Monday starts off in the Alien Dimension, and with some bad news.
Between the gates and our target is some nasty alien airpower.
We are confronted with 2 escorts, 2 assaults, a fast attack and a battleship. Escorts and battleships are enough of a danger together, add in the additional firepower power and you have a disaster in the making.
Nathan, seeing the enemy presence, aborts the mission.
We will have to return later in the week with more air power and less Agents.
Within three hours of Nathan’s call to abort the mission we get a surprise.
The Aliens seem to have followed us home… followed us in front.
Nathan, most of our agents, and all the Toxiguns are currently in the Alien Dimension. We make the tough choice to let this incursion go.
Within an hour, Synthemesh calls to let us know they have an alien problem. It takes some scrambling, but we manage to fully equip a single squad.
While I didn’t have high hopes for the mission, the three Squad leaders smash the aliens without losing or shield or teleporting. Some of the aliens teleported on top of the squad at the beginning of the mission and were gunned down before they could even turn around.
The inter-dimensional raiding part returns Wednesday a few hours before the Aliens return bringing with them the same fleet as last time. I guess they figured it scared us or something… It didn’t.
We blast the Mothership and one of the Escorts out of the air while the Battleship manages to drop some aliens in a building belonging to one of our enemies… that will make for a fun tactical mission. Then, in a twist, I get the message that a building is under attack by our units.
I am not exactly sure what caused it, but what ever it was, General Metro took it as a serious event and scrambled their combat craft.
Everyone is ordered back to base, but not ordered to lock their weapons. The result is a sort of ineffectual moving firefight. When the dust settles they’ve lost a couple of hover cars and caused some collateral damage; we are down a couple of disruption shields.
The damaged vehicles are sent to Cold Storage to get repaired and a UFO assault team is assembled to (hopefully) bring back a living and dead floaty green memory foam alien.
It doesn’t take long for the team to see their targets. Two PsiMorphs side by side.
We try it to rush in, but it turns out that there are tons of aliens with rockets standing just inside the door, so our stun squads pull back while assault squads pop in and harass over and over. Once the first alien is down our Agents stay in just long enough to cause a chain reaction before teleporting out.
The strategy works well and causes the aliens to cause damage to their ship and each other while our units disappear before taking a large amount of shield damage.
With the majority of their defense force out of the way the stun squad moves in and manages to knock out their target. A few minutes later the craft is cleared and the units head back to base with their prizes.
Last week I knew there was a chance we would get a live and dead Psimorph, so I added two alien containment facilities and a small Biolab to X-Com Cold Storage and amazingly remember to redirect the Biotrans there at the end of the mission.
The plan works really well, the two specimens take up 60% of the available space, so one containment facility wouldn’t have cut it.
The problem is you need a large lab to research the Psimorph. FUUUUUUUUU. Construction begins immediately.
We start getting some reports late in the day that Pyske has a serious alien infiltration issue, so 9 of our finest units start searching Psyke buildings for the source. I know Pyske security forces will be coming after us, so we send in an extra squad of 3 armed with our new alien Dimension Launchers.
Meanwhile, Nathan leads our 2 Retaliators and 3 Annihilators to the Alien Dimension to knock out some UFOs at the source. By the time they arrive, all Psyke buildings have been searched and two have been cleared.
It is hard to do justice to an air battle like this. The standard view is too zoomed in and the tactical map view doesn’t let you know which UFOs are which. Here are some screen shots that do the situation a little justice…
The order is finally given for a general retreat when we are down to two attack craft and the Aliens bring up an Escort/Fast Attack/Battleship team. The Annihilator barley makes it out alive.
In the end, we trade 4 shields for something on the order of 20 UFOs. While we don’t get all of the most important ships (Battleships and Escorts) we do severely limit the Aliens ability to attack our troop transports or MegaPrimus.
The aliens respond by sending in two fast attack craft to attack buildings in MegaPrimus. They manage to cause a surprising amount of damage before they retreat. Thursday was an interesting day for our weekly score.
On Friday our attack fleet returns and repairs begin. 3 Annihilators and 1 Retaliator have fairly extensive damage and will be grounded for a few days.
The good news is that the final production Annihilator comes off the line, bringing our fleet to 4 Annihilators and 2 Retaliators. Work begins on 4 more BioTransports so we can bring a maximum ground force to the alien dimension.
Saturday morning we get a surprise.
That battleship we didn’t destroy brought a friend; two battleships have arrived to bomb MegaPrimus
We scramble every combat ready craft, including two of the damaged ones and open fire. The results are good but messy.
Don’t worry, the owners of those burning buildings already hated us. All three UFOs are raided.
Sunday morning finds us once again in the Alien Dimension. Since they sent two battleships at us the previous day their defense force is depleted. Those that remain are destroyed. Currently the Aliens do not have any craft.
3 BioTrans carrying a combined total of 19 units arrive at the sleeping chambers and our agents begin the battle.
Alien Dimension missions work a little different than standard missions. The Aliens will actually spawn in every minute or so, so instead of killing all the aliens we are given an objective. Basically we have to find all of these things and destroy them. Easy enough, let’s get started.
Here are the squads going into the mission.
The fire fight begins early when we surround a squad of skeletoids. Note: the junk to the left of the screen is where aliens spawn in, I think. I can’t remember if the ugly pink scheme is the same in every alien building but I think it is…
We catch sight of our first objective a little ways into the building.
And destroy it.
5 squads sweep through the building and destroy active aliens while a 6th squad teleports to the sleeper nodes with rocket launchers and detonates them. After a few minutes all 3 nodes are gone and the building is disabled.
In MegaPrimus, Sunday is silent and the week comes to an end.
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Topic: Complete: Let’s Play Ironman/Superhuman X-Com Apocalypse! (Read 115395 times)