Tips for harder levels

For those of you getting bodied on the harder difficulties, even with the saving aspect of this game letting you break it, I figured I'd give some useful tips that you may not realize. These will help you beat the game on Nightmare with the extra enemy health and damage, etc and doesn't require the save glitch. Although it does help make it go easier. No particular order. Let me know if you guys have questions, I love little tactical games like this.

1. Always use your drone. Your drone can help you create really great fatal funnels. Set your sniper up in a position where he has a clear line of sight through a door and send your drone just to the side of the door. It'll open and you can have your sniper kill anyone wondering around in the room without having to walk in hoping your sniper is at the right angle. During later missions, really helps maintain stealth. Your drone also doesn't alert xenos who aren't hunting. So as long as there are no human or synth enemies, the drone is a great way to uncover the map from a safe location. And if it does get spotted, it doesn't count as being detected.

2. Fallback positions. As you explore the map, ALWAYS know where you will fall back to when shit hits the fan. On later levels on Nightmare and beyond, sometimes they just don't stop coming once they see you. So, before you're detected, try to find a decent room with enough room to set up all your turrets. Send your drone to keep the door open so all of your firepower can shoot through the door without having to wait for enemies to come barreling in and overwhelming you. This gives the turrets room to blast them long before getting in the room if it's a smaller room and you have no other options. Extra turrets on the map are great for this. Set up the extra ones in a room with one or two of yours and you will always have a fallback room and turrets on hand just in case. Also quick note, test lines of sight with your sniper. If your snipers red line can see through cover, your turrets can fire over it. Useful for fallback positions. Whenever you get detected, instead of just aimlessly wondering hoping they stop assaulting you, at least you'll have known ground to move towards.

3.How to clear detection fast. So, obviously creating a shelter is one thing. But how the hell do you get them off you long enough to create a shelter? Fallback positions. In your Fallback position, make sure you set up plenty of motion detectors. While you're exploring the map, if you get detected, kill whoever sees you and then break line of sight and immediately activste one of the MDs. This will bring the enemies straight into your turrets, clear the area a bit and buy you breathing room. Also, when you're stuck in your Fallback room, just take cover and let the turrets and an incinerator hold the door until the hunt ends. Setting up 1- MDs next to an APC is great too. Not only do they go away and not require turrets, but they still die.

4. Use your incinerator! Extremely underrated weapon in the game. Use this bad boy to force the enemies around certain areas. Do not block their entire path or they will jump through the fire. Set your turrets up one way, blast the incinerator on your flank and they will almost always go to the turrets. Stragglers may try to go through the flames, but never the whole horde if there's another option. Also can be used to clear eggs without noise. Much better than the grenade launcher.

5. Use your Plasma Overcharge. Here's a cool stealth tip. The plasma overcharge does NOT make your Marine break cover. So, in later missions when it's really close quarters and a xeno is 5 feet away about to walk right into you, use your plasma, NOT your sniper. This kills the xeno without risk of your Marine being spotted by him AND it makes no noise. Use this for eggs, clearing groups of enemies patrolling in a line since it penetrates, etc. Awesome powerhouse that doesn't aggro the enemies as long as you'reundetected. Better than the sniper for stealth killing multiple enemies with one command point. Be advised, if you go to activate it and then decide you can't use it yet, make sure you don't just close the skills tab, press B, or O or whatever it is for you to CANCEL the skill, otherwise the next time you pull up the tab, no matter what you pick your Marine will still activate the beam. It's the only skill with this issue.

6. Squad picks. In the beginning, Sgt, Recon, Gunner, Tech. When you get the 5th Marine, add an extra Sgt. You won't need a medic and with this setup, as long as you're decent with stealth and setting up good Fallback points with good funnels, you'll never need heals if only for stress. Command points are key on later levels. As for gear, one of every special weapon type, one grenade launcher, one smart gun and the rest plasma guns once you get them unlocked. Every special weapon type comes in handy a lot so always have one of each.

7. Leveling up. In the beginning, take full advantage of the infinite days. You don't get a clock right away so hop in random maps, trigger hordes and set up easy farming spots to level your squad up FAST. Time is not an issue yet, so you can just keep skipping days until your squad is ready to go. Hop back in, do some more Onslaughts until there are no more and repeat. Before you leave a map, always do the max amount of onslaughts to get max xp each time. That way you can have a full squad of level 10s as soon as you get your 5th Marine and some back ups leveled up for New Game+.

8. Massive Onslaughts. They should be very easy if you always set up a fallback room. 1-2 Marines on supressive fire, incinerator to block a flank or to just add an extra layer of fuck you on the 4-5 sentries blasting them in one doorway, a plasma overcharge if they start getting too jam packed in the door and start breaking through, mines inside as a last resort already set up. Should be easy really. If you're out and about when an onslaught starts, either go to your fallback position or set one up and use your incinerator to force them into your turrets when you have no good positions.

9. Perks. Don't waste time on bravery or retribution points. Always go for accuracy, critical/dismemberment, extra ammo at the start of a deployment/at rest. The other shit is just a waste. Even the ammo is unnecessary thanks you the rest/reload save glitch. But unless you want to do the glitch a LOT every time you load in, ammo perks are nice to have.

10. Rest/reload glitch. For those who don't know, to make the game MUCH easier, you can rest in any shelter, and as soon as you see the save icon pop up at the end of the rest, reload your last save. Your ammo will remain and you reload in the room before the rest. So you get ANOTHER rest and more ammo. Reload save again, your ammo stayed and you can rest again. Rinse and repeat for infinite ammo every deployment.

11. Turrets. Turrets stay on the map all the time even when your leave them. They'll be broken, but they'll be there. So on a few particular rough maps, I like to leave a few turrets next to a good fallback position next to an APC or something. I put 10 turrets and a ton of motion detectors and just farm onslaughts and crushers until I max out the XP bar and leave again. Your Marines can stay hidden and out of combat during each wave, just keep spamming your reprimand skill. This way they never get wounded and have no trauma. All they have to do is get detected for a split second, activate reprimand and hide behind the wall of turrets until the hunt/onslaught is over and keep repeating. Also, turrets shoot through you and eachother, so you can put all 5 right on top of each other for really narrow doorways to maximize direct front firepower.

12. Mines. Use mines more. Parts where you may have to sneak around the map and xenos just keep popping up everytime you go to activate that terminal? 2 mines on nightmare mode will kill a warrior. So as you explore, just pop 2 mines in chokepoints where you keep seeing them patrol. When you snipe one, think you're safe and go for the door, only for the bastard to spawn 2 feet from you? Mines solve that issue.

13. Motion detectors. Should be obvious, but if your map isn't completely covered in motion detectors at least so you can monitor every inch, you're wrong. Add a couple extras near APC spawns and fallback positions so you can always activate one while exploring if need be and clear out a few enemies whole you're at it.