Xenonauts 2 – Beginners Guide

Defeating an alien invasion is no easy task, even if you know what you’re doing – and if you don’t, it’s even harder! This guide is intended to help you understand the basic principles of Xenonauts 2 so you can concentrate on winning the war.

Guide for New Players

Setting Your Expectations

Choose an appropriate difficulty: this is not an easy game, so if you’re not familiar with the classic X-Com mechanics then start with Recruit for your first campaign (or Soldier if you’ve played a lot of the modern XCOM games).

Prepare for Casualties: expect to take heavy casualties, particularly in the early months. The situation improves a little once your soldiers have access to Warden Armour and eventually Guardian Armour, but Xenonauts is far more of a meatgrinder than XCOM – it’s okay to lose soldiers if you keep winning missions!

Starting the Campaign

• Play the Tutorial: make sure you play the tutorial at the start of your first campaign. It isn’t long, and it explains the basic controls for the strategy and tactical layer.
• Base Location: your first base should be placed in a location that maximises the amount of land covered by your radars and aircraft. Generally this means placing the base somewhere equatorial, either covering North / South America, Europe and Africa / Middle East, or the Soviet Union and Asia.
• Upgrading Your Base: it’s worth upgrading your starting base with some new facilities. Take a look at the different base structures you can build and consider building some or all of the following:
  • Medical Center: possibly the most important building of all. This speeds up soldier healing rate, and increases the survival chance of any soldiers killed in action – and you’ll probably have a lot of hurt / dead soldiers!
  • Living Quarters: this is almost essential. Make sure you place it next to your existing Living Quarters to get the adjacency bonus!
  • Laboratory: expanding your science team to speed up your research speed is usually a good plan, particularly as scientists now generate money if there’s no research for them to do.
  • Radar: each additional Radar building you construct will extend the range of your base radar, up to a maximum of three. You don’t need to do this immediately, but it’s certainly worth considering.
• Research: you should always be researching something if you can, so get started on Combat Vehicles. Once you win some tactical missions you’ll be given new research options.
• Soldiers: it’s worth taking a quick look at the brave bunch of heroes you’ll be marching into battle.
  • Check the carrying capacity of your soldiers. If they are over their carrying capacity, then remove a few items from their backpack until they aren’t (otherwise they will have a Time Units penalty). If they’ve got a lot of unused carrying capacity, give them heavier armour or some more equipment.
  • The various weapons / equipment items in the game usually have good tooltips that explain how best to use them, so give them a read. Most things are viable if used correctly, so experiment and find what works best for you!
  • The soldier recruitment pool refreshes monthly (although one new soldier is also added each time you hire one). Check to see there’s any soldiers in there with particularly good stats, and hire them if so. Most of the stats are valuable, with only Reflexes being a little less important than the others.

Combat Missions

The tactical combat is deep and rewarding, but it takes time to get used to it – particularly if you’ve played a lot of XCOM. Here’s a few tips:

• Keep troops close enough to support each other in combat, but not so close that an alien grenade will kill several of them at once.
• Soldiers have 90-degree vision cones, so remember to look around to check for aliens. It’s easy to walk right past one and get shot in the back if you don’t!
• Shooting a weapon doesn’t end your turn, so if you have Time Units remaining after shooting you can move your soldiers into a position where the enemy can’t hit them. Doorways and windows are great for this.
• Weapon damage is semi-randomised, ranging from between 50% of the base damage to 200% of the base damage.
• The maps are almost entirely destructible. The Demolition Grenade is great for removing walls or cover that may be blocking shot paths.
• If you meet a tough armoured enemy, throw a Demolition Grenade at them to remove their cover and break their armour before attacking them normally.
• Grenades and explosives will gib enemies and destroy their items, which loses you valuable resources – but this only happens an explosive scores the killing blow. If you injure them with grenades and finish them with a gun, you keep the items.
• Don’t worry too much about protecting civilians. The game doesn’t penalise you if they die.
• Ending your turn in a smoke cloud causes your soldier to take Stun Damage, and eventually fall unconscious. Running through smoke will also do this, but in smaller amounts – generally you’ll be fine if you don’t end your turn standing in smoke!
• The MARS vehicle is very powerful, so make sure you build one. The rocket pod is great for removing terrain and cover, and the secondary autorifle hits just as hard as standard soldier rifle.

Strategy Layer

• Your key strategic aim is to build additional bases to expand radar / aircraft coverage across the rest of the planet, as unattended UFOs will start to generate significant Panic once you reach the mid-game.
• Don’t feel like you need to capture every UFO you shoot down, especially if it feels like a chore. If it’s a new type of UFO, make sure you capture it – otherwise you can just claim the cash bounty unless you need the Alloys / Alenium.
• The fastest way to increase your monthly funding is to progress down the plot research projects (and the Cleaner missions).
• If you’re short on cash, you can sell your recovered items on the Stores screen. None of the recovered items are useful except for Alloys and Alenium (which you should never sell).
• You’ll want to hire some spare soldiers to cover for injuries / deaths during missions. However, be aware that most tactical missions last 72 hours on the Geoscape and newly recruited soldiers only take 48 hours to reach your base – so you can always hire new soldiers before going out on a mission!
• The effectiveness of soldier training increases as you capture more types of alien, so it’s worth setting up a Training Center and attempting to capture as many alien species as possible as you approach the mid-game.