Barracks | XCOM Base XCOM: Enemy Unknown Guide
Last update: 11 May 2016
Barracks are the last room associated with the strategic part of the game. It is here that we will be arming soldiers, promote them or, at a later stage of the game, develop their psionic abilities.
The first tab available from the start is View Soldiers. After selecting it you get a full list of available soldiers along with their current status (active, training, injured), rank, class, as well as possible psionic abilities.
Clicking on the name of a soldier will display more detailed description. In addition to the aforementioned information, we will also know in how many missions he or she participated, how many aliens he or she killed, the soldier's special abilities and statistics. There are four of them:
- HP - the number of hit points. HP bonus depends on the armor worn by the soldier.
- Will - the strength of will, increasing the chance of having a psionic abilities, their effectiveness, the ability to defend against hostile psionics, and resistance to panic
- Defense - the ability to avoid enemy attacks, without modifiers from the battlefield. Typically, this statistic is zero, and the bonus points depend on the armor worn.
- Aim - the accuracy of our soldier .Bonus points are taken from their weapons and additional equipment (such as the S.C.O.P.E.)
In addition to the abovementioned information, the soldier window also allows us to consult his current skills, and assign a new ones (Abilities), but if he has psionic abilities, we can check their status by pressing the Psi-Abilities button. Loadout will allow us to change the currently used equipment, while Dismiss removes the soldier permanently from the list of available characters. The last option, Customize, allows us to personalize our soldier. We can change the name, surname and nickname, and we can customize almost every detail on the appearance of your character: race, voice, head, skin color, hair (or helmet), hair color, beard / mustache, extra decorations on armor and shade armor. This allows each of our soldiers to become similar to our friends or be completely unique, invented for the game. Of course, if we do not want to play in changing the appearance, we can leave the original, randomly generated character.
The XCOM: Enemy Unknown can freely customize each of the soldiers.
Another tab becomes available only after the construction of the Officer Training School (officers' school). It is one of the most important installations in the XCOM base, because in it you can buy some upgrades that directly affect our soldiers. After opening a new window we can buy upgrades that affect the rate of healing of our subordinates, the number of experience acquired in combat and, most importantly, we can enlarge our group strike with two people! Thanks to this our firepower on the battlefield will increase twofold and thus the fight against aliens will become much easier. Other available skills are no less important - the following is a list of them with bonuses received:
Improvement | Effect |
Squad Size and
| Allows you to send 5 commandos on a mission |
Squad Size II
| Allows you to send 6 commandos on a mission |
New Guy
| New soldiers get automatically promoted to the rank Squaddie (their specialization is also unlocked) |
Rapid Recovery
| Soldiers wounds heal twice as fast |
Do not Die On Me
| The higher the rank of the commando, the greater the chance that it will be critically wounded (he remains one life point) rather than die in combat |
Wet Work
| +25% Experience for killing an alien |
Iron Will
| Soldiers get a bigger bonus to Will at every promotion |
The next option is also associated with the additional training of our soldiers. Visit the Psi Labs is activated only after the construction and installation of Psionic Labs allows us to detect potential mental capacity of our soldiers. Simply select up to three soldiers and wait a few days to see results. During the time of research, we need to ensure replacement soldiers for our strike team, as interrupting the training will force us to repeat the whole process over again. After ten days we get an indication of whether we will be able to use commando psionic abilities (Gifted) or not (No Gift). Before you start testing, it may be useful to unlock the Iron Will bonus in the officer school and get some promotion for every soldier, as a higher the rate of Will increases our chance to have a "gift".
Visit the Memorial allows us to see the face of the fallen: we mention our best soldiers, and to see how effective they were in battle with the invaders.
The last option available from the barracks is Hire Soldiers. When you select it you can choose how many soldiers are going to hire, and we know how much is left available to us in the barracks. New recruits will go to our base after 3 days. It is worth mentioning that the ability of New Guy (to unlock the school officer) works both on the characters which have employed before, as well as those who have just arrived.