Forging ahead

With the doom track still pretty high we have to go all out to complete some important missions, even if some of the A-listed players are wounded and out of the fight.

Every now and then you miss a shot that has a 95% probability of hitting and curse your bad luck. Of course, it can happen to aliens too as First Doc finds out below...

Jane continually places herself right in the front lines of battle. She has a skill where if she makes a kill the next attack against her is a guaranteed miss, as well as her super sword which she gets a free attack with when an enemy moves next to her. Don't mess with Jane.

Taco continues to impress, here he is drawing a bead on a distant robot. As long as someone in the squad has line of sight on an enemy, Taco can shoot at them, with an increasing accuracy penalty due to range. He's pretty accurate though, so even these distant shots hit fairly regularly!

The bad guys continue to be duped by holograms! 

Well the new weapons and armour worked pretty well. Only two gravely wounded this time, both would be dead without the armour. That's good... right?

Doc Shen makes a mess in his lab as he opens up one of the big Andromedan suits. Every bit of stolen technology we can get helps out!

And with only seconds of actual gameplay time until the game is over I attempt a big story mission. If I win it, the game continues, lose it, game over, man, game over!

No pulling punches this time, this building used to be a marvel of modern technology. Now it's a marvel that it's still standing with acid grenades lobbed, fires breaking out and plasma gun blasts throughout!

Ada blasts a turret clean to pieces!

Uh-oh. Giant two story robot approaching. Guarding a massive facility that holds our objective.

With some sneaky work drawing it over and the combined firepower of my whole team the Sectopod explodes gloriously!

Inside the building, called "The Forge" are row after row, level after level of pods. We crack one open to find that the Advent soldiers, part human, part alien are being manufactured. The aliens are cranking out rack after rack of these hybrids, all of whom are genetically predisposed to only wanting to eat Advent Burgers!

Look out! Ambush... ker-pow!

Deep inside the facility is an extra-special shiny pod. Matt Smith investigates...

And out comes something in a suit, that (apparently) just wanted a hug! Awwww. That's cute.

And then we evacuated quick-smart, carrying the suited up... whatever it might be! Mission success! Doom tracker set back a bit... we're still in the game!

Secret herbs and spices.

So, last time we were at the brink of annihilation! This time we pretty much are too! Once the doomsday tracker clocks up to maximum, the timer starts to count down. There are some missions that will take the tracker back a step, I'll have to do a lot of these types of missions (some of which require research) to stay in the game.

There's just one problem, the research takes time. Oh, and the missions are hard, so there are two problems. Oh, and because the missions are hard your troops will need healing, so I guess there are three problems... you can see where this is going!

Best foot forward, hup hup and all that then!

First thing, I need to hack into an Advent leader. I do this on a "blacksite" mission. This hits two milestones in one mission. The blacksite missions are all plot advancing, uncovering new information on the secret alien plan or setting back said plan in a subtle manner. Hacking into the Advent network with my newly researched hackertron-5000 (or whatever) causes a codex to appear.

The Codex is a sort of computer generated being. It has a sort of metal skull thing and an electronicy, glitchy sort of body that doesn't move so much as teleport around. It also has really truly annoying skills that, fortunately, I'm kinda ready for in this playthrough. One ability creates a sort of mini storm that covers an area and somehow jams all your weapons. You have to reload (which takes an action) to get your gun back in operation, but wait, there's more, the mini storm explodes a turn later, so you also need to move away from the area!

That sound annoying, right? But wait - there's more! When you damage the Codex it clones itself and the new clone teleports somewhere random. They'll just keep on cloning, so if you do small amounts of damage you'll end up with lots of them all casting annoying storms, shooting you in the back and generally causing mayhem and mischief.

In other words, send the good Doc to do a ton of damage in one hit after throwing a flashbang grenade to disable it's other skills!

Well this room hardly looks sinister at all, it's got a body on some sort of rack and others in tubes. Upon closer investigation it seems as though different mixtures of herbs and spices were being directly pumped into the body on the table. Monitoring devices were keeping tabs on the responses to the various mixtures!

Nothing could be done for the poor souls, so we set some X-4 charges and...

