Video Game / The XCOM Files

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The X-Com Files is a total conversion mod for OpenXcom, greatly inspired by Piratez, and utilising the same engine fork.

The story starts in mid-1990s, a few years before the UFO Enemy Unknown canon. X-Com is created by the same Council of Nations as an international paranormal investigation agency. With 5 scientists monitoring the news and 2 field agents travelling all over the world by public transport. Prepare to fight Obstructive Bureaucrats at every step.

The investigations would eventually conclude there is a common malicious force behind the monsters, zombies, UFOs and cults, and the organisation would be expanded to become the X-Com we know. Except that Cydonian aliens aren't the only threat. Far from it.

The mod is available for free here. You'll need the original files from UFO: Enemy Unknown. The development goes in "arcs" — more or less independent subplots that can be played through separately. As of version 0.9.2 (June of 2018) the author stated the game is 90% finished with 11 arcs winnable out of 17 planned (counting the main plot to defeat Martian base).

The mod provides examples of the following:

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Most of the unique swords, as well as the later Tritanium Swords you can forge, are insanely effective at cleaving through man-sized armor. Kevlar vests and heavy ballistic plates? Tritanium armor? Muton muscle-fibre armor? Sectopod and Turret armored hulls? With enough Strength and Melee skill, even a mundane Katana or Wakizashi can split all that wide open.
  • The Ancient Katana takes the cake: it does 50 base cutting damage (which is as good as a Trititanium Sword), and gets a power bonus of 70% of the user's melee accuracy and 30% of the user's psionic strength. If used by someone with a high psionic strength and reasonable melee accuracy, that means a sword that hits for well over 120 points of damage...while also increasing the user's melee accuracy to cause even more damage in the future.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Cyberweb hideouts. Wide enough to drive several X-COM vans. Judging from occasional large halls with pools and non-Cyberweb machinery, they are located in some kind of processing facilities.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: That was the case in X-COM: UFO Defense. With the new tilesets only half of them do. Now all deserts have either cactuses or Hellenistic ruins (as in TFTD). In addition, now all deserts have Bedouins. Regardless of the continent.
  • There are even the same cacti in Dimension X... Except they're purple.
  • Cactus-free tileset for non-American deserts was added in version 0.8.6.
• All Myths Are True: UFOEU was based off then-current ufology theories. X-Com Files adds more urban legends and conspiracy theories: chemtrails, cryptids (like snowman or chupacabra), crop circles, reptilians, men in black... In addition, we get a closer look at things only mentioned in passing, like alien abduction and cattle mutilation.
  • Ever heard of porcupines shooting their quills? Meet spineboar — a car-sized porcupine that can kill a civilian or a rookie with a single shot. And shrugs off buckshot.
  • Ghosts prove to be real.
  • There's some truth behind the legend of Nephilim. Some of them may still be alive.
• Anarchy Is Chaos: Surprisingly subverted. One of the members of the Council, the Cult of Eris, promotes anarchy, but only out of belief that universal self-determination of all human beings is the best way to better humanity. They also promote open distribution of knowledge and technology.
• Ancient Astronauts: One researchable topic is an ancient Assyrian text on gene splicing. Another topic is called "Ancient Aliens".
• Ancient Conspiracy: "Syndicate Testament" message implies that X-COM is being run by an agent of some secret organization that keeps the world in the dark. The author stated that some backers do know more than they reveal, but telling more would be a major spoiler for upcoming arcs.
  • Recent additions to the lore practically confirms this fact: the Council of Earth that formed the X-Com organisation consists of factions that are trying to influence the world in their own ways. Notable members include The Illuminati (literally) and the Majestic 12, a.k.a. The Brotherhood. Additional lore indicates that X-COM is supported by several Council factions that are invested in maintaining the status quo (specifically, in keeping their power despite the rapidly changing circumstances). However, X-COM's constantly expanding mandate is pushing the organization to true independence, and later missions make it clear that X-COM has no problem with clashing with anyone on the Council if it will protect Earth and humanity.
• Anti-Frustration Features: One of the key points of the OpenXcom remake (together with being cross-platform and moddable), and The X-COM Files takes full advantage of it.
  • Unlimited number of savegames, quick save, quick load, auto saves.
  • Selling the trophies immediately after the mission, before returning to the base.
  • Auto-selecting the same trophies for sale in subsequent missions.
  • Ufopedia references available from shop and inventory.
  • Soldier inventory can display key stats for the soldier and equipment.
  • Sorting and filtering objects in inventory, shops, workshop.
  • Tech tree viewer with optional spoilers.
  • Setting and memorizing soldier's inventory for subsequent missions.
  • Setting and memorizing soldiers order in the craft.
  • Viewing enemy information in battle: portrait, species/affiliation, weapons in hands. Used to show rank too.
  • Unconscious bodies are clearly marked to distinguish them from dead. The mark is different if the body has lethal wounds.
  • Better pathfinding algorithm. A player can view the plotted path before sending the agent.
  • Agents can run (spending more energy, but less time units) and strafe (losing less time units for turning and better reactions management).
  • For cheaters: text savegames editable by hand.
  • For hardcore players: "ironman" mode without manual saving; disabling save scumming by saving the random seed.
  • If you're particularly effective at defeating your opponents, then there's an increasing chance for the active survivors to give up and surrender. Any "intelligent, organic" unit can surrender, but if they're immune to morale checks (like robotic and terrorist units), they will refuse to do so, even if every other unit is panicking every round^note The "intelligent" tag is more important than the "organic" tag: Chryssalids and Tentaculats are sentient, but not really sapient, and cannot surrender, for example. The most surprising unit that will never surrender? Dogs.
  • Once you get your second promotion to XCOM: Paranormal Security Agency, you can order Land Surveys, at the cost of $50,000 per unit. They take 7 days to arrive, and 5 man-hours in the workshop to unpack, but they give you a random assortment of corpses and items from things like monster hunts. This can greatly advance your research if you're having trouble encountering a certain enemy, or help your manufacturing if you need more of the energetic blood plasma. After blowing up the Tasoth Factory, you can order Marine Surveys for the same effect, and capturing the Cyberweb Battleship allows you to do the same for Dimension X (though the price tag is hefty at 1.25 million dollars.
  • The appropriate research, some of the more exotic weapons and devices made from creature parts can be purchased instead of requiring manufacturing.
  • Even if you miss/lose certain artifacts during progress, it is possible to acquire them as rare drops from the Reinforced Osiron Crate, which can drop from certain Osiron missions. Likewise, one of the AI unit body types, the Seeker Drone, can be learnt about from capturing a MIB Commander if you missed getting it from the Alien Bounty Hunter mission (and the bounty hunter's Neon Bow can be acquired from the Osiron Crates as well).
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Melee weapons range from Elerium-115 powered devices through combat knives and katanas to stone-age bone clubs. Makes sense in context.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Some weapons have kinetic ammunition that can either erode armor directly or apply damage while treating armor as less than 100% effective. Either way, you can potentially hit hard enough to bypass an enemy's body armor. Warp Damage weapons in particular, like the Disruptor guns from Dimension X, not only enjoy such armor-bypassing effects but also do more than 100% effective damage to many characters due to their armor's innate weakness to Warp damage.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Given the massive amount of weapons available in the game, there's bound to be some that are not great.
  • Extremely heavy weapons are always incredibly powerful for when you unlock them, but their weight makes it all but impossible to use them without powered armor. Any weapon with a weight greater than 50 qualifies.
  • Stun Spears are your first dedicated stunning weapons^note The electric club is also a stunning weapon, but does inflict lethal damage, while the Stun Spear does not, but it's inaccurate, slow and requires two hands to use, in addition to taking up six inventory spots. The Stun Rod, available relatively quickly afterwards, is one-handed, fast, takes up 3 inventory spots and much more accurate while doing the same damage.
  • The Staff of Heart Grip. It's a psychic weapon that can "Crush Their Hearts!" Which sounds awesome until you realize that it's horribly inaccurate, has limited range (though it can go through walls) and it drains a lot of sanity with each use. As sanity takes a lot time to recover until you research and build the Sensorium, the drawbacks far outweigh the benefits.
  • The Wand of Chaos is a semi-rare psychic weapon that blasts Warp Energy (which functionally ignores armor) at a point when you're starting to encounter heavily armored enemies. But it costs more sanity to use than the Staff of Heart Grip, it's short-ranged, and it doesn't go through walls.
  • Any of the "unique" interceptor craft, such as the Kitsune-106, the CF-105 Arrow, or the Starfighter, are generally better than any other craft you can get at the same time, but end up being too unique to be really useful. In addition, if they get shot down, you lose more points than losing a normal craft, and either you have to rebuild the craft again, or it's just gone forever.
    • The Kitsune-106 interceptor/transport craft. It can mount a missile weapon and a cannon, has better damage resistance than the Interceptor, and can bring up to 12 agents to a tactical mission. However, it's slow and has the horrible "landing ramp" egress that will likely result in a lot of your troops getting ambushed as they get off the ship.
    • The CF-105 Arrow is an extremely fast interceptor available when you first start detecting enemy craft, but it has a limited loadout of 1 light missile mount and 1 cannon mount, and more importantly, it cannot take a shot to save its life^note It has 22 health, and most enemy weapons do at least 15 points of damage. Alien UFO weapons do a minimum of 25 points of damage. The MIG-31 is slower and has less range, but slightly more health and is significantly less expensive. The difference is that the MIG-31 requires several research topics to unlock and purchase, while the CF-105 is a rare reward from interrogating EXALT units and is generally one of the first interceptor craft you can access.
    • The Starfighter is a blindingly fast interceptor, able to catch up to all but the faster UFOs, and mounts two beam weapons at a time when you're still using missiles and cannons. It also runs on standard fuel (somehow), and is capable of space flight. And for all of that, it still can't take a hit, getting absolutely wrecked by anything stronger than a Supply Ship UFO. It will supplement your existing interceptors very well, but it will absolutely not replace them.
  • There are several custom guns that require researching to develop and workshops (plus Engineers and Alien Alloys) to make and press ammo for, like the Asuka 4000 and the Var Assault Cannon. While they have sufficient power to compete as mainstay weapons (with the V.A.C. having an integrated bayonet blade for melee combat), the fact that you can't buy ammo for them and have to make it to order yourself makes them something more troublesome to make, use, and maintain.
  • Once you research a Sorceror of Dagon, you can unlock "X-COM Dagonization", which is a transformation with a lot of benefits (including but not limited to a base armor increase, something no other non-Kyber transformation gets), but it requires relatively high base stats and causes a permanent reduction in sanity (unlike other transformations, which only cause a temporary reduction). While it may still be worthwhile in some circumstances, high sanity is a godsend in the mid-to-late game when missions start draining it at a fast clip.
  • Sharing technology with M.A.G.M.A. can run into this situation. Some give you access to extremely valuable gear, such as sharing tritanium ammo to get Pulse Weapons^note Tritanium ammo is great for armored opponents, while Pulse Weapons are extremely effective against unarmored opponents. Others give you access to things you can get better versions of, such as sharing Alien Gardens tech giving you access to certain chemical weapons that are inferior to what you can eventually make yourself. In addition to the hefty penalty for sharing technology to begin with, each tech shared with M.A.G.M.A. also causes new missions to spawn that are a chore to chase down and costly to ignore. The biggest hit of all is from sharing Elerium Batteries and Terramite: it give you access to Power Armor, which is extraordinarily expensive, bulky, and protective, but forces you to take a severe hit to your score (a total of -1500), and results in M.A.G.M.A. Fusion Reactor Defense missions spawning, which are not difficult, but have short windows of time to deploy and become tedious.
• Ax-Crazy / Mad Bomber: Some people who Go Mad from the Revelation end up like this — in "Homicidal Maniac/Soldier/Madman" mission. Some of them even carry an axe. You have to arrest or kill them. To a lesser extent applies to armed abduction victims.
• Badass Cape: Vampire Knights.
• Badass Longcoat:
  • X-COM leather coat. The first armor you research (second worst protection after business suit), but the best you can wear to undercover missions. Looks cool, at least.
  • Its more advanced counterpart, the bulletproof coat.
  • Red Dawn Coordinators. Best weapons, best stats, but not the best camouflage.
  • Syndicate CEO when in his human form.
  • Black Lotus Mandarins. Same as above. And their coats are purple.
  • Osiron Goons. Petty criminals want to look cool too.
  • Zombie Troopers. More of a joke. They lose their gun arms when wounded and become regular biting zombies, but in cool coats covered with green ichor.
  • Cyberweb members wear Badass Labcoats. Together with Sinister Goggles.
