Kaesar

Just want to say that I have confirmed that the amount of equipment your squad brings does affect the amount of equipment the aliens bring. So if you want to go into missions and not want to have to face aliens with shields, cloak, dimension missiles, entropy missiles, vortex mines, etc. Just bring enough equipment to get close to the limit and you'll have a very easy time. Of course, if you want new alien artifacts you'll need to leave some room for the aliens to bring them.

It really is quite easy to max out to 498 with 36 soldiers. Consider 36 * 14 = 504, a full suit of armour is 5 pieces, so each soldier can carry 9 items. If you have a gun in one hand, cloak field in another, a shield, a medkit, a clip of ammo, this already takes you up to 5. Bring in some explosives, stun gun, mind blender and you'll be running out of room. Hmm, I'm not sure if the ammo that's already loaded in the gun also counts as an item. In that case the item total is 534. I'll probably test it out with rechargeable weapons and see.

36 is the obvious limit to the size of the squad in a mission, but there's another hidden limit that is dropping the amount of agent you can have. It took me a while to figure why I couldn't bring 36 guys as well. The long awaited answer: EQUIPMENT!!! There's a limit of the total number of items you can bring in a mission. For that matter, it seems the limit is for the total number of items in mission, period (I'll explain this later). The game will stop allowing agents to go into missions if the next agent brings in equipment that will exceed the item limit. It seems the limit of the number of items you can bring is the same as the limit of the number of items in mission, hostile and friendly. Which means that the more equipment you bring, the less the aliens get to bring :shock:. I don't have any hard numbers to back it up, but on a bunch of Mothership recovery missions, I was very close to the item limit. Most of the skeletoids and anthropods I faced were not carrying any equipment at all. It does make the missions much easier, as the only threats are overspawns (guess they're still dangerous), poppers, and the 2 or 3 skeletoids/anthropods that were able to bring in equipment. I may actually try to test this theory out more rigorously and let you know. Edit: The max equipment amount is 498 including armour. I will test the alien equipment effect next.

In my current game I have 51. I still don't even have a Colonel yet. I have a team of 36 hybrids, soon they'll all be super soldiers (ie. 90+ in all stats). It's kinda fun having a full squad when going on missions. Just a barrage of bullets against the aliens. The other 15 are humans that I started out with. Their physical attributes are pretty maxed out too.

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm so happy I found this forum. I'm surprise there's still such an active x-com community after all these years.

Has anybody done this before? Battle in the slums... It was the building with the gravity shaft in the center and the fire escape on the side. I had a bunch of troops waiting on the ground outside both the shaft and the fire escape. I had already killed a bunch of aliens coming out of the center shaft when a couple of anthropods stepped on the fire escape from the roof. My troops started to fire. They missed their target but pretty much destroyed the fire escape. The anthropods retreat back on to the roof. It was then I realize that the fire escape was the only way to the roof. As I didn't have the Marsec flight suit I couldn't get to the remaining anthropods. Not about the retreat I desperate tried the find a way. I finally decided to bring the anthropods to me instead of chasing after them. How do I bring them to me you ask? Well, I proceeded to blast away all of the 8 columns that supported the whole building with devastator cannons. Lets just say when the final column was destroyed it was like an elaborate collapsing of dominoes. Sections of each floor fell in sequence. The whole thing took more than a minute to collapse. When the roof finally hit the ground, I was quite amazed that there were 3 anthropods still alive. Of course they were blasted away instantly. I think I definitely want to try that again for fun.

When ufos come into the city, some of them hover over a building and either sets up a tube or does this sparkle thing. I know the tube transports aliens down, but what does the sparkle thing do?

A few things that will help... When you investigate an area after the a ufo has dropped off the aliens, it is possible that some aliens migrate to neighbouring areas as well. You'll have to investigate those areas too. The thing I do is after I finish investigating the initial area, I save and fast forward. If the alien infiltration goes up in organizations around the original area or an alert goes off, I reload an investigate the new area right away. This makes it a lot easier cause it does not give the alien a chance to breed. The new area may only have a few aliens in it as oppose to a dozen or so if you wait till the graph goes up or an alert is sound.