YMMV / UFO: After Blank

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • It can be easy to be use nothing but assault rifles and sniper rifles against Transgenants and Reticulans. However, later on, new armored transgenants and Reticulans with force-field armour start appearing and will hand you your ass if you're not careful.
  • In Aftermath, Europe is far, far superior starting location than either the USA or Far East, despite being away from plot-related locations. The advantage comes from close proximity of bases and new territories (meaning getting extra R&D and engineering bases faster and in quantity), giving a high density of them and easy access to new, early-game missons, giving loot and experience when they are needed most. Whereas in other starting location, everything is two-three days away and is so spread out, you never really have a safe core zone.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Deathbellows are probably the only Transgenant that will put the same fear in you as a Chryssalid would. For those not in the know, Deathbellows are giant, hollowed out slug-things with bees in them. The bees are their "ammunition", meaning once they fire, you can't do anything about the bees themselves, which will always hit the area they're aimed at, and don't particularly care if you're wearing armor. One shot will half kill a soldier, if you're lucky; otherwise, they're dead. The bees are fired at a quite frankly ludicrous rate for the damage they do, and the Deathbellows themselves are resistant to projectile, laser, and explosive weaponry (i.e 90% of your usual arsenal). They are surprisingly flammable, though, and their tendency to lay in wait around corners is easily their weak point as well. They are even easier to deal with in urban terrain types, because there's almost always some urban debris lying about that you can use as a shield to get close. Once you scouted out and know where the Deathbellows is, switching to your designated grenadier, getting him/her within throwing distance, and having them toss a few incendiary grenades over the cover will quickly deal with the Deathbellows. On larger wilderness maps, you can afford to stand outside the Deathbellows' firing range and wear it down with sniper and laser rifle fire.
  • In Aftermath Reticulans packing plasma guns will feel this way in the early game. Lategame, substitute Microslug Accelerators.
  • Beastman Matriarchs in Afterlight can rapidly enter Demonic Spiders territory depending on how they are armed, and what you have on the field. You will particularly hate Plasma Cannon and lightning throwers if you're relying on drones. They can almost always see you before you see them (especially during night missions), they have better range and accuracy than you do, and they absolutely love to chuck grenades at you. If you don't have Heavy Suits or Life Support Suits, you're going to die. If you do have Heavy or Life Support, you're looking at a significant healing time for your soldiers anyway. Though Laser Cannons tend to make relatively short work of them.
  • Rollers are also frustratingly powerful for when they are introduced: any attempt to attack a Beastman-held territory will result in facing Rollers. While they are easy to see coming and move fairly slowly, they're heavily resistant to ballistic damage (rifles, pistols, sniper rifles and shotguns) and inflict serious damage very rapidly when they get in melee range. The first weapon you get that can reliably damage them is probably the Warp Cannons, which are of limited use but tend to one-shot the suckers, and you won't get those until you manage to contact Earth and wait for the supply drop, which takes several in-game months. Any early attempt to fight back against Beastman expansion will rapidly run into these brick walls.
  • Aftershock gives us Wargot Grenadiers. Their Frag Grenades are mostly harmless, but Incendiaries will put at least one of your soldiers in the sick bay for a while.
  • Also from Aftershock, the Starghosts. What makes them so dangerous is that they can use mind control to capture an entire country if you fail to defeat them when they attack a province. And you can never get the country back. Ever.
  • High-level Psionics have powerful psionic abililties that can affect the accuracy of your troops at best, or make them start shooting at their allies at worst.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Collapsible Machine Guns in Aftermath. They require powered armor and a very strong soldier to field effectively, but once you have those, you've practically won the game: their ammo type is Hard, which means they'll pulp any armored targets, and even those that resist Hard rounds end up as a smear on the floor since its damage output is so damn high, it'll chew through them anyway. The impossibility to reload during a mission is moot, since its ammo pool is enormous and damage per shot is so high that the CMG is far more efficient than it may seem at first. And if you feel troubled by powered armor being such a juicy target for Warp weaponry, a deployed gunner will start firing far faster than anything wielding a weapon, and again, the damage is so high that the Warp user will be neutralized before it can fire. Pretty much the same goes for Collapsible Plasma Cannons.
  • In Aftershock, cyborgs with max HP-boosting stats and implants have absolutely ridiculous health, more than any enemy can ever hope to overcome. Add in the third-level bonuses from Gunman and Ranger training, which grants that the soldier doesn't get knocked down and can act with serious injuries, and your cyborg becomes an Implacable Man.
  • It's pretty safe to say that the late-game Ball-Lightning Launcher from Afterlight radically alters the entire game and brings down the difficulty level. Up until that point, the Beastmen are still terribly efficient opponents, and can only be defeated by carefully avoiding direct confrontations and using lasers and mind control properly. The Ball Lightning Launcher allows a technician/soldier with Driver Training to generate an explosive "Lightning Ball" that can be guided for any distance and any amount of time, and detonated right in the enemies' faces. And since the launcher has an in-built thermal imaging sensor that can tell you about enemies around the lightning ball, you can pretty much win any mission with a single soldier, provided he's got enough batteries to power the damn thing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The UFO series is a Spiritual Successor to X-COM. Fast forward a decade or so, and several elements from Aftershock (flying base of operations, factions you can discover and ally yourself with that include mutated humans, territories with supply incomes that must be linked via infrastructure that you build yourself, The Bad Guy Wins in the first game being canon) all came up in XCOM 2 and its War of the Chosen expansion. Hell, the Lost city ruins are so similar to the urban ruins in Aftermath, you could mistake the former for a graphical remake of the latter.
• Obvious Beta: Aftershock; on top of all the aforementioned Game Breaking Bugs and shoddy copy protection, its own uninstaller is nonfunctional and an important research item doesn't appear until you give the savegame a nudge in the hex editor or send it to the company to fix it. The dev team may have been aware of this. One of the hot tips for the graphics options, instead of describing what a setting does, reads "Try this if all else fails. It won't work either."
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: In Aftermath, you're almost literally thrown new recruits every week, and you'll likely have a hard time running out. In Aftershock, you have to pay for new recruits, and the better your relation with a particular faction, the better (and more expensive) the recruit, but you're never likely to run out of meat for the grinder. In Afterlight, you start with 12 potential soldiers. After about a month and a half, you get one extra soldier, and two weeks later, you get two more. In addition, 8 of those original 12 soldiers are also scientists and technicians. You'd better get used to protecting your people and quick.

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