Hey all,

So I started playing XCOM Enemy Within due to the Beast team doing their series. Reading the comments has brought some ideas that I would not have thought of from my first play of XCOM when the game first came out a few years ago.

So, with that in mind, I was wondering if anybody had any general gameplay advise or tactical things I (and other people revisiting/new players to the series) should be doing or not be doing?

So some points I see raised from recent videos:

What sort of armour should I be using and do I focus research on that (as I got the light vest but only put it on one soldier as I assumed the grenade was best to have)?

Also, money is super tight, I have been spending what I get on facilities and satellites rather than buying new weapons and tech. How can I best balance this out?

I look forward to reading the tips and hope other new people to the series have some questions too!

Thank you.

Money is tight. Satellites are key though.

You can maybe sell stuff (extra corpses that you don't wholly need).

Armour wise, things like nanoscale vests aren't great, you want to get to heavier armour that is more properly equippable. I recall laser weapons being key to my campaign quite a while ago.

ALL HEAVIES NO MEDKITS

(don't actually do this)

@bbalpert: if you play on normal.... it can be extremely effective... if you can level them up a bit. Probably not super viable long term but, you can get two attacks per turn for your whole squad, they all can shoot rockets which are way more useful than grenades, and you’ll dish out so much punishment you won’t have wounds that need healing!

As for advice, ignore frag grenades: use scopes instead, they will always be helpful on any mission and even one hit especially later on is going to as effective or more effective than most grenade throws (usually used as a last ditch effort because of poor positioning ). Well trained units with plasma weapons and a scope have crazy high hit chances and it’s hugely useful. I tend to focus on higher chances to hit an enemy on my turn as it removes some of the randomness and allows me to control the battlefield a bit.

Research better weapons and invest in them for your team, they give a huge boost to their ability to hit and deal damage.

Research the actual armor, it goes in the armor slot not the item slot. Huge boosts to health. Get it for your whole squad.

You can see what items are free to sell off in the grey market. Do this occasionally to make sure you can maximize your finances.

Planning ahead and positioning are key. Don’t build buildings in your base or go into combat or construct a sat nexus without a plan on what it accomplishes for you and how it will do so and what you will do if it all goes wrong. When you build a nexus, make sure you have satellites ready when it finishes so you can launch them, and make sure you have interceptors ready for those satellites. Focus on getting a continent locked down so you can get the bonus. Build it in a position where you can later gain adjacency with another nexus. Plan. Ahead. Do the same moving in combat, especially when you have no contacts. Make every move like it was a move to contact.

Small differences aren’t so small in XCOM. The scope only gives you a 10% higher chance to hit, but A) that’s actually a lot and B) it stacks with the skill of the unit and the quality of the weapon. It adds up. Don’t be concerned with how much somehing does because few things do too little to be useful if that’s what you want to do. It’s also a highly RNG based game so any increase to your performance is significant over time.

i'd say- xcom is best learned through mistakes. therefore treat your first game like a sandbox- try everything you're curious about until you get dead. once you have a sense of it, you can take that accrued knowledge into your next playthrough.

take the high ground whenever available (and any armor that helps you do this).

and lastly- farm UFO missions if you need to beef up your squad/equipment. if i recall correctly, they will continuously spawn while the story missions actually advance the game.

Money is always going to be tight in the early game no matter what you do, if it's not tight that just means you aren't spending it fast enough :P

Nano scale vests are kind of a waste of money, there is always a better option to equip be it a grenade or a scope. For armor just get the standard overall tier upgrades like carapace armor. There are some more options in the endgame but I won't spoil.