... that'll take care of that "secret" facility! This also sets the doomsday clock timer back a few ticks, giving me a little precious time to keep in the game!

The next mission saw us extracting a VIP. We started on top of this building, which very soon had holes all through it and fires spreading!

This was once a stylish lobby and now is more, well, a "renovator's delight".

We succeeded in our mission only with the use of a decoy (you can see the blue hologram in the bottom left of the picture). Fortunately the Advent troops seem to want to hit the shiny, bright blue hologram that is just standing still rather than the rest of the squad running past to the evacuation point!

Eeesh. Remember that building I showed you, with the roof all collapsed and parts of it on fire. Well, I started at the top of the building, an enemy grenade blew up the floor and we all dropped downstairs! Hence everybody took falling damage and we all had to try and limp to the extraction zone! Not my finest work, and done with (as you can see) mostly squaddies and lower level troopers because the blacksite mission may have been a success, but my A-Team were pretty much all injured in that battle too!

Hence I get a charming message - so many of my troops are injured now that I don't even have enough to field a full squad! Yikes!

The next mission was a hodge-podge of guys who had only been lightly wounded and recovered in time for it. A lovely suburban area that we well and truly demolished!

Oh, yeah, my pistolier skills continue to improve. Taco here can now fire his pistol a LOT. With all skills recharged he can fire once for free, fire once more and then choose to either shoot once at each enemy in range or shoot three times at a single enemy!

Ahh, power armour! Now my team will look all futuristic and stuff. I can now worry less about one shot kills, even with rookies.

On our next mission we encounter these Andromedon type aliens. Another nasty shock. They're some sort of alien in a big suit as they can't survive in Earth-like conditions. They have a lot of health, a lot of armour, lob grenades and melee really hard. The fun surprise is that when you kill them the containment suit fails, leaving a trail of acid behind as it keeps on going! The alien slumps out dead, but the suit is robotically controlled and continues attacking! They're super damage sponges and a priority target when I see them.

Having taken out so many aliens, though, I now have a good handle on their technology and good young Shen has developed my very own plasma guns! Take that bad guys! I now have top tier armour and weapons! I still have to afford to upgrade my squads with new weapons, but hopefully that won't take tooooo long.

"Smoko" is modelling the new WAR Suit, the top tier version of the EXO Suit. Looks funky, huh =) I haven't managed to research any new heavy weapons, but the inbuilt rocket launcher will add one more explosion to each battle!

Just what is that skittering sound? Ahhh, chrysalids are back in town. Fast, zippy, armoured little creepy crawlies. They can tunnel under the ground and pop back up when you least expect it. If they get a successful melee hit in, your troop is poisoned. If you die while poisoned the baby chrysalids that you were impregnated with pop out. Gross, nasty, effective and highly dangerous. These things drain my medkits like crazy so that I don't have to put any of my guys through that!

Oh yeah, slo-mo death-cam of an Advent trooper...

And another new alien type, the Archon. These look fancy schmancy, and can fly. This picture is of one launching rockets from it's jetpack thing. The rockets will fall next turn, giving you one turn to quickly get all your guys out of the way! They're slippery suckers too, very hard to hit, with plenty of health and have a nasty melee attack as well! 

At the end of the day, however, good old Doc Tygan gets to autopsy all the new alien types. 

I've managed to make it through another few missions without any casualties, I've discovered a facility that seems to be trying to perfect a secret blend of herbs and spices, but the doom tracker is ticking back up again rapidly, so I'm still right on the edge here! 

On the plus side I have got better equipment now. On the negative side, the aliens are getting tougher and nastier!

Mailing lists.

With so many of my troops out due to injury it's time to get some experience for some fresh faces. Fortunately it's just a moderate difficulty mission! I've got Lieutenant Matt "Eleventh Doc" Smith and Lieutenant Bill "First Doc" Hartnell leading Corporal Mandy and three squaddies! I've finally upgraded to six person squads, and hopefully the extra gunpower from an extra team member will help with the lower health and skills! The little icons underneath each character is a nice summary of just how few skills they have!

At one point in the mission, where we are recovering an item from a resistance haven while Advent swoop in, "Eleventh Doc" Smith finds himself craving food unexpectedly. I zoomed in to find that he's standing next to one of the ubiquitous billboards for the Advent burger. 

