Xenonauts 2 is a fun, modern adaptation of old-school XCOM-style games. The "strategic planetary defense" element of the game is incredibly creative and unique. If you feel a little lost and want to get a more solid idea of what you're doing, this guide is for you.

The guide is split into five sections. The first three offer specific advice for each part of the game (early, middle, late). The fourth section is general tips relevant through all parts of play. The fifth and final section is WIP. I actually have no idea what to put in the fifth section so I'm just adding it for future-proofing.

It's worth mentioning that Xenonauts 2 has a wiki. There's a link in the main menu that will bring you directly to the Hooded Horse wiki website. You can find stats on enemies and equipment there as well.

WHERE SHOULD I PLACE MY FIRST BASE?

First of all, stop yelling. Second of all, a good starting location is able to shoot down UFOs over multiple continents. You receive funding from various continental blocs, like the USSR, America and Canada, Latin America, Africa, Middle East/Gulf states, etc. If your radar covers multiple continents, it will be easier to manage global panic. Less panic = more money.

To that end, a good starting location might be in western China, Egypt, or in the Israel/Palestine area. That way, your radar array will cover most of Europe, Asia, and potentially a good chunk of Africa/Middle east. North America might be a good spot for a second base. Australia can take care of itself.

HOW DO I SPEND MY STARTING MONEY?

On the normal difficulty, you have 2.5 million buckeroos to spend from day one. I will list what I consider to be the best starting investments for your base (in no particular order)

• 1. Hangar: these are super cheap at only $100k, consume no power, and building one now will allow you to produce a third interceptor later on. You have space for three interceptors to deploy against a UFO in flight, so having the ability to maximize your firepower is very important. Keep in mind, you will not need more than three Angel Interceptors. Better aircraft will become available. Once you have access to better aircraft, build them instead. EDIT: As of Milestone 3, the first two models of interceptor are significantly cheaper in monthly upkeep, so procuring more aircraft early on is even more viable than it already was.
  
  
• 2. Generator: you can only build as many buildings as you have power for. You can improve the power output from each generator later on, so having two will keep you afloat for a long time.
  
  
• 3. A laboratory and hiring enough scientists to max out your scientist capacity: there are a few research projects in the game that will increase your monthly funding. It is most profitable to research these projects early and quickly. Later on in the game engineers will become more important, but at the very beginning you will do much more researching than you will engineering.
  
  
• 4. Living Quarters: once you get into months 2-3, you'll have enough money coming in to properly build out your first base. You'll want at least 12-15 scientists and engineers each, 9-12 soldiers to fill a drop ship, plus enough soldiers in reserve to fill in for xenonauts who are dead/wounded. Building a living quarters now will ensure you have the capacity for that expansion later.
  
  
• 5. Medical Center: a med center will give you two HUGELY beneficial effects. First, it will heal each of your wounded soldiers a trickle of hp passively. This will ensure your soldiers can heal faster and become available for new missions sooner. Second, a medical center will passively increase the survival chance of a xenonaut who goes down in combat. This will save your bacon if you play on iron man mode.
  
  
• 6. Training Center: not essential, but definitely helpful to have early on. A training center will ensure that most of your soldiers are leveling up at the end of every mission. Soldier experience grants extra strength, time units, and bonuses to other attributes which make a really meaningful difference early in the game.
  
  
• 7. (only if you have money to spare) M.A.R.S. Combat Vehicle: the M.A.R.S. is a beast. It has decent accuracy and the autocannon is great throughout the early and mid game. However, $250k is very expensive and at this stage of the game you want to maximize your soldiers' experience. M.A.R.S. units do not level up or gain xp at all, so bringing one at this stage of the game could be wasteful. I'm not your mom. You decide.

WHAT WEAPONS DO I USE?

A preemptive PSA: DO NOT USE ACCELERATED WEAPONS. Accelerated weapons are relatively expensive to make and barely more effective than default ballistic weapons. Research the tech because it's a prerequisite for better stuff, but I don't recommend wasting your alloys. You won't cripple your game by making accelerated gear, but personally I think a better investment would be a whole extra Xenonaut rather than 2-3 accelerated weapons.