Some other general advice:

• grenades are king in the early game, they are guaranteed damage and strip cover even if they don't kill (on commander and above aliens have more hp) so that you can do follow up shots with way more accuracy and crit, a few lost alien corpses occasionally is better then a few lost soldiers
• as you get into higher ranked soldiers that start shooting good and have useful abilities with better guns you can start transitioning into equipping scopes and leaving the demolition duties of grenades and rockets to your heavies
• always be building satellites in advance is a common rule of thumb, but there is more nuance if you want to go there, for example it pays to create satellites in advance and launch then just before the monthly report (they have a deploy time so beware), that way you can save countries if some unexpected panic occurs and raises too high, and launching them early in the month does nothing for you,
• secondly instead of spreading them around try to completely cover specific continents first, not only do you get the bonus but satellites also prevent abduction missions in the country they are over, so if a whole continent is covered then no abduction missions will occur on that continent and panic wont rise, where as if you leave a country open on a continent it can get an abduction mission and raise the panic of other countries on the same continent into the red even if they have satellites already and you won't be able to drop it
• cover your satellites with at least one interceptor per continent, eventually 2 and try to keep them upgraded from time to time as money allows, a shot down UFO will pay for a good chunk of that anyway
• early game heavies are the most useful class so don't be afraid to bring more then one, more rockets is better; by contrast snipers are kinda weaker early on and require a bit of investment before they spin up into badasses
• plan your moves ahead, you can move soldiers and do actions interchangeably move one shoot with another then shoot with the first one, action that will end a soldiers turn should generally be taken last
• plan your failures ahead, ie think about what will you do next if a shot will fail, have a backup plan, like a grenade, or another soldier to flank or to cover, most of Xcom is actually about managing around the failures and compensating for bad rng, a new commander takes a single 50% shot then gets a soldier KO'd and blames RNG, an experienced commander goes in knowing it will likely miss and he will have to do something else to compensate, then if it hits he is lucky, it is possible to plan for and surmount all but the most unluckiest of freak streaks in Xcom and the further you get into the game the more that is true
• further to the above: getting a rookie killed behind heavy cover is not that unlucky that happens; getting a full hp corporal in the top armor behind heavy cover, on high ground and in heavy smoke one shoted, that's really unlucky
• it's a good idea to get to lasers asap as they dramatically boos your kill potential, thus also decreasing the return fire putting you at less risk, the best defense is a good offense (there are strats about skipping straight to plasma weapons but I would not recommend it to new players and frankly it's more trouble then it's worth considering in Xcom it's the early game that's the biggest hurdle and rng fest)
• do everything possible on your turn to decimate the enemy asap, if there are no enemies to shoot back you have just negated a vast portion of possible bad luck; brute force, overkill and aggressiveness can pay massive dividends
• ultimately you want to be in a position where you are not relying on luck almost at all, that's the end goal striping enemies of cover and taking 100% shots killing them outright, so the goal is to get there asap
• a lot of skill choices during level up have a clear better pick, if you want to delve further you can rely on the wiki to give you most of the basic info but that way you wont learn as well as if you would if figuring it out for yourself, so how you go about this is entirely up to you and how you want to play the game

What? No.

Outright ignoring frag grenades is the worst possible advice. Not only are they guaranteed to hit, they do guaranteed damage, can hit multiple enemies and can strip cover thus allowing the rest of the squad massive +hit and +crit boost.

Especially early game where you rookies and squaddies can't hit for shit.

Yes later on SCOPEs become very useful in the hands of experienced soldiers with with high tier weapons. At that point they should be on all soldiers, especially with the extra gear slots and heavies covering the demolition duties.

10% on a plasma wielding heavy or sniper with 80-100% hit chance is a great boost to guarantee shots. On a 60 aim rookie with a popgun assault rifle 10% extra to hit is marginal and still leaves you hugely reliant on luck to hit through cover.

This exactly the kind of thing that make Xcom much less on an RNG game then people assume.

@tennmuerti: has great advice, saved me most typing I would say.

SATELLITES! Just rush them from the start. They take time to build so you need to push them. Meanwhile, like it says above, you can rely on Grenades to carry the day for a bit. It's enough against early enemies.

One other thing I will say is the game is poorly balanced for character's advancement. To me there is almost every time one clear choice, so if you want to do research you can or just feel it out. For example, on the Sniper tree the pistol and move and shoot stuff is fine enough but it's not remotely as powerful as the other side. Get a sniper to high ground and that unit will carry the game for you.

