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[Sonlirain]

In the "Iceland Incident" (the game's backstory as told by the in-game encyclopedia) they talk about how humanity hit the first UFO they encountered using 6 nuclear ICBMs.  It crash landed intact into Iceland.

Not sure a few smaller conventional missiles and the ground would be enough to tear a significant hole in a UFO

I assume the missiles didn't explode on contact but only somewhere nearby (shot down by the UFO?) the UFO is probably very resistant to the shock waves but the EMP just scrambled its electronics enough for it to force it into landing.

[Aklyon]

Yeah, Androns are impossible to stop beyond riddling them with [INSERT WEAPON CLASS PROJECTILE HERE]. At least I could never beat them with a stun baton enough to KO them, which makes sense for robots. I don't think they can be suppressed, either, which makes fighting them that much more fun.

edit: ninja creepin' 'round here.

Electroshock grenades help too.

[Mono124]

That last mission though...

My game started off nicely, I completely skipped the starter armor and went to Wolf, and I skipped lasers and went to plasma, so I was playing extremely conservative ground missions. Overall through my entire game I lost 7 soldiers, but 4 of those were the last mission.

Spoiler: Endgame spoilers (click to show/hide)

Basically my last mission was my worst, which is odd because at first it seemed like a cakewalk. I loaded up 12 soldiers, 3 with shields, 2 snipers, 4 riflemen, and 3 heavies. Heavies had the Predator armor, and everyone else had Sentinel armor. Mission briefing told me I had a short time to kill the leader and /possibly/ get the generators. I wanted to do this with no casualties and everyone escaping. I spent roughly 2 turns killing all the aliens outside the first door, and then quickly moved up to the next door. I sent 1/4 of my team to the left (2 riflemen, a sniper, and a heavy) 1/4 of my team to the right generator (2 riflemen, a shield and a sniper) and 1/4 (2 heavies, 2 shields) to the door at the end of the hall. I spent roughly 3 or 4 turns opening doors and killing/wounding aliens before I secured both generators, and 2 aliens were left in the foyer before the leader room. I then moved 2 men into each generator room and grenaded it, and moved the 4 (2 from each side) to the middle in prep for my assault on the leaders room. Then came the fucking reapers. As if in a movie, they cut the 4 men in the generator rooms off from the main body of 8, and forced my 8 to run and gun into the foyer before the leaders room. I completely wiped the leader room out in one turn, and surveyed the situation.. and found that I was going to lose at least 7 guys if I didn't take drastic measures before the turn ended. I did the only thing I could...I had saved the c4 on my generator teams for this occasion, and since I had 4 men cut off... well, they didn't go down without taking out almost all of the Reapers in sight. This ended up saving my main force as they ran to the pods for their lives. Ended up losing those 4 men, but they quite possibly saved the other 8. The sad part is that if I had spent just one turn less stacking up on an empty room to breach it, those men wouldn't have had to die.

[GiglameshDespair]

Encountered reapers for the first time and immediately said to myself "Yep. Those are chyrssalids."
Surprisingly fragile though. I'm playing on normal and they go down to a couple of pistol shots.

[Mono124]

Encountered reapers for the first time and immediately said to myself "Yep. Those are chyrssalids."
Surprisingly fragile though. I'm playing on normal and they go down to a couple of pistol shots.

The problem is when you face them in a horde. On some of the terror missions that spawn them, if they spawn near a few juicy civilians and flank your men, it can be a wipe in one turn, even though they die rather quickly.

[Lightningfalcon]

My very first encounter with them had one come around a corner and zombify one of my men.  I took it and the zombie down without much of a problem, but it still scared me badly.  I didn't even see it on the map.  Just suddenly ZOMBIE.  Pulled all my men from that area away, and was thankful that both my rocketeers had full TUs to blast away with. 

[Aseaheru]

Did any of you get to the point where your guys with LMGs can burst twice in a turn?

[GlyphGryph]

Ugh. I am so. close. to winning.So, I finally avoided the whole "Oh fuck! Andron terror missions I'm gonna die *blech*" problem by simply utterly destroying every Andron terror ship as my number one priority.

So that worked!

Then this happens:

Spoiler: Time to lead a capture assault on a Battleship (click to show/hide)

I'm to the point where I need to capture one of the alien Praetors. I down a battleship, a Sebillian ship I'm sure I can take. I'm kitted out with the best armor (so kickass), and the best weapons. I'm working my way up the crashed battleship.

One of my units is mind controlled and kills his neighbor (my self insert unit killing my brother-insert, the two units I'd been diligently babying for much of the game). It's fine. I'll live, and maybe after I finish the mission he will too. I just need to move everyone else to the next floor. Okay, select my rocket guy, click on the telport pad and... huh. No path. Ah, I see, there's a guy in the way, we'll I'll just click him to move him and..

Oh.

Oh my.

