X-piratez guide by /xcg/ anons ver 0.4, information based on latest version at the time of writing – L6

This faq/guide is intended for players interested in getting into x-piratez and openxcom mods in general, though a lot of advice written below is relevant in other mods as well. First part will have as little spoilers as possible for people who want to explore the mod on their own, but down the line I will explain in more detail advanced strategy, tactics, goals and tech choices.

1. General questions
Q: So what is this mod anyway?
A: The game assumes xcom lost the original alien war. The year now is 2601 and you are a band of uber gals who escaped Academy facility, you find an old underground xcom base and decide to become pirates. You start with barely anything and raise to power over time.

Q: Is this some sort of a joke mod, I see anime titties everywhere!
A: This mod is ignored by tons of people because of this, despite that mod is filled with content and is a lot of fun. If you don’t like titties(or want to safely stream) pick up PG-13 mod from the openxcom forums, or if you want something similar but more serious give XCOM files mod a shot.

Q: Can I play this mod if I never played original xcom before?
A: While it’s possible this mod assumes you know the basics, I’d recommend clearing vanilla xcom at least once first it’s part of openxcom anyway. If you insist, read bootypedia very carefully as soon you start the game.

Q: I downloaded the mod zip but the game doesn’t launch, what’s wrong?
A: You need original xcom and tftd files copied to openxcom folder, you can buy originals on steam/gog or just pirate it.

Q: What’s new in this mod?
A: Too many things to list but the most important ones there are multiple soldier types, hundreds of new items, new facilities, new crafts, new mission types, many of the original assets are reused in new interesting ways. The amount of new content is often overwhelming, you can find more in depth description of new content on the wiki
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Info_(Piratez)

Q: How long does it take to beat this mod?
A: Readme estimates 400 hours and I’d say that’s a minimum. This mod dwarfs long war or any other xcom game I have played in terms of campaign length but it isn’t really boring until the very end of the game.

Q: How hard is this mod, is it fine if I’m a casual?
A: This mod is not very difficult, most of the difficulty comes from the gap of your equipment versus the enemies you’re attacking. If the gap is too big some scenarios become impossible but fleeing is a part of the game so run if you think you’re overwhelmed. There’s absolutely no shame in it and you don’t have to win every battle.

Q: What about difficulty settings?
A: There are 5 difficulty settings but only 3 are really important
2) John Silver – If you never played X-Com before or want an easy campaign, there are less enemies on missions and they all have lower stats than normal, crackdowns(base attacks) happen less frequently.
3) Blackbeard – Recommended difficulty if you've played xcom before, but haven't played XPiratez. Balanced numbers of enemies and they have standard amount of stats.
4) Davy Jones – There are significantly more enemies on all missions and all enemies gain bonus stats. They don’t deal any extra damage, though, and more enemies will give more loot and more capture opportunities. Also, crackdowns are much more frequent than normal. Recommended if you've played the game on Blackbeard before, and think it's too easy, or if you consider yourself a hardcore X-Com veteran and want to jump right into the deep end.
The easiest difficulty (Cap'n Kidd) has even fewer and easier enemies, but also makes some technologies inaccessible. The hardest difficulty (Jack Sparrow) has more and harder enemies, but also missile strikes that completely destroy your base unless you rush air defences. They cannot be recommended for most players.

Q: This guide sucks/the information is incorrect/I have a question not mentioned here, where do I complain?
A: The guide is basically unmaintained right now. You can post complaints or improvement suggestions in /xcg/ (or /civ4xg/ if /xcg/ is dead), but it cannot be guaranteed that anyone will respond.

2. Geoscape

Q: There are so many research paths, what should be my priority?
A: Try not to specialize too much into one path, you need a bit of everything and focus on what’s your weakest link at a time. If you’re having no problems with ground missions research new facilities, otherwise focus on armor or weapons and so on. Try to keep everything at roughly same tech level as a lot of advanced tech is dependent on basic research topics.
A general good rule for research is to cap out the brainers to the maximum amount your lab space allows, 12 at the start of the game. Brainers cost a lot in maintenance, but completing research also boosts your score, and therefore your income, so they'll mostly pay their own upkeep. Also try not to put too many brainers on a simple topic as that wastes some of the efficiency, 1 brainer on 1 topic never loses efficiency but simply stops being practical later on as the more advanced research topics can take hundreds of brainer days to complete.

Q: I’m stuck in the research tree, what do I do?
A: Press Q on the geoscape to open up tech tree viewer or middle click on current research topics, it will show you what research topic will get you and what it leads to, many topics have multiple dependencies.
The punctuation under the research project name will hint at the brainer-time required to complete the research. More and fancier symbols mean more difficult projects.

Q: I need <insert what you’re missing> to progress the tech tree, where do I find it?
A: There’s no good universal answer for this but often you may have what you’re missing and you’re not even aware of it. Many items can be disassembled in workshops and with certain research you can buy captives on the black market if you can’t find them anywhere in the world. They’re expensive but it may be worth it sometimes. Certain captives can also be robbed for special items so it’s not always worth it to just sell them.

Q: A mission has spawned but the airbus runs out of fuel on the way, what can I do?
A: Very early in the tech tree you’ll find research that allows you to buy craft with worldwide range but doesn’t allow you to bring as many people in the squad. Until then you will just have to let them go. You can see the effective range of each aircraft if you select it for launch by clicking on the base it's in.

