Matryx

How strange, I've yet to fail a mission after I've won it and I must've tested this about a dozen times.

Pressing "Use" will make the user swap the weapons in his hands, so if (like me) you have a one handed weapon and a medkit he will suddenly find himself unable to shoot the enemies Not really a viable solution

After you have won a mission, you can no longer lose it in any way. Thus, it's perfectly possible to win a mission, then slaughter all of the locals / allies without consequence. The allies will not try to fight back - they will not try to evade, run away, or hide. They will just sit there and take it. Indeed, in missions where these troops have equipment (e.g. Help these Cyborgs fight off the mutants) you'll get more loot, and if you do this early on you can have machine guns after the first mission or two (even though you can't use them yet). I do not advocate cheating, of course, and look forward to this bug being squashed in future patches... even if the way of squashing it is to have large rep penalties for each player-inflicted kill - or make them fight back as soon as you force-attack on them.

Grenades certainly. My pistols even will blow chuncks out of the walls... though I wouldn't use one to try and fashion a doorway. Try this test for a laugh - if you get a greenhouse on a mission, let rip with autofire through it

Well, I've always advocated laying tracks to provinces you capture if you haven't got the relevant base province yet - but in one particular case in my current game this isn't providing the input from the province. It should be noted at this time that the base province is unexplored, which may be the cause. I can't say I've noticed this problem before, and this is the only difference I can think of, anyway - as a temporary measure I've torn up the track to save costs.

That's a great idea Pete... You should mail that off to them and hope they impliment it in the first patch...

In case people are not aware, changing stances is a little less than intuitive. If you select a different stance, your soldier will not adopt this new stance until you try to give him a movement based order. Even if you just tell him to sit still and face the same direction, so long as the order is movement based he will do his best to adopt the new stance. When going "prone" you can enter a state whereby you haven't quite reached the prone position. [..A...BC..]Here we can see 3 soldiers in a corridor. If I were to issue the prone command to them, and tell them all to face the same direction, soldier A would do as instructed, but soldiers B and C would only get part way there. As prone soldiers take up 3 spaces, rather than the described 2 by the interface circles, they would both still effectively be crouching for cover and sight purposes, and I might add, unable to move properly until they reach prone, or you give up and tell them to go crouch-move elsewhere... [.aAa.bBCc.]

Having some way to turn those 27 reticulan laser pistols into even just a single alien resource each would be very worthwhile. Afterall, isn't this the sort of stuff we scavenge for materials in the first place?

I think I may be able to help with this one actually. Sometimes, when "prone" your soldiers are not really "prone" but are "on their way" The soldiers need a considerable amount of room to go prone, and once you've lined them up all nice and prone, you can move the crouching soldiers about 3 squares behind them and successfully shoot over them. I've now had a couple of successful missions where I've proceeded like this and only had <5% chance to hit the friendly targets ahead. Much better than the 60%+ "I can't do that" type shots. o o o (squaddies crouching) (gap for good measure) A A A O O O (squaddies lying down - actually takes up 3 squares as the soldier extends into surrounding forward/backward spaces) V V V X <-- aliens / direction of facing

Er, I can't remember the name of it now, but it's just some memory crash analysis which kicks in when my motherboard detects that its gone kaput. It's quite useful because it then triggers my VPU recover program and tries to shutdown all failed things. It's something that comes bundled with either ASUS or MSI motherboards, and as far as I know ownly works with them. Useful when my Radeon locks up too in buggy 3d software

1. Never stand (in run mode) - you're far easier to see, and hit. Try to stay prone if you can, and spread out a bit. Makes you harder to hit in general, and less susceptible to blast-radius attacks. 2. Using Watch mode holds your guns up, ready to fire - this can shave off as much as half a second from your fire-time which can be the crucial difference between killing them before they attack, or dying. 3. Psionics are invaluable for their ability to sense people through walls - I really notice the difference when mine is in training, so get more than one! 4. Rescue missions sometimes involve a super-powerful 'local'. Use them to hunt down enemies on the map, rather than wasting your own guys life / weapons. You may want to win the mission first, then send him/her back out on his own. 5. With enough people shooting at the aliens / mutants, you can cause them to start to run away. Seemingly breaking their morale. Be careful when pursuing them as they are likely to set up traps for you round corners. 6. People are cheap - especially at the start. For the first few missions, it doesn't matter if you get a bit shot up, you can always hire more people to fill the gaps. Winning the missions is a greater priority than ensuring all of your men survive. 7. Pick speciality trainings which compliment each other. For example - a Psionic works well as a leader and a medic, providing skills to enhance the whole team and survivability. 8. Know when to retreat. Often I'll use a single man as bait to lead aliens into traps. Or to move an entire squad back to an area better covered. 9. Medics are essential. In previous games of this style, the medic was rarely used / useful, however in this one it can really make a difference. One single medic can put an entire team back together from a few rocket blasts! 10. Don't spread yourself too thinly. At the start, make sure you research and produce the simple things to help you survive - low tech weapons, armour, and ammo. Don't do what I did in my first game and try to get one of every lab across your first 5 bases - it'll take you days and days to research anything remotely useful, by which time you may well all be dead, or out of ammo.

It's not so much of an issue at the moment, as pretty much everything pre-october is obviously AM related rather than AS, but going forward is where I'm thinking it could be most useful

As yes, saving in case of crash doesn't count of course. Mind you, I've found the auto-save does a good job of keeping things up to date, at least for starting missions anyway. Raxxman: a tip versus the flatsters - keep your guys in prone mode, watching every few seconds, move very very slowly. You should get a yard or so's notice on them, and with watch mode activated, your guys are already ready to fire. unload a few point blank snap-shot auto-fire things into them and you should only get hit once or twice if unlucky. I find muckstars harder than flatsters... though shotgun ambushes with watch mode do the trick nicely for them

The choices mean the following: - Super Ironman - When hiring new people, I don't pick and choose by refreshing the "ask for people" screen, I just take what is offered. Ironman Style - I don't save until I stop playing a session, and never reload to counteract bad turnouts. Regular Gamer - I save before/after every mission, if lots of people die, I might reload - after all, everyone has bad days! Saver Gamer - I save before/after every mission, and if someone dies, I reload. Save-Scummer - I save after every few moves - if someone gets shot badly, I reload. Well, how is it for you? When I played UFO:Enemy Unknown, and other XCom games, I was a save-scummer. Sad to admit it, but I was.... I was also much much younger. These days, I'm quite happy to say that I've changed my playstyle, improved it through Saver Gamer, Regular Gamer and now generally play Ironman or worse! I played until the first cultist attack on 'Soldier' difficulty to get a feel for the game, then went back to play on Veteran, and now I'm playing in "Super-Ironman" mode as detailed above. Something doesn't seem quite right about picking and choosing from the available people list by refreshing the window - surely the same person would be available? Anyway, I'm currently only about a day and a bit into the game, and have 4 people in the hospital for at least the next 4 game days. Veteran + SuperIronman mode certainly keeps the ER full!

Kind-of a little disappointment this one. There were some aliens sniping at me from on-top of a hillside, over the entrance to an underground bunker. With a lucky shot I managed to critical one or two of them, and to my amazement, they rolled down the hill! Even better than that, their momentum carried them off the edge of the roof and sailing into the blue! ____o______ <-- other alien out of range (being a coward)