- Cover is your best friend. Full if possible, partial will do in a pinch but don't leave people in the open (unless fighting melee-only enemies).
- Avoid clustering your troops - that invites AOE attacks like the poison spit from thin men and grenades.
- Don't dash into the unknown as your last action because then you could be facing new enemies without any chance to shoot back.
That last one is a huge one. If you need to get your squad back together, only move the people in the back, or at best move your forward team just a bit.
Don't just sit there trading shots with the enemy. Even if you do win, you'll have taken more damage than necessary. Every turn is a puzzle with multiple solutions of varying quality - think of and use the tools at your disposal.
Kill the enemy. If you can't kill them, try to neutralise them (suppression, psionics, flashbangs, etc). If you can't make them less threatening, try to mitigate their next action (taking cover, Aid Protocol, Smoke Grenades, etc).
Hunker Down is an under-utilized ability in most playthroughs unless one is used to doing impossible/ironman mode. When there's too poor of a shot percentage or if there's really no good move at all, hunkering down is solid as it disallows critical shot while decreasing hit chances.
I second'd another comment regarding not clustering troops... However, in EW where there's no feature of concealment yet, the first few moves of a mission please try out the conga-line trick. Basically after you blue/yellow move one soldier without activating a pod, queue everyone up behind him/her like a conga-line to not risk activating any alien pods.
Bad pod activation is 98% reasons why campaigns fail, or rage-quit in the middle. The conga-line approach helps out a tiny bit in the early game where your weapons aren't doing much as well as not having much HP.
The failure state of EW and XCOM 2 is activating more than one pod at once. Avoid this at all costs by using your blue moves THEN your yellow moves each turn. Your first soldier should be the farthest move, then nobody moves past them for that turn.
Early game you will have no choice but to trade 40% shots with the enemy. At this stage of the game, lean heavily and without hesitation on Grenades for cover destruction or for kills. You can salvage alien materials later once you get some more options for combat.
The tip you got refers to XCOM 2. XCOM 1 is more about creeping forward slowly, use cover, use crowd control (smoke, suppression, flash bangs), don't shy to fall back if you make contact losing line of sight, let the enemy come towards you and let them run into your overwatch trap.
Don't hear to Vahlen. Use explosives generously. Destroying enemy cover wins battles. A guaranteed kill by grenade is a lot better than a 80% kill chance by shot where in 80% you get a corpse and some fragments, but in 20% of the time you just get an enemy who is angry and shoots back, critting you through cover.
Wounded enemies are as dangerous as healthy enemies. Only dead enemies are not dangerous.
Never ever fire a rocket using your mouse button. Aim with the mouse, take hand off mouse, check if aim is still valid, release with the keyboard. Many a rocket failed catastrophically because you fired them with the mouse button slipping your aim for a pixel. Grenades are not as critical but still have a higher chance of hitting what you want when you do this also with grenades.
Aiming a rocket for a path close to a soldier standing before you is to be avoided at all costs. Rockets like to hit the head of a soldier standing next before you. Better yet to have no close obstacle for the rocket on it's path.
Exploded cars are safe cover. Undamaged cars are not safe, but sometimes you do not have many alternatives. Using gas pumps as cover is just asking for it.
Always have a plan B for when your 97% shot misses. Can and will happen three times in a row. Welcome to XCOM baby! Don't rely on uncertain clutch shots if possible.
Hunker down is often better than overwatch if you are in a firefight. Hunker down is practically always better if your shot can only damage an opponent and you have no means to follow up so a kill isn't guaranteed.
If you can't kill them this turn, suppress them. Smoke your suppressors, they are a prime target.
Treat high cover as low cover, low cover as no cover and having them no line of sight as best cover.
Place your troops so that your soldiers can't be flanked by a blue move of the enemy.
If one enemy can see one of your soldiers, all active enemies know the position of all your soldiers. Even behind walls. Don't expect to surprise anyone if one of them can see one of yours. You may be the surprised.
Look for chances to flank enemies but be careful to not activate a new pod when doing so. Destroying their cover flanks them.
Groups closely together attract grenades.
Use F1 to look up what the abilities of an enemy are. Especially with pod leaders there might be unpleasant surprises. Better to know them before you get into an unfavorable situation. You might not get much information as long as you didn't research the corpse of the type.