Q: I went to a mutant pogrom and got destroyed!
A: These missions are far too difficult at the start of the game. These are technically terror missions but the point loss for ignoring them is minimal until you research Mutant Alliance.

Q: How do I build my base?
A: The game has missile strikes that can destroy base facilities, and if this leaves any facilities disconnected from the access lift, those will also be destroyed. Don't try to create choke points with empty space, you don't want to have a single point of failure connecting the entire rest of your base to the lift. You can instead try to create choke points with traps or gun emplacements. Even the basic security corridor works, since it lets you see the enemies, and blocks off the sewer layer so they can't sneak behind your forces. Most of your regular troops will spawn in barracks, and your animals in animal pens, so those are also good to place near the lift or the hangars.

Q: When should I build second base, how many bases do I need?
A: A second base greatly improves your reach, and you can start building one as soon as you think you can afford it, if you've researched the essential facilities. Eventually you will want to fill out all base slots for worldwide radar coverage

3. Battlescape

Q: I started a mission and now my soldiers are stuck in a box, what happened?
A: Certain missions can only be done with specific armor or soldier types. Click on the mission marker on geoscape and click “what to wear” to see what’s allowed

Q: I started a mission and most/all of my guns are gone, what happened?
A: Some missions are limited to specific type of gun categories, most commonly you’ll find yourself limited to infiltration, 0-G or underwater gear. In the craft equipment menu you can filter current equipment into categories or look in the bootypedia which item belongs to which category.

Q: What’s the best weapon/armor/loadout/tactics/etc?
A: Short answer it depends, most of the balance in this game is based on rock/paper/scissor counters so what’s good against one faction may not work as well against the other. Diversify your loadouts as no damage type becomes worthless, so give all weapons at least one try. Many items that seem or look worthless are often better than expected.

Q: I shot someone point blank and my character flipped out and shot completely the opposite way!
A: There’s mechanic called CQC. The theory is that if you’re attacking someone with a bulky gun in melee range they have a chance to interrupt your attack, in reality even pistols or small arms will often get interrupted. Generally never shoot guns in melee range, it’s often better to pull a dagger or a melee weapon out of your pocket or just shoot from one tile away to avoid it. This also works for you and evasion is based on reactions or melee depending on armor so sometimes just charging up to someone can be the safest thing you can do. Enemy with a shotgun would be devastating from few tiles away but it becomes worthless at point blank. The chance for CQC is highest from the front lowest from the back and sides have half the penalty.

Q: I had a 100% chance to hit and I still missed, is this game broken?
A: For a gun, a 100% chance to hit means you will always hit in completely open terrain. If there's anything occluding the target even slightly, the actual chance to hit can be much smaller, all the way down to zero. There’s not much you can do about it other than changing position for next shot, or trying to destroy the terrain between yourself and the target. Firing accuracy technically scales up to 130%, anything beyond that doesn’t help.
With melee weapons there’s evasion which reduces your chance to hit, enemies have the most evasion in the front and least in the back. Civilians have almost no evasion but more advanced combatants can have a lot and attacking some of them from front is often futile even with accuracy far exceeding 100%.

Q: I can’t see anything during night missions!
A: There’s night vision mode, scroll lock to enable by default. You can also hold Alt to highlight creatures and show which way they're facing. You can change hotkey and the color of night vision in options.

Q: I hit the <enemy> a ton and it refused to die, what do?
A: Enemies can have resistances or immunities, there’s no real way to know until you research them but some common sense applies. Hitting robotic units with mind damage is probably not going to be effective so be mindful of what type of damage are you dealing against what kind of enemy.

Q: How do I know if my attack was effective?
A: Press ctrl + h, this will pop up menu that shows either ->(miss),0(you hit, but dealt no damage), hit(attack was effective and dealt hp damage, HIT!(critical hit)

Q: My base got attacked early on by enemies with plasma weapons and I’m screwed, what now?
A: Every time you shoot down a shipping from one of the factions (civilians won't crack you down if you shoot their battery car out of the sky as well as some minor factions) down there’s a chance that faction will launch a crackdown mission against you. If successful they will usually send a very large craft to attack your base, so even enemies that normally don’t use plasma weapons will have them. Not all is lost and with careful strategy and good defensive base layout wins against all odds are completely possible.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!WARNING SPOILERS BELOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
First of all go on here and read all the articles, there’s mostly good information on the wiki
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Piratez
There’s obviously lots of spoilers there and how much you use it is up to you, the piratez wiki is also not always up to date so don’t expect too much. Almost all relevant information can be found in-game anyway but this can do as a cheat sheet in a pinch. All the advice that I’m going to write below is based on personal experience. I have cleared 2 campaigns and by no means I’m saying this is a definite way to play, it’s just what worked the best for me and what I think is most important.

Early game goals
- Acquire guns better than flintlocks such as shotguns, low powered rifles, ballistic pistols etc, EP ammo for guns is a great project and will make guns like RCF rifle and manstopper really shine. Armor for gals can be mostly ignored there’s almost nothing good short of flying capability in the early game, prioritize loknaar and peasant armors instead
- Create reliable source of income through runts – x-grog and Chateau de la mort will fuel your early game economy
- Max out all brainer slots
- Research and pick a codex
- Build codex ship and first real interceptor
- Do not die to a crackdown

Early game is probably the hardest part of the game, most of the weapons you have suck, initial gals don’t have greatest stats, and you’ll probably either get them killed or wounded and be forced to use peasants and loknaars as reinforcements. Let’s expand on some concepts.

