Mithran

The research for Shotguns is advanced firearms. To research it you need to have a shooting range at the base as well as having researched earth tech and firearms Laputians gives you 2 Gauss cannons (awesome weapon hehe) and 1 level of noble metals. Training-wise you should consider specializing your troops a bit and don't forget to train the ones that are not pure soldiers! Also test what weapons works well against which enemies and equip/deploy according to that. (don't wanna give too much away so you'll have to test it a bit yourself )

First off: You certainly need better weapons asap Get shotguns! They work wonders against beastmen! well-trained snipers are also effective for a while but not sure they're worth it in the long run as the later opponents are hard for them to take down. My combat team usually consists of 3 soldiers, 2 soldier/techs and 2 soldier/scientists. two soldiers trained to run fast and close with shotguns, one for heavy weapons, Techs and scientist with repair-kits and med-kits with rifles to begin with and later on some of the new and fun weapons that gets available later on One thing you don't mention in your post is how you train your troops, Maybe that's something you need to change as well. All figthers should have at least minor suit as well as minor toughness. Aside from that I would say it's a matter of style Hope this is helpfull Cheers! Ohh about research... focus on getting your base and production up and running first, then when you are more established you can start teraforming, don't go for that right away you will get plenty of time for that when you're firmly equipped to fight the tougher opponents..

ok thanks I'll try to look at IGN, the tech tree didn't show any hidden requirements as that was the first thing I looked at to see if I had forgotten something hehe

It didn't show in the unavailable tab either. Only time I've seen it this time around was when I used the console to get all research, then it showed in completed with the listed requirements of crystal mining and noble metal mining.

Hi everyone I recently started playing UFO:AL again and am playing vanilla 1.7. Here I noticed that the research for advanced mining didn't show up even after finishing both crystal and noble metal mining. After researching a bit more and finally concluding it wasn't gonna show up. I used the console to give me all research to see if that would give it to me. Lo and behold suddenly I had all research including the advanced mining. Anyone knows of a way to fix this without getting all research? On a side note: I used the console to give some training to my soldiers in this game, dunno if that had anything to do with the research not showing up, but I wouldn't expect it hence my question here.