Those "dead" civilians were in fact only unconscious. They count as alive and well in your final score.

That's the reason I always bring tasers with me in terror mission. Don't wait for a civilians to run right into your friendly fire: taze them and move on.

Managing the economy, expanding as fast as possible but not overspending, is an important part of the game. :)

I don't remember this exactly, and I don't know if some of those civilians could be alive, although in that case I think they would count as saved. But I think civilians give you positive points only if not killed (saved), but they give you negative points only if killed by you. That is, you get no points, positive or negative, if they are killed by the aliens (not saved). I'm not sure about this right now, though.

No, you do get some negatives for each killed civilians. But you get double if not even more negative if you kill them yourself!

But like I said, tazing them or otherwise any action which will stun them to the ground will save them. Short of having a grenade or bomb or anything explosive killing them. The Aliens will completely ignore them.

This is especially useful for the black ninja which name escape me.

Chryssalids AKA nightmare fuel on two legs.

Even though their name escape me because I find their threat level minimal? :p

Before you get to laser cannons, producing & selling laser rifles is the way to keep your economy in the green. Before that, it's medikits. And even before that, your workshops should be busy producing weapons that you need to survive :)

The most profitable items to produce for sale before laser cannons are motion scanners, at $18 per hour and engineer, taking into account price and all costs. Laser rifles are arguably the best weapon to use, but earn only $7.5, and medikits $9.3. Laser cannons earn a whooping $61.9 per hour and engineer, so they make a big difference, although they're useless for your craft and you also need to research heavy laser which is worthless for both using and selling. But motion scanners are the absolute second in profitability after laser cannons.

Motion scanners are also useless for using as far as I'm concerned. Never bothered to build any.

I equip one, at most two, as backup equipment for my teams. Sometimes it helps a little with hunting down the last remaining aliens.

There's no point in having all soldiers carry one, but I have my two worst shooters carry one each. They're very useful. They tell you if there are aliens in any building without needing to enter, and exactly where, so you can avoid being ambushed by a lucky alien standing close to a wall. And the same goes for UFOs, and when exiting the transport ship.

It's such a long thread that we keep repeating old discussions... :P