10.
Ultimate Enemy
I suppose things are going well. Now that Mutons have showed up I'm a little worried about how far behind I am in tech.
The Council is mollified at the moment; that alien supply ship really made the difference in our score. Egypt is pissed that we've left an alien base inside their territory and are essentially doing nothing about it. Currently our technology just isn't good enough to justify an assault on an alien base. I have done alien base assaults with only 14 troops before, but they were my best troops, fully equipped, not a group that's almost half useless rookies.
This is one of the only hints in the game that you aren't doing as well as you should be. This event will fire if you haven't discovered enough alien bases yet and haven't done a whole lot on the battlefield.
Interesting. This base could potentially be any of the aliens we've seen so far, but based on its location being around where we saw a ton of UFO activity early on in the game, I'd be fairly willing to bet that its either Sectoid or Floater. This could be important later.
This reminds me to check the area where we took out that Muton Supply Ship for another alien base. I'm not sure if the game gives you a small score bonus for identifying bases, but it couldn't hurt and it would give me a few options in the future. The Jace Interceptor finds nothing of note though. The missions that the aliens conduct to set up a base goes something like: Multiple scouts visit the area, then a Battleship and a Supply Ship both land at roughly the same time and stay in the area for a slightly longer time than most UFO missions. After alien activity is conducted, the base spawns.
I'm relatively certain if you interrupt either the Supply Ship or the Battleship and successfully take one of them, the base is not set up. Unfortunately you don't get any real bonus for interfering in alien base activity, just the score for capturing the UFOs. There's supposed to be some way to prevent the Battleship from even showing up if you manage to shoot down all of the scouts, but I've never even gotten enough interceptors into the area before the Battleship appears.
(Ed note: The wiki reveals that shooting down either the Battleship, Supply Ship or both will only delay the creation of the base by an unspecified amount of time.)
Researching captured Navigators will give you free research into the alien missions, but that research tree is mostly useless and will tell you stuff that is blatantly obvious. Importantly though, your first captured Navigator will unlock the Hyperwave Decoder. You can technically win the game without this invention, but it will make your life a Hell of alot easier since it lets you get a peek at the alien transmissions. This way you know exactly what you're up against and can even prevent things like Terror Missions before they occur.
Laser Defenses finish research. I get this team working on Plasma Rifle magazines because I want to even the odds with the Mutons next time I have to fight them.
I transfer the Chrischan Interceptor to Deagle Nation even though I probably should have transfered the Jace interceptor over there. Fuck it.
We are very far behind on UFO technology, but that's not as important as it sounds. All it means is we're pretty far away from being able to complete the final spacecraft that we need to conduct the mission to Cydonia. I get working on UFO Power Sources next.
I'm not thrilled at all about fighting Mutons without plasma weapons, but at least their Terror Units are a joke. I expect a lot of casualties on this mission though.
Oh fuck. These are the final alien race, the Ethereals. Every single one of them can use psionic powers, and on top of that all of them have excellent accuracy. We may not be able to win this mission.
I do what I can to kill off at least a handful of these guys before they can break out their psionics.
Considered HARMful is the only soldier to step off the Skyranger. He's hit with a Stun Bomb on the alien turn and goes down.
It begins.
Dark Edea loses his shit and fills
@Penne Dreadful full of holes.
Fougaro, thinking quickly, decides to redeem himself for shooting Genichiro in the back and leaps out of the Skyranger, sweeping up Considered HARMful's stunned body and even grabbing his heavy laser.
Dark Edea falls under alien control. This is going to hurt.
Dark Edea executes
@Mary the Goldsmith. Ayyy lmao intensifies. Dear Leader takes a few pisonic attacks himself and loses it. Insert canned Doomer Null freakout joke here. Mr. Moon1488 somehow takes a laser shot straight to the face, suffers no damage, but panics like a bitch anyway.
Fougaro can clearly see we're totally surrounded on the ground. An alien Sectopod is right on top of us. People who have actually played the remake can let me know how similar they are to the Mechtoid, but essentially the Sectopod is hardened to plasma fire and explosives damage. I've never had a ton of trouble with these things myself, but I'm hardly in a good enough position to deal with this shit right now.
Fougaro makes it back onto the Skyranger. Lets get the hell out of here. To add insult to injury, the warning message reminds me I forgot to add two more recruits on to the Skyranger after the last fight, so I actually showed up to this fight without a full crew.
That sucked. Its a massive embarassment for XCOM, but it could have gone so much worse. The game takes the time to readjust the ranks based on all the new recruits, giving Dear Leader his rightful place as Commander.
At least we're half way to decent Plasma weaponry.
We accomplished dick this month. The Council is pissed, and who can blame them. XCOM needs another victory, a big victory.
At least we have decent plasma weaponry now. Or we would, but my secretary informs me that I sold them all last month to open up more storage space. Fuck! We're basically unarmed against the Ethereals and still no match for the Mutons.