• Balance Buff: Sectoids went through several over the course of development. Earlier versions made psionic attacks much more frequent than in UFO. As of 0.9.1 the psionics seem to be back to normal, but now they have force field shields. Killing them now requires piercing the shield first on the same turn, since those partially regenerate. Still, not much of a problem, even with the starting Glock.
• Beach Episode: "Surf Time" missions. Agents posing as surfers have to neutralize Osiron smugglers operating at a beach resort. Agents can only wear swimming trunks and carry melee weapons and dart guns. And surfboards, which make decent stun weapons. The penalty for skipping the mission is low, but retreat is not an option, once you start it.
• The Beastmaster:
  • You can use dogs, and so can some of your enemies. You can also tame any Shadowbats or Giant Rats you capture, after a little research, and even breed the rats to get more.
  • There's some malicious force behind various strange animals that attack people all over the globe. The Syndicate is taking a page out of the Umbrella Labs playbook, creating monsters and releasing them to study what happens and improve their experiments.
  • If zombies count as beasts, M.A.G.M.A. experiments qualify. The Syndicate doesn't like the competition, and has the zombie controls hacked.
  • "Beastmaster" rank of some aliens seems to imply their job is controlling living terror weapons like Cryssalids for Snakemen or Spitters for Anthropods. Otherwise beastmasters are like medics.
• BFG: The bigger the gun, the more powerful it is, but the heavier it is.
  • Early on, you can get access to light machine guns (and later heavy machine guns), which are relatively inaccurate, but lay down a solid stream of fire that can cut through armor. These upgrade to the BlackOps Light Minigun and Minigun, which fire more bullets, are (slightly) more accurate and (slightly) lighter, and can be loaded with tritanium ammo for increased damage. Research eventually leads to the Scatter Laser, which is a Minigun with lasers.
  • Gauss weaponry is significantly more powerful than Mass Driver weapons, but pay for that power by being much heavier. Any agent can wield a Mass Driver Sniper Rifle, but you need power armor or an insanely high strength score to use a Gauss Sniper Rifle. But the weight is worthwhile: Gauss weapons are the hardest hitting kinetic weapons in the game.
  • Rocket Launchers are situational and hefty, but the real BFG of the group is the Blaster Launcher, which fires a guided rocket that deals as much damage as an Elerium-enhanced high explosive package (while also being very heavy and cumbersome to use).
  • Laser weapons have a unique variant not seen in other weapon classes: the Portable Laser Cannon (and the upgrade, the Portable Turbolaser Cannon). It's so heavy that you almost need powered armor to carry it, but it does the most laser damage in the game, doing more damage^note though of a different class than even a Heavy Plasma shot. The Portable Turbolaser Cannon is notable for being able to kill a Sectopod with a single shot.
  • The Tactical Sniper Rifle is an exclusive^note at first... X-COM designed sniper rifle that fires a massive bullet with incredible accuracy. It's designed to reach across the entire battlefield to hit a target the sniper can't even see, with accuracy rating easily reaching into 300%, and a huge power boost from firing accuracy. It can also be loaded with trititanium ammunition for even more power, and it ignores a whopping 25% of armor. It's also incredibly heavy, and requires a staggering 90% time units to fire, meaning that the sniper will barely be moving, if they move at all.
  • The Var Assault Cannon is a very powerful, very heavy gun with a huge bayonet attached, capable of doing overwhelming damage in melee and at range. But it's heavier than almost every other weapon in the game, and the description specifically mentions that power armor is required to use it. It's easily possible to unlock this weapon at a point when you don't have power armor.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The Earth is threatened from the outer space (Cydonia), from the oceans (T'Leth), from another plane of existence (Dimension X) and from the underground (Shogg). Not to mention all the criminals within the human society.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies:
  • Giant Beetles. Appear from the start in monster hunt or monster attack missions. Some of them can spit explosive liquid. Eliminated when the arc is resolved.
  • Megascorpion. Same as above, sans exploding.
  • Giant Spiders. Same as above, but prove to have an underground civilization.
  • Swarmids. Look like a swarm of large bees, but prove far more alien. Appear in Dimension X missions.
  • Megaworms. Another Dimension X life form.
  • Waspites. Insectoid Aliens and Cyborgs.
  • Antmen. Bee People that live underground.
  • Lobstermen. Unlike TFTD there also exist feral ones that only fight with pincers.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Besides werebeasts at least 2 upright-walking monsters qualify. Mongorns are giant apes and shamblers are white giant sloths. Both attack humans aggressively.
• BFG: In addition to those present in the original games, there's a variety of general-purpose, heavy and rotary machine guns, as well as the alien Plasma Destroyer and X-Com Portable Turbolaser Cannon meant for power-armored agents. The biggest BFG is, unsurprisingly, the VAST BFG (named exactly that) that runs on Hell Energy and is potentially more powerful than the Blaster Launcher, if used by the right agent.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Beside the established aliens from UFO, TFTD and Apocalypse and fairly mundane Chtonites there are:
  • Cerebreals, who are just psionic brains with tentacles.
  • Waspites, who beat Floaters at body modification. Original head plus life support system, plus mechanical arms, plus a bioengineered symbiotic plant.
  • Zombies, who get progressively weirder and more human-like with every step of evolution.
  • "Abominations" that seem so bizzare, they shouldn't live. Possibly inspired by The Thing.
  • Metamorphs, which are directly inspired by The Thing.
• Black Comedy: Less than in Piratez, but still occasionally appears in Ufopaedia entries. Mainly as "Staff Input".
  Wha... what do you mean by 'the interrogation', Commander? I-I wasn't interrogating a thing!
  It's true! I swear I wasn't spending time with the Chief Medic, and she totally didn't leave a lit cigarette on the desk, and I assure you there was no unauthorized, inflammable stuff in my office. So as you can see, there's no way a prisoner burned alive while we were... busy! See, see what I mean?
• Black Market: Most of X-COM's purchases are above-board, but as the game goes on, you get the option to access unorthodox suppliers. These purchases are made on the Grey Market. In addition, anything you sell is explicitly sold on the same Grey Market, though it's mentioned that you're not the only supplier. This ends up having consequences: Cyberweb are specifically noted to be acquiring a lot of their alien technology from the Grey Market.
• Boring, but Practical: There's a lot of weapons and tactics in the game that are not guaranteed to work, but are guaranteed to work most of the time.
  • Once you actually get it, the BlackOps SmartRifle is one of the best ballistic weapons in the game. It has good damage, which only gets better once you get Tritanium ammunition, excellent weight for the class, a 50-round magazine, an inherent accuracy bonus from the smart technology, and a five-round autofire. Every single other ballistic weapon is either strictly worse, or has a specific purpose^note Shotguns are better at close range and against unarmored enemies; MAGMA Pulse Weapons are better against shielded but unarmored enemies but have lower range, ammunition and accuracy; explosives are dangerous; heavy weapons are impractically heavy but occasionally necessary. It can take a while to get the contacts needed to be able to purchase the weapon, but there's almost no reason to bother with anything else until you're able to reliably^note as in, with laser weapons you make rather than ones you scavenge replace it with laser weapons or magnetic/Gauss weapons. The BlackOps Smartgun is even better, being a disturbing accurate short-to-medium range light machine gun with better power than the rifle.
  • The humble Interceptor can only be armed with a light missile weapon and a cannon, but that's all it needs to take down most small UFOs, especially when armed with either a Tritanium Cannon or a Mass Driver Cannon. It also doesn't require any special materials to make, which is a godsend when you're constantly scrabbling for Alien Alloys and Tritanium for your many projects.
  • XCOM Liquidator Armor is easily purchased once unlocked (requiring only contacting VAST), and represents the best armor you can buy, full stop. It doesn't do well against exotic weaponry like lasers and plasma, but it has a hefty bonus against kinetic rounds and is the first armor you get that has built-in night vision, negating one of the most dangerous aspects of night missions (limited vision). It's more expensive than the equivalent protection offered by the Armored Vest, and can't use a shield, but the night-vision alone is a huge benefit.
  • The Beretta pistol at the beginning of the game is just as powerful as any other pistol, but has the advantage of requiring the same (low) amount of time units for both a snap shot and an aimed shot, meaning there's no reason to ever use the snap shot. It lacks burst fire, but is nonetheless a very capable early game weapon.
  • Knockout Grenades are slow to manufacture and cumbersome to use, requiring that you prime and then throw the grenade, which will likely take most of your turn. But with every non-alien enemy in the game taking 400% damage from choke sources, and the Knockout Grenade doing 80 points of choke damage, even a low damage roll^note Grenades can do a minimum of 50% damage, which means that a low roll is 40 points of choke damage, which increases to 160 points of choke damage from targets that are weak to it will knock out your opponents for a long time. Until enemies start resisting choke damage, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better way of dealing with your enemies.
  • The Taser Pistol: it's available at the beginning of the game, it has a range of 5 tiles maximum, it only holds 2 rounds, and it's inaccurate as all hell. It's also capable of doing significant electric damage that is not lethal, and it's your only ranged capture weapon until you get Knockout Grenades. It's still useful even when you have the KO Grenades, because enemies that resist choke damage are usually still vulnerable to electric damage, and the limited-but-welcome range offered can make it advantageous over the many melee-based stun weapons like the Stun Rod (which does more stun damage). It even gets an upgrade in the form of Bioelectric Taser Clips, which do significantly more stun damage and increase the ammunition capacity by 50% (to 3). There's rarely a situation in which you won't want to stuff your transport craft with Taser Pistols.
  • Of all the higher-end augmentations, the Helix Knight is the most boring one, only requiring a few basic augs to be applied (Bio-enhancement, Gun Kata, Combat Pilot Training, Martial Arts Training, Tactical Implants), and only giving a handful of basic stats in every category, but it is also one of the most easily accessible higher-end augments that needs the least resources invested (Only requiring a minimum of 30 Psi Strength for the martial arts), and has basically no drawbacks (apart from the 25 Sanity cost of learning Gun Kata and getting both Bio-enhancement and a Tactical Implant). In exchange, it easily pushes an agent into lower-end superhuman levels of ability, and you can still augment them further afterwards.
  • Throwing weapons, which encompasses everything from the ever-useful grenades of all stripes to Throwing Knives and Shuriken and even the common Bow (and later the Neon Bow). Many of these weapons do even more damage the more Throwing accuracy you gain from training your skills in such, so a well-trained and accurate grenadier can also wield throwing knives and bows and arrows with good proficiency.
  • Tritanium Vests are an upgrade over Armored Vests, and require Alien Alloys to create. But they have such good stats that they can withstand most shotgun blasts^note Heavy Shotguns with Tritanium Ammo are still terrifying, most non-sniper kinetic rounds, and even some laser and plasma shots. They're significantly less expensive than the next level of armor (Cyber Armor or Synthsuits) and remain a very reliable option for defense for a long time. You can get some for free from Osiron Fixers, and start manufacturing them as soon as you've research Alien Alloys (which have a lot of potential early sources).
  • Refusing to use Cult Arms Dealers. You don't get access to some useful weapons early (like the G36, the M16, and so on), but you do get a one-time boost to your score. And anything the dealers could supply you with is ultimately inferior to what you could get once you've progressed further (all the Cult Arms Dealer weapons are overshadowed by BlackOps weaponry, for example, which you get at Promotion II, after defeating one of the cults).
  • Refusing to share technologies with M.A.G.M.A. Sure, you'll miss out on some good stuff, like Pulse weapons and Power Armor, but you'll get points for refusing, and you won't have to deal with M.A.G.M.A. constantly asking for your help when they "somehow" lose control of the tech you've given them. M.A.G.M.A. never holds it against you for refusing, while the Council will always hold it against you for accepting.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Subverted for laser weapons — otherwise similar to UFOEU, they now have finite magazines, albeit large. The upgraded version, Turbolasers, have infinite ammo, however, thanks to their antimatter batteries.
  • Subverted for Cyberweb prototypes. Their batteries pump energy from another dimension, like disruptors in Apocalypse, but not for long.
  • Craft Laser Beams have limited shots while deployed (50), but recharge for free back at base. Craft Plasma Beams require Elerium to recharge (1 per 10 shots), but have functionally unlimited ammo while deployed (100 shots, and it will be difficult to use all those shots up before the interceptor has to return to base).
  • The Thunder Arcer is a unique weapon carried by Gillmen Heroes that requires you to capture one of those units alive to understand how it works. It turns out it uses a unique biological reaction chamber stuffed with micro-organisms to generate the electrical discharge, meaning for all intents and purposes, it has infinite ammo. X-COM scientists understand exactly how it works, but can't replicate the process.
