Print this page

The Barracks Menu

The Barracks is where most of your interaction with your soldiers takes place, and with the exception of the loading menu when you configure your Squad for missions, is the only place in the game where you can get information about each of your soldiers as well as modify various aspects for each.

Hiring New Soldiers

One of the most important elements of the Barracks Menu is the ability to hire additional soldiers as you lose Squad members to enemy action. When you select the Hire Soldiers option you are shown the present standings of the Barracks - how many soldiers there are and how many more you can hire until it is maxed out.

When you hire new soldiers there is a time delay of around 3 days before they actually arrive at the Barracks and become available to you.

Until you unlock the “New Guy” Perk in the Officer Training School (this costs $250 and requires that one of your existing soldiers have the rank of Major) each of the soldiers that you hire for your Barracks will arrive as Rookies, which is the lowest rank in the game and the least advanced as far as stats and accuracy goes. Once you unlock the New Guy Perk all of the new soldiers that you hire will arrive with the rank of Squaddie, and each will already have their Specialization listed (their Job), which will make planning out which ones to use for each mission a lot easier.

Each soldier will rise in rank based upon the XP they earn for going on missions and killing Aliens, and will climb the ranks as follows:

• Rookie
  
• Squaddie
  
• Corporal
  
• Sergeant
  
• Lieutenant
  
• Captain
  
• Major
  
• Colonel
  

As noted above, in addition to rank each of the soldiers will also have a profession/job, which they unlock when they make Squaddie. These are:

Assault Class: The first in and the last out, these Shotgun-toting bad boys can also be equipped with the Assault Rifle (in its many forms) as well as the Shotgun (in its different forms) if you prefer a little distance to their damage. The Assault Class are your basic grunts, whose job it is to cover the other professions in your squad.

Heavy Class: These are your brutes, and they are equipped with what passes for Heavy Weapons in the game, which means Squad Automatic Weapons and Rocket Launchers. When you have full Squad size of 6, this class works best when there are two in your unit, which allows them to lay down an impressive field of fire, provide fire support, and remove objects that get in the way with their rocket launchers.

Sniper Class: The elite of the elite, the Sniper (once they are ranked and sufficiently trained up that is) are truly a force to be feared on the battlefield, especially if you can get them into an elevated position so that they have command of the battlefield from above. The jetpack armor in the game was clearly created with these guys (and gals) in mind! Basically this is the soldier in your squad that you want to hang back and deliver death from a distance.

Support Class: For most of the missions you only need one of these, and it helps if they are the most skilled and ranking officer in your Squad since that means that they will have the most HP and thus are a lot less likely to die on you! These guys are the safety net of your squad, being Medics as well as tactical planners, they can heal, but they also gain abilities like their special smoke grenades that boost the stats for the squad, so having a well trained Support Class as part of your squad is an obvious advantage.

Soldier Customization

One of the cool aspects of the Barracks Menu System is that it allows you to access the records for each individual soldier, and once you do there are several fields in their record that you can edit - their first and last name and their nickname/call sign.

This allows you to use your own shorthand to indicate what their Class is, which makes strategic movement and troop placement on the battlefield a LOT easier on-the-fly, so this is a feature you should probably make use of!

The Squad Memorial

Think of this as the Unit's Chapel, a place where the fallen are memorialized and where the living can go to honor the dead. Not only that, but you also get to see a list of their names, their basic stats (number of missions, the rank they were when they took the long dirt nap, and how many of the enemy they managed to take with them!).

In a way this list in the Memorial can help you to visualize your progress and how you got better at completing the missions, since you should be seeing longer and longer gaps in the dates between deaths, just saying.

That wraps up the Barracks Menu.