Monday begins with a dance. It is the same dance we seem to do every morning. Nathan and Montgomery sit down and try to figure out what new toys need to be bought to win and what old toys could be sold to buy the new toys.
Within a few hours, $70,000 becomes $46,000 and a couple of hover bikes and a bunch of psilcones turn into a well equipped Hawk Air Warrior.
Nathan, of course, takes command of our new flag ship.
We also hire some more troops and physicist. The advanced quantum lab is online but not fully staffed. We hope to fix that tomorrow when the first living quarters of X-Com Armaments come online and we can ship off a few engineers to start in on some construction projects there.
Montgomery is pleased to hear reports that seem to indicate that the raid of Aliens at the temple helped to stem the tide of Alien Infiltration there. Hopefully it will be a long time before troops have to return.
Before the sun sets Monday, our Quanties finish their research on the advanced engineering lab, and construction on the facility begins at both bases.
Early Tuesday the UFOs return, including our missing link, the Destroyer.
But something isn’t right. Destroyers and Fast attack craft usually only show up together if the aliens our out to level a building.
Turns out they are… they open fire on a government warehouse.
This is good news for us, as the government will respond with a slew of attack craft… not that we really needed them…
Fuck yeah!
We decide that if we can knock out a destroyer, we could probably take out a fast attack craft too!
In the process, we lose two bikes, and Sean is killed.
Note: you get the pause and center message before the bike actually explodes.
And we cause a MASSIVE amount of collateral damage.
Seriously Massive. It is hard to relay the destruction we caused, so instead I’ll show you who we’ve pissed off.
Fuck them! We shot down TWO UFOs. Two IMPORTANT UFOs. Now we just have to win the ground war.
Because of the importance of the mission, 3 squads of our best are sent to the Destroyer but the aliens hardly even put up a fight and are quickly overwhelmed after only injuring 3 soldiers. As a double bonus we capture one of our two remaining “known” aliens alive. We only have to capture a live Popper now.
While the mission to the Fast Attack Craft isn’t as important as the Destroyer, we still elect to send 3 squads. There should be very little other tactical combat to do and we shouldn’t waste an opportunity to bring in a new UFO.
The mission starts out with two squads coming under heavy fire before we can get in position around the UFO and then the third running into mild resistance on the way to help. After a short time the aliens are beaten back and the three squads form a perimeter, slowly wiping the remaining alien resistance.
Another mission complete, another 3 units added to the Med Bay, another UFO ready for research. Even with all the bad Karma we generated blowing the shit out of the city, we are off to a rocking start.
Not rockin, though, is our money, which we run out of within 12 hours of capturing the fast attack craft. We are forced to sell off more disruptor guns, further crashing the market, just to keep production of Toxigun ammo moving.
Shortly after that, however, we get our final piece love on good news Tuesday.
Meet: The Bio-Transportor.
Quantum Physics really gives us many amazing technologies. I guess I would consider this the first one. It is actually the second X-Com designed craft, but the first really useful one. Once it is built it will become our main crew transport. Unfortunately we can’t even start building it until our advanced labs finish.
All X-Com built craft have the ability to go to the alien dimension. This is the first one that can bring a crew there. This will be important later.
One final note is that this craft is the best item to build and sell for money. A fact we will exploit in the near future.
The Aliens finally return on Thursday to a hail of rather impressive plasma fire. They send in two Assualt ships and 3 fast attacks. We shoot one of the assaults before it can drop and let everything else get away, leaving us with a tactical mission back at our recycletorium.
Fight starts out normally enough, long range gun fire. One of the aliens misses and shoots some sort of explosive tank next to him. As the fire hits him I get some very welcome news.
Ohmigosh, ohmigosh, ohmigosh. It is good to finally see you, Mr. Personal Disruption Shield.
In theory, I could have seen these as early as week 2, but here they finally are. These things caused young Fikes a great amount of strife. They are, as the name suggests, a personal shield that protects the wearer from most damage. Back when young Fikes was trying to figure this game out he beat his head against the wall in frustration! They made the aliens so much harder to kill with Devastator cannons but when you finally did kill them, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Cheating bastards!
But young Fikes didn’t get it. These things break when they run out of health. You will never get one if the only weapon you use to kill aliens is a Devastator; the shields absorb the shots and then break.
They do not, however, absorb Toxigun ammo. Hence my excitement. The aliens have actually brought a technology into the game that will ONLY help me. Once we get our hands on these items, the balance of power shifts further in our favor and it will be impossible for the aliens to one shot us.
Speaking of one shotting, to my surprise, RabbitJoe is brought down off screen.
They didn’t use it in combat so I was surprised to find this after the fight.
Meet: The Vortex Mine.
This is the second alien grenade. It is extremely powerful and prone to causing spectacular chain reactions. Much more of a threat than the Boomeroid.
Later in the day research another great Quantum tech
This will allow us to quarantine the entrances at our base, making it nearly impossible for attack forces to get at our scientists.
Sadly out of our price range right now.
Sunday afternoon our arch rivals return to drop off some aliens in a factory, belonging to a group that already doesn’t care for us. This time, instead of rushing off into armed combat we wait, and less than an hour later our ground infantry gets a major boost. Shields have been researched.
This is now the standard load out for our troops. There is going to be one more upgrade in the near future, but we will worry about that later. This really puts us far ahead of the aliens. Any other upgrades are really just icing on the cake.
We have won the ground war.
Also, pictured here is Ajna. She is amazing. She saved the worst mission to date the same week she did the double grenade throw back. She is a supa troopa and I hope she continues the good work.
Our newly equipped troopers not only humiliated the alien force, but did so without taking any wounds. When was the last time we survived a mission without ANY injuries!? AND AND AND, that was with a vortex, boomeroid, boomeroid, triple chain reaction!
Believe me when I say that the ground war is basically won.
And with that, the week comes to an end.
Our score was comparatively low this week (due to us blowing so much junk up), but still high enough for government work.
Total Score: 10276
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Topic: Complete: Let’s Play Ironman/Superhuman X-Com Apocalypse! (Read 115341 times)