I gotta say well done.
Yes gas is the best as far as knocking out the aliens, but you can dual wield stun grapplers, and in real time is when dual wielding really shines

Stun grapples are stunning! (In real time)

You were right, grapples with dual wielding is awesome !
Just put your squad right on the side of a ship door, full auto and ring the bell.

But explosive dogs, yikes.
The only issue is that my alien containment occupation immediately rised to 285%, I should have anticipate...

After a few raids, UFO drastically upgraded and I finally crashed them easily, no more complete obliteration. raiding Sirius looks like an exploit though.


But now I have an issue:
After an alien raid where I downed and recovered two type 4 (brown bell) and one type 3 (purple omelette), invasion went crazy: I cleaned 4 to 5 communicating building in a row. No more aliens to find but whatever I do, synth gets overtaken a few hours later.

Is losing organizations mandatory at some point ?
Maybe I should just bribe them with Sirius 'free coupons'.

Originally posted by PaulWarburg:

Is losing organizations mandatory at some point ?
Maybe I should just bribe them with Sirius 'free coupons'.

Depends. You can and should improve relations with other companies by bribing them, which buys you more time. However, there's some also some permanent decay every time you take relationship damage, and eventually companies will refuse to get bribed past certain levels, until at some point they become irreversibly hostile. This becomes a greater challenge at higher difficulty levels because bribes cost more and the city is made of taller buildings, which causes airspace battles to deal large amounts of damage to the city more easily.

It's much easier to complete the game without losing any companies at low difficulties, but high difficulty campaigns can easily end with one or more companies lost, Transtellar being an infamous one because road network damage easily causes damage to their relationship and once they're lost, you can't hire personnel anymore, and you have to survive the rest with who you have.

Making the CoS "pay for the wall" is definitely a viable strategy.

Originally posted by Trehek:

Depends. You can and should improve relations with other companies by bribing them, which buys you more time. However, there's some also some permanent decay every time you take relationship damage, and eventually companies will refuse to get bribed past certain levels, until at some point they become irreversibly hostile. This becomes a greater challenge at higher difficulty levels because bribes cost more and the city is made of taller buildings, which causes airspace battles to deal large amounts of damage to the city more easily.

It's much easier to complete the game without losing any companies at low difficulties, but high difficulty campaigns can easily end with one or more companies lost, Transtellar being an infamous one because road network damage easily causes damage to their relationship and once they're lost, you can't hire personnel anymore, and you have to survive the rest with who you have.

Making the CoS "pay for the wall" is definitely a viable strategy.

Thank you for this valuable insight.
Higher difficulties look really challenging. Finishing the campaign while struggling with crippled logistics and hostility raids, sheesh, Gollop really nailed the operational level of war.

So damaging roads costs money AND harms relationships with transtellar, yeepee.
I figured out two new things:
- synthmech kept falling to the aliens, even if ALL invaders were wiped out, for the simple reason that they have one direct connection tube to sirius. Raiding and crumbling their temple every day solved the problem. Working but still a pain.

- funnily enough, after another alien repelled raid, I had the energy-stuff company falling to them as well. I ran a complementary investigation in the same building, which worked: ONE worm was lying around. Sprotch, done. So this thing took a whole company, from 0 to 80% infiltration in one day, ALL BY ITSELF !

Lore wise, worms are really efficient.

Originally posted by PaulWarburg:

So damaging roads costs money AND harms relationships with transtellar, yeepee.
I figured out two new things:
- synthmech kept falling to the aliens, even if ALL invaders were wiped out, for the simple reason that they have one direct connection tube to sirius. Raiding and crumbling their temple every day solved the problem. Working but still a pain.

If you're raiding an organization for loot, never attack the building. Only send your troops in and fight them on foot. Attacking the building can cause a huge amount of financial damage to the organization, but I never found that important. But on the downside, it causes them to respond with their vehicles and the resulting air battle can cause relationship losses with surrounding organizations, potentially costing you anything you might've gained in bribes. Any damage you cause to the city also results in a point loss for the week.

The only time I would destroy a building would be when in extreme need, to manipulate relationships, which work on a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" basis. If an organization won't let you deal with them but you need to, you might be able to salvage the situation by attacking an enemy of said organization, which will cause your desired organization to view you more favorably for hurting their enemy. But you still need to tank the point loss.

Not sure if you were attacking the building, but it sounded like you might have, so all of this just as a heads up!

Originally posted by PaulWarburg:

- funnily enough, after another alien repelled raid, I had the energy-stuff company falling to them as well. I ran a complementary investigation in the same building, which worked: ONE worm was lying around. Sprotch, done. So this thing took a whole company, from 0 to 80% infiltration in one day, ALL BY ITSELF !

Lore wise, worms are really efficient.

Yep, they sure are! There's actually a reason for that, but IMO it's a fun detail you can find out later, so I won't spoil.

I don't use the land vehicles.
I use the flying main craft as crew / alien recovery/attack, and hoverbikes.
If you use slow / pause, then try turning off weapons as the enemy gets more damaged, so less likely to destroy.

When the alien ships are flying, watch them very closely.
When they stop and unload, you want to make a note of that building, and go search it for aliens.
You may wish to save first, as they get pissed if there are none.

Check the graph for infiltration rising and try searching for aliens in those buildings.
If several, see if they have adjacent buildings in same area - not sure if that is a thing though.