• Bound and Gagged: Victims captured by Deep Ones to be sacrificed to the dark gods of the depths.
• Brain in a Jar:
  • Jarhead cyborgs, which are heavily based on T'Leth technology used for making their infamous Bio-Drones. You can copy this technology and use it create the Alenhead chassis and then the Enforcer chassis for your AI Units, giving them humanoid forms that use the same equipment as your regular agents.
  • Cerebreal larva for a broader definition of "jar".
  • Waspites are living heads on artificial bodies.
• Breast Plate: Female tomb guardians wear those.
• Breather Episode: "Crop Circles", "Cattle Mutilation" and "Alien Abduction" missions. Many players use them to train rookies — capturing an unarmed farmer can give as much experience and score as killing an Ethereal. Occasionally subverted, when you are ambushed by zombies or Men in Black. You are warned of the ambush only by the briefing after landing.
  • There's also the inherent danger of the turn limit: these missions have a maximum duration of 10 turns. In the earlier versions of the mod, after 10 turns, the mission ended and everyone and everything on the mission was lost. Later versions replaced that with arrival of a large wave of Men in Black forces on turn 10. And if you cannot handle them or leave you will face another, harder wave at turn 13. Rookies tend to have far less Time Units than veterans, and the maps aren't all that small. Be quick.
• Briefcase Full of Money: Part of the loot in some missions. Worth $100,000 each. There are also money bags worth $500,000. And later a scaled-down version "wad of cash" was added (worth $5000). Unfortunately, grabbing money and escaping is rarely an option, since reaching it usually requires neutralizing most enemies on the map. Some of the mystery box crates you can confiscate from the cults and open later at base will also contain these cash stashes.
• Character Exaggeration: Alien races reveal Hidden Depths.
  • Sectoids surrendered to Ethereals for the promise to perfect their genetic design.
  • Floaters almost killed their homeworld with pollution and only Ethereals' cybernetic enhancement saved them. Becoming a soldier race that feels few pleasures of flesh was a small price.
  • Snakemen were primitive hunters from an arid world, whom "gods" invited to join "great hunting among the stars". Most were born off-world, but the few who remember their homeworld miss it.
  • Mutons are Proud Warrior Race Guys telepathically linked to Ethereals. They see this connection as holy.
  • Ethereals have horrifying legends about super-powerful psionic aliens similar to The Great Race of Yith.
• Church Militant: Church of Dagon and Black Lotus. Probably Cult of Apocalypse too, but this arc isn't finished yet. EXALT and Red Dawn are also called "cults", but seem to have nothing religious about them.
• Clown-Car Base: Some cult outposts are defended by a disproportionately large number of cultists, especially on higher difficulties.
• Commonplace Rare:
  • Despite the name, Alien Electronics don't appear on every UFO or underground base. To get some, the player needs to disassemble certain dead enemies: Cyberdisk, Cybermite, Obliterator.
  • In the hands of someone with high thrown, bows can be immensely powerful in the early game... but acquiring them in a timely manner is very hard, generally requiring a lucky drop from a ramshackle weapons crate or from illegal requisition orders.
• Crossover: The game mixes elements from the original trilogy as well as the official and unofficial remakes. All in 1990s. As well as some other stories:
  • UFOEU aliens with some additions: Sectoids, Chtonites, Floaters, Snakemen, Mutons and more — all ruled by Ethereals. Based on Mars. Kiryu-Kai — the Japanese alien-fighting force — is also mentioned.
  • TFTD aliens: Deep Ones (Gill Men brought closer to their roots), Aquatoids, Tasoths — all ruled by the thing that inspired Cthulhu Mythos. Based underwater.
  • Apocalypse elements: Dimension X, the Disruptor weapons, and the infamous Boomeroid explosive make their appearance, as do the Anthropods and some of their local and smaller Micronoid warforms (like the Megaworm,Spitter, and the Swarmids).
  • XCOM Enforcer is referenced by the humanoid chassis of the same name that you can make for your AI unit allies.
    • Cyberweb. In the 20th century they are a loose band of Obliviously Evil Mad Scientists investigating alien technology.
    • Osiron. In the 20th century they are a criminal organisation dealing in alien technology.
    • Hybrid Network — what would become Mutant Alliance. Fully controlled by Sectoids.
    • Dimensional portals. Cyberweb is hiding them.
    • And of course the aliens — Megaworms, Oozes (Micronoid colonies), Spitters, Anthropods. The latter two are said to be artificial soldiers entirely under Cydonians' control.
  • EXALT. They do look like in Enemy Within, but also resemble Psyke of Apocalypse.
  • At least some of the events of Xenonauts did happen in the 1970s, and you can benefit from their data once you get the access.
  • Ditto The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, but it doesn't give you much. Unless this is planned for an unfinished arc.
  • UNIT (as in Doctor Who) did exist in this universe in the middle of the 20th century. Later it got disbanded, with remnants ending up in the Bureau, then in Xenonauts, which were eventually disbanded too.
    • Cerebreals are totally not psionically-overpowered Daleks.
  • The Syndicate is at least called like one in The X-Files. Ditto Hybrids.
  • Mrrshan (as in Master of Orion) weapons appeared in version 0.6.8. Also, a special craft given to the player (Kitsune-106) is told to initially contain "...visual representations of humanoid forms with cat-like or bat-like ears.", which is another nod to the race.
  • Then the authour jokingly mentioned that only the Governor of the Solar System (as in Piratez) protects us from Sakkras, another MoO race.
  • Muckstar monsters are from UFO: After Blank.
  • One of the contacts is called UAC, though in here it stands for United Aerotech Corporation. That said, their logo◊ does resemble the Union Aerospace one.
    • The name has since been changed to VAST, but their plot line progresses exactly as it has been suspected to, including Hell energy portals and daemon-infested moonbases.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The author once stated that he plans to make all enemies' ranks visible. As of version 0.6.7:
  • Sectoid commanders wear a golden circlet on their heads, while Armored Sectoids wear body armor made of Tritanium.
  • Floaters wear capes of different colours:
    • deep orange for soldiers;
    • dark blue for commanders;
    • green for engineers;
    • red for leaders;
    • grey for medics;
    • light blue for navigators.
  • Snakemen wear rucksacks of different colours:
    • light blue for soldiers;
    • red for commanders;
    • green for engineers;
    • grey for leaders;
    • black for beastmasters (medic equivalent);
    • dark blue for navigators.
  • Low-ranking Ethereals wear orange robes, members of their Order wear white (with the Grand Matsters sporting a red banner on the front), Keepers wear green, and the dreaded Eliminators wear black. Servitors wear red, but it's unclear if they should even be considered to be living things.
  • Mutons wear differently-coloured jumpsuits and different headgear. Yes, there are red mutons in this game, the commanders.
  • Syndicate security have green visors, security captains have red visors.
• Darkened Building Shootout: Every night or underground mission. Except that many enemies see in the dark better than you. Notably, this game makes nights much darker and vision range much shorter than OpenXcom default. Unfortunately, sound clues aren't implemented even on par with Apocalypse.
  • There is an option in OpenXCOM to turn on night vision by pushing the Scroll Lock button, which makes everything (including your agents vision radii) much easier to see. But whatever you do, do NOT push it while you're in Dimension X.
• Delinquent Hair: Agents' hair styles vary greatly. Some of them obviously won't be welcome in any military or police force, but Ragtag Bunch of Misfits called X-Com can't be picky.
• Defeat Means Friendship: If you capture an enemy dog alive, it's added to your animal pen as a soldier. You can also capture and befriend rats and bats.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Melee combat. You need to take full advantage of the terrain and positioning to get into position to effectively charge an enemy without getting blasted with reaction fire, but in exchange, lighter melee weapons cost very few Time Units to attack with, while heavier melee weapons often get a lot of bonus damage multipliers based on your melee accuracy or strength. On top of that, some melee weapons will do either Cutting, Concussive, or Choking damage, all of which are often less-resisted by armor, the Assault Armor's optionally-researched Shield can inlict Electrical damage that is especially effective against machines and ghosts, and the alien-made Plasma blades and swords deal Plasma damage, which cuts right through a lot of mundane armor types.
  • Kyberization. The ability to turn a soldier into a cyborg that retains most of their skills (at the cost of sanity) is already pretty awesome. However, if you invest in research and manufacturing, you can give Kyberized soldiers additional implants that make them extremely powerful, including eye implants for natural night vision and better accuracy, armor implants for natural damage resistance (on top of what they get for wearing armor!), and more. Kyberization is difficult specifically because every procedure, including implants, costs sanity, so a soldier needs to have a lot of it to survive the process.
  • Some items require animals to process, whether it's just their corpses or having actual live animals. This can make some of the more useful items hard to source if you can't nail some tricky live captures - Spiderwebs can make bullet-resistant Webwear, Chitin can be interwoven with Durathread and Zombie Parasites to make a kind of Chitin armor insert, Chupacabras can be used to make the Zephyr Serum, Bombardier Beetles can be processed to make Napalm Grenades and acquire chitin.
  • Psi weapons. Apart from consumables like the Klein Bottle Grenade or ammo-using "guns" wielded by the Reclamation of Aether cultists, there are several other Psi weapons that don't require ammo and run off your Energy (and sometimes your Sanity). On the one hand, they can be exhausting to wield, as its possible for a soldier to make themselves vunerable to fainting from self-inflicted stun damage, or suffer from self-inflicted Sanity loss. On the other hand, they all do exotic damage that makes it possible to bypass the usual armor resistances and do extra damage to enemies that are vunerable to them, such as the Flame Glove doing Plasma damage and setting enemies alight, or the Staff of Dagon being very accurate and doing Chemical damage, or the Staff of Heart's Grip being a very potent and damaging weapon if you can hit with it. On the third hand, as these weapons run off your Psi Strength and/or Skill as well as sometimes relying on your mundane Firing or Throwing accuracy, you will only be able to wield them effectively or accurately with a powerful or well-trained psychic agent - of particular note is the Forceblade, a melee weapon that requires all four of Psi Strength, Psi Skill, Reaction, and Melee accuracy to be wielded effectively, making them effectively a unique weapon just for a fully-powered Helix Psion Hybrid agent.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Collectively, the initial cults (EXALT, Church of Dagon, Red Dawn and the Black Lotus) - destroying their HQ will be a great feat in the early game and will permanently get rid of them, and will be the point X-Com will start to properly militarize - but then much more difficult enemies start to appear, including the Syndicate, Cyberweb, the Men in Black and, of course, the three actual alien threats.
• Do-Anything Soldier: As per X-Com tradition. Moreso, this game answers a long-standing fan question of who pilots the craft — same agents that fight ground battles. Which means that any VTOL interceptor doubles as a one-man troop transport — as long as you get missions a single agent can win.
• Doing Research: With the massively expanded tech tree (there's over *1000* things to research!), a great deal of the strategic layer is identifying what projects are worthwhile and getting enough scientists to investigate things in a timely fashion. It also plays with the formula at times, and deviates from the original game in significant aspects.
  • At the beginning of the game, you're "researching" things like kevlar body armor and van rentals. It's explicitly made clear that you're not researching how these things work, but rather putting your scientists on the task of dealing with the bureaucratic red tape that comes with getting access to these resources.
  • Advanced technologies are available quickly, with enemies showing up with lasers and plasma weapons as early as a year into the campaign. However, while you can use any of the tech^note as long as it's been developed by humans; alien tech is much more complicated, replicating it requires understanding the underlying principles, which is a whole separate projects, and in some cases a series of projects.
  • Alien technology is mind-bogglingly difficult to figure out. In the original game, laser weapons are one of the first projects you can complete. In XCOM Files, understanding laser weapons requires learning how to power them, which requires learning about Elerium batteries, which requires learning Alien Language, which requires a series of projects in and of itself. It's not enough to know that a weapon has a trigger and a power pack: you need to figure out how to talk to aliens in a language you can both understand, in order to figure out how to ask the questions you don't know to figure out the things you don't understand. To say that the process is involved is understating the problem.
• Don't Ask: "If some terminology you find in the entries of this Ufopedia does not mean anything to you, it means you do not need to have access to this knowledge yet."
