Symphony D.
Deity
MISSION 16: CURSED EMPIRE
I brought three snipers because of those amber waves of grain.
We move around a bit for cover and straight out of the fog come four Seekers.
By the end of our turn there's one on 1 health visible, and one invisible.
The invisible one strangles pole475 for one damage (it doubles every turn) and the second misses EQandcivfanatic on a flank. Both Seekers die easily.
Next turn, four more pop up, and I elect to simplify our problems. You can begin to see why Scouts are really awesome beyond just long moves, the ability to carry most weapons, and Lightning Reflexes: LW loves to throw missions every now and then that would otherwise be "Haha, all your dudes are suffocating, what now?"
Shoot 'Em Up. Good movie, by the way.
One is left alive and repeatedly tries to re-stealth rather than shoot the flanked pole475, whom I have nuke smoke grenade to try and up their survival chances. Normally they go hog wild and try and murder people by flying up to them and plasma rifling them. It dies the next turn.
nuke meets some new friends: 4 Drones.
Variations on this image describe what happens to them.
EQandcivfanatic injures 2 more Seekers by rolling a grenade through a door. Both take 2 damage and move up. One is killed outright after being revealed by a Battle Scanner and the other survives into the next turn only to cloaking error itself into extinction like the previous one.
While moving up, CivOasis spots two more. Human vision is exactly 1 tile farther than alien vision, so they haven't activated yet. This type of UFO seems to always have 19 enemies, 16 whatever, and 3 Outsiders. These are 15 and 16. I figured the Outsider fight will be tough, but I make an executive decision.
Humans: 16, Robots: 0
Then it turns out the Outsiders weren't waiting on the bridge. This ship has one large room beyond this blue door at top center, and then beyond that is the bridge. Normally they just wait there, but apparently they were roving too.
We take out this one with concentrated fire, but where are the other two?
nuke finds out they were trying to flank. We take out one but nuke's left staring down the barrel of the other. I ultimately decide his best chance at survival is running to the rocks on the left, as otherwise the Outsider can just flank him.
It works, and nuke lives to fight another day, a little worse for wear. After the Outsider is sniped by ChiefDesigner and grenaded by EQandcivfanatic, he runs up to finish it off.
Nicknames for everybody! nuke earns the one I discarded.
We make bank. Going Sniper heavy turned out really well here given the enemies we were fighting and the fact that roving pods made them all feed out into the open. It would've been less good if we'd had to fight our way into the UFO. We were also lucky; I had this kind of UFO as my second mission of the game back in one playthrough of Beta 6 and it was throwing around Chrysalids and Thin Men. On like March 5th.