X-COM: Apocalypse Strategy Guide/Printable version

X-COM: Apocalypse Strategy Guide

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General Tips

Agents

There are three sort of agents you can hire.

Humans

The standard agent. Most of your staff will be human. They are average agents for all things and a jack of all trades.

Mutants

Mutants are an interesting twist on human agents. They have more Psi energy, attack, and defense then standard human agents. However they have less health and strength then humans. As a result mutants make good psychers, but fit poorly in other agent roles.

Androids

Androids are agents with more health, strength, and accuracy then human agents. In addition to this, they have total immunity to psy attacks. However this comes at a severe cost, Android agents are unable to make psy attacks themselves, nor can they progress. In this sense, they are much like SHIVs in other X-COM games.

Equipment

Initial Equipment

Personnel Weapons

Megapol LawPistol

Quite decent in the first week, after that it's obsolete and should be avoided. As a single-handed weapon, it allows the use of a second item (grenade, medikit, a second gun) in the other hand without lowering accuracy.

Megapol Plasma Gun

Much better than it's predecessor. This gun never really becomes obsolete but it's not really not that effective. As a single-handed weapon, it allows the use of a second item (grenade, medikit, a second gun) in the other hand without lowering accuracy.

Marsec M4000 Machine Gun

The same thing can be said about this weapon as about the basic pistol, except on the higher difficulties where it's obsolete before the game starts.

Megapol Laser Sniper Gun

An excellent long range weapon. While it's damage capabilities leaves a lot of room for improvement just remember that if you miss damage will be exactly 0, so hitting is better than missing. While using this gun agents will progress relatively rapidly in their accuracy skills, making it a good weapon for training.

First Week

Tactical Combat

In the first week, ammunition is scarce. There should however be enough to go around unless you waste it. However if you decide to take the guns blazing full auto approach don't expect ammunition to last. Take every possible opportunity to conserve ammunition. A few explosive grenades would be a good idea to use when appropriate. After a bio-transport module has been created fit it on a craft and try to capture live aliens. The way to do this is to attack a live specimen with a stun grenade or stun grappler until it falls unconscious, and then finish the mission before it wakes up. Throwing more stun grenades will keep it unconscious for longer.

Strategical

Put some effort in bringing down at least one of every type of UFO that appear. Also, finish the bio-transport module as soon possible and put it on a craft, the better you can start bringing in live aliens for research the better.

Strategical Combat

This early on UFO's are easy to shoot down, but it won't stay this way. Scatter your vehicles over the city so they'll have a greater chance of being close to an UFO incursion, one or two hoverbikes each should be sufficient for the early UFO's.

Spoilers

All tips that are spoilers and can be placed here should be put here. Skip this entire chapter if you want as few spoilers as possible.

If you want money and experience points for your agents without using cheat codes:

Raid the Cult Sirius corporation over and over, their building will never been empty. They will never ally with you, so don't bother worrying about their wellbeing. With each raid you will recover some valuable Psi-clone and some equipment that you might sell.

Spoilers end here.

OpenApoc

What is OpenApoc

OpenApoc is a reimplementation of the X-COM: Apocalypse game engine which offers a number of improvements. Most importantly, this engine offers support for contemporary operating systems. This engines does not ship with game assets, so an official game disk is still required to use this engine.