Lord Chambers

I used to try and play with strategy, having scout type soldiers, snipers, the medic, then I realized that is a stupid way to play in this game. The perfect loadout is seven guys using the best rifle (probably an AUG or Plasma rifle [for sure not the obsolete laser rifles]) you have, then later in the game, as many guys as you can have using gatling guns or double barrel machine guns. You can try to think it out, use tactics and whatnot, but all that really matters is having your soldiers move in a Civil War era firing line until they see a guy, stopping and all firing at their maximum range, then moving forward. If you're in doors you might use the burst settings. Sadly it's that simple (the exception being when the aliens shoot an incendiary rocket at you, which causes you to scatter your soldiers for a second before sending another hail of bullets). For spice you can have a deployable carrying soldier, and having someone really fast can be of much use for running in and then out of a room to lure people to that deployed guy, but not neccesary. You could as well have the group of rifles or gatling gunners run in the room (they might get a scratch or two).

Alarg! http://oregonstate.edu/~chambchr/marge.jpg

"How am I supposed to get there?" asks one of my soldiers over the mic. I don't know how he's supposed to get there either. For some reason this mission has us starting in a blocked off corner of the map. There are two mountains that leave only two accessable squares between them, and they are connected diagonally, so my troops can't move across them. Looks like this: x = not accessable o = accessable ooxx xoxx xxoo xxoo Awesome. I can't reach the UFO. Saving and reloadnig before I land at the mission doesn't help either. Nor does going and doing another mission first. It looks like the landscape is determined right when the mission appears on the geoscape, so I am helpless to complete this important mission. The UFO is in plain sight, I just can't get to it. It's funny too, since I just reinstalled UFO:AM after not playing for months, and I was reading up on the new patches (1.2 and 1.3) which have as part of their changelog something about no longer having missions with objectives that are unreachable.