Xenonauts – Veteran Difficulty Tips

Tips for Veteran Difficulty

Playing X-division, which is basically a longer and harder xenonauts experience, so I guess my advices can help.

• As it was said before, wining the air battle is the most important thing. You said it yourself, with 2 aircraft per base, you can’t handle alien ships once they start to ramp up. That means you need way more aircrafts. Even basics f17 and bombers can fare fairly well in 1v1 against anything that isn’t a dedicated fighter. In most case, once you are behind the ennemy ship, it’s over for them as you can usually turn faster than them and stay behind.
• Interesting to note than retreating from an airfight don’t mean losing it. For exemple if you can’t protect your bomber from the escort of a big ship, you can actually send fighters and bombers in two waves. Fighters draw attention from aliens fighters and fight them out of range from the big ship, then retreat. Bombers come in, deliver their payload and if the target is still flying, retreat to rearm. An other wave of bombers can finish the job, or if you are lucky they can rearm and come back before the hard target leave the planet or finish it’s bombing mission. Also sometimes even damaging a bomber or terror ship is enough to force them to abandon their mission.
• Downing ships gives more fundings, and raiding ships also inscrease fundings. So unless you can’t reach the crashsite in time you should never airstrike it. If you destroy most alien ships in each waves, you should gain more and more income so you can keep increasing your fleet, labs and workshops. Thats why having a base in each major landmass (IE : america, europe/africa, asia/russia ) ASAP is optimal. I usually get Europ HQ, then build USA and Asia first month, only proveide them with a radar, 2 f17 and a squad and chinnok each until I can afford more aircrafts or second researchers and ingeneers groups.
• About income, you should alway try to tackle terror missions. If you do you won’t get punished as much for dying civilians. retreating is okay. But you don’t try it, the city will get nuked ad you’ll lose about 250k fundings from the country.

When you hit phase 2 the alien will start to bomb cities, so need a decent fleet by that time to fight thoses bombers or you’ll lose all your hard earned fundings. Keep that in mind as you select your researches.

Now about the ground fights!

My go to composition at start:

• 4 Shields
• 2 Lmgs
• 3 Shotguns
• 1 Vehicle

IMO snipers are useless. can’t shoot after moving, can’t move after shooting, not enough damage at long range. Aliens will almost never walk in their killing range.

Shields are great as they can get hit a few times in short range before beeing destroyed, and can take even more hit at medium/long range. Pistol is usefull in close range both as reaction fire and Damage, as they can shoot up to 6 time per round. They can also bring a electric stick at their waist, and switch at need to capture aliens. When you want to capture an alien, I use waht I like to call the “CRS strategy”: Supress it with LMG or flashbang, then send 4 guys with shield and sticks to suround him and beat him down on the ground until he stops to move. Works wonder I swear.

Shotgun are really good. Supress an alien, run at them, put you canon in their mouth and unload your chamber until they stop to move. You can also grab their weapons if you want.

LMGs are very usefull. Can easily destroy walls, can easily supress fire, can easily destroy anyone if you shoot pointblank. Not as efficient as other classes at medium range, but IMO that’s not their role. Their role is to supress ennemies so they won’t rush nade your team.

If a shield get crounched, you can put a LMG guy behind to shoot at targets and he will be protected by the shield.

Tank is great to uncover aliens and take a few reaction shots instead of your mens. It can easily supress target at range. And kill anyone in one burst if you manage to shoot pointblank. Or you can use it as a building destruction tool with rockets launchers. Also it can destroy this nasty ship door by moving on it when it’s open.

Smokes works again ceasan (and andron if I remember). Each smoke tile between you and target is 20% less chance to hit. So in most case, one or two smoke tiles are enough to be mostly safe (won’t save you point blank, as the bullet has nowher else to go besides your body).

For assaulting a ship. I generally shoot at the door with LMGs and Tank machine gun to supress anyone camping behind. Then I open it with a shield, and either try to stun them or kill them. If they are not all down, I try to get my shields in front and toss a smoke on them. As the surviving aliens are supressed and can’t really hit because of the smoke, they usually panick and move in place.

If have gaz rockets, shoot at the door, the gaz will leak inside and stun any campers behind. Just wait a few turns until gaz dissipate.

If you are against andron… them bad luck I think only smokes and shields can help you to mitigate the reaction fire. C4 works wonder but will completelly destroy them. You can try a first rocket to soften they armor/HO then shoot with conventional weapons. Obviously, IEM them to death if you have unlocked the relevant technologies.