Ahh, Tom Baker has joined us as scientific liaison, we'll be uncovering the secrets of Jelly Baby technology any second now! Maybe we can fight the Advent burger with a new type of sugar treat?

Mission successful and with only a few injuries, the next mission rolled on before everybody had time to recover. That's even with bonus healing from my med-bay! With a mix of A-team and B-team injuries, the next mission is a go in the snow!

Check out this beastie! This is a berserker, it has lots and lots of health, it likes to hit things really, really hard, berserker is always angry, don't be like berserker. Man, one of these can ruin your day, a smashing hit against a squaddie can mean no more squaddie. If only there were a way to concentrate lots of firepower against it.

Oh, yeah, there is a way to concentrate lots of firepower against it. Phew!

Of course, if you're not really careful you can end up with one of your troops on only one health. Phew, that was CLOSE! I think it's probably not the best idea to tell your wife that you let her die. Even in a game =)

And moving towards a large old building, "Cowboy" finds herself grenaded and shot at as well, leaving her on one health with enemies still close by! She's been with me since the very first mission! If you look at the name in the bottom left of the previous screenshot and this next one you'll see it's "First Doc". He has saved the bacon of SO many troops with his flying, healing, Gremlin drone!

By the way, one way to get extra intel from Advent troops is to "Skullmine" them. The Skulljack is a tool that "interfaces" with the chips in the Advent skulls. Unfortunately it's not USB compatible so "Analytic" Lovelace uses the interface that Doc Tygan has invented. It looks a lot like two long claws that stab upwards through the jaw and into the skull. It's slightly invasive. The trooper doesn't really survive. It looks awesome though! Here's to new intel! The only downside is that it's a melee attack, leaving the generally weaker specialist out in the open. Still, surely she won't die from one small step out into the more open area?

Oh, right, another Faceless (the shapeshifting goo monsters) was hiding in plain sight, pretending to be a civilian. One big claw sweep and my squad is almost destroyed, you can see the burning ruins of the cover "Analytic" was hiding behind. Fortunately Mandy is in a good position with her sniper rifle and liquifies the huge alien entity!

Wow, that was supposed to just be a moderate difficulty mission! Although I had three near casualties, I'd have had actual KIAs if the Doc hadn't been around! Mandy racked up a few kills too, sniping from a distance whenever there was an enemy that needed a little more incentive to pack up and go.

The boffins have been boffining away, and created this new special lab called the Shadow Chamber. With special computer systems, the hope is that we can discover more about the alien plan with targeted research.

And what amazing things we've discovered! Some of the intel we've "extracted" are chains of DNA. The bodies we found at the "special sauce" lab all have particular DNA strands in common. There is obviously some system at play here, specific DNA codes that Advent are interested in. Just what for, we're still not entirely sure. 

Digging a little deeper we find a mailing list! Spam email and letter box drops targetting different fast foods to different people! Oh... My... Gosh... the devils are using a targeting DNA based approach to develop the ultimate special sauce tailored right down to the tastebuds of each human being. There are some that can resist this advertising, but soon I think we'll all be eating right out of their hands. Hmm. Hopefully not literally as some of them are big gooey monsters.

Just as well they're nowhere near developing this to its full extent... oh... wait... The project countdown has been reached and I have just a few days left to try and set back their plans or else the Earth is DOOOOOOOOMED!

I'm almost out of supplies, I'm almost out of time, I'm almost out of troops. This may not be the playthrough we were looking for! 

Special Sauce

In order to spread word of the resistance we're fighting alien advertising with our own advertising! Central is putting together some crowd funded television programs.

We have erected a few of these really subtle, hope the aliens don't find them, radio towers. They'll be spreading the good word!

With the new engineers and scientists (thanks mostly to my Dad and Doctor Who incarnations) we've finally created more advanced weaponry. These magnetic weapons pack quite a substantial punch over our old guns. Shen quite enjoys trying them out!

