Hard times

[Tsathoggua]

Just had a bit of a hairy fight, partly due to bugs in xcomutil.

 

Spotted a base and decided to take it out, arrived with a full squad of men and a tank/cannon gunning for T-rex, only to find that the map randomizer had decided to turn it into a land map, facing mostly tasoth and a fair few aquatoids with some major issues, like having to rely on a few sonic cannons, one sonic rifle and pistol and a pair of gas cannon with two IC and one HE magazine a piece plus a handful of grenades and a couple of demolitions charges. Because I'd loaded up on heavy weaponry, DPLs mostly, hydrojet cannon and other such under-water only weapons. Turns out in such a situation the enemy is able to use the disruptor pulse launcher on land, whilst x-com can't. And nor can MC-ed aliens already packing one.

 

Otherwise, it was mostly pretty brutal, nasty close quarters fighting, jumping aliens with vibro-blades and tazer prods for the first half of the mission, and having to kill every last alien because there was no exit grid to fight towards in a hurry, making it necessary to hunt down and exterminate every last alien. Still, captured lots of live ones. The deciding factor in the end were a pair of psykers, one of them pretty talented the other mid strength, and since the enemy can't fire DPLs on reaction fire, and can't use the ones held by MC-ed aliens or the attacks of terrorists, kept having to take over an enemy with MC, have them throw over their loaded weapons then run suicidally out into the line of sight of some DPL-wielder and use them as something along the lines of a living bomb magnet, charge the taken over enemy into a mass of others, pull all the humans back out of the way then allow them to let fly. Tentaculat everywhere too, since this game is on genius difficulty, although thankfully there was the tank and almost all of them were in one tightly packed area, maybe 6-7 or so of the buggers.

 

Made an awful mess when one of their own troops fired a DPL round into the middle of that lot

[Tsathoggua]

The bugs are getting absolutely PISSED with me it seems. Got a full complement of bases, and hyperwave decoders, MC generators installed, but am finding that wherever there is space, I've just had to install a veritable country-worth of defense systems by way of base-defense PWT cannon turrets, spotting mission after mission after mission after mission, with just the odd scout, whilst the damn swines have been taking such a beating lately that every time they try to establish a base, every time that they reactivate an artifact site, and every craft that gets detected is being shot down within moments of it appearing on radar/hyperwave decoder, and had to expand and train backup assault teams there are so many ships being trashed.

 

Just lost three of my own, though, barracuda got shot down, after taking out one dreadnought (this is something like the fifth, sixth or even seventh in a week or just over, game time, all of them bar one (that one was on an infiltration mission) searching for X-com facilities to raid. Just had three dreadnoughts and a cruiser show up at once, downed the lot, although losing 3 barracuda and 2 more damaged, one critically and one just slapped around a bit. Gave them a heavy pounding from a flight of 14-15, maybe more barracuda interceptors packing sonic oscillators and in one case, even a few old, outdated DUP head torpedoes jammed up the alien's backsides for good measure, before a second squad armed with sonic weapons and a fair few mounting twinned PWT cannon came to relieve the first swarm of craft, and downing every one of the dreadnoughts, the cruiser being wiped out entirely.

 

Assault team is taking on the first of the dreadnoughts, and due to x-comutil its proved to be a land battle, no civillians around though thankfully because the fighting is more than heavy, the skies are crawling with sonics fire, shock grenades and the occasional DPL shell, although any DPL trails have been immediately followed by the sonic displacer tank and the shooter slaughtered. This time, its gill men, and they are packing xarquid aplenty (difficulty is on genius), whilst psykers MC anything that moves and bring them into line of fire for the sniper teams to take out, or else have them turn their weapons on their own.

 

No casualties as of yet, most of the squad are hanging back and raining down sniper fire, making MC attacks whilst the displacer is proving to be a tremendous force-multiplier, a great improvement over the gauss tanks they are replacing, the latter being used as base defense to assist the more inexperienced teams that in many cases haven't yet fought, and are mainly serving as garrison troops in case any of those damned dreadnoughts does get through.

 

Think I'm going to start slowly rotating the squads, a few rookies at a time being assigned to the sharp end of the spear, my primary assault team, where they can be backed up by a squad made up of more than 3/4 members that are my elite psyker division, all armored in mag ion armor and packing one hell of a lot of firepower, so the rookies can get some training, get armored up properly and then be sent back to guard the factory bases and research facilities, as well as the bases serving as early warning and detection and providing interceptor cover for the places further away from my main few bases.

 

This is some of the heaviest fighting I've seen in a while, and for gill men they are really putting up a pretty determined effort. Although aside from a couple of hits to the tank from a xarquid, the only thing to have hit any of my troops are a fair few stun grenades to the tank and a couple of glancing hits from a sonic rifle (I think, didn't do any damage worth counting anyway)