Things I wish I knew before I started (a beginner's guide)

I have just completed a full play-through of apocalypse. I learnt (remembered) a few things along the way. If I was to begin again, I would do these things differently. If you are new, you might appreciate these tips.

When it comes to protecting your troops, you have the options of shield, invisibility and armour. Each stops your guys getting hurt in one way or another, and obviously, you want all three. But you need to research and then manufacture each one, so which one first? The answer is easily invisibility. Shields would appear to be best, but they are a pain to actually get any, you need to incapacitate an enemy with one, which is more difficult than killing them, Manufacturing your own takes a ridiculous amount of time. Armour is great, but the basic armour is decent too. You also need to manufacture all the parts separately. Invisibility you can just pick up in bulk, so research this first.

Psychic powers? are they worth it? Well, it is up to you, but I would say not. In my play-through, I decided to put everyone in psychic training. this was to (at least) boost thei psy defence for the late game, I would ignore combat training in lieu of combat experience. However, Psychic powers really don't feature in a major way, you can easily ignore them completely if you want. Furthermore, psy training is incredibly slow. Even at the end of the game, my guys had barely improved.
Having read up on psy training, the simple rule is "the better they are, the quicker they train" and so those with very low psy scores are pointless to put into training at all. The key stat for training is psy energy, and anyone less than 20 is not worth it.
Furthermore, combat experience is not the same as combat training. Combat training is also physical training, it improves strength which improves action points. Those mutants are in for a tough time, even the worst mutant beast the best human for psychic powers and so are really the only ones to put in physic training, which is still, even for them, incredibly slow, but they are physically weak, so need the physical training to beef up,

Declare war on the gangs earlier. I immediately declared war on the cult, of course, but I thought taking on the cult AND three gangs immediately would be a bit too much, I was wrong, I struggled to make a profit from my raids. You need to corner the drug market to really make money, and the gangs have far more than the cult. Indeed the aliens sometimes got in the way of my drug wars. I am however, unsure if killing humans gives you any combat experience. You do get credit for the kill, but it does not seem to improve your stats. Raids are therefore for loot only. There is still nothing to stop you doing 45 raids in the first 5 minutes of game time though...

exploit the clock. Understand when time has meaning and when it doesn't. I am pretty sure your guys only gain experience or heal at midnight. Staff available to recruit also refresh at midnight. Shops refresh every week. Any unsold stock is not added to. therefore always buy stuff you need (like the big plasma guns for the craft) before you need it because there will only be 2-3 items per week. If you don't buy them all, there will still only be 2-3 items available when you need them
during the day You can send your guys to raid an infinite number of times. You don't even need to return to base, Just raid, raid, raid, raid, raid. Get as much gear and experience (which as I said will only be credited at midnight) as you can before everyone is injured

You don't need more than two bases. I got this one right. Just make sure that you collect the UFOs and send them to your research base. Individual unit items can be transferred, but the UFOs themselves need to go to the research base

Do the aliens give you a week off when you go visit? If playing the game in a roleplaying way, you need to send the probe to the alien dimension to make sure your tech works, then use that experience to build better craft. If playing to exploit the game design however there is absolutely no reason to do this. Designing better craft is not based on you researching them in turn, it is based on capturing and copying the higher-end UFO craft. Therefore it is better to build up an armada and visit with that (at least 3 retaliators). When I visited with the probe, the aliens decided to give me the week off, I couldn't find anything in the wiki about that but maybe the game switched from "human defence" mode to "human attack" mode. In any case, I was in no way ready to exploit the free time.

three Valkyries with the large plasma gun is enough to bring down any UFO, as long as you have shields

Shields on craft stack, shields on units do not (I knew this one)

the guide

[retrohaggis]

The benefit of walking is that can fire on the move accurately on real time combat mode

[zanitzeuken]

5. Stun guns can save you from a surprise Popper behind a random corner. I like to keep them on my guys at all times for the low AP cost.

6. If you ever randomly lose an entire base during a UFO raid, they likely dropped in aliens in a base without soldiers. Those base defense modules won't help.

7. Buy up all the Stormdogs, strip them, and sell all components for a tidy profit.

8. As long as you don't kill anyone, avoid stunning all the defenders, and then use the exit spaces to "fail" the raid, you can raid neutral orgs, keep the loot, and avoid angering the org it belongs to.

9 Your units are using "walk" by default and it's horribly slow. I'm sure there's some benefit, but to get around, use the "run" option on the bottom right of the UI.

Thanks for the guide!

[zanitzeuken]

Useful notes! I forget so much when I come back around to XCOM3. I wanted to add some:

1. Research Bio Transport Model immediately, then build it (takes longer), and finally add it to your Valkyrie. You're going to get a few alien raids and be unable to bring in live ones at first. Note you don't need this module to collect UFO crash sites. Just click the downed UFOs on the overmap.

2. Be careful with raiding too much, because the higher your score, the better the aliens get.

3. Hiring pools refresh at midnight and you're not promised new ones in each category. Always check/assess your needs. Late game, I needed lots of engineers and nothing else, so of course hardly any were available >.>

4. Don't vaporize UFOs in the air. Learn to time your shots so you "wound" the UFO, forcing it to land...unless you just don't want to deal with it. There's 10 UFOs to collect. Generally, you want all the alien tech you can get for your troops and aircraft.