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: On lower difficulties, if you know what's coming in general terms, you can do a really good job of protecting Earth, preventing any alien incursions and attacks, and racking up thousands of points a month. This is actually a bad idea. If the aliens manage to subvert a funding nation and force it to withdraw from the XCOM Project, they'll establish an Alien Colony in that nation's borders. While is this obviously a bad thing, as the Alien Colony will launch multiple missions to subvert more countries and you lose the funding from that nation, the Alien Colony, when successfully attacked, will yield up the Tritanium Matrix. When researched, that allows you to build a Tritanium Foundry and manufacture your own Alien Alloys in whatever quantities you need, allowing you to build extremely advanced weapons, armor and interceptors without being reliant on the fickle UFO captures or dangerous Hybrid Embassy assaults. The only other source of a Tritanium Matrix is from an extremely late-game mission^note involving attacking an alien ship in Earth Orbit, which starts the chain of events leading to the endgame assault on Mars 7 story missions later, while an Alien Colony can show up as early as mid-1999 otherwise.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Reapers are the terror weapon of Floaters, who normally appear by spring of 1999. But a monster hunt with Reaper(s) may appear as early as December 1997.
• Elaborate Underground Base: You build several, same as in the original games. Cydonian aliens occasionally build bases on Earth, which you have to capture, same as in the original. In addition, many of your enemies have similar bases, which serve as the final dungeons for their respective arcs. This includes Black Lotus, Red Dawn, post-cult Dagon, Syndicate. Zombie and Shogg cave dwellings also qualify. Ditto less elaborate Cyberweb sewer hideouts.
• Emergency Weapon: Punches became available since version 0.9.0. Civilians suddenly became quite capable of beating early enemies. Using ranged weapons as clubs is still impossible, unlike some other mods, with a notable exception of bayoneted SKS rifle.
• Encyclopedia Exposita: UFOpaedia. Also contains a lot of hints for new players, highlighting the differences from the original games.
• Enemy Civil War: Downplayed. Early on your research indicates you are fighting several groups of aliens, who seem non-hostile to each other, but pursue different goals. Later you find that The Bureau and UNIT won against an entirely different enemy and there may be yet another side that once helped humans. In-game, however, the various factions will never attack each other.
• Everyone Is Armed: Civilians in terror and monster missions are not completely defenseless. More so for police. Even unarmed ones can use their fists. Hunters and warriors in "Strange Life Form" missions may kill a lone spineboar before you find it. 2018 changes to the engine AI made them more aggressive, and letting them pick up weapons from defeated enemies (or your agents). They still die en masse.
• Evil Minions: Syndicate scientists and office employees.
• Faceless Mooks: Considering the sprite size and resolution, there's not much face to see, but some cover even that. Plus, there are full-length portraits in the inventory screen.
  • Ethereals' faces are invisible under the overly large hoods.
  • EXALT infiltrators and goons wear some sort of black respirators.
  • Disciples of Dagon wear green KKK-like hoods. Chosen of Dagon dress like Ethereals, but green.
  • Black Lotus warriors and assassins dress like ninjas.
  • Tomb Guardians wear face-covering helmets.
  • Syndicate security wear face-covering helmets.
  • Muton Engineers wear protective visors.
  • Averted for X-COM agents. Unlike the original games, when agents wear armour, they hold helmets in their hands on the inventory screen, unless the outfit in question does not allow helmet removal.
• Fantastic Drug: There are several, with the nasty ones being distributed by the cults you initially start the game investigating.
  • Storm, essentially a steroid superpowered by alien technology somehow, distributed and used extensively by Red Dawn. Repeated use turns a human in a Stormy, a steroid pumping, barely-restrained ball of antagonism with higher-than-normal strength and resilience. Also a Psycho Serum if used too much. X-COM scientists appreciate the engineering behind it and use a safe version for X-COM Bio Enhancements.
  • Psiclone, although it's a device, not a substance. It forcibly enhances a user's psychic power while at the same time blasting them with energy that makes them reliant on and subservient to EXALT, who produce and distribute it. Also a Psycho Serum, though in this case, it's because EXALT uses it to force people to do unsavory things or join EXALT. Again, X-COM scientists realize the benefit of implanting psychic thoughts, and use Psiclone to develop and implant agents with advanced Gun Kata techniques. Defeating EXALT is less about tearing the organization down, and more about becoming the new distributor of Psiclone, though the X-COM version is relatively benign.
  • X-COM also develops various drugs based on the physical qualities of unusual specimens. Nobelon and Zephyr Serum are early examples, with Zephyr Serum specifically being developed from Chupacabra blood. Most such drugs cause health damage when used.
• Fish People: Deep Ones are the Gillmen from TFTD. "Carcharodons" are part-shark Half-Human Hybrids.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: After certain researches you get a report that X-COM is going to concentrate on important targets and would no longer react to minor events like sightings of individual members of a criminal organization, small safehouses and such. Similarly, when you finish the operation that ends an arc, you get a report that this threat has been neutralized. Yet you may still get several more missions against this enemy. The engine generates a set of missions at the start of each month, and they all happen regardless. The enemies may become weaker, though. Newer versions of the mod change the report slightly to point out that the organization is finished "except for a few holdouts".
  • Later in the game, some organizations that you have successfully defeated will still spawn missions. For example, after defeating the Black Lotus, you will still occasionally get missions in which Black Lotus ninjas and their mechanical ninjas try to rob a bank, and XCOM is expected to stop them. In addition to providing a source of cash, these types of missions spawn to provide the player with access to certain limited resources, such as Ninja Scrolls, that are otherwise completely unavailable.
• Gatling Good: The BlackOps Minigun and its light counterpart are both traditional ballistic rotary guns, with the light version using smaller rounds and have a more easily carried ammo can. Both of them fire massive bursts of bullets with each Auto Shot, and they have the unique property of being able to erode armor with each hit. You can also get the Scatter Turbolaser, which is a Turbolaser that has multiple rotating barrels. All of them are unable to perform Reaction Fire shots (since they lack a Snap Shot), but have the unique property of getting much more accurate if your agent kneels down to steady their aim. While the base accuracy of the weapon is low, resulting in a large bullet spread, the sheer volume of fire makes it possible to land multiple bullets on the same target, or with some good positioning, you could even mow down multiple foes at once (This is most easily seen in the Communion of Apocalypse event where the enemy force is DOZENS of cultists, some armed with VAST weapons). Due to their armor shredding property, they are also good for softening up armored enemies. They also tend to be very heavy.
• Glamour: Bug-eyed grey-skinned Hybrids use "impersonatron" (combining holoprojector and psi waves emitter) to pass as humans. Their "infiltrators" are the real deal, though.
  • Later you use this technology to infiltrate and storm The Syndicate HQ.
  • Research notes indicate that your own hybrid forces are constantly emitting low-level psionic waves to make them look human to the uninitiated, so that they can operate around the world without attracting suspicion.
• Gotta Catch Them All: There are a number of hidden objectives that are gained for researching all items in a particular category, such as "All classic weapons known" or "All strange life forms researched". These aren't required for plot purposes (though they used to be), but give you a one-time bonus to your score when completed.
• Green Rocks: Elerium-115 here is not only used to power alien machinery, but also a critical part of physiology of many creatures (the "energetic blood plasma" component). It can also be weaponized.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: The Ufopaedia picture for "Subculture: Luchadores" (zombie-eaters).
• Guide Dang It!:
  • "Asylum Apparitions" mission usually appears before you get weapons that can kill or stun ghosts reasonably quickly. But disabling all enemies is not necessary to win, if you pay attention to the briefing. You need to find and destroy the seal that summoned them, instead.
  • Speaking of, ghost missions can be extraordinarily frustrating, as all of your weapons are ineffective against them^note As with most things in XCOM, which is not strictly true: it is possible to shoot a ghost to death, but they only take about 10-15% damage from ballistic weapons and explosions, your main sources of damage when ghosts start becoming a problem. Until you realize that they have a crippling weakness to electricity, which turns things around. Ghosts take full damage from electricity, but they are actually weak against Psi weapons, which do a lot more damage to them. You just won't have any good Psi weapons for a long time, unless you're able to reverse-engineer some ghost weapons. Fortunately, they also don't like lasers..
  • When you capture an UFO, you immediately get Elerium. When you capture an USO, you need to research the Zrbite Container and then process it in the Workshop to open it before you can actually research Zrbite itself.
  • While most of the early cults are straightforward to handle, simply requiring that you identify and capture increasingly higher ranked (and rare) individuals, the Church of Dagon is somewhat harder to handle. You still need to find higher ranked units, and the ultimate unit is easy to identify thanks for a face full of tentacles, but even when you ultimately capture the Church of Dagon Statue, you need to invest time in Eldritch Language and Eldritch Language Translation before you can actually research the key item and get the Terminate The Church of Dagon research topic, something that isn't required of any other cult.
  • Lasers are easily captured and researched and available for use as soon as you find them (except for the Alien Laser Rifle), since they're made by humans for humans. But you won't be able to research them until you find and research one specific example: the somewhat rare Hydra Laser. Doing that will give you access to the basics of laser weapon research, and then Laser Weapon Construction, and then finally Laser Pistol and Laser Rifle. If you don't find that Hydra Laser, you'll be stuck scavenging what you can find (which means they're being shot at you) and using increasingly ineffective ballistic weapons. AND you'll be locked out of plasma weapons entirely, since understanding those requires laser weapon research.
• Gun Struggle: If the shooter stands next to the target and the target has time units left, he'll try to push the gun aside. The outcome depends on their respective melee skills, the gun used (pistols are harder to stop than a minigun) and random chance. If the shooter fails, he spends extra TUs turning in random direction and shoots there. Good news: your agents can defend themselves this way too, and after months of training their melee and reaction stats gets high enough to shoot most enemies point blank.
  • This can result in the absolutely ridiculous tactic of charging a heavy gun. Because heavy weapons tend to impede melee skill, if you shoot at an enemy and fail to take them down, the next best thing might actually be to just run up to them and stand next to them. Most of the time, the AI will try to fire instead of moving away first, and if you win the Gun Struggle, they'll miss entirely. It's a very dangerous tactic, but can save lives.
  • Melee-oriented X-Animal units like Rats, Bats, and Dogs have good to great odds of fouling an enemy's aim in close combat due to being good enough at melee to win the Gun Struggle regularly.
• Half-Human Hybrid:
  • "Hybrids" are of human and Sectoid origin. Most of them are covertly preparing the invasion. One of them runs EXALT, and you can eventually convince some that are dissatisfied with their alien masters to defect to XCOM and become playable characters.
  • Biblical Nephilim — offspring of humans and fallen angels, usually translated as "giants" or "fallen ones" — were an earlier experiment that used Ethereal rather than Sectoid DNA. Some of them may have survived the purge.
  • Werewolves and werecats are artificial creatures combining human and animal genes. They are bipedal, covered with fur, smart (but no longer sapient as of 0.9.3), carnivorous and can eat humans. Some can possess rudimentary Psychic Powers, but only to talk to each other.
  • "Carcharodons" are part-human part-shark artificial soldiers.
  • Subverted by Gillman Heroes. They are, in fact, normal humans who were kidnapped by T'leth aliens and enhanced with biological and mechanical modification before being mentally dominated and forcibly conscripted into the alien forces. Capturing one alive reveals that this mental domination is easily broken and the subject retains all their memories and personality. They are horrified by what the aliens did to them and gladly help XCOM.
• Hazmat Suit: By default, your agents don't have access to these, but don't actually need them. As threats are uncovered, however, Hazmat Suits become available, offering excellent protection against chemical, electrical, fire and choke (smoke) damage, but no protection at all against weapons like kinetic, laser or plasma damage, making them highly specialized. They're also the minimum requirement for an expedition to Dimension X, making those missions even more of a hassle due to the bulk of the suit^note Hazmat suits reduce maximum Time Units and Energy, as well as Reaction. There's an upgraded version known as the Bio-Exo Suit, which provides even better protection than the Hazmat Suit at the cost of needing to be be manufactured rather than purchased, and an even better version of that called the Toxi-Suit that's specifically designed to protect against alien toxic weapons (providing exceptional protection from acid, biological and fire weapons). However, it turns out that any self-contained suit can double as a Hazmat Suit, meaning that once you have access to Aqua Plastic Suits, you'll never need to use Hazmat Suits again.
• Humans Are Bastards: In the majority of arcs your enemies are humans working for aliens. Directly or indirectly.
• The Illuminati: The Illuminati are the most influential group in the Council of Earth - they're a rare (relatively) benevolent example, as they believe Status Quo Is God and they plan to create a global society where every human's needs are met (as long as they remain in control, of course). They're X-COM's biggest sponsors and are opposed by Majestic 12, who instead created and back the Men in Black to dethrone the Illuminati.
• Immune to Bullets:
  • Swarmids — swarms of, well, some small and very alien things from the world of Spitters and Megaworms. Not exactly immune, but can't be realistically killed by Earth pistols or rifles. Fortunately, tasers and fire work fine.