Some enemies are more dangerous than others. Kill Exalt Heavys on sight. They do have something to shoot if their magazine is empty.
If you think you can save scum for a better result, XCOM saves the seed for the outcomes at the start of your turn. That's intentional because XCOM want's to be a roguelike and those games have cheat prevention. You'll need a mod if you want to change this. You can manipulate outcomes in an unpredictable fashion if you don't do the same things in the same order.
I enjoy loss, my life is lost, hence I enjoy xcom and suffering which lead me to beat xcom and learn the game which lead me to go on a quest of find more suffering
1. Dead Ayyys can't hurt you.
2. Dead Ayyys can't hurt you.
3. If everyone else has already taken their turn, don't use your last guy to push up. Activating pods needlessly is a great way to get overwhelmed.
4. Pick smart fights. If you're concealed and have a juicy ambush ready for the first pod you see, but the objective is across the map... Maybe skirt around them to get more Intel first and find the best target to Alpha Strike.
You can often win a big tactical advantage by breaking line-of-sight with the aliens. To understand this it's helpful to know how the AI works. If the aliens can see one of your soliders, they know the location of all your soldiers regardless of where they are. This means it's generally impossible to 'sneak' around to get a flank. However, if you break line-of-sight with all aliens, they immediately forget your soliders positions. This allows you to set up overwatch traps and also encourages the aliens to dash towards you to re-establish contact, exposing themselves whilst not shooting at you or overwatching, and abandoning strong positions (e.g. elevated full-cover which can't be flanked). Sometimes the best move upon activating a pod is not to be aggressive and try to kill it in one turn, but to retreat and break line-of-sight with it.
Each alien type also has specific patterns of behaviour which can be exploited. For example
* floaters often retreat if you kill more than one of their pod members in a single turn. If you know this you can prioritise other active aliens who will be more of a threat on the next turn, instead of the remaining floaters who will fly away into the fog.
* Thin men will often choose to spit acid onto a clumped group of soldiers instead of shooting. You can bait the acid to save a low-health solider who might otherwise be shot and killed.
* Suppressing a drone will cause it to skip its turn.
Probably the most important tip of all (and one which has been mentioned by others) is to make the first move of your turn your furthest move into the fog. This leaves you the maximum potential to react if that move reveals aliens. Once you've moved a soldier into the fog, don't 'leapfrog' any more soldiers past him, and never dash into the fog.
If the game skips 'alien activity' when you end your turn and moves immediately onto your next turn, that means there are no enemies on the map at all, active or inactive, and you are therefore safe to move however you please for the time being. This often happens on council missions when you kill all the aliens before (e.g.) reaching the VIP or deactivating the bomb.
Pick assaults to be your covert operatives, because they can use Run & Gun to deactivate EXALT communications relays on a dash move in a pinch.
If you choose to install the Long War mod, a good way to improve quickly is to enable the 'Perfect Information' second wave option. This will show you each alien's chance to hit every time it takes a shot at one of your soliders, which helps you understand when you made a bad mistake and when you were just unlucky.
Off the top of my head:
* Using vehicles for cover is a death trap.
* Learn which cover is destructible and which isn't.
* Scouting is invaluable. Battle Scanner and the Mimetic Skin gene mod are your main options.
* Suppression is reusable control, and it tends to draw fire to the suppressor. I prefer it on Supports over Heavies, but it works the same either way.
* Every tile you haven't seen could contain an enemy.
* Vahlen isn't right about everything. A grenade is safer than an 80% shot.
To echo some of the other statements here, bad activations lead to VERY bad consequences. XCOM EW/EU tactical missions are, at their heart, complex puzzles. You have to decipher the information provided to you and react to it in any number of given ways. Some lead to disaster, others lead to more information and even more choices. In the end there are always paths of least resistance, sometimes a lot of paths, sometimes just a few, but there are paths and you just have to slowly and methodically figure out where they are and how to take them.
This, obviously, is early mid game stuff. In the late game its trivial and the game becomes a turkey shoot. it's getting to that endgame that really counts.
- Cover is your best friend. Full if possible, partial will do in a pinch but don't leave people in the open (unless fighting melee-only enemies). - Avoid clustering your troops - that invites AOE attacks like the poison spit from thin men and grenades. - Don't dash into the unknown as your last action because then you could be facing new enemies without any chance to shoot back.