I just clicked on the mind controlled dude.

While I had the rocket launcher guy selected.

T_T

WELP, there goes 6 of my 8 dudes. Two left and a jeep on the bottom floor, I can... I can still do this, right?

*One of the dudes is mind controlled, kills the other, the mind control wears off just as a reaper comes barreling through the door and ganks the guy*

>_< Noooo!

...

So, I'm actually in a pretty comfortable position despite that. I have total air dominance (9 Marauders and 12 foxtrots), and high support among all countries.I'm essentially swimming in cash, with the main constraint actually being alenium. Unfortunately, it will take me a while to train up another halfway decent team.

Still, the swimming in cash bit let me hire 50+ garbage soldiers at one base so I could hire 10 uber-soldiers at my first, all of whom have starting bravery of over 60 (bravery resists mind control, right? At the very least it means less panic and stuff) and great across the board stats besides.

It's gonna be a long haul training them back up though. Ugh. I only have 2 vets left, one with garbage bravery but amazing every-other-stat, both of whom were kicked off the mission for the jeep and it's blow-em-up gun. A good thing, I suppose. And I learned my lesson about bringing rocket guys and clumping dudes up on the final approach.

[EnigmaticHat]

Did any of you get to the point where your guys with LMGs can burst twice in a turn?

Unless there's a game mechanic I'm not aware of (I'm trying to keep at least a few surprises for myself) it shouldn't be possible.  Firing an LMG takes 80% of your available TUs, regardless of what your max is.

[GlyphGryph]

I can confirm I have fired the LMG twice in a turn. But only when wearing Predator armor, which makes the % taken all... wonky.

[Mono124]

I can confirm I have fired the LMG twice in a turn. But only when wearing Predator armor, which makes the % taken all... wonky.

From what I've found with Predator armor, you can fire an LMG twice but pretty much only if you don't move at all that turn. You might be able to move one square, or maybe crouch or rotate a little, but it still uses a massive number of TUs even with the armor. Also, I'm not sure if you can fire twice if you have a low TU count, because my 3 heavies all had 100 TUs and as far as I can remember I had less than 5 TUs left after I shot twice, so it might not work nicely with lower numbers.

Anyway, I started an ironman game on veteran. It was going fairly well until I accidentally slipped and hit 4 instead of 3. Cue an alien fighter downing my Charlie on it's way back from a mission killing all but my self-named soldier and a garbage Private. Time to restart I guess.

[EnigmaticHat]

I once misclicked trying to get my machinegunner to pointblank blast a bush at her feet because it was making breaching a UFO awkward.  Instead I clicked on the soldier next to her... I like to think that the commander mispoke and the Xenonaut he was talking to coldly executed the soldier next to her without so much as asking for confirmation.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Heh. I'm not quite so far along in the game, but I already get the feeling like I'm playing classic X-Com.

I've shot down a Caesan scout. It crashes into a military base, there's just three aliens on the outside, so it's a quick stroll to the ship itself. I have a squad of six soldiers and a Hunter arrayed in front of the entrance. One Assault opens the door - there are 3 Caesans inside. The Shielder tosses in a flashbang, suppresses two and forces another to shoot and miss a reaction shot.

Then the fun starts.

The first Assault turns around and shoots, doing unspeakable damage to the little fence the aliens are hiding behind. The second Assault storms in and violently disembowels a computer console and some wall paneling. The Hunter opens up in a hurricane of bullets, finishing off the console, the little fence, and the wall paneling, suppressing the two Assaults because the aliens inside are already as suppressed as they can be, and also destroys a very unlucky stack of barrels the Shielder is using for cover. Two Riflemen take two normal shots each, grazing the pillar behind the aliens and actually managing to score the first hit, dealing 9 damage to one of the blueshirts. Then the sniper takes an 89% shot against a redshirt in the corner and fumbles something fierce, somehow hitting the outside of the saucer.

I survived that mission because on the next turn, the aliens missed almost every shot (the Shielder caught one but survived), and on the next turn a hidden fourth Caesan reaction-fired into his buddy's back in response to my Assaults taking positions inside the saucer. But still. Let's hope such luck is not normal.

[Mono124]

The best way to take down UFOs early on I've found is to use a ton of grenades. Before you research stun weaponry, stack up flashbangs. Have all your men stack up outside the door, open it, throw as many flashes as you can, and close it. Repeat until enemies are incapacitated. Flashbangs are actually extremely useful, mostly just due to their ability to cause suppression... which before you have armor, means not dying. Stun grenades are better later on though, and then ultimately flashbangs and stun grenades will be situational because enemies are immune/extremely hard to stun.

edit: Also stacking up grenades/equipment is a great idea anyway, because your soldiers only get a strength increase after a ground mission that they started with 80% of their carrying weight used or higher.

[Aseaheru]

I thought that LMGs just took 40 TUs...