Gill man commander?

[Tsathoggua]

This is odd. Just caught a ship, and a large one at that, very large, battlecruiser I think. Only, owing to xcomutil its turned out to be a land mission, island type territory. Gill men, just downed a bunch of them, taking them over, as most are armed with stun launchers at this point.

 

Finally, I hope, I'll have captured myself a xarquid. Knocked one down with a stun round from an MC'ed gill man. But the gill mans rank is commander. Didn't think they had commander ranks, thought it was only lobstermen and aquatoids that did. What gives?

[Zombie]

No, Gillmen have commanders so nothing new there.

 

- Zombie

[NKF]

You generally have your hands full with the Lobstermen and Tasoth in the late game, but the Gillman Commander's there to throw you a wobbly when you go up against the Gillmen and suddenly find yourself under MC attack. It's the only Gillman rank to get MC abilities.

 

Not an issue at all with a well MC-screened team, but could be disastrous if you decide to send in an untested team expecting a clean by-the-numbers battle with no MC interference.

 

- NKF

[Tsathoggua]

These troops are by now pretty hardcore, don't think there is likely to be a great deal of MC problems. There shouldn't be many commanders on the island, and little floor-by-floor searching since there isn't going to be a UFO there with a land crash like this. Ideally this should be the perfect opportunity to capture a xarquid, since there are definitely at least two of them around, already knocked out down, plan after that is to take the commander alive and kill everything else.

[Tsathoggua]

Got the bugger, alive and in one piece. MC'ed it and brought it close then dragged it into the triton. Little sod made a break for it, but unfortunately for him/her the squad's best psyker was standing guard, and with a shock prod at that. Down it went (again).

 

Made a point of vaporizing spare corpses with grenades (already dead ones, and anything that wasn't a primary target)

 

Oddly, the xarquid, despite stunning two and killing one of them, three came back, all dead. Better than nothing though, even if a point was made to keep two out of three alive. The other one there wasn't much choice, as somebody ended up directly staring it in the...err..face? so couldn't use stun launchers, and going from my last up close and personal fight with a xarquid, it took nearly a week to just over a week to plan and predict exactly what it would do in any given situation before dropping the team down on top of it (yes, they jumped off a second/third storey (if you count the hold) building, some of them right on top of the creature in a shipping lane mission, whilst others blasted holes through a wall, leaving others to swarm out with prods and hammer the thing stupid, mutated cephalopod or no, don't think it needed a head to have a migraine after that one. Didn't come back though even after several save/reloads (it was the end of that portion of the mission, and the object was solely to get that last critter, already unconscious, back alive. I don't count working around game engine bugs as cheating.