Tips, Tricks, Analysis, Strategy for UFO Aftershock
Skills Analysis
Ratings are generally biased towards early/midgame, since that’s where most of the difficulty is.
Solid long ranged accuracy but low overall DPS. Badly needs sniper 3 training to target heads and get crits. Until then its mostly of use against soft targets or for luring enemies to you. Even then the aimed shots take painfully long, and the longer the shot the more likely the enemy will walk behind some 2 inch post or something, your aim gets thrown off and the aiming timer is reset when you try to shoot something else. Remember that shooting will give away your position and enemy counter sniper fire can be deadly, so move behind cover for a few seconds after each shot if you’re fighting enemies that will shoot back.
Jack of all trades weapon and the closest thing to a long ranged weapon you can use without training. Can be used for short ranged combat in a pinch but does not do well at this and the first time you fail to down a target who fires back with a shotgun is going to get your rifleman killed. Has no real upsides vs. more specialized weapons and being mediocre at everything is not a winning strategy in general. In the late game does make a bit of a comeback with plasma/warp rifles, but by then all difficulty is long past gone. Use them early but do not focus your points on them.
Two separate weapons to talk about here, Shotguns and SMGs.
Shotguns are by far your best and most important weapon early in the early game and into the mid game. In the beginning on Super Hero difficulty most enemies will be able to outshoot you at range, and even if you win the fight getting shot at all and spending time healing means either less missions run or less XP for your most important characters. On the other hand the SPAS 15, on burst fire, wielded by even the lowliest recruit, lying in wait to ambush enemies coming around a corner or through a door, can take out virtually anything at next to zero risk. Two soldiers working together in this manner can keep up with an entire area’s worth of enemies rushing though that door, which they often will because shotguns are loud and attract attention. Note that you do not need much close combat skill for this since your chance to hit is always very high, you’re better off maximizing Enemy skill to do more damage. That’s the only reason Close Combat gets a 4/5, you don’t need it much until switching to SMGs.
SMGs are at first glance just a weaker rifle. Not nearly enough damage to handle close range encounters like a Shotgun while their accuracy drops off fast with range. But two of them wielded together with ambidexterity has DPS almost rivalling a shotgun, and high skill and weapon mods can extend range significantly. High rate of fire also means more chance for crits, which means more chances to automatically knock down enemies. Knocking down enemies consistently is almost an “I Win” button. By the time they get up you can shoot multiple other enemies, reload, retreat, call your mother and tell her you love her, whatever you want.
Grenades tend to be very weak at actually killing most things. Their main point is knocking groups of enemies down. They are good at this, but you don’t need skill to use them. Their explosive radius does the working of hitting enemies for you. It’s hard to even tell if throwing skill improves accuracy when aiming at the ground, which is what you’ll want to do to lead your targets properly.
Machine guns are the guy that Rifles and Sniper Rifles told you not to worry about. Higher range than a Rifle with no real drawbacks. Almost the range of a Sniper Rifle, more than you’ll usually need after getting high mechanical skill, but with twice the DPS. If you have someone with a machine gun taking 50% shots next to a sniper rifle taking 100% shots, the machine gun is probably contributing more to the fight. Higher rate of fire also maximizes the chance of critting, Only downside is that they aren’t as quick to fire as close combat weapons or rifles. Best used for massed, long ranged fire.
Not dying is good, mkay?
Healing outside battle is % based, so a higher health pool will allow you to heal faster and shrug off incidental small hits without getting taken out of the active squad.
Don’t underestimate dodge, it directly negates enemy weapon skill levels. It’s quite amusing seeing high level enemies 20 feet away miss constantly with a 15% hit chance thanks to super heroic dodge levels.
It’s pretty rare that you truly need speed. But poor or worse speed is a pain to deal with if it means one character is lagging behind. And 2 or 3 super heroic dual SMG characters can run around cleaning up missions in a matter of seconds.
You don’t need much of this to carry everything you want. Average is enough to wear medium armor and carry most weapons aside from machine guns.
These go hand in hand with similar purpose, seeing enemies before they see you. Possibly the most important stat at the start of the game, getting shot and often killed or downed out of nowhere by enemies on super hero difficulty is common. If you see them first you can get the first shot off with long ranged weapons or arrange to show yourself, quickly duck behind a corner, and ambush with a shotgun. Does fall off eventually since there’s no need to see significantly further than enemies, but is always handy to have.
Just useless. I’ve never run out of medkits to use in a mission.