A team comp that worked really well for me in the early game was 1-2 shield guys, 1-2 assault rifle guys, 1-2 sniper guys, and 3-5 shotgun guys. Why so many shotguns you ask? Despite being very close range, shotguns are the most reliable weapon when it comes to accuracy and damage, especially in the early game.

Give shotguns to the soldiers with the highest Time Unit stat (TUs). That way they have more time units to move closer to the target or get to cover before shooting.

Your shield guys should have high strength so they can carry the shield and a pistol with no TU penalty. Shield guys are good for scouting and gathering intel without getting one-tapped in overwatch.

Your assault rifle guys should have good accuracy for mid-range combat and high strength to carry grenades.

Your sniper guys can have any attribute spread. They don't need high accuracy because the sniper rifle gives +50 accuracy so long as you haven't moved.

WHY NO GRENADE LAUNCHER OR LMG?

The grenade launcher is okay, but it's effectiveness drops sharply. A soldier with enough strength can simply throw a grenade with a 100% chance to land where you want it. That reliability alone makes handheld grenades much more effective than the launcher.

The LMG can be fun, but ALL shots with the LMG are fired with a penalty to accuracy, even with a high strength soldier who can suppress recoil. IN MY O-P-I-N-I-O-N, Shotguns are better for damage and stun grenades are better for suppression.

UPDATE: I've done some testing after receiving comment feedback and LMGs can actually be really effective at cover destruction. Using the freeshoot mode (by holding control over the tile you want to shoot) can improve your accuracy somewhat and both allow for cover destruction and potentially some damage on an alien.

User Ozone said firing LMGs in this manner can also be highly efficient and lethal against enemies. I have yet to test this, but considering he's played more of the latest version of X2 than I have, I defer to his expertise.

EARLY INCOME STRATEGIES:

1. Sell corpses: corpses are worth a decent chunk of cash and keeping them in your inventory is just hanging onto dead weight (ha!). Always keep one of every specimen in your inventory for research purposes, but any additional corpses can be sold.

2. Research the monthly income projects asap (or just capture a life cleaner). While it can be difficult to pull off, using stun grenades, you can knock out a cleaner and carry him into your dropship. Doing so will net you a ton of money. Keep in mind, stun/fatigue damage is measured against an enemy's current health, so you can tap a cleaner with a low damage weapon like a pistol and then knock him out. If you can position yourself well, this is completely doable even without the stun baton.

3. Leave your engineers idle: while this isn't insanely profitable, early in the game you won't have unlocked a ton of engineering projects. There is no need to build more defender armor or a M.A.R.S. in the first month of the game. When idle, engineers passively generate $50/hour. They work around the clock, too. That's 24 hours in a day, thirty days in a month. That's $36k a month. It costs $50k to hire an engineer. This essentially means any engineers you hire in the first month will be massively discounted if you hire them and then let them sit for 30 days. Not the most advanced strat out there, but a nice-to-have. This will only work in the first month. After Day 30 you will definitely want to start making vehicles and stun batons and aircraft, and you should always keep your engineers building if you have the money and materials.

By now you are solidly in the mid-game. You should be on track to eliminating the Cleaners, if you haven't already. You should have a full three angel interceptors to deploy against UFOs, or at least be in a position to construct a third interceptor. You should be getting a decent amount of income month-over-month, and your use of shield guys and shotgun guys should *hopefully* be keeping your casualty rate sustainable.

Best Mid-Game Investments:

• Buy upgrades the moment they become available. Base upgrades are great to have, but not essential. Engineer upgrades and research, on the other hand, are usually essential. Almost all the equipment upgrades offered by the engineers (that I can think of) are EXTREMELY useful, and often they are prerequisites to the best stuff in the game. Upgrade sooner instead of keeping your money and getting them later.
  
  
• Build a dragonfly dropship and (optionally) two M.A.R.S. vehicles. The dragonfly is probably the biggest single upgrade in the entire game. It moves faster, has an insane range, and most importantly you can carry more soldiers and more vehicles. The M.A.R.S. isn't a must-have, but it's a free extra gun (and a powerful one at that), so if you have the money, a M.A.R.S. is never a bad investment in my experience. Having ten soldiers and a pair of M.A.R.S. to scout/snipe with is extremely useful. In either case: BUILD THE DRAGONFLY.
  
