Sinai

I'm pretty sure there are invisible mental health bars. Notice that after someone's been possessed the first time, they get possessed the second time on the first attempt damn near always.

Since restarting the game on normal(previously playing on hard) I haven't reloaded. I made it past the old greys mission and only lost a total of 2 men(and that was because I was being stupid)...then things started to get a little hairy. I lost my first full team a few missions back when 3 aliens, one with a rocket launcher, one with a microslug, and one with a warp rifle decided to all show up at once inside a ship from two different directions. You have to get used to a few things. First, try to delegate any mission that involves entering a ship, because that's when you usually lose men(as an aside, successrate in delegated missions seems about the same for all difficulty levels). Second, if you do lose men, heck, it's not as great as a loss as you'd think, the game will always keep you above a certain number of troops, and if you just delegate every hard mission for awhile you're usually back up to speed shortly. Third, be ready to bail out of a mission, even if it means leaving men behind. Fourth, don't squander that bio armor on low level guys or the scouts. If a guy is a raw recruit, don't pamper him, he's just fresh meat, save it for if he actually manages to survive. I anticipate losing even more men, especially in some of the story meat grinder missions, but I'll try to stick it out. But, hell, I sure as heck wouldn't try it without loading on hard, I felt like I lost my entire squad every third mission on hard. And I must admit, on the original, whenever those bastards sniped more than 1 guy before they left their avenger, it was time to hit the load button. Or when the aliens mind controlled my man with the blaster bomb...I suppose I should count myself lucky they didn't fire the blaster bomb inside the avenger.

Sure, it sucks to start losing to the biomass, but just think, the best memories and stories are when you almost lose and you pull a comeback from hell outta your ass:)

90 percent of the time I totally forget that little window showing you video of the research/dev stuff. Hell, it's completely incomprehensible most of the time. Which is a damn shame because clearly a lot of work went into it. I love getting research notes when I finish a research, maybe it's just me...I just wish they had a research completed window with song and dance pop up every time like say, in Master of Orion 2. Would probably annoy a lot of people, but heck, you can always make an option for it.

Aye, one of the few things I think are a great improvement over the original is improved inventory management so you don't have to spend so much damn time in the loadout screen.

I had a fairly standard setup, 3 men in heavy armor because i really didn't want them to die, a sun armor, and 1 or 2 others in standard combat armor between levels 6-10. Frankly I hate the heavy armor, but it's the only way I can consistently keep people alive so I can have guys at levels significantly higher than the base levels. Poor tactics on my part I'm sure, but I've always been a fan of speed over survival:P This was my 4th attempt on the mission, having gotten blown up in a variety of ways on my earlier tries. I had a sniper, 3 men with rifles, a rocket launcher, a mp7, and a shotgunner(not recommended). The first thing I did was scatter my men out to a reasonable radius, while running my mp7 and shotgunner at the rocketmen in the corner(sun/combat armors). My riflemen in the meantime took out the alien rocketeers, while my own rocketlauncher took care of the pesky guys in the other direction. After the intial skirmish, I healed up and took up position near the wall about midway between the edge of the map and the entrance to the base. In my previous game, I stupidly waltzed through the entrance with my entire team and lost half before I bailed out of the mission. I proceeded to lob grenades over the wall until I killed 5 or 6 aliens. This took me about 20 grenades. Use your best thrower, because you really don't want to knock down the wall until you're ready. Then I broke down the wall and rifled the survivors. Since you get feedback on damage dealt and you can magically see alien blood, once you get a hit you can finish off any alien fairly easily. After entering the base, I set up a kill zone and baited any aliens with scouts. I got fairly lucky, not losing anybody to the plasma throwers(a rarity for me when raiding a base early on), and after making my way about half through, i took my runner, dropped everything, and made a dash for the item. Recovery and extraction went smoothly, and everything was happy again until a good number of missions later when advanced alien plasma launchers made their appearance. Oh yea, playing on hard because of the mofo "default". I'm considering changing to a normal or easy game though...during a base defense just now a grey walked into my ambush area with 6 men targeting him, 3 of them with close range hard weapons ...and then he proceeded to mow them all down one by one and only 2 men survived, a fluke, to be sure, but come on now, that's ridiculous even for a fluke.