The Holographic Orange Lines (as in your screenshot) point to undiscovered Meld containers and are always the same sound. The Soundwave-y Lines point to undiscovered Pods (and are different sounds based on the makeup of the pod)

It seems like the first non-tutorial stage just has bugged ladders on the iOS version. I was able to climb ladders and pipes on every stage but this one by switching layers (two finger swipe) to the roof. Even after starting a new file, this was the only stage where I could not access the roof.

On Impossible difficulty coming across a mission with 12 enemies isn't uncommon, and depending on the mission type you're essentially guaranteed to have at least 12 enemies per missions. Having all those enemies being Thin Men is probably a tad on the unlucky side, but on Impossible difficulty there's no limit to how many of a single alien type can appear on a mission. The UFOpaedia has a page which goes over Alien Deployment in detail, although it can honestly be really confusing to read. The fandom XCOM wiki has a page which goes over difficulty levels, which has some details on pods as well. As for your question of having all these pods activated at once, well, that sounds like it's a combination of bad luck and just poor tactics. When fighting squads of enemies you always need to be really careful to avoid running into unknown territory, since as you discovered, there's the very real possibility of activating additional pods. This is even more of a problem on Impossible, since on lower difficulties the game will try to move pods in such to reduce the chance of you activating multiple pods, but on Impossible the game stops doing this. So the best way to avoid this problem in this future is to just switch up your tactics. You should always try to avoid running into an unexplored part of the map once you're already engaged in combat. Instead, you should actually try to fight the enemy fairly close to where you activated them. You can also try to lure them back a bit, further into areas you've already explored, since that'll allow you to flank them without worrying about activating more pods.

Depending on where your forces are, it can be easier and faster to just kill the rest of them. They also drop whatever weapon they're using, and the soldier who kills them will get XP from it. Other than that, feel free to GTFO in the Skyranger, since your operative has all the intel that the local government will need to destroy the cell on their own.

I looked around on a couple of other forums and found the following GameFaqs I ignored a few shot down ufo and didn't get any negative panic hits. 2K-forums You didn't lose any points in OG from a crashed ship, you just didn't gain any more points. Just shooting the ship down gives you points and keeps the aliens from getting a complete mission, so they don't get points. In OG, once I had things settled (month 2-3) I never sent a skyranger to a crashed ship. They usually didn't have a good power core, so there was really no point in going. I only assaulted supply-ships and infiltration missions that were landed.

As far as my own experience and other forums seem to be saying, one hit death does seem to be number of times friendlies have been one hit killed. Therefore I can only assume that this was some form of bug or odd feature. I've found on one forum that apparently this sort of thing can happen at the end of the game when killing the boss: "There's a bug at the end of the game, when the big bad boss MC's one of your guys. If you kill him, everything on his "Side" dies, so your MC'd character could of died also, but nothing became of it due to it initiating a cut-scene almost instantly, and then ending the game." - Vexx303

XCOM:EW has great factor for customization and purpose developed team members, so it would be hard to give straight answer what would be the best for your soldier, in synergy with the team. So best advice to give I think is to hand out medals as giving a further edge to an anyway well-trained soldier, so s/he can perform even better in that aspect. Medals go with the soldier, even if turned into a MEC. Best timing is contradictious in this manner, because you profit most often if you give out medals early, but you will be able to verify a concept only later (or be a good planner and stick to it (and not playing ironman), so you can hand them out early). As the soldiers level up, the medal will mean smaller difference to their skill. So give aiming to sniper, dodge for ranger, HP/defense for tank, etc. If you go tinkering a bit, you can come up combinations that can get close to bend the general chances

It's a while since I played Enemy Within, but from memory there are two key things: the first rather obviously, is to do lots of damage to it. Make the most of holo targeting (because it has high defense), HEAT ammo, and ideally open with a shredder rocket. The second, if (as is usually the case) you can't kill it in one turn, is to reduce the danger to your squad. Suppression works to reduce its aim, and smoke and the defensive psi ability work to increase your defense. However, the best "sneaky" way that I remember is with the top-tier MEC and its EMP ability (afraid I forget the name of it). Walk up to the sectopod, use the EMP. That does damage to it and stuns it. No return fire, no reaction fire, etc, so your squad can concentrate on removing its health. On the next turn, your MEC can either retreat to a safe distance to avoid the death explosion (if the rest of the squad can comfortably kill it), or just punch it twice!

Time stops during missions. I can't find any citation indicating that time stops during a mission, but from my memory of playing through the game several times I feel pretty confident saying that it does. This would be easy enough to check. Save, start a mission, see what time it is when you get there, play some turns, leave, check the time. But not when flying to the mission site. But in this version of X-Com, you don't have much control over your aircraft. The skyranger will fly to the site, taking up time, and fly back when it's done, without you being able to stop it and send your interceptor. So check. This means that maybe you can do the mission first, and maybe not. To be sure, save the game, head to the mission site, leave immediately, and return to base. If you can still intercept the UFO, then you're fine doing the mission. Load, and actually do it.