All of our effort now is poured into Heavy Plasma and the Hyperwave Decoder. A functional Hyperwave Decoder will allow us to spot which UFOs are carrying Ethereals and avoid them until we have psionic research in the bag. At least we don't need to deal with the agony that is capturing a live Ethereal.
Exactly what I was hoping for.
Supply Missions are the dirty little secret that every XCOM powergamer doesn't tell the newbies. You saw just how much loot and score that last UFO provided us with, even if we did lose a bunch of people on the ground taking it. Supply Ships have to visit alien bases at least twice a month, sometimes three times a month. They always have a fairly large crew, but their leaders and engineers rarely carry heavy weaponry, and they never carry Terror Units. If you have a base inside your radar detection range, you can essentially farm these things as long as you want.
This confirms my suspicion that the base in Egypt is Snakemen, as the race of the Supply ship is always the same as whatever the base is. This means XCOM will also be able to deal with these aliens a lot easier than Mutons. On top of that, Desert environments are mostly flat with some hills. There are no pesky trees or buildings for alien support to hide in. This is the perfect spot to farm Supply Ships for the foreseeable future.
Nobody said this would be a cakewalk though. Snakemen still favor Heavy Plasma and can still tank a decent amount of laser fire.
@Fougaro is killed by return fire.
The Snakemen counterattack on their turn and kill
@Prehistoric Jazz.
We break the counterattack. XCOM can finally advance.
The flat terrain means there's very little for cover though.
@GrammaNazi is taken out approaching the UFO. Dark Edea is left in a bad spot.
My troops are able to abuse the massive splash radius of the alien grenade to kill the Snakeman advancing on Edea.
Having learned my lesson from last time, both UFO entrances are breached at the same time.
The UFO's bottom floor is quite effectively stormed.
The terrible access lifts on this thing give us trouble again. Axfaxf lands a kill on something he can't even see, while
@Tactical Wizard is on the recieveing end of the worst knock knock joke he'll ever hear.
Our team demonstrates some pretty awful reactions when the Snakemen try to push us back. One straight up walks into the lift and goes down to second floor before our dipshit troops manage to take it out.
Now we're finally getting somewhere.
The team on the second floor shows some better reactions than the one on the third.
@Spunt quite literally cannot reaction fire to save his life.
Second floor is clear.
Third floor is clear. Uh.
God damnit. A Snakeman, probably from the second floor, slipped by us earlier and now gets the drop on
@Megatardingo. What follows is an incredibly irritating bughunt as I move both teams back to the first floor.
The alien makes it outside with axfaxf in hot pursuit.
@axfaxf misses his only shot though and the alien returns fire.
Mr. Moon1488 deals with the troublesome alien.
Losing half our number in any other military would be abysmal, but to XCOM is just another mission, and a rather successful one at that.
I waste a bunch of missiles shooting down two Small Scouts, but anything we can kill or damage right now will help our score.
Another Supply Ship lands at the base in Egypt.
Dear Leader wants a nice clean dispersal this time. Two teams of five troops each will enter either access hatch. No aliens will slip by us this time.
@Allakazam223 is killed during the advance, but otherwise things go smoothly.
The aliens have a rather bad day.
Our team is inside. Every possible angle is covered this time.
No UFO breach is perfect though.
@AmpleApricots buys the farm when an alien steps out of the lift.
Catgirls are Love scores two kills while camping the lift and waitng for the rest of the team to sweep the engine room.
Alien discipline has gone to hell. This is not the XCOM they were briefed about; that broke and ran in the face of the Star Gods. This is a relentless team of specialists hellbent on taking no prisoners.
That said, not all Snakemen are created equal. A counterattack from the bridge succeeds in catching rookie
@Agarathium1066 and Captain
@mr.moon1488 off guard. They are wiped out.
The aliens from the bridge try to rush the second lift and make their escape.
@Peasant gets one of them, but the other one gets him.
@A Proud Black Woman's team makes a nasty discovery when they find that the aliens haven't tried to return to the bridge and instead are camping the hallway.
I don't catch it completely but the last alien actually throws a grenade at Karl der Grosse and draggs as they corner it next to the lift. Draggs is knocked on his ass but somehow Karl der Grosse stays on his feet.
Karl der Grosse gets the glory of the last kill despite being mortally wounded.
6 deaths is almost as bad as the last mission, but we're getting there. The score is even higher this time as a result. The directors are confident both of these missions will put us into positive light with the Council and may even reverse Egypt's negative opinion of us.
We detect a Supply Ship visiting the alien base in Russia. Intercepting it right now would mean a mission at night. Most of our new recruits have no armor to wear, and we do not know what kind of alien the threat is. Much as it pains Dear Leader, he's forced to call off the mission. At the very least we'll need to wait until the crew is better armored.
Damn.