Extremely important. Getting close enough or having high enough weapon skill or adding weapon mods can always be enough to push you to 100% accuracy in the ideal situations, but it can’t help your damage more than that. On the other hand your enemy skill is always increasing damage, all of the time. Especially important for close range combat where not getting a kill immediately often leads to a quick death.
Psi weapons are fairly weak and require your flimsy Psionic character to put herself far too close to the enemy to be safe. If the enemy uses psi weapons against you, thank them. While one of your characters is possibly risking the chance of being stunned the rest of your characters pound the stunner into dust. A lot better than taking actual damage, isn’t it?
I won’t go over what each attribute does, but if we plug in the ratings for each skill in for what each attribute affects, we come up with the following ratings:
Strength: 13 points
Dexterity: 9 points
Agility: 11.5 points
Willpower: 7 points
Intelligence: 11.5 points
Perception: 15.5 points
If we do it by only taking the highest value of each combat skill (since you will only be using one weapon most of the time), we get this instead:
Strength: 10.5 points
Dexterity: 7 points
Agility: 11 points
Willpower: 6.5 points
Intelligence: 11.5 points
Perception: 15.5 points
Take these ratings with a grain of salt. Synergies, trainings, and character purpose matter a lot. But I do highly recommend a good amount of Perception early on and eventually aiming for maxed Intelligence for everyone. And willpower is a pretty trash stat for anyone aside from snipers.
Trainings Analysis
Lets you use machine guns. Boosts machine guns. Requires Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence, all of which boost machine guns (and intelligence being a double boost thanks to increasing Enemy). Maybe use a mine or a rocket launcher once just to play around and see the wargots go flying around. For regular humans also allows for heavy armor which is a huge durability boost between when you unlock it and unlocking energy shields in the late game.
Absolutely everything synergizes here around one of the best weapons in the game.
First two levels are useless.
Level 3 massively improves out of combat healing rate if anyone you have has it, and is a good argument for hiring any level 3 medic you can get ASAP from any of the factions. Just having that nerd stuffed in a closet somewhere on the laputa cuts the maximum heal time for the most gravely wounded characters down to 24 hours.
Level 3 also lets you revive killed characters on the field. If you’re playing with self-enforced ironman rules this is a very good insurance policy. Otherwise its fairly irrelevant as by the time you unlock it your characters are likely quite competent, tanky, and unlikely to die.
3/5 rating is for including the Medic on your squad, there’s no reason to not have a medic on base.
Leader represents a conundrum. On the one hand, I consider high Enemy skill essential, and with leader you theoretically only need one character with maxed Enemy to give everyone the benefits. That’s potentially dozens of character skill points and levels saved.
But then lets think further. Lots of other good trainings already require intelligence (Stalker, Technician, Scout, Medic). In fact I would say that every good character wants at least one of those four. So everyone already needs a good amount of intelligence.
Additionally, Leader’s buff only works on characters the leader can see. This means that you either need 2 leaders, one for your close combat team and the other for your long ranged team, or only half the group can afford to avoid taking Enemy skill. Then you’d want an additional leader to act as backup for when the leader is either in healing or training. Not having high Enemy skill at all times is not acceptable, your whole group losing half of their damage because your leader wasn’t around is going to change an easy fight into a hellish one.
Put together, we either need to massively complicate our group lineup composition by including up to 4 leaders. Or we can just ignore leader, save the valuable training slot, and spend a few extra skill points on intelligence above what our other trainings require. I choose the latter option, but I can see an argument for integrating leader into at least one of the long ranged character positions.
Scout presents an interesting proposition. Scanning equipment lets you see basically every enemy’s location and potentially fire on them with impunity. This is an awesome thing, but that scanning equipment takes a long time to develop. By the time you have it you probably naturally out-vision most of your enemies anyway. And the only truly long-range enemies worth having a scanner for are cultist snipers, who you’ve probably been fighting and killing for hours by the time you can get scanning equipment found, finished, and your scout trained.
I’m giving this a 3/5 while also having not used it at all in my games. I can see the use, but it isn’t there for me.
Specialized Commando equipment is pretty trash. Automatic fire on shotguns already handles melee ranged fighting extremely well, and by the time you have the stat points to sprint across open fields you also have the stat points to make SMGs into practically long ranged weapons with a similar damage output.
+2 Dodge is cool, a kitted out ninja cyborg with Super Heroic +4 dodge is hilariously hard to hit. But you could also just be 10 feet further away shooting with a gun and the enemy chance to hit would drop similarly. Unfortunately other training combos are simply more useful for the two slots that cyborgs have.