  • Some big monsters have hides so thick, they are immune to small pistols and buckshot.
  • Ghosts require several dozens of bullets to kill. The Asylum Apparitions mission requires a different solution. They are vulnerable to lasers as well as other high-energy weapons (like plasma), but when the ghosts are introduced, you won't have those. At that point, it's important to remember that electricity is a type of energy.
  • Red Dawn enemies above the rank-and-file (Pioneers and up) are surprisingly resistant to bullets as a consequence of their genetic modification, taking only 70% damage from bullets. Fortunately, they don't have very high hit points. Coordinators, on the other hand, will mess you up. The best option for taking them down is copious amounts of fire.
  • EXALT high level enemies have the same resistance to bullets as Red Dawn, but lower armor.
  • The biggest advantage that Tritanium Vest (and later, Cyber Armor) provides is that the armor rating is higher than 200% of most normal ballistic weapons. As a result, unless an enemy gets really lucky, XCOM agents wearing such armor are immune to bullets. Of course, then the enemies will bring out lasers, plasma weapons, extremely powerful kinetic weapons, bio and chemical weapons, and psi weapons, which are much harder to defend against. If you combine armor with good Kinetic protection with Webwear (a spidersilk undershirt woven from the silk of giant spiders), you can make your agents surprisingly hard to hurt with mundane guns - an agent wearing a Bulletproof Coat with a Webwear undershirt cannot be easily wounded by anything less powerful than a proper military weapon.
• Implacable Man: Syndicate Soldiers have exceedingly good armor, and when you fight them, your primary weapons will be kinetic, which they take reduced damage from (70%), meaning they can walk through a hail of fire with no or minimal damage and gun down your agents. The best option for taking them down is chemical weapons (if you have them), electrical weapons, stun weapons or fire (and to a lesser extent, grenades or explosives). Once you have a reliable source of usable energy weapons, they are much more manageable, taking 130% damage from those weapons. And then the Syndicate fields their Supersoldiers and Minotaurs, which are just as hard to hurt and have huge health pools.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: If your agents survive, and you manage to get them good weapons, hit chances in excess of 100% are not only possible, but likely, especially with advanced Smart weaponry or sniper rifles in aimed shot mode. The Arasaka 3000 is especially notable: it's decently powerful and has a very high snap shot accuracy, even at long ranges, making it very useful from about mid-1997 to late 1998 (when most enemies have high kinetic resistance). Unfortunately, higher level enemies also have exceptional aiming skill, and are usually armed with weapons that have high inherent accuracy as well, meaning your agents will get shot. Constantly.
• Impossible Hourglass Figure: Strix. With big hips and large Non-Mammal Mammaries (since they give "energetic blood plasma" and substances that control lesser zombies).
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • Prior to version 0.9.3, the Thunderstorm interceptor with tritanium cannon. The best fighter that needs no elerium. Enough speed to catch all UFO types, but two. Enough hit points, agility and firepower to fight battleships one-on-one and survive (more often than not). And best of all, you can get it before 1999. Still, it cannot help against infiltrations^note According to developers' notes, the country is successfully infiltrated the moment the second battleship arrives, shooting down earlier UFOs only delays the inevitable. or enemies that don't use flying craft. Version 0.9.3 nerfed it by replacing the cannon mount with a second heavy missile mount, making the Thunderstorm much more specialized.
  • A Raven interceptor with a Tritanium Cannon and a Mass Driver Cannon. The Raven is very fast, reasonably durable, and has an excellent range, letting it go halfway around the world with little trouble while still using normal fuel. The Tritanium Cannon can shoot down any Small UFO due to damage and accuracy, and the Mass Driver Cannon can shoot down Medium and a few less tanky Large UFOs. It will struggle mightily against anything that outranges it, but given the constant spawning of Small UFOs, the Raven will likely be your main interceptor for a significant portion of your aerial battles.
  • The Skymarshall transport craft: an upgrade of the Skyranger, it can hold two more agents, and avoids some of the very serious drawbacks of the Skyranger. The Skymarshall "sits" on the ground in combat missions, meaning that there's no exit ramp to descend at the beginning of the mission, and the "tail" provides some cover against being immediately shot by ambushing enemies. It also has two "front" exit doors in case the rear exit is too dangerous, or just for getting people at the front of the loading bay into combat. It's slightly faster than the Skyranger and only costs 50 Alien Alloy to manufacture^note The Skyranger and the Skyraider don't require any Alien Alloy. There's absolutely no reason to ever bother with the Skyranger if you can rush the Skymarshall (which becomes available for research immediately after the Skyranger project is completed), as long as you have the Alien Alloy to build it, but even then, it's better to wait until you do have the Alloy. It does, however, require quite a bit more manufacturing time than the Skyranger.
  • Smart Rifles loaded with Tritanium rounds. An extremely accurate weapon with excellent aimed shot range, good snap shot accuracy, and a five round auto shot (that's also reasonably accurate) while also sporting a 50 round magazine. Loaded with regular ammunition, it's good. With Tritanium rounds, it will punch through the armor of almost anything terrestrial ( Syndicate Supersoldiers and Minotaurs, as well as higher-ranking MiB soldiers will resist it more often than not), and aliens, who generally don't use armor, will be torn apart by the auto shot dispersing their energy shields. It will struggle against heavily armored enemies and is completely worthless against vehicles, but for the weight and cost, there's nothing better until you get post-ballistic weapons.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • An actual sword, even: the Ancient Katana. It does 50 cutting damage (already difficult for most enemies to resist), and it adds 30% of the user's psi strength, and 70% of the user's melee skill to damage, on top of an exceptionally high accuracy (base of 100%). Agents can have up to 100 psi strength, and up to 150 melee accuracy^note realistically, they'll top out at 120, which means putting the sword in the right hands can do upwards of 185 damage in a single strike, which is enough to bypass any armor in the game. The disadvantage of having to get close to the target is massively offset by the sheer damage output of one 12-time-unit, 100% accurate attack. It also works underwater, and in space, and even in the Dreamscape! Getting it does, however, requiring defeating Lo Wo, which is incredibly dangerous.
  • Another sword rivals the Ancient Katana: the Nachtfall, a two-handed sword with similar psi strength-enhanced performance, but where the Ancient Katana has a unique benefit of being partially usable with an offhand item/weapon (dropping to 85% of power/accuracy instead of 50%), Nachtfall's benefit comes in the form of lifesteal (tied in-lore to the modified Alenium Shard in the hilt). This allows a melee user with Nachtfall to restore any damage taken (or heal back lifeloss from popping Zephyr Serum pills) just by hitting enemies in melee.
  • The Scatter Laser is insanely, ridiculously powerful. It shoots lasers more powerful than the equivalent Laser Rifle and Laser Sniper Rifle, it's reasonably accurate for what is essentially a minigun, and it shoots 15 times with autofire at a rate that allows you to take two shots. There's almost nothing that can survive 15 shots from this beast, and there is nothing that can survive 30. Granted, not all shots will hit due to the low accuracy, but if you have a lot of targets, or one big target, the Scatter Laser will settle things with just a small amount of indiscriminate firepower.
• Instant Sedation: Dart pistols and rifles, gas grenades. Targets suffer no ill effects.
• Jumped at the Call: Most (if not all) of X-Com senior staff. The Chief Engineer won't actually join until you've researched a "strange alien device", for example, and he specifically says he doesn't care whether or not the alien invasion is real: he just wants to see and play with all the cool toys. Your Chief Xenologist is hired as soon as you research a sufficiently alien creature, and points out that he doesn't know why he was hired, because quite frankly, you're not really dealing with aliens, but he's willing to stick around just in case you do, because that's the opportunity of a lifetime.
• Kill It with Fire: Represented by flare pistols, flamethrowers and incendinary munitions like grenades, rockets, and light/heavy/auto-cannon shells. Like Reapers in the original UFO, many monsters are vulnerable to fire. Some enemies, like swarmids, are near-immune to everything else. Some incendinary weapons are coded to inflict extra Morale damage when you light enemies on fire with them, increasing the probability that they panic or go berserk after you ignite them.
  • The ultimate solution to the monster problem is a chemical that makes them ignite spontaneously.
  • On an unrelated note, since version 0.9.1 good old alien plasma weapons started to set everything on fire. Fortunately, you can buy fire extinguishers from the start, and later you can develop chemgun ammo tanks that are filled with fire-extinguishing agents.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: It's eventually revealed that the Men In Black routinely use it on their agents. As it turns out, most of their agents are, in fact, ordinary people forcibly conscripted to their cause. The ones you capture aren't able to tell you much because they don't remember much. The same is true to a lesser extent with the Black Lotus, but in those cases, they don't get to go back to who they were.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: The UAC Stapler. It's a, well, stapler, that has a truly pathetic range of 4 tiles, and does zero damage beyond that. However, it's surprisingly accurate within those 4 tiles, very fast to fire in aimed shot mode, and does cutting damage, which most enemies in the game do not resist. It doesn't do a lot of cutting damage (10 points, with a bonus of 10% of the firing unit's Bravery for being stupid enough to use it), but it's a ranged weapon that can output a surprising amount of unresisted damage if you can get close enough to use it. Once you get Tritanium melee weapons, it becomes useless, but it does have its niche.
  • The Noose. It's a melee weapon with a terrible hit chance, but it does choke damage. The only things that resist choke damage don't breathe, and everything else is incredibly vulnerable to it (humans take 400%' damage from choke sources). Using one is a terrible idea, of course...unless...
• Left Hanging: The game is still being updated, but not all plotlines are necessarily resolved (by design).
  • Defeating Cyberweb involves taking control of their battleship in Dimension X. It's mentioned that there's an entire alien civilization there that has proven hostile to humanity, but the final mission briefing decides that it's not worth provoking anything with all the other stuff you have going on. Newer versions have the aliens decide that they're interested in Earth: they "capture" the Technomads that were stuck in Dimension X, brainsuck them, and then send them through dimensional portals back to Earth. This swiftly becomes X-COM's problem, once you've convinced the Council of it.
  • Defeating any of the main cults (EXALT, Red Dawn, Black Lotus and Church of Dagon) notes that the cults themselves haven't been shut down, but as you've taken out the leader of the organization or in the case of Black Lotus, cut off their link to their leader, the remnants aren't going to be a world-endangering threat anymore, so you can ignore them.
  • Defeating the T'leth faction requires you to raid their principle clone factory so that you can figure out how to blow it up. Once you've done so, the faction is functionally defeated: they're still a threat, but since Dagon won't be a problem for at least 40 years, X-COM decides to reprioritize and look to more immediate threats. And then subverted: you can immediately initiate a research project to say "No, this is still a problem" over even your own staff's objections, and establish Hydro Space Dynamics, essentially the underwater equivalent of X-COM, to handle the continued underwater incursions.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • To unlock a certain storyline you need to study a certain weapon (one of several). Those weapons appear in few missions and may never appear at all.
  • On a related note — there's a chance to never encounter some non-crucial, but useful weapons.
  • The ability to study the majority of the artefacts and much of your own research depend on discoveries you get from interrogations. But each prisoner reveals a random piece of information from around 10-20, and most of it is "fluff", i.e. flavour texts that help to immerse you in the game world, but do little to advance the plot. In other words, you may get the necessary information immediately, or next year (though as long as you keep capturing and interrogating suspects, you will get all information eventually).
  • The final series of missions requires that you launch a satellite to keep an eye on the moon so you can pinpoint an alien base. Once you've completed the research, built the required facility and completed the manufacturing project to build and launch the satellite. All you can do is wait. There's a 50% chance every month that the relevant mission will trigger, and it is not cumulative: if you lose that coin flip, you'll be waiting another month just to see if you get it. You could be waiting months in-game to get the relevant event. And once you do get the right event and complete the relevant mission and research from it, you have to wait another month to get the next mission to trigger. This happens a total of five times. Only once you've completed that series of missions will you be able to pinpoint the alien base on Mars and research the "Cydonia or Bust" topic to trigger the endgame mission...which you can do at any time from the Geoscape, making the wait time even more infuriating in retrospect.
    • If that's not enough, launching the satellite seems to be a trigger for the aliens to ramp up their "Alien Infiltration" missions, meaning you'll suddenly start losing countries and seeing Alien Colonies pop up unless you're able to shoot down Battleships regularly.
• Magikarp Power: As with most X-COM games, your starting units are not great. But they become insanely effective if they survive. Slightly alleviating this is the existence of gyms and agent requisitions.