CODEX CHOICE
I don’t have much to say here as each codex has some merits, I don’t have a clear favourite and the wiki does the job of explaining which codex gives what well enough. I personally barely used the codex special items, voodoo and mind control is unimpressive in this mod. The bio suit is marked as a tanking armor but harbinger is available to everyone and does the job just flat out better. The item I enjoyed using the most was the ghost dagger and that’s available to all codices except green.
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Tiny_Drill_(Piratez)

ECONOMY
Money (measured in $) is VERY important in this mod, you will need at least 1 BILLION dolaroos to beat the game and deep pockets solve a ton of problems in this game. You’re also not reliant on looting alloys or elerium like in other xcom games as you can either make or buy them, so having lots of money is great. As you ramp up your income you will be allowed to make more mistakes: troops become more expandable and you can better equip them, your research speed increases, you gain air superiority and worldwide radar coverage, it’s just great. Money is very good and while there is no such thing as infinite money, unless you have a billion in the bank you probably don't have enough.
Your economy starts with a still in your first base that will make alcohol, x-grog can be researched quickly and it can be made infinitely, chateau makes better profit but requires apples and eventually you’re going to run out. If you can find sectoweed, canteen o’ wisdom can be a good alternative. When your tech tree goes far enough to allow you make new stills, this is probably the time to create a second base and make it a dedicated manufacturing facility to print you more money. Since in the early game you’re limited to 3 extractors workshop and a still, you have space leftover and you have some choices. You can make some training facilities here, you can get some brainer capacity in your second base and a prison to speed up interrogations, you can make large vaults as you inevitably run out of space in your first base, it’s up to you. Typically that second base will turn into some sort of hybrid multipurpose base, in my latest playthrough I made alcohol in it alongside a prison with 2-3 brainers for interrogations. When factory was researched I moved production to another base, scrapped down production and built a computer core with data centers, that allowed me to have about 20 brainers working in secondary base which skyrocketed my tech levels.

WEAPONS
There's hundreds of new weapons in this mod so how do you know which ones are good and which are not? While listing every single item is far beyond scope of this guide, many items fall into a category that should help you decide if it's worth using.

Pistols are useful, they fit in quickdraw slot deal suprisingly good amount of damage but have typically limited ammo and range. They are a perfect sidearm for melee focused gal or someone with a heavy weapon, rocket/grenade launchers are great but not in close quarters and pulling out your pistol can be far more effective.
Notables in this category: Smartpistol, Super Magnum(mercury rounds), XG Pistol, Plasma Pistol

SMGs are pretty shit they're mostly npc weapons, in your hands they don't fill any particular role. SMG will typically have no or reduced one hand penalty, decent ammo capacity and rather generous auto fire up to 8 shots, they can be used alongside a melee weapon like pistols but have even less effective range. They're best at missions which limit you to infilitration gear as most SMGs are concealable.
Notables in this category: Death blossom SMG, Mini-cougar SMG, Assault Laser, Plasma Subrifle

Rifles are very good and they are defined by two traits unlimited aimed shot range and 15% armor piercing up to 30% with special ammo types. Rifle is the true jack of all trades it is almost never useless but rarely the best at the same time. Keep a few in your squad at all times and give it to soldiers with good accuracy 75 or higher is recommended.
Notables in this category: Too many to list. Almost all rifles are useful, most of them get improved ammo types and which ones you get is rng based.

Machine guns are technically not a category defined by the game but they are heavy rifles which are focused on auto fire and large ammo capacity. Autogun or light machinegun are good examples these are much better than standard rifles at autofire but have no or poor aimed shot so they're kinda like smgs but better in every way. Not to be confused with miniguns those are proper heavy weapons.
Notables in this category: Meridian's special autogun(arcane ammo), Smartgun, Autolaser, XG Chaingun

Sniper rifles are okay but definitely not as good as they look or sound. A sniper rifle is defined by accuracy formula that scales well with high aim and by damage bonuses received as percentage of firing accuracy, the game suggests minimum of 75 accuracy to use them but from my experience you really want 100 or more. Sniper rifles are most effective when aimed shot exceeds 200% accuracy so you can shoot targets out of your own line of sight(No sight carries 50% aim penalty) and snap shot exceeding 100% so you can move and shoot, if those targets cannot be met you're usually better off with a standard rifle.
Notables in this category: Custom snipin gun, Precision Laser, XG Sniper Rifle

Shotguns are absolutely amazing, they're very easy to use but don't scale as well as other guns essentially 50 firing accuracy is all you need. Most shotguns come with 2 types of ammo the standard multiple projectile buckshot which is brutal against unarmored targets and single shot slugs gainst armored enemies, the ammo capacity is typically very limited and reload takes a long time. Shotgun is NOT a short range weapon by any means, crouching and using aimed shot with AP ammo can hit targets even up to 20 tiles with very high accuracy, the buckshot ammo typically fares worse at longer ranges but if the target is weak hitting with one pellet may be all you need.
Notables in this category: Domestic shotgun(First useful gun you'll find), CAWS, Space Rangers Shotgun, Boom Gun, Flechette Multicannon

