Early Sectoid Base

[silencer_pl]

Hi All.

 

 

I would like to know how to handle early Sectoid Base with Superhuman Ironman mode. By early I mean march-april when you have laser rifles and personal armor.

 

I've heard two different things about AI in this game.

 

1. It sees all your units all the time

2. It sees all your units after 20th turn.

 

My first attempt at taking sectoid base was utter failure. At round 4 half of my 14 man team was taken out by mind controlling, and some of them where still in the enterance / exit.

[NKF]

For the purposes of psi, the moment the aliens see any one of your soldiers they will be able to start using psi attacks on any soldier, going for the weaker ones first. Note that each alien has a limited number of turns when they can 'remember' seeing your soldiers.

 

On turn 20, or if there are only 2 remaining aliens left, they get a free-look at all your soldiers. This often means a series of psi attacks or non-psi aliens rushing to your nearest troops.

 

I don't have too many exciting tips to impart on an early sectoid raid, but:

 

- If it's not urgent, you can leave the base for later when you have a fair idea of what your psi stats are. Just do the occasional shootdown and crash recovery in the area every month to nullify the effects of the base.

 

- Cannon or rocket tanks are useful as they don't get psi controlled. Since this is superhuman, try not to waste rocket tanks on cyberdiscs - they need stronger weapons.

 

- Play aggressively. If you're fast enough and can take down a lot of sectoids within the first couple of turns, you might just be able to get the aliens to panic instead.

 

- Light arms like rifles and pistols are good vs. sectoids but won't hurt much while wearing armour. Personal armour is quite resistant to rifle/pistol bullets. Power armour is impervious. They're not much good against Cyberdiscs, so you will need some lasers or other strong weapons. Stunrods are great since the aliens don't know how to use it.

 

- A more popular alternative to that is to have everyone drop their weapon each turn. It slows everyone down, but anyone that gets mind controlled will not be a danger.

 

- There are a limited number of psi capable sectoids. Leaders and the commander. A good majority of these guys are located in the command centre. Locate it as soon as possible and attack it. You can also bring in a lot of soldiers to give them more targets to waste psi on. Spread them out a bit and have them either go unarmed, use stunrods or carry basic pistols.

 

- If you're desperate and just want the base gone: simply destroy the tables in each corner of the upper level of the command centre. Shoot up at the ceiling underneath them with explosive weapons while you're in the outer ring so that you don't have to physically enter the command centre. That might harm some of the commanding sectoids in the process. After all 16 segments of the 4 tables are destroyed, escape and abort the mission.

 

- NKF

[Bomb Bloke]

One of the developers mentioned the "aliens see everything" thing in an interview. It wasn't until much later that folks worked out that this was not true all the time (though it IS true for most of any given battle).

 

Psi is the alien's strongest weapon against you. Well, maybe that and Sectopods/Cyberdiscs, though the discs go down for keeps if they smell a whiff of a stun bomb. A superhuman Sectoid base is a daunting prospect no matter your load-out, unless you've got a cracking psi-ops team of your own (... or a blaster launcher). Consider leaving the place alone for now; in a month or three you might be able to field a squad of strong psi troopers (so long as they can't be mind-controlled, the troopers will have little trouble killing Sectoids in bulk).

 

I would consider sticking with personal armor, unless you can find a less dangerous base to harvest Elerium from (eg Floaters). Heavy plasmas will up your chances a fair bit, though laser rifles are quite serviceable.