15.
String of Bad Luck
Its a lo-ong way to Ma-ars, its a lo-ong way, to go-o...
Who am I kidding? I can't sing.
The ideal defense system for an XCOM base is a line of Fusion Defenses. The Plasma Beam craft weapon is better in the air due to how UFOs can dodge Fusion weapons and its rate of fire, but when your base is attacked each defensive emplacement can only fire once unless you have a pulse shield installation. Fusion Defenses are the most bang for your buck but we're still a little ways off from them and they're a bitch to build.
At least the Interceptor pilots aren't getting bored.
These Abductor recovery missions are extremely boring and tedious for me to play on account of the craft layout, but the positive score from taking them even heavily damaged like this is just too good to pass up.
Everyone on the ground feels they know the drill. The aliens are as ever full of surprises though.
Somewhere around two updates ago I manufactured a stack of about 60 alien grenades since we recover maybe eight or so per mission. At the rate I use them even recklessly versus the rate of recovery we shouldn't need to manufacture more grenades for the rest of the game. We're still sitting on that stack of conventional grenades I bought at the start too, maybe about 40 or so of those left.
The aliens give us little trouble at first.
Ponchik comes under psionic attack relatively late into the mission. The aliens on Abductors are usually pretty hesitant to use their psionics, generally because there are so few of them, but they succeed in getting Ponchik to panic and then run amok. The rest of XCOM continues their sweep of the UFO.
Looks like we have the aliens inside the ship on the ropes.
Just as I have
@Kane Lives round a corner into a hedged off area, a Sectoid medic hiding in the area hulks out and actually manages to kill him with autofire!
I retaliate by having
@Bathroom Attendant bomb where I think the alien scampered off to. Its a clean miss. On top of that the wiley medic manages to kill him too!
I have the team on the inside of the ship head for the UFO entrance once they finish killing the two panicked aliens. The medic has beat the team to the entryway however, and ambushes
@Randall Fragg with reaction fire right as he comes through the door.
@Judge Dredd isn't too far behind Fragg. The alien manages to kill him as well.
Eventually somebody outside the UFO snipes the alien when the smoke on the interior dissipates.
Its a positive score but at great cost for an otherwise routine mission. Affluent Reptilian is criticised for using too few soldiers to secure chokepoints and in general not backing his troops up enough on the battlefield. He is left in command for the time being though.
Eurasia sees a lot of the UFO activity in a relatively short period of time. Our interceptors manage to take down two more Abductors.
The reason for the increased UFO activity soon makes itself known.
The team leaves in such a hurry that it takes a few minutes for Command to realize the ship is still full of green rookies. Affluent Reptillian reports that the Amberlynn Reid is touching down before they make it into the ops rooms.
Thank God, its just Floaters.
Since XCOM is now armed with modern weaponry, the Floaters and especially their useless Terror Units, the Reapers, are unable to put up an effective resistance. Reapers are perfectly vulnerable to even the conventional explosives at the start of the game and have no special resistances towards any of the weapons developed afterwards. Floaters are poorly armored, supposedly a bit toughter than Sectoids but definitely without much of their perceptive skills.
World of Shit eats a stun bomb followed up with a big bowl of pavement for dessert.
The advantage that Floaters, at least in the early game, are supposed to have over XCOM is their ability to fly. However, unless your troops have excellent vision, the ability to just take off from the ground and float over the battlefield becomes more of a liability than anything else. You'd think in real life a man-sized target hovering irregularly in the air would be fairly difficult to hit, or at least something a soldier isn't used to shooting at, but in-game there is no disadvantage to shooting at a hovering target at all in the game, Which means all that a unit does when it takes off is just exposes itself on a Z-Axis plane where it effectively has little to no cover
Units in the air don't recieve an accuracy bonus either. I'm aware that there are XCOM veterans out there who love the Flying Suit and everything and have all of these neat little tricks they can do with it, but for me taking any of my troops off the ground just invites certain death.
The rookies somehow manage a mission with zero casualties. The aliens did utterly slaughter the civilians though so the score isn't as high as it could have been.
Back to the desert.
Team cohesion is supposed to be tighter this time, so we have about four troops covering each side of the UFO as they advance to prevent some Rambo medic from fucking us up.
It takes the aliens only one psionic attack to send MikeFoxtrotTango over the edge. He fills
@Friend computer full of holes.
Ponchik loses it again and runs screaming into the UFO without his weapon. Luckily he finds a dead alien killed in the crash still gripping a Heavy Plasma. He uses his newly salvaged weapon to blow an alien away before succumbing to panic again.
Ponchik falls under alien control once again. Llama King acts quickly enough though, destroying the last alien and ending the mission before Ponchik can do any damage.
Could've been worse, I guess.
New troops arrive, though I probably need to order another batch of 10 recruits fairly soon due to all of the attrition we're suffering on UFO recovery missions.
