**spoiler** = starghosts, of course.

I stumbled upon this little gem while being bored having to go into a mission, kill 5-10 starghost units, and that's it. Let's face it, those guys aren't any fun to fight, and win my award for 'most uninspired visuals within UFO:AS'. Maybe if they didn't look like basic geometric shapes, they'd be a little more intimidating... Even the Wargots, who look considerably like predators, are still fun to fight, just 'cause they go flying all over the place.

So, I noticed that if I ignore the starghost attack, the territory reverts ... to mutant control! Which means, instead of fighting basic geometric shapes, you can fight reticulans and mutants. This is especially fun if you've already taken over the world already and have no more mutants to shoot... ::sniff::

Of course, this is prior to the reticulans crash landing and the "second wargot ship" showing up. From what I understand, the starghosts eventually do something with your territories other than revert them back to mutant control...

**SPOILER**

If they take one of your countries, you can't regain them. Good thing I met them before the mothership assault, so I knew what works on Sg clouds. I never finished that mission (it's still on geoscape for some reason), because it crashed to desktop every time, but I knew about Clouds, so when they actually attacked again, I just brought one weapon of every kind.

*** SPOILERS ***


If you have a level three sniper, give him a sniper laser rifle because SG clouds have body parts for reason that become clear later on. And take a psionic because SG clouds are easy to detect psionically, although the other starghosts aren't.

The early missions against the Starghosts should be thought of as a chance to become familiar with them before they start planting their pillars of death. You will get a warning of when the Starghosts change their tactics - there will be an animated sequense when one of your advisors on the Laputa tells you that the Starghosts have changed tactics, and a randomly selected province will automatically succumb without a mission being generated. It's rather like when the cultists emerged earlier in the game.

**SPOILER**

And of course, they chose a base.

But the laser sniper thing is interesting. I used phosphorous things and stun weapons on them till now. Works well enough.

I tend to go with a plasma gun. It's nice and does a bit of damage to them. I've never used a LSR, so I'm not sure how effective it would be, but my snipers are all carrying .50 caliber rifles to tackle the more physical starghost units.

Also, if you don't want to bring a psionic in your squad (my psionics tend to suck, and I don't have time to train them compared to my mundanes and cyborgs,) you can have your factories manufacture a helmet-mounted psionic detector (requires scout equipment to use) and use that instead. I find it works very well on Starghosts, as well as cultists and wargots too. Most physical starghosts show up on infra-red pretty well too, making helmet infra-sights and thermal gunsights pretty effective.