Heavy weapons are very much hit or miss, they are typically very heavy(duh) so only trained gals can use them or sometimes so heavy you need assistance of power armor to even carry them. Besides weight they are usually very situational, mortar is great unless the area is filled with trees and you can't make any good arcs, rocket launchers will get you killed in close quarters or reaction fire by accident blowing up your own team, that machinegun that needs to kneel to aim properly takes too long to setup and so on. As they said with great power comes great responsibility so always be careful with anyone using heavy weapons.
Notables in this category: Autocannon, Tornado Rocket Mortar, Advanced Launcher, UAC BFG

Voodoo weapons are a dissapointment in most cases, this includes voodoo orbs which allow you to panic or mind control people or weapons which use voodoo power/skill for aiming or damage. While on paper some of them look pretty sweet in practice just shooting someone with a gun is far more effective. Most of these require you to use armor with no protective value just for voodoo stat buffs or be really close on top of using best vodooo troops to do it. Ghost dagger is an outlier but most of the damage comes from reactions anyway so can you even call it a voodoo weapon? Feel free to try them out but they didn't work too great for me.

Melee, explosives, special weapons or anything that doesn't fit to above criteria are generally a good supplement to your main gun and fit in your quickdraw slots(anything but backpack). I say supplement as I don't think that dedicated melee or grenadiers or anything like that have a place in a squad, a full sized shotgun complemented by a dagger in a pocket typically works better than big sword complemented by a small shotgun or a pistol. For example in early game a low powered rifle cannot deal with armored targets so put a molotov or black powder bomb in your pocket for those situations or in the endgame a space ranger shotgun cannot hurt tanks but an EMP grenade in the pocket sure can, generally try to put a support item that will fill in the weakness of your main weapon for more flexibility.
Non-explosive throwing weapons generally have a limited range, a flat TU cost to fire (meaning gals with more time units can fire them more times per turn), and sometimes bonus damage that scales off skill. They're not very useful in the hands of unskilled troops, but a gal with high throwing skill can be more deadly with a javelin than any of the guns you have in early game. Those javelins are also usable underwater, and there are a few other throwing weapons with a special use. The electric lasso is very good at stunning, so long as you have a gal with enough throwing skill to hit with it.
Other notables in this category: Moltov cocktail, Black powder bomb, stick grenade, shiv, shock'a'fist, poisoned dagger, ghost dagger, he/frag/hellerium/fusion grenade, EMP grenade, minilauncher/shoulder launcher

ARMOR
There is a tip in the game claiming "armor is useful to only those who get hit" and the person who wrote that is a fucking idiot. You are going to get hit in this game, a whole lot actually but armor value is not the most important thing at the same time so where's the sweet spot? Armors have lots of stats and it's difficult to put them into categories as armors have lots of characteristics like armor value, resistances, stat bonuses and penalties, energy recovery, night vision, camouflage/invisibility/sense(seeing through walls), inventory size, ability to fly, run, kneel and strafe and I bet I forgot something it's complicated, so how do you figure out which armors are good or not? Let's oversimplify some concepts into some categories.

Light stat armors - these armors typically provide little to no protection but have stat bonuses large enough to justify using them over more protective variants, night vision with camo is invaluable on a night mission or flying can render you invincible against monster hunts.
examples - assassin(best night vision and huge firing accuracy), guerilla(camo), blitz(huge TU/reactions + flying), chiller(breathing underwater)

Medium protective armors - any armor that provides good armor value with resistances but doesn't slow you down too much and must have full freedom of movement(run, kneel, strafe)this armor is intended for breaches where you expect you're gonna get hit or just putting your soldier in dangerous positions, not as fast as light but not as slow as heavy the middle ground is here.
examples - chain/plate mail(enough armor value to stop low powered guns and cutting resistance against melee), tac vest/armor(early game piercing resistance), revenant/brute(mid/late game piercing resistance and str/melee bonuses), assault(well armored despite being a flying suit)

Heavy tanking armor - big slow and heavy, first to go out of the door on turn 1 and eat all the reaction fire. Essentially original xcom version of lightning reflexes just exactly the opposite, negative reactions are actually good here as you'll pull more reaction fire with each step. These armors provide best protection but will severely slow you down usually preventing you from running or kneeling but are invaluable on an open field with no cover or just a shitty situations where someone will have to take some hits and it may as well be the heavy armor dude. Use them only on the soldiers with capped TU, you really don't want to have a soldier with 20 TU on the field they're totally worthless.
examples - chain/plate mail with shield(very heavy with big energy penalties but the armor value on the front is extremely tanky at that stage of the game), testudo(not effective against plasma but pretty good against everything else, and you won't miss your slave soldier if they die), harbinger(ultimate tanking armor, put on riot/shotgun shield and grav damper in the inventory and laugh at everything that tries to shoot you, only sectopods will kill them and usually in a single shot too)

On top of all that there's protective gear, these have slots so pay attention to item description and you can carry them in your inventory for addtional bonuses. While I didn't try many of them, those that give you additional resistances are pretty sweet. Just remember you can't stack multiple of the same slot so carrying 2 shields does not stack but a riot shield and studded stockings will. This can produce soldiers that are far tankier than they would be otherwise, for example putting on shotgun shield on a harbinger gal increases plasma resistance to 50% which allows that gal to tank heavy plasma or cyberdisc shots with ease and it works really well on low end armor too.