No, DLCs cannot be activated if they were not enabled when the game was started. As for how to check, it depends on what you mean. For the added storylines (Slingshot and Progeny): You can check the Barracks/Memorial. Both Progeny and Slingshot give you unique soldiers: Slingshot has Shaojie Zhang, and Progeny has Annette Durand. You can just wait. No, really. Friends in Low Places and Portent are both in April-ish. Confounding Light and Gangplank are about one month after that. Deluge and Furies are shortly after XCOM Base Defense. Almost certainly in the save file somewhere. Nobody knows for sure because the format is undocumented. As for the Enemy Within DLC: Go to the main menu. Does the gigantic subtitle say "Enemy Within"? There's your answer. If you launch in vanilla, you can't load EW save files. If you launch in EW, you can't load vanilla save files.

This is pretty much a hard limit, unless you use the savescumming strategies described here. A soldier's will appears to influence the chance that they'll be gifted, but there's no way to tell for sure without doing the testing, because that's when the decision is actually made. In vanilla XCOM: EW (i.e. not playing Long War) 10 days isn't all that long of a time, so it's generally feasible to just stick one high-rank soldier and a couple of lower-rank soldiers in that you don't mind losing for 10 days at a time.

It doubles the ammo capacity of all weapons. This means less time reloading and thus more time killing enemies/setting up for overwatch/etc. It is an excellent foundry upgrade.

As you noticed yourself, cheating interacts with parts that makes progress to the game. In the normal course of events game progresses with satellite numbers in the beginning, and "sadly" covered areas has no direct connection with UFO sightings (except it will appear only in covered areas). Global coverage with cheating is contraproductive, because when you begin to deal with events, you can save 1 area and consequently cause trust drop in 2 areas. Math is easy, you will eventually loose support from countries in the long run. The effect can be balanced with many civilians saved in terror attack missions, so there will be continent bonus to keep issues down. I'm sure there are editors for android save games, but Simon W wrote, just play it normal It is a strategy game, which will not tutor you for best practices, but you will learn on it the hard way. But tactics work like that.

No. This is "flavour" for the story, not game mechanics. You can take as long as you like to interrogate aliens.

Are you on console? I am not certain, but I do remember reading that it's a known console bug where unalerted enemies don't get damaged unless you directly fire at them. It was brought up in the context of firing a rocket into a known enemy nest in the fog of war, but I assume it would also apply to your situation since the only difference is the absence of fog of war.

There are a few ways to deliberately destroy damageable terrain, but they involve grenades, rockets, properly timed destruction of Sectopods, Mechtoids, Ethereals or Cyberdisks or the MEC trooper's collateral damage special ability. Missed shots' fire angle is randomly determined; if it hits something else the game determines then and there whether that type of weapons fire has the capability to destroy the object (or in the case of cars, set it on fire) and resolves on the spot.

I recently received a base defense mission in my current b15f3 campaign. It seems that the Command ability is not available if the Commanding Officer is not selected as an active soldier. I selected 5 officers as a test. The soldier displayed as 'Commanding Officer' at the load out screen was not part of the troops that appeared in mission. Out of the multiple (lower ranked) officers that did appear in the mission, none of them had Command available.

When you look at the Reward before accepting the mission, you can see a text that says: New Recruit: [Class] ([Rank]) It is that [Rank] that tells you which rank your new recruit will be. Recruits won as a reward can be of any rank except rookie, while those recruited through the Barracks are without exception rookies*. *: If you have learned the "New Guy" skill at the Officer Training School, then all rookies will automatically be promoted to squaddies.

The maximum adjacency bonus depends on your version, since the bonus is greater in Enemy Within. In Enemy Unknown, the bonus is 7% so you need 15 for over 100%. To get 15 adjacencies, you'll need 11 workshops (or 10 plus the Foundry which also counts) in a 3x4 layout with a corner missing. This may not be practical, since you also need space for uplinks, power, labs, and the plot critical buildings. If you are playing Enemy Within, the bonus is 10% so you will only need 10 adjacencies. This needs 8 workshops (or 6 workshops, the Foundry and Cybernetics Lab). There are two possible layouts for this- 2x4 or 3x3 with a corner missing.

From the XCOM Wiki : Generators +2 Power for every adjacent power facility. Uplinks +1 satellite capacity for every two adjacent uplinks. Research Laboratory, Genetics Lab : +10% increase to research speed for every adjacent laboratory. Alien Containment : none. Engineering Workshop, Foundry, Cybernetics Lab : +10% on resources used when building vehicles.