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No. 180407
>>180402
My first piece of advice is, don't play on lower than Classic difficulty. The tension involved is half the game's appeal, there's almost no point to playing it on anything lower.
Tactical advice:
1. Squadsight snipers are good to the point of being insanely broken. Pre-squadsight snipers are all but useless. Bring them along with frag grenades and make getting kills for them your top priority.
2. When you don't have any alerted enemies, only make one move a turn into unknown territory. Move your first guy forward, then have the rest of your squad follow in his exact footsteps. That way, you don't have to worry about alerting enemies when you don't have your whole squad's worth of move to spend dealing with them. Doing things this way means you can advance forward without having cover.
3. Once you have a squadsight sniper, park his ass somewhere high up with good lines of sight and leave him there on overwatch. If you need to reposition him for line of sight (and there are no alerted enemies), move only either the sniper or the rest of your squad in any given turn. Safety first.
4. Avoid taking cover behind cars or anything else that can explode. If they get lit up you do have a turn to move away before they blow, but if someone panics they're dead as shit. Sometimes you have no choice, but when there's a better option, take it.
5. Explosives give you control. If there's two enemies activated, say, and you can hit them with a rocket or with a grenade and kill them, so long as you save your explosive for last you can fire with impunity even if the odds are low and shitty. You ideally want to be able to kill them without the use of explosives, which is why you try, but you have the guaranteed damage in case you don't hit them.
6. Don't be afraid to turtle up. If you move a guy forward, activate some enemies and find yourself in a not-so-great situation, don't be afraid to retreat back the way you came and try to lure them into a hail of overwatch fire. Likewise, if you can't see a way to avoid taking fire, consider hunkering your vulnerable guys down, which makes them way less likely to get shot, or tossing a smoke grenade.
7. When melee enemies are around, fuck cover. Cover doesn't do shit against them. Your priority, instead, is to keep out of their movement range. When facing both melee and ranged enemies at once, retreat only in cover and prioritize killing the melee enemy first.
8. DO NOT TRADE SHOTS WITH THEM. I cannot stress this enough. If you and the enemy both sit in cover and shoot at each other, not only are the odds in their favor most of the time, there are always more aliens per map than you have soldiers, and an infinite number of aliens between missions. If you don't have good odds to hit, maneuver until you do. If you can't maneuver to a flank on them, retreat and lure them to somewhere you can. If you can't do either of those, use explosives to flush them out. Taking low-to-middling odds shots on aliens who can attack you next turn is a prayer-based solution, to be turned to only out of desperation.
Strategy advice:
1. Your first research priority is beam weapons, followed by carapace armor. If you don't have laser rifles when your first terror mission comes around, you're going to have a rough time of it. If you don't have them by the time you encounter mutons, you are fucked. As HP totals increase, you need to increase your damage output so you can drop them quickly. Carapace armor is a second priority because it will keep you nice and safe - although not so safe you can play recklessly, mind. After that, the specialized laser weapons, followed by plasma weapons and titan armor.
2. You want to be able to launch at least one satellite a month. Save them until just a few days before the council report - launching a satellite decreases panic, so you want to save it for as long as possible so you can do panic triage. Buy satellites even if you don't have the uplink capacity to support them yet - they'll be there when you build the uplinks.
3. When choosing abduction missions, considering panic levels takes priority over the rewards. Panic is decreased in the country where you perform the mission, but it's increased by a notch or two across the entire continent of the two you didn't choose, with the largest increase happening in the country where the mission would have taken place.
4. Build the Officer Training School as soon as you can and increase your squad size. All the OTS upgrades are worth the money, but the squad size increases are real game changers.
5. You can and should sell any items that says there's no research value to them. You can sell corpses, so long as you leave yourself a stockpile to build items from. You can also sell weapon fragments, but don't unless you absolutely have to. Don't sell alloys or elerium unless it's a serious emergency, you need them for advanced tech items and research, and you only get them from UFOs.
6. Plan ahead. Try to spot a good area to put several power generators or satellite uplinks together in, since these ones really benefit from the adjacency bonuses. Start building more power facilities before you need them, so you don't get caught out.
7. If there's a convenient tile with steam in it, an early Thermo Generator can handle all your power needs for a very long time. However, if your only steam vents are at the bottom or require a ton of excavation to get to, don't kill yourself trying.
8. Spread promotions around. Having a super-squad of Colonels may feel awesome, and it's certainly great to roll them out for a Terror mission or one of the big plot missions. But if a mission goes sour - which can happen even when you're fully fitted up and - and they all die, and you're left with three squaddies and a bunch of rookies...well, you won't have a fun time of it. Council missions in particular are good missions to take a rookie or squaddie along to, because the only enemies you face on those are sectoids and thin men.
9. You will lose at least one country in the first few months. Probably more. Don't freak out. Once you have titan armor and plasma weapons, you're past the big difficulty hump.
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