If you've been watching GB play, the one thing they don't do remotely enough is flank. You get great shots when you flank and it isn't so hard. Some time on GB they don't even look to move before they shoot and stuff. The openings are there. And they overwatch way too much. You can dash plenty if you just dash into areas you know. Also, it's usually a safer idea to move at least as far as you can in your first action just to see what's ahead of you, then dash after with a different action. Same result many times, but using this method, I have saved myself by getting into cover after tripping a new alien squad, for example. It will save you at times.

You don't want to dash into the unknown and trip a squad of aliens. Overwatch does have moments in this game though, especially because the game doesn't really punish you for playing conservatively (XCOM 2 does that way more).

Basically, aggro-ing aliens that way is kind of a super key, but unspoken, part of the game. Be wary of it. Fighting too many enemies is how you die.

@tennmuerti: depends on the difficulty for one, and positioning. I’d much rather flank, set up rockets, etc. yes, grenades can be useful early on but usually by the time I have scopes I don’t really have any rookies left so I’ll have at least a heavy or two with rockets that are oh so much more useful. I never had issues setting up good hit chances after the first maybe 2-3 missions once I was able to get rid of rookie status. Rockets do the exact same thing, but at a longer range and with a bigger radius. Sure you can’t move first but don’t move your heavies first and there’s no issue with that. You still have the range advantage and still do the same thing.

It OP plans on jumping into a harder difficult from the jump, maybe then the frags will be useful a bit longer but for my money it’s scopes all day. It adds up over the course of a mission, even going from 60 to 70 is a nice change when it happens a dozen times in a mission. The frag may never be useful and if you keep using it you limit your intake of resources. I rarely use explosives of any kind on normal.

Maybe it depends on how you play but I never needed the grenades once I had something else to put in those slots. I’d probably rather have the armor honestly, that can at least help with random criticals downing your shiny FNG in one blast.

The main thing is satellites, they are the most important thing to do in the entire game. I've been playing a lot of xcom 2 so the combat strats are forgotten to me, although i know i ran with 2 medics a lot of the time. Snipers become one of the most powerful unit by the end of the game as well. I guess just play it safe and move up slowly and overwatch, i think it's easy enough to get the hang of after a while.

@opusofthemagnum: Yeah I never played on normal. They are a huge benefit on commander and above, mandatory even to do well in the early game.

if either of these things are true: 1. you have moved a soldier this turn or 2. you are fighting some aliens, try your best to explore as little of the fog of war as possible. did you move your first unit up and not reveal any aliens? great! don't move past them. if you're in a fight the worst thing that you can do is venture up through the unexplored fog of war for that juicy flank and reveal another pod of aliens. now here's some random tactical tidbits:

- a unit that is in full cover that has been hunkered down has 80 defense, that's -80% chance to be hit, and they cannot be hit critically if they are hunkered

- there is an aim multiplier of .7 on any overwatch shot. low level soldiers + overwatch = useless garbage shooting

- aliens get a .6 multiplier on their overwatch shot if they're shooting a dashing soldier (a soldier that is making a yellow move)

- abuse the height advantage aim bonus when you get the chance to. you can actually get rookies to hit things if you do this

- there is another innate aim bonus for being close to an enemy. want to get 100% chance shots in the early game? stick that gun in the aliens face from one tile away. keep in mind that enemies also get a proximity aim bonus in this game (in xcom2 only xcom gets the proximity bonus)

Get that delicious meld as much as you can, it's kind of the key to tipping the scales in your favour, and it's incredibly fun to be a wrecking machine later on, mechs and psi ops makes you feel like you are really bringing the fight to aliens.

All hover SHIVs. No soldiers.

(actually do this. it's fun.)

I very much disagree with this, provided that the expansion is installed. Although I'd pick something else for snipers I send into the field, pistol snipers are great to send on EXALT infiltration missions since that solider always starts the extraction with just a pistol.