All of the new troops are fresh names, with the exception of
@Megatardingo, who was actually added in the last batch but I failed to screenshot him for some reason.
@SailingtheSaltySeas,
@TerribleIdeas™,
@Mooger Meng,
@Shadfan666xxx000
I'm starting to get real sick of Abductors.
The aliens have stepped up their game since the last Abductor mission. They ambush us from two different points and take out
@world of shit and
@Lemmingwise before they have a chance to do much of anything. Affluent Reptilian is wounded leading his troops.
Its a little close for one of those jewels, but Affluent Reptilian didn't make Captain by playing it safe. He atomizes a pair of aliens with an alien grenade along with much of the barn they were hiding in.
Amazingly, there's still a Sectoid alive on the second floor. One of the troops coming off the Skyranger nails it.
I miss screenshotting the notification, but MikeFoxtrotTango falls under alien control almost immediately and executes
@Forever Sunrise and
@Twitter Hate Mob.
Its up to the wounded Affluent Reptile to stun MikeFoxtrot. Before he can get any help though the team comes under attack from an alien to the south, which they manage to dispatch. Another alien steps out of the Abductor's main entrance and wastes
@Super Sad Smile.
This mission has been an embarassing disaster for XCOM but at least the UFO breach goes okay.
For about two turns. Then, a psionic attack panics Genichiro while an alien comes down the lift and turns
@JongleJingle into paste.
White Devil somehow gets reaction fire on the alien without putting a hole in Genichiro,
Affluent Reptilian is hospitalized for his wounds and thus unable to lead the squad anyway, but Command relieves him of his position for the moment. He retains his rank though, something a lot of the other recruits are displeased with. They're even less thrilled when they hear that panicky Ponchik will be in charge of all rookie operations for the foreseeable future.
Its not long before the Jace Interceptor shoots down a Muton Scout over Siberia.
Ponchik's first mission as team leader goes... surprisingly well, actually.
By the book deployment, quick and clean sweep of the surrounding area, and a flawless UFO breach.
Command is impressed.
Our end of the month report is not promising. Japan has fallen to alien infiltration as predicted earlier. our maintenance is beginning to reach our total income, though this is not neccesarily an issue especially given the cash we have in reserve. The real thing that concerns me is the relatively low score we got for the month. I recovered every single downed UFO and completed a Terror Mission, but our score is still in the okay range. We need to start dealing with some of those alien bases, but we just don't have the troop transportation capacity for a Base Assault yet.
I'm done fucking around with research. I use up the last two open spaces in Kiwi Farms to build extra laboratories, which once complete I will staff to full capacity so we can whip through the remaining technology. I also order 14 more engineers to bring Kiwi Farms's workshop staff up to full capacity.
We take down a few more small fry in the mean time. It seems pointless, but the rechargeable plasma beams run on nothing at all so its worth the distraction to bump us up a few extra points.
Research on the Blaster Bomb completes. The warheads it uses are antigravity smart missiles; capable of making hairpin turns and carrying an extremely powerful fusion charge. Work isn't yet complete on the launcher though.
A major stepping stone in our research of the alien craft is complete, but our teams still need to research two more advanced craft in order to reach the ultimate XCOM craft. Work starts right away.
Another UFO is shot down near Yakutia, Russia. Ponchik rallies his team and sets off at once.
On the way there, the science team finalizes their design for the Power Suit. This pressurized, mechanized suit is the ultimate protection XCOM soldiers can wear. We can research the Flying Suit, but I've already spelled out why I don't find them to be worth the trouble above. In addition to that, I think the Flying Suit is slightly weaker to compensate for the antigravity unit. (Ed note: I'm wrong about this, but its still expensive anyway.)
Constructing these things will take forever though, so I'm only going to build what I need for the final mission on Cydonia and a few extra. In general, expect to see more troops in Personnel Armor than Power Suits up until the final mission.
On the ground its Mutons again.
@Llama king is killed by reaction fire as XCOM spreads out.
Otherwise, the mission goes quite well, with Ponchik personally leading his troops to take the UFO.
The death of only one recruit is regrettable but hardly anything XCOM hasn't seen before.
Finally. Research on the Psi-Amp, XCOM's answer to alien psionics, is complete.
I immediately divert most of the engineering staff to Psi-Amp production. The first six units are ready for deployment in less than three days. Four will be deployed to the battlefield and two kept as backups.
The Psi-Amp weighs very little, so it will be given to officers who have high ranks and are intent on staying in the back of the Skyranger rather than being immediately deployed. Affluent Reptilian, McMitch4kf, Chaos Theorist and of course Dear Leader are the first four to recieve Psi-Amps. Dear Leader has low Psi Resistance which could prove to be a liability but I'm willing to chance that having our own successful team of psonic troops will distract the aliens enough that they cannot make effective use of their own psionics.
Next time: The power of the mind, more routine missions, and maybe I decide to get a little ambitious.