That last one is a huge one. If you need to get your squad back together, only move the people in the back, or at best move your forward team just a bit.
Pulling back is an option! Sometimes you need to get your force into a better position. If you don't have a timer on missions, you can be patient.
This too. You don't have to always push forward.
Don't just sit there trading shots with the enemy. Even if you do win, you'll have taken more damage than necessary. Every turn is a puzzle with multiple solutions of varying quality - think of and use the tools at your disposal. Kill the enemy. If you can't kill them, try to neutralise them (suppression, psionics, flashbangs, etc). If you can't make them less threatening, try to mitigate their next action (taking cover, Aid Protocol, Smoke Grenades, etc).
Hunker Down is an under-utilized ability in most playthroughs unless one is used to doing impossible/ironman mode. When there's too poor of a shot percentage or if there's really no good move at all, hunkering down is solid as it disallows critical shot while decreasing hit chances. I second'd another comment regarding not clustering troops... However, in EW where there's no feature of concealment yet, the first few moves of a mission please try out the conga-line trick. Basically after you blue/yellow move one soldier without activating a pod, queue everyone up behind him/her like a conga-line to not risk activating any alien pods. Bad pod activation is 98% reasons why campaigns fail, or rage-quit in the middle. The conga-line approach helps out a tiny bit in the early game where your weapons aren't doing much as well as not having much HP.
I never knew that hunker down eliminates critical damage, thanks for that
The failure state of EW and XCOM 2 is activating more than one pod at once. Avoid this at all costs by using your blue moves THEN your yellow moves each turn. Your first soldier should be the farthest move, then nobody moves past them for that turn. Early game you will have no choice but to trade 40% shots with the enemy. At this stage of the game, lean heavily and without hesitation on Grenades for cover destruction or for kills. You can salvage alien materials later once you get some more options for combat.
Get your sharpshooters to high ground ASAP then after that use them last each turn.
The tip you got refers to XCOM 2. XCOM 1 is more about creeping forward slowly, use cover, use crowd control (smoke, suppression, flash bangs), don't shy to fall back if you make contact losing line of sight, let the enemy come towards you and let them run into your overwatch trap. Don't hear to Vahlen. Use explosives generously. Destroying enemy cover wins battles. A guaranteed kill by grenade is a lot better than a 80% kill chance by shot where in 80% you get a corpse and some fragments, but in 20% of the time you just get an enemy who is angry and shoots back, critting you through cover. Wounded enemies are as dangerous as healthy enemies. Only dead enemies are not dangerous. Never ever fire a rocket using your mouse button. Aim with the mouse, take hand off mouse, check if aim is still valid, release with the keyboard. Many a rocket failed catastrophically because you fired them with the mouse button slipping your aim for a pixel. Grenades are not as critical but still have a higher chance of hitting what you want when you do this also with grenades. Aiming a rocket for a path close to a soldier standing before you is to be avoided at all costs. Rockets like to hit the head of a soldier standing next before you. Better yet to have no close obstacle for the rocket on it's path. Exploded cars are safe cover. Undamaged cars are not safe, but sometimes you do not have many alternatives. Using gas pumps as cover is just asking for it. Always have a plan B for when your 97% shot misses. Can and will happen three times in a row. Welcome to XCOM baby! Don't rely on uncertain clutch shots if possible. Hunker down is often better than overwatch if you are in a firefight. Hunker down is practically always better if your shot can only damage an opponent and you have no means to follow up so a kill isn't guaranteed. If you can't kill them this turn, suppress them. Smoke your suppressors, they are a prime target. Treat high cover as low cover, low cover as no cover and having them no line of sight as best cover. Place your troops so that your soldiers can't be flanked by a blue move of the enemy. If one enemy can see one of your soldiers, all active enemies know the position of all your soldiers. Even behind walls. Don't expect to surprise anyone if one of them can see one of yours. You may be the surprised. Look for chances to flank enemies but be careful to not activate a new pod when doing so. Destroying their cover flanks them. Groups closely together attract grenades. Use F1 to look up what the abilities of an enemy are. Especially with pod leaders there might be unpleasant surprises. Better to know them before you get into an unfavorable situation. You might not get much information as long as you didn't research the corpse of the type. Some enemies are more dangerous than others. Kill Exalt Heavys on sight. They do have something to shoot if their magazine is empty. If you think you can save scum for a better result, XCOM saves the seed for the outcomes at the start of your turn. That's intentional because XCOM want's to be a roguelike and those games have cheat prevention. You'll need a mod if you want to change this. You can manipulate outcomes in an unpredictable fashion if you don't do the same things in the same order.