TROOPS AND TACTICS(EARLY GAME)
As you start the game you only have 6 gals and you will want reinforcements as soon as possible, in one of the recent patches there is a “choice” to be made in the tech tree to pick either male slave soldiers or stay with gals. The male choice is a trap, it’s terrible don’t fall for it. It prevents you from buying new gals until veterans which is a huge gap and it also locks you out of superhero armor and ravenclaw robe for peasants, stick with gals. First you will get the option to recruit hands, then warriors and veterans. As soon you get the higher tier just keep buying the best trained recruits, if you have good economy like I suggested earlier you should have no problems with buying veterans. However in most early to mid-game missions you don’t need gals at all, and arguably there is a point where peasants/lokknaar squads are superior.
Do not underestimate peasants, their starting stats are poor but first of all they only cost $5k so firing a rocket probably costs you more than life of that peasant, second they can raise stats to match mid range gals, third their starting stats are good enough to kill most early game targets with a shotgun and finally, fourth, they can wear legion armor. So peasants kinda suck until you get minimum tac vests for them but they turn into literal bulletproof predator tier killing machines with legion armor. The armor is also cheap to build and if a peasant dies it can be repaired for fraction of the cost of the new one the value is top notch. Peasants can be trained using militia training which comes in rather fast and gladiatorial training later. With training and healing facilities a fresh rookie peasant can be turned into an okay soldier in a month or so with no combat experience, make them the majority of your early game reinforcements.
When you just hire a peasant they can basically only use light shotguns effectively. The way shotguns work is that they have base accuracy of 50 and only half of soldier's firing accuracy counts. A baseline human with 30 aim, will have 65% base accuracy with a shotgun and most shotguns have a 120% or higher snap shot which translates into roughly 80% accuracy, which is easily enough to be an effective killer. This shotgun aiming formula also means that it doesn’t scale very well. For example a maxed out gal in assassin armor can have 160 aim and she will have 130% base accuracy from a shotgun, only twice as good as the weakest peasant despite having over 5 times more accuracy. When your peasants reach 75 aim you can replace their shotguns with rifles, otherwise shotguns are better. Just use aimed shot if you need to take a longer range shot and replace buckshot ammo with slugs to better deal with armored targets.

Lokknars are pretty shit soldiers but they have high innate night vision, good reactions and camo so they make great scouts. In the early game you want to run almost exclusively night missions, it gives you big advantage when you can see further than the enemies. Legion armor peasant/lokknaar squad has 16NV, gals have 12, and most early game targets have 9 but camo reduces this even further. A baseline human will only be able to spot a lokknaar from 3 tiles away, but be careful around more advanced units or sources of light. For example osiron security have 16NV and can match you but matching is good enough in most cases. Lokknaars are mostly there for scouting and training to be as good pilots as quickly as it’s possible. If a lokknaar has 125 reactions it’s time to retire them for aircraft pilot duty. Throughout the game you will need like 10 pilots or so, train them early while they’re still useful because by the midgame they’re barely worth using in combat.
Auxiliary units can be quite handy, attack dogs are great because they start with 100 TU's and are cheap and expendables. Blood hounds are significantly tougher for not much more money, piloted vehicles are not practical for early game as airbus is just too small.
Eventually you’ll also be allowed to hire bugeyes. They’re very fragile and will never become combat troops but they start with a pretty good medkit armor, have very high voodoo power and can use voodoo without any items. Training them without voodoo schools however is very slow and tedious. On average it will take about 40 missions to train up a bugeye to its full potential but it can be worth it. Bugeyes can easily mind control megapol beastmen and let them kill each other, letting you get loot that otherwise wouldn’t be possible and they do okay against baseline humans and pretty good against mercenaries. You can also give them heartgrip staff for killing armored targets (staff deals bio damage) within 20 tiles or voodoo great staff in the endgame for really powerful mind controls. Screen them tightly upon recruitment, any bugeye below 70 voodoo power is probably not worth keeping, they’re completely useless aside from voodoo. While some guns use voodoo power for aiming or power bonuses there are no good armors you can give to a bugeye and loader suit disables their voodoo.
Gnomes have very high bravery, and most vehicle weapons get an aim bonus from bravery, making gnomes very good vehicle pilots. They're also very weak and fragile, so if you don't have some kind of tank or mech for them to hide in, you should use them as interceptor pilots instead. They have high voodoo power, but their voodoo skill cap is very low.
To wrap this part up, avoid using gals in the early game and mix in peasants, lokknaars, and dogs. That kind of squad can be more effective during night and much cheaper in case something goes wrong. You will want some trained peasants for missions later in the game so this effort is not wasted by any means.

BASES AND EXPANSION
So I have touched upon bases in the economy part, but let’s expand on bases eventually you will want to fill up all the slots. First base is where my best troops are at and deploy missions from and also fills a primary research base purpose. The second base starts as production and transitions into secondary research base when computer core/data center is completed. Next are three dedicated production bases. Why three? Because primarily you want to make ton of money, but secondary each base has different designation to maximize output and convenience, so ALL bases will have a factory, industrial printer, armory tower, one armored vaults and as many luxury barracks as you can fit. One of the bases will have only armory tower and only make battle tanks for profit. Second base will have a hangar and fusion reactor to make new aircraft fast and make some high end ammo/explosives as well as hellerium fuel cells. Third base will have surgery room and library to manufacture power armors and annihilator suits for the endgame. You don’t have to build 3 of them right away, but I found that eventually you will want three to build everything you need fast and make you enough money to make it possible.
I also like having a dedicated training base with luxury spa, beast den, all healing facilities available to you and later voodoo schools. This base is just designed to shit out reinforcements at a fast pace, hiring veterans, putting them through gladiatorial training and voodoo school can turn a fresh rookie into star god A-team murderer in like 2 months. It’s amazing, with that kind of base you will never run out of good soldiers. After that you can fill in some gaps in radars with a dedicated spy zeppelin hangar hideout, a base can hold maximum of 8 hangars and this should fill in any gaps on your radars, a dedicated hangar base can also be used to store extra interceptors for better coverage and air superiority.