  • Gyms allow a unit to train passively, as long as they're not on a mission or injured. This gives all their stats a boost over time, particularly increasing Stamina, Strength, Firing, Melee and Throwing Accuracy so that agents are not terrible at their jobs. There is a limit to how much they can train, and it takes about two to three months of training to actually get to the point that gym training won't help anymore (at which point the agent becomes "merely" effective rather than deadweight), but there's no reason not to throw everyone you recruit into the gym.
  • If you get at least 1000 points in a month (and complete the relevant research), during the following month, you'll get a random requisition for an agent. This can be sold for money ($99,000, which is a lot in the early game), or processed in your workshop to give you an agent with the relevant background, such as Spy, Soldier, Marksman, Martial Artist, or Sapper. These backgrounds give slight bonuses to the agent, but most importantly, they are recruited having already completed the gym training, so they are effective from the moment they're hired, while still being able to gain stat points rapidly from missions.
  • When they are unlocked, dogs are vulnerable, weak, and struggle to be effective in combat. But they level up fast, gaining stats rapidly through combat^note Dogs are, unfortunately, not able to be trained passively and must level up in combat. By the mid-game, with Neoderm and either Synthsuit or Cyber Armor upgrades for them, they become absolute whirlwinds, moving significantly faster and farther than even a Chryssalid while their bite attack can be spammed for massive Fatal Wound accumulation. And their bark ability can drain time units and morale. Keeping them alive to get to that point is difficult, however.
  • X-COM as a whole is this: at the beginning of the game, the agency is established as a UN analogue to the FBI, responsible for investigating weird cults and unusual activity around the world. This means you start with 5 scientists, 8 untrained agents, 1 engineer, extremely basic facilities, and a budget that can best be described as "aspirational". Your quartermaster complains that you don't have access to Kevlar Vests, something easily accessible to municipal police departments, and you have to spend time going through a lot of red tape just to get access to those. By the time you get your third promotion, X-COM is a global defense agency, likely with well-staffed and defended bases around the world, with a competent group of superhuman agents responding to everything from zombie attacks to massive cults to underwater attacks, and has taken down multiple cults and at least one massive Council project, while pushing the boundaries of science, investigating other dimensions, and exposing corruption throughout the world as an afterthought. Oh, and also taking the fight to the many alien factions interested in Earth, and doing so effectively despite a massive (but narrowing) technology gap. By the end of the game, X-COM is a premiere organization with bases on multiple celestial bodies and other dimensions, and has defeated all other factions.
• Magnetic Weapons: Represented by Gauss weapons (used by Reptoids) and their less advanced cousins, human-made Mass Drivers. Mass Drivers are lighter and less powerful than Gauss weapons, but easier to make and wield.
• The Man Behind the Man: Of the first four well-defined enemies three unlock next enemy.
  • The Church of Dagon is controlled by, well, "sea god" Dagon. He lives in T'leth, the alien city from Terror from the Deep.
  • EXALT is secretly run by Hybrids, who do the bidding of Cydonian aliens.
  • Red Dawn isn't directly run by any outside force, but they pick the scraps from Cyberweb, who has connections in another dimension.
  • As of version 1.8 the Black Lotus handlers haven't been implemented yet. It's known that they're being psionically dominated by a being from space, but beyond cutting that control, you can't confront her. Given the power of her Avatars and Hosts, that's probably a good thing. However, defeating Black Lotus gives you information on the power of psionics, specifically "psi whispers" from otherworldly individuals, which indirectly leads to ghosts and the Reclamation of Aether.
  • Once you've dealt with the Cults and investigated their supporters, you get to find out about more layers, though the connections are more tenuous as the interested parties
    • Cyberweb has no real interest in working with the aliens of Dimension X, only seeing that place as a convenient hiding place away from Earth authorities. The aliens are far more interested in Earth itself, however.
    • The Hybrids are directly controlled by the aliens from outer space, specifically the Sectoids and their Ethereal masters.
    • The Syndicate has no interest in any of the factions, but they are profiting from the illegal distribution of their products through Osiron, which gets your attention and eventually reveals they're directly responsible for the proliferation of mutated wildlife.
    • The Cult of Apocalypse is mostly a nuisance at the lower echelons, but when they start to show up with a significant amount of VAST weaponry, your investigations will turn in that direction.
• Masquerade: Modus operandi of the entire conspiracy setting. The Earth is ruled by a mysterious assembly of influential people (even the X-COM Commander, who should in theory know everyone that they report to, doesn't know about them), working in various groups who are constantly struggling for power and control over one another. Ordinary citizens have no idea that these groups even exist.
  • The alien invasion threatens to expose all of this, which upsets the Council. In turn, they demand XCOM deal with the problem.
  • The Council is also working at cross purposes. At the beginning of the game, you don't even know anything about the Council beyond the fact that they're bankrolling you. There's entire research lines about the Council and the various factions within it. But most importantly, one of the most dangerous non-alien groups, the Men in Black, was established at the same time as X-COM, with the opposite mandate: ensure humanity's survival by cooperating with the aliens. The Council sees no hypocrisy in having two groups naturally opposed to each other, and instead views it as a Darwinian struggle: if X-COM wins, the MIB weren't pursuing their agenda successfully. If MIB wins, X-COM had no chance to stop the invasion anyway.
• MegaCorp:
  • The Syndicate.
  • BlackOps Industries, which proves to be its subsidiary.
  • Osiron is a downplayed version of this: they are everywhere and buying and selling everything, but they are illegal arms dealers and alien technology traffickers. You never actually get a chance to shut down Osiron, specifically because they are so decentralized that you can only impede their activity. But the Bosses and Fixers are implied to be extremely wealthy (until you arrest or kill them).
  • M.A.G.M.A. They're your allies for the most part, offering advanced technology in exchange for your advanced technology. But the fact that one of your first missions to help them involves taking out experimental zombie troopers that had their implants hacked implies that the corporation is not on the up-and-up. Interestingly enough, while M.A.G.M.A. won't actively work against you, giving them access to advanced technology isn't considered a good thing. It will lose you a lot of score points (-500 points, when ignoring a Terror Site is -1000 points), and any technology you give you M.A.G.M.A. has a chance of being used against you by other factions (the only technology you unlock from M.A.G.M.A that never gets used by enemy factions is the Power Armor that requires you to release Elerium Batteries and Terramite material science to the tune of -1500 reputation with the Council in total, but it is also an expensive piece of kit that is sold to XCOM at 750 thousand dollars per suit of armor).
  • VAST, which ingame is focused on space-capable weapons and is later implicated in a cult plot due to their weapons always being wielded by members of said cult. Turns out they're being manipulated by Hell, with half the company (or more) fighting against the other half for control.
• The Men in Black: Early on your organization seems to be the Men in Black. The black suits are your default outfit, you are a mysterious organization with some SF gear. Quickly subverted when you end up having to fight the real Men in Black during a crop circles, alien abduction or cattle mutilation mission. They are a mysterious organisation dealing with the Hybrid Network and covering up stuff like abductions. Turns out the Council decided to hedge their bets: XCOM is trying to stop the alien invasion, the Men in Black are trying to work with the aliens to make sure the Council stays on top of humanity while serving under the aliens.
• Mind-Control Device: Many.
  • The first one that you run into is likely Psiclone, from the EXALT cult. Psiclone is designed (and sold) to forcibly boost the user's psionic potential, but the EXALT version also pummels them with thoughts of obedience and servitude, turning them into new EXALT agents. XCOM eventually takes over production, but without the mental pummeling and significantly milder general effects, to shut down EXALT.
  • The Black Lotus cult is eventually revealed to be controlled by a powerful creature from beyond the stars known only as the Purple Lady. Using a psionic communicator hidden in the Black Lotus headquarters, she mentally dominates susceptible people into following her orders without question. Those that are exposed to the mental effects for long enough become Black Lotus Hosts, and eventually Black Lotus Avatars.
  • The Hybrid Network is controlled by a powerful Hybrid Mental Control Device, ensuring and enforcing loyalty to the aliens just in case indoctrination isn't sufficient. Capturing the device allows you to turn it off, which attracts Hybrids that rebelled against the indoctrination for you to hire.
  • Although not much is made of it, the underwater races (excluding the Gillmen) are all controlled by devices implanted in their bodies. While the game doesn't call these Molecular Control Devices (which is what they were named in X-COM: Terror from the Deep), it does note that they "likely" provide some manner of control and respond to psionic energy.
  • XCOM avoids implanting anyone or anything with mind control devices to ensure loyalty, but they eventually develop the Skulljack, the Psi-Amp and the Multi-Phased Psi-Amp^note The Skulljack is melee-range only, while the Psi-Amp is short-ranged and line-of-sight limited, and the MPPA is medium-range and can go through walls, which allows those with sufficient Psi Strength and Skill to force units to panic, or just mentally control them for a turn. The aliens, on the other hand, don't need additional devices; they can just mind control your units directly.
• Mordor / Hostile Terraforming: What the Reptoids plan to do with the planet Earth.
• More than Mind Control: While most cases of mind control are noted to be involuntary, there are exceptions.
  • Sectoids will point out that they serve their masters, the Ethereals, willingly, though they are still subject to psionic control. When questioned about it, they explained that they were promised a cure for their inability to reproduce. They believe so fervently in this idea that they don't understand the question about when they will get the cure, or how long it's been since they were promised it.
  • Black Lotus members who are exposed for too long to the mental effects of their Goddess eventually change, first becoming Hosts to her "divine will" and then becoming Avatars, at which point they are no longer people, but rather simply extensions of their Goddess. Analysis of their remains notes that their DNA has not been altered, despite, in some cases, no longer being the same biological sex, and XCOM scientists have no idea how that's even possible.
  • Men In Black agents are not mind controlled at all. Instead they are mind wiped. If the process is reversed, they go back to normal with no memory of the intervening time.
  • After Cyberweb is defeated, the aliens from Dimension X offer them sanctuary, in return for missions. These agents are noted to retain the personalities, skills and memories. But they have been "brainsucked". Their bodies are hosts to an incredible number of microscopic organisms that connect them to the Dimension X alien hive mind through some not-understood process. They can do whatever they want, and they are aware of themselves and their own desires, meaning that they serve willingly. But if they turn against their alien benefactors, willingly or not, the micro-organisms will immediately flood their bodies with lethal toxins, killing them. The agents are aware of this, and even warn XCOM interrogators that it will happen if they persist in asking questions. Veterans of X-COM: Apocalypse will recognize the influence of the Micronoids.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Mission names like "Blood Moon" or "Soul Harvest".
• Nerf:
  • The fan-named "lethal injection" — shooting from an adjacent tile — no longer works as before. A target with time units will start a Gun Struggle.
  • Interceptor craft have their weaponry divided into "Cannon", "Beam", "Light Missile" and "Heavy Missile". Beam weapons, while devastating and efficient, can only be mounted in the Beam weapon slot, which is not available until you have advanced craft powered by Elerium, forcing you to rely on short-ranged, ammunition-using cannons and expensive and bulky missiles for significantly longer.
  • The Thunderstorm interceptor suffered from a huge nerf: previously, it used a heavy missile mount and cannon mount, allowing it to use its superior speed and evasion to tangle with anything short of a battleship. After the nerf, it was restricted to two heavy missile mounts, making it far less effective against smaller UFOs, while also preventing it from carrying the weaponry to shoot down larger UFOs, resulting in it filling a much more niche role in aerial combat.
  • Each base can have no more than 1 laboratory of each kind, and you have to research and build them separately, making it much more difficult (and expensive) to have a full cadre of scientists ready to go. In addition, some research projects require the presence of a specific lab: you can't properly interrogate people without an Intelligence Lab, for example, even if you have 25 scientists ready to go in a Science Laboratory.
  • Workshops are no longer profitable. The most profitable goods can pay the engineers' wage, but nothing beyond that, not even the workshops' upkeep.
    • Additionally, it's not possible to manufacture Alien Alloys unless and until you capture an extremely rare Tritanium Matrix, and even then, you still have to build the costly Tritanium Foundry, forcing you to scavenge for Alien Alloys for much longer.
  • Middle click no longer reveals enemies' ranks (which was a programming oversight). Go figure if this Black Lotus Warrior is actually an Assassin (requiring extreme caution and firepower). Or which of Sectoids is the engineer you desperately need to question^note While most enemies have enough distinguishing characteristics to allow you to eventually identify them at a glance, Black Lotus Warriors and Assassins are completely identical, though Assassins are far more deadly, and Sectoids all look exactly the same except for Commanders, who wear a circlet.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: As you develop more powerful technology, M.A.G.M.A. will contact you to ask you for access to it, so that they can replicate it and give you access to additional gear based on it. However, while M.A.G.M.A. intentions are generally good, they are terrible at security: every bit of technology you give them will result in new mission types spawning when they inevitably lose control over it. The mission briefings make it very clear that this is a result of your dissemination of alien technology and the Council expects you to clean up your mess or suffer a huge penalty in score^note The most basic penalty, for ignoring a tritanium ammo deal, is a whopping 350 point penalty, on par with letting a homicidal madman run rampant.