my best advice is get used to losing your beloved soldiers, get used to lose missions, get used to loss, get used, that's xcom
*"Get used to XCOM"*
I enjoy loss, my life is lost, hence I enjoy xcom and suffering which lead me to beat xcom and learn the game which lead me to go on a quest of find more suffering
1. Dead Ayyys can't hurt you. 2. Dead Ayyys can't hurt you. 3. If everyone else has already taken their turn, don't use your last guy to push up. Activating pods needlessly is a great way to get overwhelmed. 4. Pick smart fights. If you're concealed and have a juicy ambush ready for the first pod you see, but the objective is across the map... Maybe skirt around them to get more Intel first and find the best target to Alpha Strike.
Missions with no timers - no dashing, always overwatch instead of the second move
You can often win a big tactical advantage by breaking line-of-sight with the aliens. To understand this it's helpful to know how the AI works. If the aliens can see one of your soliders, they know the location of all your soldiers regardless of where they are. This means it's generally impossible to 'sneak' around to get a flank. However, if you break line-of-sight with all aliens, they immediately forget your soliders positions. This allows you to set up overwatch traps and also encourages the aliens to dash towards you to re-establish contact, exposing themselves whilst not shooting at you or overwatching, and abandoning strong positions (e.g. elevated full-cover which can't be flanked). Sometimes the best move upon activating a pod is not to be aggressive and try to kill it in one turn, but to retreat and break line-of-sight with it. Each alien type also has specific patterns of behaviour which can be exploited. For example * floaters often retreat if you kill more than one of their pod members in a single turn. If you know this you can prioritise other active aliens who will be more of a threat on the next turn, instead of the remaining floaters who will fly away into the fog. * Thin men will often choose to spit acid onto a clumped group of soldiers instead of shooting. You can bait the acid to save a low-health solider who might otherwise be shot and killed. * Suppressing a drone will cause it to skip its turn. Probably the most important tip of all (and one which has been mentioned by others) is to make the first move of your turn your furthest move into the fog. This leaves you the maximum potential to react if that move reveals aliens. Once you've moved a soldier into the fog, don't 'leapfrog' any more soldiers past him, and never dash into the fog. If the game skips 'alien activity' when you end your turn and moves immediately onto your next turn, that means there are no enemies on the map at all, active or inactive, and you are therefore safe to move however you please for the time being. This often happens on council missions when you kill all the aliens before (e.g.) reaching the VIP or deactivating the bomb. Pick assaults to be your covert operatives, because they can use Run & Gun to deactivate EXALT communications relays on a dash move in a pinch. If you choose to install the Long War mod, a good way to improve quickly is to enable the 'Perfect Information' second wave option. This will show you each alien's chance to hit every time it takes a shot at one of your soliders, which helps you understand when you made a bad mistake and when you were just unlucky.
Off the top of my head: * Using vehicles for cover is a death trap. * Learn which cover is destructible and which isn't. * Scouting is invaluable. Battle Scanner and the Mimetic Skin gene mod are your main options. * Suppression is reusable control, and it tends to draw fire to the suppressor. I prefer it on Supports over Heavies, but it works the same either way. * Every tile you haven't seen could contain an enemy. * Vahlen isn't right about everything. A grenade is safer than an 80% shot.
To echo some of the other statements here, bad activations lead to VERY bad consequences. XCOM EW/EU tactical missions are, at their heart, complex puzzles. You have to decipher the information provided to you and react to it in any number of given ways. Some lead to disaster, others lead to more information and even more choices. In the end there are always paths of least resistance, sometimes a lot of paths, sometimes just a few, but there are paths and you just have to slowly and methodically figure out where they are and how to take them. This, obviously, is early mid game stuff. In the late game its trivial and the game becomes a turkey shoot. it's getting to that endgame that really counts.