  
• Now is the time to build workshops and hire engineers to match your science capacity, if you haven't already. In my game I currently have 15-19 engineers and scientists each in my main base, and that feels like a good number to keep up with production.
  
  
• INVEST IN LASER WEAPONS: Laser weapons were a game changer for me. Great damage, benefits soldiers with low accuracy, amazing armor destruction. The only detriment is the limited ammo capacity, but as long as your positioning is somewhat optimal and you aren't taking risky shots, ammo shouldn't be an issue. Due to the armor destruction, even one or two Xenonauts with lasers will be a huge support to a whole team with normal ballistic gear. If you are still running shotguns, build five laser shotguns and then three of everything else. That should be enough for everybody. Don't waste your time on laser LMGs or Precision Laser sniper rifles. The Precision Laser (at the time of writing) gets no +50 bonus to accuracy, so it's basically a long range assault rifle that costs more TU to fire. Worthless.

WHERE DO I BUILD MY SECOND BASE???

First off, calm down. Second, don’t overthink it. Even after you place your second base, your first base will still be doing most of the work. Your second base placement doesn’t need to be perfect. However, I would recommend your second base go near a continent your radar doesn’t currently cover.

For example: if your first base was in Israel/Palestine, you have no radar coverage over North America. In my game, I placed my second base in the Philippines. Guam, Mexico City, Panama, or Florida are also good choices. Then again, maybe you should exclusively place your base over land, because if you shoot down a UFO over open ocean... no loot for you.

CRITICAL BUILDINGS FOR YOUR SECOND BASE:

You should only build a new base if you have $1.5-2 million to spare: if you build a base with no money left, then it's sitting there doing nothing. The very next building you should build is a radar array, and then three hangars. It’s way more important to have air superiority than it is to deploy soldiers in a given area. Remember, you can only deploy soldiers to a crash site *after* shooting the aliens down. If your first base has a Dragonfly, it can deploy troops anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours.

DON'T FORGET to add extra soldiers and/or air defenses to your second base. If you don't, the aliens will just dispatch a raiding party and destroy it. You can't write that off in your taxes. If you lose a base, that time and money is gone forever.

Other things to consider:
Capture live alien specimens! You can interrogate a live alien to get a permanent damage bonus against that type of alien in combat. You can do this with the stun+smoke grenade combo in a tight space (like the top floor of a UFO), or you can use weapons like the stun baton. Also, unconscious aliens will be transported with you after a mission and can be sold for double the price of a corpse, so capturing aliens early might be a good income strategy if you can get away with it.

EDIT: as of Milestone 3, aliens will no longer idly choke on smoke until loss of consciousness. When smoked out, they will move to a free tile. This makes it significantly harder to knock out aliens by hot boxing the top floor of a UFO. Using stun grenades and then tagging enemies with low damage weapons (like pistols) is now the most viable method of knocking enemies out.

This section of the guide will be the shortest, since the game becomes far more manageable with Gauss weapons, advanced modules, and a healthy number of Phantom Interceptors. At this point, you should begin developing your second base and making sure all gaps in your armory are filled.

Some things to consider that you may have missed:

• Fusion grenades are insanely powerful. They deal 75 damage and destroy a decent amount of armor. Don't hesitate to research them and use them if you haven't already.
  
  
• Feel free to experiment and mix loadouts on your aircraft. Phantoms only have two hardpoints so it's better to just give them two guns rather than a missile and a gun. However, giving one of your phantoms two laser lances and the other two gauss blasters can be a very powerful combination. The superior range of the laser lance allows one Phantom to draw fire while your other two interceptors flank and shred with gauss blasters.
  
  
• Angel interceptors are actually completely viable in the late game. With three hardpoints, you can mix an Angel "missile boat" together with phantoms, or have one Angel run torpedoes and the other two run missiles. It's still a good idea to keep a gun on at least 2/3 of your Angels, though. Larger alien ships like abductors have a lot of health and you won't be able to reliably kill them with just missiles and torps.
  
  
• At this stage of the game, you will have to contend with several alien craft in the airspace at the same time. Since you might have an excessive amount of alloys and alienium already, don't be afraid to sell the salvage rights of a UFO instead of deploying a dropship. Exosuits are $100k per suit, so you might need money more than the materials.