1. How do you get eliite units? I had units with 300+ experience but they were still veteran.

2. I noticed that regardless of how many seige cruisers you have, you can only have a max of 4 missles in a sea square? Is this a bug?

3. How exactly do you get the money to afford a decent stack of units? Im finding that even with oppressive taxes as Cyth, taxes generate way too little money and trade income doesnt help much. Im having to spam 6+ replicators per province, all doing nothing but focusing on trade, just to maintain a decent army.

4. How do you tell what enemy units are in a province? I mean you can see the icons, but the game doesnt give you their names when you mouse over them.

5. Do medics heal infantry in battle? Or only outside of battle?

6. How exactly do you counter tidal vortex generators? They affect up to 1 province away, so you spend 1 turn moving next to the province, then you lose half your fleet without being able to do anything. Thats just ridiculously OP.

7. Unless im missing something, what is the point of super nova jets? For the same upkeep you can have 6 starflare bombers, which of course will do way more damage.

8. Is there a way to make the game auto-reallocate colonists back to trade when you finish building units?

9. Im struggling with the second Cyth campaign mission, at the start the AI has AAVs, which are about as powerful as a Fusion tank. But you start with literally no tech...so the AI just uses his starting AAV to rush you across the map and kill your colonies. Building multiple laser canons per colony really slows your growth down and just delays the inevitable (the AI gets a massive tech start in this mission i think) and spams more AAVs at you. Is there a way to win this without cheating?

Cyth is a great choice ! I'll try to answer some of these,
1. I think elite is at 400 exp, the easiest way to find out is to use a Scout, they gain exp fast from stealing tech and such.
2.I believe 4 is the max, same if you spam missile silos in a territory, can only have 4 warheads stored there. You can try putting the siege cruisers in a sea platform that has missile silos and see if it increases. It could also be a visual issue, try engaging with them and see how many missiles fire.
3. How big of stacks are you aiming for ? The upkeep of units is based on type, infantry/tank/air/sea, once you start getting like 10+ and 20+ the upkeep costs explode, so you'll want to maintain a medium army of all types of units. 15 tanks, 15 infantry, 15 aircraft, will be way cheaper than 30 units of one type.
4. Click the icon? Should give you a list, at least pictures of them.
5. I think the way the manual explains is, is they increase the defense of infantry so they're more likely to survive. I doubt it stacks and each medic may only affect 10 infantry at a time (like commanders do)
6. Attack with air/missiles, then maybe try a AAV to capture the platform.
7.See @3, supernova jets have better range and much better anti-air abilities, stack of 15 will do a lot better than 15 stareflare bombers
8.I wish, you can try locking the non-trade positions and they may filter back to Trade.
9. How quickly do they attack you? I did the Cyth campaign but it may of been on a different patch with less aggressive AI. You could risk the skirineen to buy a powerful military unit early on, maybe a single starflare bomber.

2. Nope, i checked the stack view and only 4 of the seige cruisers have missles, the rest dont.

3. I usually use stacks of 15 infantry and some aircraft. Do you know what the exact formulae for calculating maintainance costs is? It gets really expensive when you need to find on multiple fronts.

4. You can see the pictures but not the names, thats the problem.

5. Huh i didnt realise commanders only affected 10 units max. So you need more commanders beyond that?

6. Its super easy for the enemy to have a large stack of defending ships to shoot down your super expensive bombers though. I think a stack of 20 bombers is at least 1k+ maintainance cost by itself?

7. The problem is a stack of 15 will cost 6 times as much as a stack of 15 starflare bombers.

9. Within the first 10 turns i think, especially if you colonize the SE province to your landing location. I had to cheat to get gold and buy tons of techs/units to keep up with the AI in this mission.

Well then 4 is the missile max, Cruiers arnt a unit to spam anyways, mixed units are kind of what they want you to do

I've tried to look at the formula, what you can do is build one unit a turn and watch your upkeep to see WHEN it starts to spike, kind of like Warcraft 3, after X population you get hit with a tax.

Yeah you gotta learn to recognize units, infantry is hard for some races.

I also had trouble against some really fortified sea structures, ended up building missile silos in several bases. Launching 20 missiles and a wave of aircraft cleared them out for good, missiles are very useful for that late game, hitting heavily fortified areas. Send army + missiles.

Since the tax spike is based on how many units you have, you'll want them to be efficient units, check the cost difference of 20 vs 20 !

Its best to not sit on large armies, but to throw them in battle ASAP. You could maintain a small infantry army + towers in each base for 'defense', and build huge tank/air armies to throw at enemies before you're paying 5k a turn in upkeep.

The naval combat mechanics are really frustrating. As far as i can tell you cant keep naval units in port, so when you build them they run out to the nearest sea zone and suicide there....