AIR GAME
The air game probably starts with an aircar and a 25mm cannon strapped to it, this will allow you to engage civilians and loot them for profit. The real air game starts when you can make your first interceptor – hunter killer. That’s an interceptor that when used properly will serve you till the very end of the game, there’s no real reason to replace it. Pilots are very important for aircrafts and lokknaars are by far the best, a fully trained lokknaar will add 26% accuracy to guns and 42% dodge. When you attach 2 thrusters to missile slots your interceptor becomes virtually impossible to hit by enemy ships. Only battleships or star god/mercenaries will pose any threat to you and shooting down craft comes down to having enough ammo to actually take it down and not survival of your own craft. But don’t stick to hunter killer too long as possibly the best aircraft in the game is right around the corner.
Barracuda is simply fucking amazing there’s no other way to describe it. It’s only fault is being too slow to catch up to fastest ufos but most ufos you shoot down slow down anyway so it’s not a huge issue. The craft has 4 light weapon slots, 25% innate dodge and requires only 1 pilot. Endgame barracuda equipped with 1 lascannon, 2 tesla cannons, and light shield generator can take on everything short of battleships alone and is a great secondary craft against battleships due to tesla cannons, will almost never take damage and even if it does the shield will usually absorb it giving it 0 downtime. I was blown away to see a puny barracuda destroy a large bomber by itself that used to give my fleets a problem. This craft trivializes most of the airgame is available rather quickly, it’s very flexible and most light weapons cost nothing to fire and restock automatically. Build this craft, use it and love it.
Nightmare is good because it can become faster than almost all ufos. With 2 thrusters it reaches 6000 speed and it can be good for intercepting high priority ufos(crackdowns). Since you give up missile slots for thrusters for survival and speed, it becomes a weaker craft then the barracuda in direct engagement and cannot engage largest ships. Its biggest advantage is speed and is well worth using just for that, sabre is an obvious upgrade but it comes in very late at the tech tree.
Swordfish is a notable craft due to being relatively fast with 2 heavy weapon slots and having 10% bonus accuracy, the pilot here doesn’t matter as much but prioritize someone with high aim and bravery as you’ll be usually dodge tanking with an interceptor. This craft will be used for shooting down large and very large crafts before you can reach good light weapons. Naval gun is available fairly quickly and deals respectable amount of damage, basically enough to help your interceptor take on the biggest crafts.
I generally find bombers and missiles to be just worthless. Missiles are expensive and annoying to restock and you don’t need them to shoot down anything, combination of light and heavy weapons is enough. If you really do want to use missiles consider using lancer as it can outrange most crafts if you don’t have any good pilots. By the endgame you can just arm a sabre with fusion balls or implosion bombs if you ever need the extra oomph otherwise just avoid missiles they’re simply not worth it.
Kraken/dragon are useful for taking on battleships, silver towers, or large+ star god/mercenary crafts basically the biggest and meanest ships in the skies. Unfortunately they’re rather slow and not practical to use for anything else and they’ll spend most of their time in hangar, but they’re still worth building and using for that purpose.

The main point of air superiority in this game is twofold, one is generating crash sites for you to go on missions and get points for the end of the month rating and second is avoiding crackdowns. When you start to crash down ufos from any of the factions they will want to launch base assaults against you and you don’t want that. Crackdowns are typically difficult and annoying missions due to sewers and with good air game they can be almost completely avoided. Try to position your bases in a way so a craft doesn’t have to travel half of the world when crackdown mission is detected, the faster a crackdown ufo is shot down the less chance they have at detecting your base. Some bases will not have their own hangar for defense so auxiliary intercept bases are essential to protect them. A production base is very hard to defend in a ground mission so stopping ufos with crackdown mission is a high priority

Mid game assumes a couple of things, you must have your codex ship and interceptor built, a decent source of income, “back to school” and “mutant alliance” research projects finished, all of this will allow you to engage more difficult targets.
Mid game goals
- Acquire better weapons, plastasteel ballistics or superconductive lasers first, smartguns/HVAP Advanced firearms and nuclear lasers later, entry level plasma last.
- Research mid-range armor for gals, most “blue” armors(defender, guardian, dragonfly, stormy, assassin) are a substantial upgrade, revenant is a solid choice too and it leads to brute armor later.
- Make a space capable ship and research space suits, deliverator works great and lasguns can be dedicated to 0-G missions before you research clips, just the looted ones are usually enough.
- Phase out early game tactics of lokknarr and peasants to more gal/bugeye focused squads, stronger armor really makes the difference here.
- Improve economy with refinery, industrial printer and factory, making chemicals, then durathread last plastasteel, this will make you loads of money and you need all of it.
- Improve craft weapons that 25mm cannon is not going to cut it against real targets, craft lascannon is probably the best gun here, reticulan plasma charger is a weaker but easier to get, by this point most ships up to medium should be easily within your reach, some large and very large from easier factions too.
- Keep expanding, with more income you will make more bases when computer core is researched you should boost your brainer count to about 50, runts should be working in hundreds by this point.
- Capture faction leaders("Any Leader" research topic in tech tree preview) that will allow you to research interrogation for breaking captives and later school graduation – this unlocks most of the really good tech.