• Ninja: Black Lotus warriors and assassins. They even have psionic invisibility. They can use guns, but prefer silent crossbows, throwing stars and knives, and katanas and wakizashi.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Sometime after the defeat of Black Lotus, you will occasionally get a notification about a Black Lotus ninjas trying to rob a bank. Only one of the attackers is human. The rest are "Mashinobi", robot ninjas. Researching them reveals that Black Lotus was made up of several "ninja clans" that are operating more independently after the defeat of their parent organization.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted, there is a specific alert message to warn you that your arcing weapons lack a viable trajectory to hit the enemy. Also applies to grenades and some projectiles, like flares. You can even shoot over obstacles and hit enemies with no line of sight as long as you have a spotter.
• No-Sell: It depends on a number of factors, but this can happen a lot.
  • Any unit with a shield will outright ignore damage unless and until the shield is breached.
  • If an attack fails to defeat a unit's armor, they will not take damage from it at all, not even armor damage. This generally results in an Oh, Crap! moment.
  • Robotic units are completely immune to any mind control attempt, since they have no actual mind to control. The same is true of XCOM AI units. Likewise, these units are immune to morale failure as they cannot lose morale at all. Which means that, as long as any robotic units are active, the enemy will never surrender.
  • AI Units are immune to most of the damage Ghosts can dish out since they take no damage from Psi attacks whatsover. This can result in the amusing scenario of a squad of Flying Drones training their firing accuracy by peppering ghosts with their lasers with impunity as the ghost projectiles just bounce off their casings. Poltergeists, however, attack with physical objects and remain dangerous to the lightly armored and low health AI units.
  • Once UFOs reach a certain size, they become immune to certain attacks, reflected by their (unknown) armor rating. This is reflected in combat with the message "Bounced off the hull!", though that won't stop the pilot from continuing to use that weapon unless you turn it off manually. Craft shields also prevent a target from being damaged until the shield is defeated (and the craft could still have armor after that).
• Not Enough to Bury: Some powerful weapons have a chance to destroy the target's body leaving no corpse and no loot if they hit the target hard enough. Hitting an enemy with a flame weapon will sometimes incinerate the remains.
• Not the Intended Use: Various clandestine missions require that you show up without your fancy armor and big guns, in an inconspicuous vehicle, so as to not draw too much attention to your alien war. The best inconspicuous vehicle you can use? The Dragonfly, a VTOL jet that transports up to 8 agents. Showing up to meet an informant at a seedy dive bar in a black painted hovering jet is apparently considered low-key.
• Nubile Savage: The UFOpaedia picture for "Subculture: Cavemen".
• Oh, Crap!: In newer versions of the mod, cults can spawn manors around the world (which are for all intents and purposes cult versions of alien bases). Attacking a base with any vehicle that doesn't have the "Undetectable" tag^note limited to Public Car, Public Van and Private Car, which are slow, restricted in the number of agents you can bring, or both will spawn a group of enemies in cars to attack your vehicle. If you didn't bother to put a weapon on your Humvee, or you're not using a vehicle that can outrun them, expect to lose your entire team and the car. And if you do have a gun on your Humvee, you still want to be careful attacking Red Dawn manors, as they may spawn several Hind D attack helicopters to ruin your day.
• Older Than They Look: Some dossiers. Those women use alien technology to look young.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Werewolves and werecats are genetically engineered from human and animal DNA. They can't shapeshift, but their pack leaders have limited psionic abilities.
• Our Zombies Are Different: There are 2 different kinds:
  • Same as in UFOEU, the victims of Cryssalids. Quickly turn into Cryssalids. Appear in late 1999 or later. These are also followed up with the victims of Tentaculats once the Deep Ones progression sets in (due to sprite limitations they use the same "hatch into Cryssalid" animation when defeated, but will turn into Tentaculats).
  • An entirely new type, the victims of alien-introduced zombie parasite. Appear from the start as yet another kind of "strange life form". They share biochemistry with other monsters, but later prove able to evolve into tougher, faster and smarter forms: fat zombies, infectors, strixes, tomb guardians, vampires — by eating other zombies and concentrating enough energy to rebuild their nervous systems.
  • Additionally, unscrupulous scientists create militarized forms of the latter: zombie troopers and megazombies.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: Flying saucers before 1999 probably qualify. Several UFOs on "research" mission may appear randomly in 1997-1998, but not necessarily within your reach. They are crewed by Sectoids armed with plasma, shields and often psionics. If you win (hint: use cover), the spoils are worth a lot, though you won't be able to research most artefacts until much later. Newer versions of the mod guarantee a chance to raid an UFO by spawning the "Human Military Shoots Down a UFO" mission in mid-1998.
• Permanently Missable Content: Once an arc is finished, there is no way to get certain artefacts. Early versions, for example, made it so that if you didn't get Durathread by specifically killing a Red Dawn soldier of higher rank, you wouldn't get Durathread at all, and lose all the research tied to it (which includes interceptors). This has been significantly alleviated by forcing interrogations in order to close out the arc, and those interrogations giving you the necessary resources. Optional items (such as Ninja Scrolls, the Ancient Katana, Lo Wo's Scroll of Secrets, to name a few) can still be permanently missed, but they are not required to beat the game, just very helpful (and according to the mod author, they can be randomly obtained in Osiron Crates).
• Powered Armor: There are many kinds in this game.
  • The earliest is the Cyber Armor, a lightweight plated armor set with a cybernetic jack, and you can make a series of suits using the Synthfibers taken from Mutons, in addition to the classic XCOM Power Suit and Flying Suit, like the Synthsuit, Assault Suit, the Stormtrooper armor, and the Shocktrooper armor.
  • If you release Elerium battery technology and Terramite to the M.A.G.M.A. corporation, you will take a large reputation hit with the Council, but in exchange, you can start buying M.A.G.M.A. developed Power Armor, which is capable of functioning underwater and is competitive in protection with the Power Suit (although it is less capable in melee or throwing accuracy, lacks a backpack for inventory space, and has sufficiently different damage resistances that it can handle very differently against different weapon types).
  • From the TFTD content, you can eventually develop the Juggernaut diving armor instead of Mag-Ion Armor from the original TFTD, which lacks the full underwater flight-like manuverability, but in exchange, it has some of the best raw armor stats in the game and a non-trivial amount of resistances.
• The Prophecy:

• Putting on the Reich: Syndicate CEOs wear authentic SS rings. And call Earthlings "subhumans". They may or may not be related to Black Sun, the (as of now unfinished) hi-tech faction of Nazi remnants that hides on the Moon.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Same as in the original games. High-ranking enemies have better weapons and stats. With a few exceptions — for example, EXALT Masters are slow and weak, since they effectively bought their positions. Don't assume the same thing about the EXALT CEO.
• Red Shirt Army:
  • In terror and monster missions police and soldiers tend to attack the enemies head-on, regardless of danger. This may work against spiders, beetles or scorpions, but not when an enemy has couple hundred HPs, is immune to bullets or carries a heavy plasma gun. To add insult to injury, neither wear any body armour and police are issued the weakest pistol in the game.
  • Same goes for security in mansion defense missions. Even when they have half-decent guns, they are unarmoured, and outgunned.
• The Remnant: early in the game, cults are your main opponents, and in newer versions, they can establish long term bases akin to alien bases, called Cult Manors. If you wipe out the cult, the manors themselves don't go away until they're successfully assaulted and cleared, meaning a cult can continue existing for days, weeks, months, years after completing the Terminate mission.
• Research, Inc.: See MegaCorp above.
• Sanity Slippage: While not a problem at first, eventually, most missions will have an "eerie atmosphere" or worse, an "oppressive atmosphere"^note "Eerie" reduces sanity by 1 point a turn. "Oppressive" reduces it by 2. The absolute worse is "This place feels nightmareish", which reduces Sanity by a whopping 3 points per turn and frequently shows up on base assault missions, which take 10-20 rounds to clear. These moods represent the amount of sanity damage your agents will take each turn. At high Sanity, agents get a boost to Energy and Morale regeneration, but at low Sanity, regeneration is penalized, and at very low levels, even Time Unit regeneration (normally 100% every turn) can be penalized^note If Sanity is fully drained and Morale bottoms out, the soldier will start taking health damage. Extremely high Bravery (100+, which rarely occur naturally) can mitigate Sanity loss, but it won't remove the issue. Sanity also doesn't automatically get restored at the end of combat either: agents will normally only get 3 points back per day.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: This mod has many more missions that penalize letting them expire than the vanilla game, but it's still possible to arrive, see the situation is unwinnable and leave. Of course, if there are any civilians or crucial installations, you are penalized for leaving them to die or be destroyed. But sometimes coming and leaving is preferrable to skipping the mission outright.
  • Undercover missions have no exit grid. You can only win or die. At least it's not that hard and the penalty for skipping isn't too high.
  • In the Black Lotus Party mission you need to fight your way from the first floor to the exit grid on the roof. Killing all the enemies instead isn't much harder.
  • It's expected that some missions will be too difficult to actually complete. Being completely surrounded at your arrival point will happen more often than not, and since you move first, the enemies will have full Time Units and will get reaction fire if you don't down them immediately. In those cases, it's usually better to hit the Abort Mission button and take the penalty: there will be other opportunities to succeed.
• Seductive Mummy: One of the Mummy Matriachs, Anexis, has fanservicey portraits for her UFOpedia reports where it's clear that she doesn't wear much under her jewelry and bandages.
• Sequence Breaking: Normally you start researching and making high-tech alien devices — such as ray guns or anti-gravity — only in 1999. It is possible to research alien alloys and Reaper and Sectoid autopsies (and alien containment) before mid-1997, but that's all. Unless you are Crazy-Prepared enough to have an alien containment at every base, lucky enough to catch several landed UFOs between 1997-02 and 1998-12, good enough to capture several engineers and navigators, and lucky enough to get important technologies from interrogated aliens. The trickiest part is detecting the UFOs in time — headquarters and intelligence centers have unlimited range, but low probability of detection; radars (researchable from mid-1997 or later) have short range, but higher probability; all of the above have prohibitively high costs, especially the HQ.
  • As of 1.9, it's possible to get a lot of alien gear before the actual alien invasion begins. Random events might give you a Muton corpse, for example, and a lot of the cults have low-end alien gear, like lasers and plasma weapons. It's still not a guarantee, but by the time the aliens hit the ground, you could be walking around in advanced armor and blasting them with energy weapons almost immediately. Reinforced Osiron Crates, MIB crates, and the random loot in Cyberweb Lairs also tend to contain alien artifacts.
• Shock and Awe:
  • Stunning weapons use electroshock: electric club, taser pistol, stun rod...
  • The Cyberweb Lightning Gun, which also does less damage the further away your target is.
  • The Deep One Janissary attacks with a Thunder Arcer, as do Gill Heroes. If you capture Gill Heroes and rescue the people trapped inside, you can acquire their Juggernaut diving suits and the Thunder Arcers.
  • Storm Rose, which is a Psi Weapon powered by your agent's Psi Strength and Firing accuracy. It has a very wide shot grouping, but it DOES do electrical damage and doesn't have ammo, instead consuming Stamina/energy and inflicting Stun damage with each use.
  • Muckstars attack this way, hinting that their remains can be used to make Bioelectric cartridges for the Taser Pistol.
  • The Assault Armor's optional shock shield inflicts Electrical damage, and unlike most other electrical/melee weapons, it is a lethal weapon.
• Shoot the Fuel Tank: Game mechanics-wise transport aircraft are destroyable buildings, while cars and interceptors are large pieces of furniture (you can't enter them and start outside). Each tile can be destroyed (cars are the weakest), and some of them explode, even from melee weapons. Outside "convoy" missions you are the only one with transport. Furthermore, often the car is your only cover. Don't worry: destroying the car in the tactical map has no effect on the strategic layer.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Typical, as most weapons in the game have shorter ranges than in real life, and even other games. Shotguns are affected harder than most.
• Shout-Out:
  • One dossier entry describes an alien mercenary Meridian. Meridian is the programmer developing OXCE+ engine fork the game uses.
  • See "Crossovers" above.
  • Also Xenonauts description calls them Psychonauts.
  • Researching Laser Weapons Construction unlocks an interrogation message from your military advisor suggesting that X-Com should be renamed to "Laser Squad", which was the game Julian Gollop made immediately prior to X-Com; originally; X-Com was going to be Laser Squad 2.