Im trying to take out an enemy sea platform with a weather control/tidal harness thingy. Its an inland lake, so i have to build naval units directly into combat. Unfortunately 1 torpedo defense platform can easily take on 6 shockwave dreadnaughts....infact the torpedo defense platform one shots the shockwave dreadnaughts. Im suprirsed by how weak naval units are actually...

I cant send planes against the platform because they get instant killed while adjacent to it. Seriously the tidal vortex thing is the worst idea ever.

I think i just encountered a game breaking bug.

See screenshot.

Bloodbath plains was originally owned by the human AI and i attacked it successfully. After the battle though, all my ground units were kicked out back to human landing.

Event log did not explain why...and everytime i tried to send land units back there, they would get kicked out back to human landing again.

Someties the event log would complain that my military units are running out of food, which is silly because i have tons and transporter tech (which lets me bypass blockades and send supplies anywhere).

Someties the game would forcibly disband units that i send to bloodbath plains.

What the hell is going on here? I need to take that province because it has a shrine and its shrine conquest...

Diplomacy wise, why is the AI so stupid?

For example Re'Lu is losing a war against the humans and begs me for help. So i send them a NAP request and they get pissed and turn me down...

I cant figure out how to give allies money/resources either. Even if i send free resources to friendly colonies, they complain the price is too high and reject it. Even though the price is absolutely zero. And after a while the skireenen refuses to buy ANYTHING....everything becomes worth 0 credits....whats with that? Is it a bug?

Noticed some odd bugs as well, for example if you fire missles against sea platforms, they will frequently land in the water, even if you have set them to attack buildings only.

I was also not able to target a anti-matter defence in a ground province even with "attack buildings only" or "attack forts only". The missles would keep landing on half-built buildings instead of the sole remaining AM defence.

Edit : Also i noticed my medics kept charging into battle and getting themselves killed....turns out their orders keeps resetting to "attack units only". Ive tried setting them to "combat support", but they just keep changing back to "attack units only". What gives?

Edit 2 : And now for some reason i cannot place any buildings at all....the tile is open, i drop the building onto it, and it dissapears. No building site appears. WTF?

Okay i figured out what was going on with bloodpath plains...seems to have been a bug with mines not getting cleared, because after i sent in some spies set to disarm mines, i was able to move my units in properly.

However the event log does not seem to say whether mines are successfully disarmed. How are you supposed to know?

Once i sent in 10 spies to disarm mines, and i got a message that 3 were caught. The other 7 for some reason engaged in open battle with the defending units....why? All 10 were set to "disarm mines" but in the next turn, i got the battle screen with my spies in open combat. There was no explanation given for this.

Thats also when i noticed that the AI seems to cheat....it never seems to run out of food (even with zero farms and 60 defending units) and it never takes morale hits for having a ton of patrolling units (even if they are not cyth).

Im wondering if theres any way to mod the game? E.G. Adjust unit stats, etc.

As for not being able to place buildings, this seems to happen when there are too many buildings on the map, if you destroy a building, you can build another. I guess this is the limitation of an old game...

Because upkeep costs rise so steeply, I've avoided the army sizes you hint at in your post. Could you say how many units you built, of each type?

I think it's roughly the number of units of a type, squared. And then another multiplier. From recent memory:
infanty: 1 * N * N
tanks: 2 * N * N
ships: 3 * N * N
planes: 4 * N * N

So if you go from 6 infantry to 8 infantry, I'd estimate upkeep rises from 36 per turn to 64 per turn. I ramped up my holocaust canon in one scenario, and might have been paying 578 for 17 tanks (maybe). But I had over 100k sitting around so it was affordable. I favor slower progress, though.

I agree you need lots of replication stations generating trade income. If you're building more units regardless of how many you already have, the dramatic rise in cost with increased army size could be one place to look. You might be able to balance out the cost by trimming your air and naval forces some. Missiles really help on upkeep, plus it's just fun to watch 20 of them land on an enemy colony. Missiles do have a 4/territory limit, however.

A question back at you - how many units do you send to disarm mines? I've sat with my submarine over a known minefield and nothing happens however long I sit in the same sea square. I've wondered if it's just broken, or if maybe I need to send cheap units until it's cleared...

I can also explain what happened to your 10 spy situation, but only based on my Deadlock 1 knowledge (I haven't seen it in Deadlock 2). Your first 3 spies somehow got intercepted by patrolling units, which is lethal. Your other 7 spies were successfully spying but encountered a command corp doing an "uncloak" mission. Although "uncloak" hasn't worked for me much in Deadlock 2, in the original Deadlock one command unit was enough to uncloak anything entering a territory.