• Soldiers with high skills out in the field are rare. Without the scope the best way to determine an estimate of a soldiers skills is to consider their attire. Soldiers that wear high rank hats for example will have better skills than those who wear common hats. However, the scope is your key source of information on soldiers abilities and skills. Upgrade it as soon as possible, check what requirements you are missing, such as a lower than needed level in a particular ability branch of your Mother Base and do what you can to increase the level. Keep in mind that you also get volunteer soldiers after completing missions, so extracting is not the only means to get skilled soldiers.

• The population cap per division as well as the overall cap can be raised by building base structors for that division, building a command base structure raises all divisions population cap. Base structures cost resources and GMP, try to go through different interiors and side outposts in free roam to find the materials needed to upgrade your base.

• Fulton costs relatively low GMP to use in the field, try to store up on GMP when you know you will need it for Fulton (and resupply drops). You can build up GMP through doing missions, side ops, and operations with your soldiers. Other ways to gain GMP include extracting animals. Try to do missions sneaky and quickly for big GMP points (multiple hundred thousands), so long as you don't spend your points on upgrades that you don't need right away, you will have plenty of points to spare for Fultons. You can also increase your storage capacity and success rate by increasing your Support division in MotherBase.

Your codename is based not just on the mission you just did, but also the previous two missions before that.

Starting with the completion of mission 06, the game will give you a codename based on how you did the three previous missions. Prior to mission 06, the only codename you will receive is Chick (and possibly Chicken if you actually use the chicken hat, but I can't confirm that). The majority of the codenames are based on the method you used to neutralize enemies, although two (possibly three) codenames take priority if the conditions for them are met. Some (not all!) of the codenames you can get are as follows:

• Foxhound: Three consecutive "Perfect Stealth, No Kills" (never spotted by an enemy, no kills during the mission), overrides all other codenames
• Fox: You were not detected in the last three missions (or, if you were spotted and Reflex Mode was enabled, you neutralized the enemy during Reflex)
• Octopus: majority of enemy neutralizations was using nonlethal weapons (e.g. Wu pistol)
• Bear: majority of the enemy neutralizations was using CQC

A (brief) google indicates there's a different codename for each class of lethal weapon (handguns, shotguns, smgs, and so on) and also for using support (heli, carpet-bombs) and buddies to neutralize enemies.