Aliens: Dark Descent – How to Avoid Combat as Much as Possible

Guide to Avoid Combat

How-To

Other than what people commonly tell, it can be easier and faster to be stealthy than gun through everything. On normal difficulty being spotted can be managed but on like nightmare you won’t want that extra hassle before you invite it. Here are tricks that can be used to avoid being spotted:

1. Move fast as possible before all patrols arrive.
2. Use silenced snipe to remove anything you can’t move around. Snipe is often good on cultists as they won’t respawn on most locations.
3. Distract with sounds from drone/tracker when needed.
4. Use rooms that xenos won’t patrol to plan your next move. In such positions you can even use drone to roam around to see all rooms before you move around. Xenos ignore drone but beware other enemies.
5. Weld saferoom to break hunted.
6. Flamethrower is silent weapon to deal with group of eggs. You can snipe eggs but it takes more command points and eggs are often behind corners. If there is no xenos around you can use explosives. Flames are sometimes best weapon against cultist as they seem to be average mmo players who stand in fire without realizing why before it is too late.
7. Banshee missiles can rarely but still, be surprisingly good solution on outer areas.
8. Make noise near ARC/APC and hide. Enemies just disappear.

Bonus Alternative Methods

Some people do mine a lot to reduce aliens but I don’t like it. On story/normal it can work but it creates a lot of randomness for spawns and won’t always even kill warriors. On some missions aliens patrol certain areas and it serves little use to mine those places as they will soon return there. Mines can be useful sometimes but I’m not using them for patrol control. Better use them as defensive tool.

I once attracted xenos on cultist position and those xenos dragged them away clearing path from both threats. It is good laugh but not really an option on most missions.

Sentries can be placed on locations where you want them to remove enemies. Be careful tho as sentries can be broken and will eventually run out of ammo. If you want to collect your sentries, it can be extra work. Not fan of this as it has much of this method. It is often waste of ammo and has same issues with mines as they break set board and will cause more randomness.