• Smart Gun: Smart Magnum. Upgrade to standard Magnum revolvers gained from Cyberweb. Same power (approaching shotgun slugs and heavy machineguns, above most other Earth guns), but with range and precision of a sniper rifle.
  • There are also Smart Shotguns, Smart Rifles, Smart Sniper Rifles, and Smart Machineguns. Smart Magnums and Smart Shotguns are unique in that you have to make them yourself. The others, you can purchase from M.A.G.M.A.
• Snake People: Snakemen, like in the original game.
• Spider Swarm: Complete with the queen, several types of drones, and an additional twist with the Spider Kings.
• Spies In a Van: X-Com, of course.
• Spread Shot: Shotguns work that way.
• Spy Catsuit: Man in Black Psi Ops.
• Staging an Intervention: Parodied by some "Staff Input" articles, where a named member of the cast complains about other residents of the base or living conditions in general.
• Stalked by the Bell: After you discover a way to defeat a particular organization, you may decide to Take Your Time. Maybe rob their HQ once or twice more. Maybe wait for that special mission that unlocks the next stage much earlier. Maybe try to get that useful artefact. Well, be careful. Not dealing with them swiftly leaves your reputation vulnerable. Starting next month you may get "slander" missions, when you have 2-3 hours to reach the site or face 500 score penalty (for comparison: each dead civilian is 30 and ignoring a terror site is 1000).
• Stripperriffic: One specific unique mission has XCOM deployed to capture or kill a particularly effective hybrid infiltrator who is currently attempting to seduce a VIP to lure him onto a UFO. She's dressed for seduction, not combat, but she's still a dangerous hand-to-hand combatant thanks to her training and enhancements.
• Super-Soldier: Many organisations try to create one, with varying success. To name a few: Red Dawn, Syndicate, Men in Black. Of course, you get in on this as well once you unlock the various Transformation procedures, allowing you to turn your agents into your very own army of bio-enhanced, cyborg warriors.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Infiltration missions generally don't cover the part of how exactly the agents got inside, as long as they don't stand out too much ( like carrying around rifles).
• Tap on the Head: Some blunt melee weapons, shields (that come with some armours). Also electroshock stunners: electric club, taser pistol, stun rod. Targets usually suffer no ill effects, although some blunt weapons have "lethal" chance — up to 75% for a baseball bat.
• Tech Tree: Like in the original games, only much bigger and without the infamous TFTD quirks. Furthemore, the engine allows to browse the tree entries (press "q" in Geoscape), because even some mod authors occasionally get lost.
• This Was His True Form: The body of The Syndicate CEO.
• Timed Mission:
  • Crop circles, alien abduction and cattle mutilation. If you don't kill or stun everybody in 10 turns, you will have to face a large wave of Men in Black reinforcements. And an even larger one if you're still there by turn 13. Usually it's pretty simple: find and stun the unlucky farmer. But occasionally you'll meet zombies or Men in Black.
  • Every mission on the Geoscape is timed: if you don't deploy before the timer is up, it despawns and you get a score penalty based on the severity of the mission (ignoring a Terror Mission, for example, has a 1000 point penalty, while ignoring a Hybrid Experimental Farm only carries an 80 point penalty). The timers are usually very generous, but two missions in particular stand out:
    • If you share alien tech too much, a rare mission called "XCOM Slander" will spawn, in which one of the critics of your decision will badmouth XCOM to members of the Council. You can only respond with a Public Car, Public Van or Private Car, but the mission will despawn in 4-6 hours. The mission description even states "it's unlikely that we'll be able to get there in time to do anything about it". Failing to deploy gets you a 500 point penalty.
    • After you discover the Shogg threat, you will occasionally get notifications that they're attempting to assassinate a high-ranking figure. This mission is relatively easy, consisting of only two to four enemy units, but it will despawn in 6-12 hours. Failing to deploy gets you a 1000 point penalty.
• Title Drop: The third promotion has one for the original game: "You are now known as X-Com: UFO Defense."
• Transhuman:
  • Cyberweb members claim to be ones. Their version of transhumanism includes Transhuman Treachery.
  • X-Com agents also get upgrades eventually, either cybernetic, biological, or psionic.
• Too Awesome to Use: Pretty much any decent weapon for which you can neither buy nor manufacture ammo.
• Underwater Level: Underwater missions against Deep Ones and their masters. The problem: you can't see underwater anywhere as well as actual underwater races, and the choice of weapon and armor is greatly reduced. Advanced underwater armor, starting with Plastic Aqua-Armor, increases your sight range and reduces the penalties you take.
• The Unfought:
  • The research during the Dagon arc leads you to believe this enemy is going to be far more challenging than your previous enemies, with him being the expy of Cthulhu and "The Ultimate Alien" from TFTD and difficulty scaled accordingly. But actually he won't wake up until 2040s and started to build an army only recently. His arc ends with the destruction of the Tasoth factory, delaying their deployment while you deal with other stuff. The more recent versions make it clear that the underwater society is still a threat, however, and XCOM establishes a spinoff organization to handle it, occasionally assisting them.
  • The Cyberweb arc eventually develops into a 1990s version of X-COM: Apocalypse and you end up fighting Spitters, Anthropods, Hyperworms and Micronoids in their home dimension. This new enemy is quite hostile and their city keeps shooting your scouting drones. This can only mean that you'll have to storm the alien city, right? Wrong. You leave this side goal for later and focus on your immediate enemy — Cyberweb. The more recent versions have the aliens use the Cyberweb remnants to invade Earth, meaning that they objected to being The Unfought.
  • The Black Lotus arc definitively ends when you cut the cult off from their psi communicator, which was allowing them to talk to their "Goddess", the Purple Lady, who is somewhere out in the galaxy. The closest you come to fighting her is defeating her Avatars and Hosts and, given how powerful they are, that's probably for the best.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon:
  • Each Cult's HQ is one:
    • The Red Dawn has a huge military base with dozens of soldiers and armored cars, alongside a sprawling bunker.
    • The Church of Dagon has an ancient pyramid in equatorial africa protected both by cultists and Deep Ones.
    • The Black Lotus has an underground base of winding corridors, featuring at least one Avatar and a large army of ninja.
    • Exalt is a Downplayed Trope example, since their HQ is just a normal apartment building.
  • The final fight against Cyberweb is in the Cyberweb Battleship, moored over in Dimension X and attacked on land while vulnerable.
  • The Syndicate's headquarters is a sprawling hideout fully staffed and reinforced by supersoldiers and Minotaurs.
  • Hybrid bases and Embassies are a preview of Sectoid-controlled Alien Bases, with a Sectoid Leader lurking around, Large and regular Alien Drones in place of Cyberdiscs, and an army of Hybrid Assault soldiers wearing good body armor and armed with Alien Laser weapons.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: In version 0.8.2, the game could not be completed, since a crucial artifact didn't spawn. It was fixed in 0.8.3.
• Unobtainium: Elerium-115 as in UFOEU. Can be picked from intact UFO engines, as in the original game. The mod adds a twist that it can be extracted from alien ammunition, some other devices and even fuel traces from landed UFOs. Zrbite as in TFTD, but it has fewer uses, apart from fueling a hybrid transport ship made with technology from T'leth or making Sonic weapons.
• Unstable Equilibrium: When the game begins, X-COM is funded less as an anti-alien force and more as a "just sweep things under the rug" investigative agency. As a result, you have no access to fancy weapons or tools, you're wildly underfunded, and your science team is extremely small. As you uncover evidence of various conspiracies and cults, your mandate is expanded, but your funding isn't: you'll have access to purchase cool guns and build awesome laboratories, but you won't have the money for it. In fact, most early funding comes from selling loot on the Grey Market. By the mid-game, you're not buying gear as much as you're making it yourself, or stealing it from more advanced enemies, meaning money is less important while you're actually getting more funding from the Council because of your successes. By the end of the game, money is almost completely worthless, as you'll be raking it in hand over fist just selling all the useless things you don't need that are recovered from missions.
• Van in Black: Your cars and vans (except the jeep) double as one. You don't get to do any spying missions, but you have to use an inconspicious vehicle to quietly approach some enemy hideouts before they can evacuate. Sure, a black van with a big "X" on each side is totally harmless.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The Men in Black can appear at pretty much any time since the start of the game, ambushing in otherwise routine missions like Crop Circles and Unknown Lifeform - even the low-ranked Agents wield powerful Blackops weapons that are going to be significantly more powerful than most things you have access to at the early stages of the run, and the higher-ranked ones that show up later can wield laser weapons, multi-pack rocket launchers and extremely powerful Power Armor units.
• Was Once a Man: Zombies, janissaries and jarheads.
  • You can do this to your own agents: Dagonization is the process of turning an agent into a squidhead, and Kyberism does away with all that useless meat and replaces it with metal. There are drawback and advantages to both.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Human enemies always have a massive vulnerability to choke damage^note Unless they are in fully-encased suits or wearing gas masks, which makes them immune, making knockout grenades, with their measly 20 damage, actually much stronger than they appear to be. The only reason knockout grenades aren't more powerful is because they have to be manufactured, and are prohibitively time-consuming to create.
• Weapons Kitchen Sink: Justified by the variety of your enemies: they're using a terrifyingly wide variety of weaponry...and turnabout is fair play (Actually, assembled from whatever mods fans make for OpenXcom).
• We ARE Struggling Together:
  • The UN created XCOM as a bureaucracy agency, but early research quickly reveals that the UN is under the control of the Council of Earth, a shadowy cabal that consists of every nation that's funding your efforts^note and XCOM wasn't created to fight the aliens so much as it was to appease a faction within the Council that insisted on a response to the increasing threat of cults and otherworldly creatures. It's only after XCOM provides proof that the Earth is under attack that the UN, and by extension the Council, starts taking the threats seriously, and while they do increase XCOM's authority as a result, they also create the Men In Black as a counterbalance to try to appease the aliens. As it turns out, the Council of Earth is a Deadly Decadent Court, comprised of multiple factions with competing agendas. While the cults are a threat to everyone, the backers of the cults (for example, the Syndicate or Cyberweb) are generally either under the control of, or supported by, factions within the Council. In order to take down those organizations, you need to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are dangerous to humanity as a whole, at which point the Council (through the UN) will give you authorization to destroy them.
  • Ultimately, it's revealed that the cults are just the slightly-more-public faces of various organizations or agendas (the Church of Dagon for T'leth, or Red Dawn for Cyberweb, for example), and those organizations are themselves threats to humanity...while also having their own backers in the Council. The ultimate human-based enemy organization ends up being The Men In Black, who were established at about the same time as X-COM, but with a very different mandate of collaboration with the aliens in case the X-COM Project failed. The power players in the Council like to hedge their bets.
• We Can Rule Together: The "Syndicate Testament" message. Given that you just disrupted their plans to the nth degree, such that they're no longer a threat, it comes off as sour grapes, but it does give you access to the Spartanism transformation.
• We Have Reserves: While hiring replacements is no bigger problem than in the vanilla game, losing half of a 2-man team is problematic. Many players remark that smaller teams force them to care more about agents. Besides, training in the gym means that an agent with several months of experience is far superior to any new hire.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Investigating the Cult of Apocalypse you eventually conclude that those people are stirring trouble to ultimately make Earth people stronger, but in such a chaotic way that it's not actually helpful. Most of the Cult doesn't know about this goal. And the ultimate leader of the Cult, Samael, has been completely subverted by Hell and is actively working against this goal. Meanwhile, the Cult's sponsors, VAST, are not nearly as well-intentioned.
• You Have Researched Breathing: You need to research everything, including the stuff an investigating agency should have from the start, like armoured vests. Every time you pick an Earth weapon on the battlefield, you need to research it twice — once to determine its parameters, once to find a way to purchase it. Justified by being run by Obstructive Bureaucrats that require paperwork for every step. This also explains on one hand why did X-COM in the original game have no armoured vests, no riot shields and such lousy weapons, on the other hand why did it have UFO-specific radars, designs for alien containment and ability to quickly invent bottomless laser weapons, medkits and stun rods.
  • In every case where it seems like you're just getting access to basic tech, it's justified that it's being customized to work against your adversaries. The most prominent example is radar technology: there's no need for it at the start of the game, as you're not intercepting UFOs yet. In order to unlock basic radars, you need to figure out the specific signatures that UFOs have, so that the radars can actually detect them. To shoot them down, you need to get authorization to properly militarize: the UN isn't going to give the global equivalent of the FBI permission to use supersonic jet fighters without a really good reason.