The abilities as listed are all fairly weak to useless. But, contrary to what the game says, the increased crit rate appears to work on all guns. This makes Stalker 3 god-tier with rapid fire weapons likely to crit at least once with every burst. It’s a fairly consistent damage increase and absolutely humiliates slower enemies like Wargots who can’t get a single shot off before falling on their face. The attribute requirements of Agility, Perception and Intelligence are also naturally what you’d want to have on many characters.
Stalker should arguably be taken on everyone except snipers who can already guarantee a crit with Sniper 3 training, and getting it on a sniper is not out of the question thanks to 2 shot burst fire snapshots on the SR-25.
A class where every level is beneficial, strongly focused on a single powerful character build, and offers well-rounded bonuses. Dual wield SMGs and go to town. Perseverance keeps you on your feet and able to run away when going down in the heat of close quarters combat would mean instant death. Only downside is that the Willpower requirement is a… bit awkward. That’s not a stat we particularly want for SMGs.
The main benefit here is letting you wear heavy armor and use heavy weapons. Problem? Technician already does that, and Technician doesn’t require Willpower but rather substitutes the much more useful intelligence. The level 2 and 3 boosts are nice but I can’t see an argument for taking this over Technician because the stats just don’t work out well enough for what it gives. Remember, machine gunners are fairly long ranged characters, they aren’t the ones who need a ton of HP or are likely to be in danger of being knocked around by explosives.
We don’t want rifles or rockets. If we did, we’d make the character a Technician Machinegunner instead, and we’d be able to not spend points on willpower to boot.
It makes you a sniper. Getting a long ranged headshot is juicy damage. Sniper rifles are not the best weapon, but they are probably the only thing you want a Psionic to be doing since it keeps them safe and lines up with their usual starting statline, if they don’t already start with sniper training. Thankfully at least the attribute requirement for willpower here is in synergy with the weapon, and so are the dexterity and perception requirements.
Psionic: Rating 2/5
Details covered in the next section.
Character Race Analysis
Humans start off armorless, with light armor and helmet being slightly better than Cyborg basic armor. Medium armor is potentially obtainable fairly early and makes them quite tanky for the early game. Light armor + two energy shields makes for the maximum potential durability of any character, but this is extreme late game tech. Heavy armor is needed to be truly survivable in the mid game, but this requires either gunman or technician training to unlock which aren’t ideal to take on close combat characters. Heavy armor will also likely require you to invest in carry capacity, which will then be wasted when you switch back to light armor with energy shields.
Being able to pick 3 trainings is an advantage. This makes them able to flexibly act as a leader, scout, or medic while still having two other combat-focused trainings. But it requires a lot of stats unless you want to take suboptimal trainings.
Humans do have a larger inventory size. Physical size, not carry capacity. That’s… great, I guess?
Summary: Humans can be a bit odd to fit in as the most flexible class that doesn’t excel in anything and has bumpy progression with armor and tech.
Technician/Stalker/Medic. Req 24 attribute points, reachable at level 15
Technician/Stalker/Scout. Req 25 attribute points, reachable at level 16.
Technician/Stalker/Leader. Req 25 attribute points, reachable at level 16.
Around 30% more health than Humans.
Arm/Leg implants can add +2 strength or dexterity in hand slots and +2 strength or agility in leg slots. This is huge and is like adding 4 free levels. Some of which will go into making you more effective with your weapon and some of which will go into either pumping health even higher or giving you more mobility/dodge. Additionally this stat increase can be swapped out (don’t believe the game’s lies about only being able to upgrade) to qualify for trainings, including training cyborg itself.
Arm Implant Chipset can add +1 long rifle, rifle, throwing, close combat, or give ambidexterity. Note that getting ambidexterity through this is extremely powerful, but is effectively sacrificing +2 close combat vs. training in Ranger.
Eye Implant can add +1 long rifle, +1 observation, or various vision augments. This is… OK I guess? Kind of funny that cyborgs can even be better snipers than anyone else, but there’s not much reason to use them that way.
Cyborgs start with decent armor and can get their advanced armor fairly quickly if you’re investing in their research, which is almost as good as human heavy armor.
Only issue is that it tends to be difficult to hire high level cyborgs that have ideal stat lines (good intelligence/perception) without having bad trainings that you don’t want. Pick out good level 1 hires as soon as they are available and train them up, or else you’ll have to wait several extra levels before being able to max out your trainings.
Summary: Hands down the strongest race for most purposes. Incredibly durable, tons of stat increases everywhere. Other races dream of being able to reach Super Heroic +3 or +4 in their weapon skills. The main argument against running all Cyborgs is that having 7 identical clones gets to be a bit tiresome.
Cyborg/Stalker/Technician. Req 23 attribute points. With attribute shifting through implants you only need 19 attribute points though, reachable at level 10.
