Devencire

They're handy as a jack-of-all-trades grenade. You can use them to land hits with rookies who can't aim straight, deal reasonable damage inside UFOs without destroying precious UFO contents, and stun aliens without the positioning nightmare that is the use of stun rods. Since grenades are unlikely to entirely miss, you can also use large numbers of them to guarantee a kill/stun, rather than taking lots of shots that could theoretically miss. Certainly if you've got a clear and accurate enough laser shot, take it. If not, electroshocks are a fair option. They do have pretty tough competition in flashbangs, though - the main edge being that at least electroshocks do something to Androns.

Flashbangs deal stun damage, even to enemies that are immune to stun damage from gas grenades. True, they don't deal much - you may need a dozen to take down an officer! - but it's entirely viable (and lets you, bizarrely, capture and interrogate aliens having not researched Alien Biology yet, as I accidentally did in my first play-through... which leads me to suspect it's entirely possible to complete the game without ever researching Alien Biology, let alone Stun Weapons!) That said, waiting until Electroshock Grenades is a safe and sensible way to go.

Thanks for the recommendations!

Once the Xenonauts ground combat music started entering my dreams, I switched over to more soothing electronic music by Solar Fields (e.g. ), making me a calm and composed commander. That said, I began to miss the feeling of dread that came over me whenever I heard the ground combat night-time music start up...

Injured soldiers that are sent into battle start with a current health value 2 points above their maximum health for the battle, showing e.g. '60/58' health. This isn't that problematic in itself (is this a way of making injured soldiers become more injured automatically if they participate in combat? That would make some sense), but has an unfortunate interaction with the medkit. Medkits use TUs (and ammo) relative to how much health the target is missing. However, when this is negative, the medkit uses negative TUs and expends negative ammo - i.e. the soldier gains TUs and the medkit has some ammo restored. (Soldiers can go over their maximum TUs by this method, though medkits cannot go over their maximum ammo.) A save file is attached to help quickly verify this bug - on loading, Col. Kevin Leach should already be selected, holding an advanced medkit; have him use the medkit on himself to regain 2 TUs and medkit ammo per use (interestingly causing a damage animation and sound as well). His above-maximum health value was just the result of having him participate in the mission while injured. (Incidentally, just because I've only joined the forums to report some bugs, that doesn't mean I'm not really enjoying the game. I'm pretty bad at it still, but really enjoying how the invasion is progressing across my first playthrough. Cheers!) healing tus.sav healing tus.sav

I should also note that you can teleport soldiers back to base regardless of the location of their dropship by assigning them the 'Unassigned' group (or presumably a grounded dropship group) in the Barracks roster. This is perhaps less useful, but would allow you to defend against base attacks using forces you deployed to a different hemisphere (though at least you can't return them to the airborne dropship after making them Unassigned).

Double-clicking a soldier's name in the Barracks roster takes you to the Soldier Equipment screen and selects the soldier. The bug is that this works on soldiers who are in airborne dropships, and thus should not have access to base equipment. (This bypasses the restriction that you cannot select an airborne dropship group in the bottom-left of the Soldier Equipment screen.) Using this exploit you can e.g. change a soldier's armour to something you only just finished building at the soldier's home base, even if the soldier is in a dropship on the other side of the planet. Since something is in place to stop this being done the obvious way, I assume it's unintentional that it's possible at all.