MID GAME TACTICS
Couple of things change here, with a codex ship now you can take somewhere between 12-18 troops on a mission so you can attempt more difficult missions you will also be forced to at least attempt mutant pogroms by now. With roughly blue armor/plastasteel ballistics level you can really start cracking down on bigger targets, so peasants are slowly starting to go away. They’re still fine against most ballistics, but you don’t want to bring them against mid tier church with lasers or trader’s guild with gauss, they’re gonna die pretty horribly and not be very effective. You can use them in loader suits to extend their stay but they're really slow and cannot kneel to use mortars so their usefulness is limited. Breaking the HVAP/laser barrier allows you to really fuck a lot of shit up., HVAP weapons will allow you to shit all over church and academy, and lasers work great against trader’s guild. Keep grinding missions, there will be a lot of them. With gals you can also carry heavier weapons than peasants so look into mortars, autocannons and such. Explore your options because at this point of the game you probably have more guns to know what to do with them all. Do not engage mercenaries or star gods yet, unless they come in a small ship like a fighter or a sentry. Do grind sentries as much as you can, they have space ranger laser weapons and the shotgun is absolutely fantastic, one of the best guns in the game.

MAJOR FACTIONS
Let’s say a few words about factions in this game, the major factions are Trader’s Guild, Academy, Church, Mercenaries and Star gods, in order of increasing difficulty.

Trader’s guild are mostly humans. They have some soldiers with classic xcom personal and power armor and are not very tough in general. They do use tanks though which are really annoying to kill and you’ll face lots of them when raiding heavy freighters but they’re generally the easiest faction to fight.
Guildmaster is the Trader’s Guild VIP and he’s not too difficult to capture, use charm or a very strong gal to punch him in the back. He’s highly armored so most electric stun weapons won’t do anything.

Academy is not much harder than trader’s guild, their armor is not as tough but higher level enemies use type blue shields(effective against energy weapons such as lasers and plasma). They also deploy cyberdiscs as terror units and they deal 150 plasma damage so it one shots almost anything.
Academy Provost has mid range armor and shields also has mind control capability, can become very annoying because she can fly and be outside of your melee range.

Church is a huge fucking bitch to fight, their early troops are rather harmless and mid range is not too bad either, but they have the most deadly terror units out of all factions. Church exalts are essentially flying chryssalids with more time units. They don’t turn your troops into zombies but will kill almost anything in 1 hit. Celatids can easily one shot power armor and chryssalid is always 1 hit KO. Fortunately they have one weakness, church troops use gold shields and piercing damage completely ignores them, low tech ballistic weapons or smartguns are far more effective than even plasma.
Church Cardinal is their VIP, has very high shields and uses tome of lightning as a weapon. Not too hard to capture but taking down those shields is rather tricky even with emp boms and it’s easy to kill him by accident as he has virtually no protection once shield is down.

The Mercenaries are tough but fair, they have very high health and are very resistant to piercing damage but their armor provides no protection from lasers or plasma so use those. Mercenaries are always very well equipped typically with gauss weaponry and they can also attack you in melee with vibro axes which hits incredibly hard. They also have very high evasion so don’t try to attack their captains with melee, it’s rather silly. Their voodoo power is low and bugeyes can rather easily mind control one, since most of them have gauss weapons and are resistant to gauss they can absorb a ton of fire. They use hovertanks as a “terror” unit, which have 250 shields their gun deals 150 piercing damage but are weak to emp damage. Minilauncher makes short work of them, 2 shots will almost always kill them. Mercenaries have high strength and love to lob grenades at you so do not clump up your troops or you’ll be really miserable. Generally fighting mercenaries is tough but they don’t really have any bullshit units or abilities.
Mercenary commander is their VIP and you don't really need him to win the game and he's a pain in the ass to capture, mind damage from neural whip works probably best here.

Star Gods is the final faction and fighting them is actually not that bad as long you’re prepared. Star god guardians are the standard red ethereals, they have shield and carry plasma weapons but they’re nothing special. Novices, operators and coordinators are invisible and can be spotted only from 5 tiles away, have ghost beam which deals damage based on voodoo defense, and will attempt to mind control you. They have no shields though and are very easy to kill and capture once you found them, you can use large incendiary explosions to reveal them. Waspites are flying robots with high armor but almost no hp behind it; fire damage, emp or high piercing shot will easily take them down. Cyclops are essentially the lobstermen of this mod, rather harmless but have tons of hp and resistances. They’re weak to bio damage and toxi lance will usually bring them down in 1-2 hits. Do not even try to use plasma against them, they’ll tank multiple bfg shots like it’s nothing. Sectopods are simply the worst, 500 shields and 200 damage laser gun, they one shot almost everything and are very hard to kill. Generally all star god units are resistant to plasma and have no piercing resistance, X-gauss is great against them. When engaging star gods make sure you have high voodoo gals attacking them and psi rods ready to absorb the mind control. It’s better to use psi rods even if you have full stack of high voodoo strength gals because if AI thinks they have no chance at mind controlling you, they’ll use their time units for something else.

