, dose extra maps you included n stuff! This game is really awesome. Your updates seems amazing!

The game seems kind of grindy as is doh. xP

Alright,g lad to see cheap bases are making it easier. I figured it would, but I didn't know how much. Seems neat! Well, it's kind of a minor issue. Really important to you know, not losing the game (you can't have six nations drop and such) but, overall a minor issue compared to the excellent ground combat. I don't mind losing at the 3rd month I suppose or just changing funding to 10 million or 1000 million dollars and forgoing the issue of finances virtually all together. Ground combat is amazing and incredibly well polished. There are some minor issues but I don't consider them too important.

Oh yes, my only problems with the games are nit picking. Overall this is an amazing and fantastic game; I didn't play the earlier versions per say but, all of those seems do seem nice, I wasn't aware it was an improvement of an older version

lol, I know right? Typically they survive for me though just cause I am fairly aggressive anyways. When the civvies run they tell me where the bad guys are (that is, by seeing their reaction). Also, I typically have a guy woth a shield usually who can absorb a few hits without taking damage. xP Also I play easiesz. But how much do you really boost your funding with that?

I absolutely love the game though; the ground tactics are superb, almost perfect. The weapon variation, the strategy, the AI's are nice, even the graphics are a great touch. It's sad to see such a great game marred by some weird finance balancing. But, I realized how easy it it is to edit now that someone PM'ed me and told me how to edit the NOTEPAD, a word document, to change around funding and such. The customability has helped win this game back for me, imo. I decreased event penalties by about 75%, and started off with 5 million moneysz instead of 2 million, and it seemed to work alright for me. Still barely turning a profit but, that's to be expected. Still, the ground combat is AWESOME. Maybe doing well in ground combat should be more rewarding? Perhaps say, more money, or even just a boost in morale and thus funding? Since it's the core central aspect of the game, I think it should boost satisfaction rates or something. xP

Well, maybe just a beginning grace period? You need funding to build bases; you only get more funding by having more bases, or more coverage. In order to get more bases, you'd need the first few months to give you quite a bit of money, so you can build more. You get almost no money from missions, at least not as much as the original x-com, so you are reliant on funding from the nations almost entirely. However, because you need to build bases to get started having coverage in order to get more money, and you aren't just given enough to build 3 bases to begin with, it's kind of a catch 22. You can't get funding to get more bases unless you have more funding, which requires new bases. Because the game's alien interactions are largely randomized, unless you get lucky and your first couple of months had the predominant activity in the base area in starting you chose, you are going to lose funding and literally have nothing you can do about it, thus setting up a cycle that basically ensures you will lose without any real merit by the player. It's less about how hard it is and more so about being doomed to start with. Now, this may just be me, or other people who've been experiencing wild funding changes, but it seems to be a problem when you're already losing money by the end of the 2nd month and all you've created is one new base, forgoing practically everything else. I like the difficulty of the game, and I'm only on easy and normal thus far. But the whole funding thing seems kind of out of whack. You can do amazing on ground missions and it means nothing. Maybe that should count more? Idk.

Well, the base itself costs 500,000 less. But an old 1 million dollar base with three radars cost 1.3 million (1 million +100k x 3). A new base with 3 radars cost 1.25 million (250k per radar, x 3, = 750k, compared ot the base cost of 500,000, meaning it's 1.25 million). You can argue that you don't need radars, but seeing that the only point of more bases is more coverage in new areas, bases without radars are more or less useless. Meaning it still more or less ends up costing the same. The starting base gets 1 free radar, so it's slightly cheaper.

Well, the base itself costs 500,000 less. But an old 1 million dollar base with three radars cost 1.3 million (1 million +100k x 3). A new base with 3 radars cost 1.25 million (250k per radar, x 3, = 750k, compared ot the base cost of 500,000, meaning it's 1.25 million). You can argue that you don't need radars, but seeing that the only point of more bases is more coverage in new areas, bases without radars are more or less useless. EDIT: Herp a derp troubles quoting. xP

Herm, I was thinking that maybe if you lose several consecutive waves of UFO's in a row then funding should drop? Losing 1 battle doesn't seem like enough to lose morale, or do that kind of damage. It's too variable to have to win every single battle or you funding drops to 0 immediately. And that's with downing multiple UFO's that whole month. Maybe it should be like, if you consistently lose several times in a row, or that you have to take down a certain percentage of the UFO's, instead of all of them? Idk.

Yeah, it is, and I don't really see the point to it. O_o Why should you lose so much if you don't take down 1 wave; shouldn't it be losing several consecutive or something?

Thanks for all the input! I put one in the middle east since I've been reading about that, but, I don't sure how I'm supposed to even get coverage that early since without 3 bases I'm going to be losing out? I'd rather not play another 8 hours and realize my 3 base positions were wrong, does anyone have an ideal location? Also now that radars are 250k, and radars are more or less essential for coverage, the price of bases haven't really gone down; in fact, it's only 50,000 dollars cheaper now. xP

I'm not sure exactly if it was a bug, what version I was playing, but it was awful. All my characters, all that time invested into that game and it's dead. What's the point? If I have to provide as much coverage early on, then how do I set up my bases; doesn't that mean that there is an opportune way to set up bases, and if so, why not just start off that way if that's the only way to really play the game and there's no styles available? Start off with 3 bases or something? Where do I put these 3 bases; I'm really only into the ground combat tactics part of it so I don't really care much about the funding thing. Which is more or less the game's strongpoint. Does my radar just have to cover a "continent" or does the actual circle range indicate where my coverage is?

Funding seems to be way off; I bought xenonuats today, thinking it would be great fun. And it was, I enjoyed the tactics and strategies immensely, especially the new weapons, the shotguns and machine guns, it was fantastic, and a markable improvement, IMO, over X-com, at least the old version. A lot of the changes I would have made were in there, from the newer weapons to the updated graphics and geoscape. However, funding was off, pretty much completely. I started off the first month in September, doing pretty well; i'd probably say I shot down and engaged in a ground mission virtually all the UFO's, except a few that ended up in the ocean. Despite this, I took negatives to my income. I have no idea why. The second go around, I'm telling myself, okay, *maybe* I need more coverage, so I built a new base and basically had zero money. Even shooting down and taking down as many as possible, I got negative funding. Negative, on month two. 3 continents dropped out by the third month. Now, it's not like I wasn't doing anything; I was shooting them down like crazy. I must have gone on dozens of ground missions and meticulously plotted out each one. I didn't and on that game still haven't lost a single soldier in combat. And yet the frustrating part of it was watching my funding go down and having no way to counter act it, at all. It was just hopeless. And the really annoying part was I was on easy. Yeah, easy. And yet by the third month, I was taking negative income. Tell me, how am I supposed to get coverage over the whole planet when I need money in the first place? I need money to get bases to get coverage to not lose money which I can't do since I'm already basically out of money before I can get the bases. It's ludicrous, it sapped away all the fun for me. And I don't see why or what I did wrong; is there some magic button I'm not pressing? Furthermore, why is funding going down in places I have no radar coverage in? How can I possibly be expected to fight UFO's over there? It just seems a might silly. There's really no way to play the game like that. Apparently I'm not the only one who's had this problem, so I'm thinking it might be a new game update? It's absolutely ridiculous. Unless this is the way the game was intended to be played...? And if so, why?