I/O Error

Heh heh... yeah, one of the largest drawbacks to leaving guys at the base, and expecting to use them later, is that their skills are usually nothing at all like what you woud like. This is especially true for characters that need lots of prerequisite skills to reach something (example: getting the Panzerklein-related Engineer skills). Not a good thing if you like to choose how your people progress!

To be honest, the whole "unused characters level up" process is very, very buggy. Evasion points, in particular, are wildly off. If you don't take the time to train your guys outside of combat (meleeing dead bodies, shooting trees for target practice, etc.) your guys will NEVER match the huge skill ratings of the guys left at base. It's idiotic. Now, your question about the skill tree seems like a totally unrelated issue. The skill tree is the tree of character-specific attributes, like "Night Vision" or "Vanguard" or "SMG Specialization". The point of those is quite clear; they are a roleplaying element for your characters, and they help make them much more effective in their chosen specialized roles. For instance, if you use a medic as one of your "sneaky kill" soldiers, giving them the melee skills could be useful. The skill tree allows you to pick one special skill every time the character levels up.

I've finally gotten around to playing S2, with a huge delay between my purchase and now. (I've discovered that my games collection is rapidly turning into a retirement plan; too many games, too little time) Anyway, I wondering if anyone else uses a rather strange tactic of mine. Whenever possible, I try to have EVERYBODY fire at a target in unison. I discovered early on that all shots, successful or not, targeted at an enemy or not, add to one's shooting/burst skill. It seems like hitting real bodies is more beneficial, but not hugely so. Anyway, so if I see a wounded enemy all six of my characters take a shot at him. It's MASSIVE overkill with six bullets hitting at the same time, but it definitely does the job! The advantage to this is that of course everybody's shooting skill raises more-or-less at the same rate (allowing for class differences). Very useful in a training sense. And there's nothing more terrifying than a line of six guys shooting in unison straight at you, LOL! I've also found this useful in a tactical sense. You know the random encounter with the ninjas? Well, I first found that when my team was level 5. Even with the skill training I had done previously for my people, that's pretty early for a fight that rough! As a result, sometimes I simply could NOT see the enemy until I literally walked into them. So, one thing I did was use my rifle volley fire technique, in turn-based mode, to clear parts of the map. Six guys firing away with high-powered rifles, EVENTUALLY you're going to hit something the enemy would really rather you didn't. I killed three of the ninjas outright this way, without even seeing them until they died! I also wounded a few others and made them come after me. Everybody else I was able to kill in the normal method, because they charged me. So, volley fire can spoil the enemy's hide-and-go-seek games. Fortunately ammo isn't a problem, because I only do this with rifles. As long as I strip every enemy's weapon of ammunition before I leave an area, my ammunition supply is fine. On a final note, can you imagine how horrible it must be for enemy to come across 20 of their men dead in a field, with no enemy bodies around, and with all the ammo gone and the weapons cast aside? THAT must make them wonder, yikes. Oh, and of course all your guys have to be selected for this to work. The hotkey for that is "=" if anybody wants an easier way than drawing a box. (Am I the only one who has problems with dragging a box around my guys in S2? In this game, sometimes it just doesn't want to let me do that without several tries. Very odd.)