Cyborg/Stalker/Ranger. Req 28 skill points. With attribute shifting the requirement is 23 attribute points, reachable at level 14. Keep in mind that you can use your ambidexterity chipset to replicate Ranger while at lower level.
Around 20% less health than humans and armor made of paper makes them fragile as hell. A single shot that a would barely register on a cyborg can put a psionic into the medbay for a day. This makes them practically unusable for any role except snipers, a role in which they are still fairly likely to explode into a red smoke if they ever shot back by a sniper returning fire.
Circlets can add boosts against enemies that the Psionic can see. Issue here is that the psionic seeing the enemy is a little dangerous, though psionically “seeing” the enemy through walls does count. The damage circlet appears to be about a 20% damage increase, the accuracy circle about 5-10% chance to hit increase, no idea what the accuracy penalty to enemies is.
Trueshot vambraces add +1 Long Range skill. Which is what your psionic should be using since they need to stay in the back.
The more complex item equipments are either not working, are finnicky and seem to fail to work half the time, or are just of utterly marginal value. For example it’d be cool if Escape collar could work to get someone downed out of combat, but it hasn’t for me when I’ve tested and by the time you get it you’re probably not in danger of dying with well built characters. On the plus side this means you don’t really need to train Psionics past level 1 or 2.
One nice aspect is that your higher level pregenerated psionic character hiring options tend to be focused on exactly what you’d use them for, so there aren’t many “wasted” levels. Higher level ones can also come with their psionic equipment, most importantly circlets, which lets you potentially get them before you’ve even built a psionics lab. Maybe you never build one at all.
Summary: Use them as snipers to take advantage of 1 or 2 team boosts through circlets. Be very careful against Cultist snipers. Or just don’t use them, it’s really just fine either way. Circlets really sound better than they actually are
Psionic/Sniper/Medic. Req 18 attribute points, reachable at level 9.
Psionic/Sniper/Scout. Req 19 attribute points, reachable at level 10.
Psionic/Sniper/Leader. Req 18 attribute points, reachable at level 9.
Battlescape Tactics
– The name of the game early on is Spas 15 burst fire shotgun ambushing. It’s the closest thing you can get to a “free” kill in terms of not getting hurt. Most things in the game tend to die when you put 2000 to 4000 points of damage into them. Shotguns can properly reload individual shots rather than rotating magazines like most other weapons, so constantly doing so while in downtime to top off your ammo supply is a good idea.
– Get in the habit of queuing up the watch order after every movement.
– You can “savescum” a number of things. Chiefly among them is the mission type you get offered when you click the mission button. Early on you can get a lot of help in missions and free guns by specifically doing missions where you assist friendly forces.
– When assisting friendlies, you can knock them unconscious and or kill them to take their weapons. Just finish the mission objective first, do your thing, and accept the reward before the last one dies, its fine if you knock them unconscious. In particular this will get you laser sniper rifles from psionics and machine guns from cyborgs. Kniving them works for this.
– Constantly infuriated by your soldiers losing track of their target? It works just as well against the enemy. Attract their attention with one character and then duck behind a corner to reset their aim.
– Running away is usually an option. I don’t mean aborting the mission, just literally running away. Unless the enemy has snipers or machine guns their aim is just as screwed as yours is adding just a little extra distance between you. Some won’t follow, some will, but will be a lot simpler to fight when they are walking straight towards you in a line together.
– Make sure to take lasers on any mission that involves capturing. Reticulan rifles for the early game, later giving laser sniper rifles to your snipers works well.
Muckstars are the bane of your existence, even with good perception they’ll often seem to just zap you out of nowhere from long range. Unless you have the ability to immediately retaliate with accurate long ranged fire, retreat behind nearby cover and ambush them.
Everything else is fairly straightforward to fight. Just pay attention to what weapon Morelmen are holding. If its a shotgun then they will be able to one shot anyone who gets into close range without strong armor. Even with strong armor it’ll hurt like hell.
It doesn’t take too much perception to see them before they see you. Once you cross that threshold they fairly quickly go from deadly to a piece of cake. Their lasers don’t even do much real damage to you if you do get hit. Pay attention to what they are holding once they start to acquire rocket launchers though.
Your first battle against cultists is arguably the hardest in the game, or at least close to tied with the first handful of battles with level 1 characters. Deploy next to a structure if possible and rush in immediately with close combat characters. Then slowly move and scout other structures, spotting for snipers to take out what they can, with snipers retreating behind cover after every shot to avoid counter sniper fire. If any enemy groups are roaming around outside structures wait and try to snipe or ambush them before breaching structures. Doing cultist missions gets you important tech and usually finds great weapon addons so try not to put them off.