MINOR FACTIONS
There are various smaller less significant faction in world of piratez, most notables are zombies which are the fucking worst to fight against they are giant hp sponges and are generally not fun to fight against. Spartans are just humans with camo and decent ballistic guns, they can attack your base with plasma guns though. Humanists are not that much of a pain except for Siberia mission. Bandits are not a big deal aside from very early game, with smugglers the same and other factions I forgot don’t matter that much. There’s decent information on the wiki so read up if you care.

Entering late game
This assumes you have researched school graduation and most of the topics after it, this is where the rng starts
Late game goals
- You should be able to build power armor now, harbinger armor is possibly the best tanking armor in the game
- Squads should be purely gals at this point, other soldiers are obsolete maybe one bugeye or some sort of voodoo peasant if you really want, the gals should have mostly 3 designated armor roles, harbinger – front door tanking for trained gals, brute – very strong and fairly mobile melee gals the gauntlet is surprisingly effective stun weapon, but watch out as that armor has no plasma protection and will melt to star gods or cyberdiscs, blitz – training armor as well as highly mobile shock troopers, I typically like space ranger shotgun/ghost/poison dagger loadout for them, assault – sectopod tanking armor, use shittiest troops you have into those and give them personal shield matrix and try to draw fire from sectopods, in most cases they will survive 2-3 hits which is roughly as good as it’s gonna get with a sectopod otherwise I find blitz to better in most situations.
- For weapons you will want to mix and match guns depending on which faction you fight, X-gauss is probably the best all rounder it only doesn’t really work against mercenaries but is useful against everything else, AP lasers, plasma rifle/heavy plasma, vibro ax, ghost daggers, mini launchers, emp grenades, space ranger shotguns are all highly effective and combination of all above will make the strongest squads, also you should have thunderhorse by now 24 squad members is enough for all missions.
- Capture VIPs from 4 major factions, this is a major pain in the ass and you need multiples of some of them to research the “broken” one later, if the faction has a base you should assault the base get the vip out alive and just run, instantly return to actually clear the base to capture another one, otherwise finding vips is rather difficult as they spawn only on very large ships or crackdowns and there’s a chance they will die on the crash site, church, trader’s guild and academy vips can be bought from mercenaries for a mountain of money but consider that worst case scenario, the star god vip cannot be bought and you must find it by yourself, star god coordinator is virtually impossible to find so try to find a public enemy on a smuggler ship but these are also rare, if you do find one squad wipe, savescum, cheat do anything to capture it because second chance could be hundreds of hours away.
- Your economy should be booming now by making battle tanks, you should have more money than you can spend but you will need it to build mars attack vessel as well as all the mars equipment.
- With all VIPs broken you can research higher studies and unlock all endgame tech, higher studies takes a VERY long time to research so accumulate all brainers on that one project once you dedicate to it.

LATE GAME TACTICS
There’s not much to say here, at this point you should feel really overpowered, only the biggest ships filled with mercenaries or star gods will provide any challenge, clench your butt and prep for the endgame grind.
Mars preparation/Very late game goals
- At this point most missions can be ignored, you can do easy missions to train up your A team but that’s about it, the last thing missing in the tech tree will probably live star god operatives so very large star god ships will be most of what you’ll be doing here, once you have all needed tech there’s no reason to attack them anymore.
- Build Annihilator suits for the mars team, everyone who goes on mars gets annihilator suit no exceptions and annihilator suit is a pain in the ass to make so plan ahead.
- Weapons for mars should consist of mostly X-gauss sniper rifles and chainguns, x-plasma destroyers, bfgs, blaster launchers, shoulder launchers with emp bombs, you will fight mercenaries in phase 1 and star gods/sectopods in phase 2 with no rearming on phase 2 so prepare accordingly.
- Voodoo screening should already start in mid-late game, but your gals will be segregated into trash or the mars A-team, anyone with 50+ voodoo strength is A team and you want at least a few 60 voodoo strength ones to carry the best guns, blaster launcher, bfg etc. star gods will almost never target them for mind control and you do need heavy firepower especially in phase 2, gals with about 30 voodoo strength will become psi rods and you want few of them like 5 or so, essentially you want them to be mind controlled so equip them with shotguns that won’t pierce anyone armor, gals which are in 40-50 range are the most useless and designate them to dangerous roles like taking out a church base full of chryssalids, also fully train anyone who will make it to mars team, reactions, firing accuracy and voodoo skill are the most important.
- Build the conqueror, it’s expensive, it takes a ton of time and resources to build, hellerium fuel capsules will take the longest, if you’ve taken proper care of your economy you should have hundreds of millions to just buy hellerium, manufacturing It is cheaper but takes more time.
- Hopefully you have all star god codes, conqueror is ready and your A team is selected, trained and equipped, launch the final assault on mars.

MARS
This mission as far as I’m concerned is not really properly developed yet so it’s mostly in vanilla state, you will fight mercs on surface of Mars and star gods below. Phase 2 is swarming with sectopods but it should be no problem for your squad, good luck captain!

End note
I took few hours to write down this massive wall of text and obviously I couldn't include everything about the game, but I believe these guidelines should be enough to know what are you supposed to do from start to finish and not spoil all the fun the game has to offer.