Wargots basically act as a DPS/build check. If you have high DPS and/or lots of critting then they are laughably easy, being so slow and dumb that you make mincemeat of them while they flail about unable to get a shot off before you’ve sent a whole group of them to the floor. If you don’t have those then you’ll be overwhelmed with an excess of HP walking towards you. Bear in mind that you can usually just run away, and masses of slowly moving clumped up wargots is quite the good opportunity for a well placed grenade.
I really have no advice for these beyond bringing an energy weapon for the projectile immune starghost. Projectile weapons aren’t great against some of the more common variants but by the time Starghosts show up you’ll undoubtably have an extremely well kitted out group that outputs thousands of damage per second. They aren’t especially deadly to you except at very close range, so just shoot them until they die.
Geoscape Strategy
– Spread out the regions you control as much as possible. Each region bordering yours has a small chance to be revealed every few hours. The more regions you border, the more you’ll discover automatically and the quicker you can expand. Use your mission button that force explores regions over a period of time to work your way around the globe quickly as possible.
– Get to France first, then concentrate on taking all of the port connections, then go west through North America to get to the ports on the west coast and take them to connect to Asia.
– Only bases need to be connected by tracks.
– Resource income is boosted by knowledge. For most bases you’ll want to build a library, then two colleges, then delete the library and let the colleges sustain each other. Resource-heavy bases (like central Europe), or ones with lots of resources that are rare for you (usually psionics) may even want all colleges. The improvement seems to be multiplicative with each college.
– At the start of the game request the matching resource every time you do a mission for a faction. You can get around 1k per mission and it really helps you get a head start on buildings if you can get a decent stockpile of 5k or so, more if your starting province income with a resource is low. This allows you to invest in the colleges you need to further boost your resource rate and get things moving quickly. Once you have colleges you’ll probably have a big excess of two of the resources that can be used to bribe factions.
– When a mission is for a Human/Cyborg/Psionic region its entirely random whether success results in the region flipping to your control or not. It can happen on the first one, or it could take 5+. This is savescummable if you quicksave before hitting finish mission. You can also choose to savescum until the province doesn’t join, allowing you to do more missions for more XP and to improve diplomatic relations.
– If you’re sure you’re fine with pissing off your friendly factions it’s OK to do missions that anger them. I don’t recommend it, but if you’ve hired all you want of their characters and don’t need their resources, it’s an option. They tend to be pretty difficult fights on par with Cultists though and without the significant rewards of fighting cultists. Otherwise refuse to fight them and wait a few hours for the mission to clear before spawning a new one and checking if its a better one.
– Once you’re able push the cultists back to a single base province, but don’t take it. They’ll just magically respawn and take your land back. You will need to do a plot related mission on the cultist base at some point but this does not result in taking it and won’t wipe them out and force a respawn.
– Once you’ve conquered the world and finished the Wargot plotline I highly recommend installing a mod to reduce research times. There’s not much left to the game aside from passing time waiting for tech to finish up while hundreds of tedious starghost missions spawn.
First go for the libraries and the rest of the knowledge buildings.
Second, get 2-4 Jet propulsion labs for the Laputa size upgrade. 5 to 7 squad size is a big jump, especially on the rescue or capture missions where you’re down a spot. Every mission you finish without the upgrade means missing out on free experience, nevermind the missions being harder to finish. You can delete the labs once you’re done, but don’t be a dumbass like me and forget that they existed then wonder why you’re stuck in tech progression for several days of game time. You are going to need them again eventually to progress the plot.
Weapon labs can be almost entirely avoided for the early part of the game. You’re gonna get most of the weapons you need just lying around, you won’t need to build them. You’ll need to produce ammo eventually but there’s not much rush, especially if you’re… “farming” friendlies. The main draw is to get the research requirements to get to advanced weapon labs, which unlock medium and heavy armor for your humans.
Energy weapon research is needed to unlock medium armor. Otherwise its mostly ignorable until a certain enemy requiring energy damage shows up.
Implants are probably the best early investment you can do if you use cyborgs. It’s directly adding stats in a way no other research can while also unlocking great armor for them.
Psionics research can be mostly avoided, potentially completely if you get the items for free from hiring high level Psionic characters.
And that wraps up our share on UFO: Aftershock: UFO Aftershock Build and Strategy guide. If you have any additional insights or tips to contribute, don’t hesitate to drop a comment below. For a more in-depth read, you can refer to the original article here by ULTRAKRILL, who deserves all the credit. Happy gaming!