Our next mission is another nasty retaliation one. The aliens are attacking and slaying innocent violent resistance fighters (you know, all they've ever done is plant explosives on vans, buildings, trains...). We encounter mutons, big hulking guys with nasty plasma weapons and a mean left hook. I found this out in my previous game the hard way. My ranger ran up and went to slice him, but he counterattacked, doing massive damage and ensuring that I only ever use long range weapons on them now! They also have armour, so are pretty tough tanks. Oh, and they can throw grenades too!  

And to make matters really fun there are two shape changers on this mission. Of course, you don't know that they're not innocent trained killer guerilla fighters until you stand close to them. Then the ordinary human explodes into this goopy...

... enormous, massively tall (like twice person height) monster with big claws. They're actually not too bad if you're ready for them, but if you're already fighting other aliens, having one of these pop up right in the middle of it all is terribly nasty! During the game you often get a choice between several missions, you can only do one. Each of the missions will have a different bonus for completing it, AND cancels one possible alien bonus. The missions you don't do enable one of the alien bonuses! One such alien bonus is the addition of more of these shape changing aliens to missions. It's a lot of fun, actually, to have different random changes in the game going on all the time.

Here's one of the snake ladies wrapping up "Cowboy". This wouldn't ordinarily have been too big a deal, she's pretty tough and in a minute she'll chop up the hissing serpent with her customary aplomb.

The reason it was a problem on this particular mission is that with Cowboy wrapped up, there was nobody available to intercede when one of the people we were here to rescue turned out to be a shapeshifter, who climbed up next to the Sixth Doctor, swung a mightily massive claw and sent the Doctor off to another regeneration cycle! Nooooooo! He'd been totally awesome and it was devastating to lose one of my fun and high level guys. So tempted to hit the reload button!

A veteran of 8 missions, his grenadiering skills had saved much, much bacon. The grenadiers don't always get super kill ratios, but their grenades often incapacitate, remove armour and allow the others to mop up afterwards. I find them indispensable. Unfortunately one was just dispensed with!

In a bit of hilarity to lighten the mood, my father in law was a reward from a mission. He just happens to be a grenadier! Unfortunately he's not as skilled or well equipped yet. Here's hoping I can keep him alive, otherwise I'll be in trouble!

And if I'd had this just one mission earlier, the Sixth Doctor may have still been with us! Our boffins have made some stronger armour, well named Predator armour will stop a few more projectiles and alien claw swipes I hope! Here's Cowboy trying it on in our little fashion show room on the Avenger.

Oh, look, Paul McGann has joined us! I'm hoping with this many Doctor Whos (Doctors Who?) I can't surely lose!

Operation Severed Chicken put me back in my place! How fun are the mission names! If it wasn't for "First Doc" Hartnell I'd have had a complete party wipe! Even so, my poor team are going to be resting up for a while after this! What went wrong? I was so tense that I didn't take any screen shots of the mission! What happened was a simple case of "my new guns and armour mean that I can play way more riskily!" Nope. Apparently not. I've read a lot about people not liking how tough this game is, but I quite like the risk. Even when I'm doing well, a few stupid decisions can really turn out badly! Next time I shouldn't run blindly forwards showing three groups of aliens at once.

While the A-team rest and recuperate I build an impressive new special armour. It's an exo-skeleton harness thing that is ideal for heavy weapons users. On one arm it includes a pop-out rocket launcher! Tari takes it for its first outing and it proves to be great fun =) It's got quite a noisy sound effect of all the little pistons and stuff at work. The new mag cannon is much easier to wield with the EXO suit! 

The next mission involves knocking out an enemy VIP and shoulder carrying him back to base. Here's First Doc doing the honours while an Advent wanted poster shows Tari in the background! Word has it that this enemy VIP knows some of the secret herbs and spices being used in the Advent burgers. We need to interrogate him!

After Doc Tygan performs another very splatty autopsy on a muton we are able to upgrade to using plasma grenades. I'm still not sure why he had to slice up the alien for us to learn about grenades. I'm not sure I want to ask.

My next special armour type is called the Skeleton Suit. It is lighter armour than the big EXO Suit, but increases mobility and includes a grappling hook! The grappling hook can be used every few turns. You shoot it up on top of a building, vehicle etc. and it pulls you right up there. Great for snipers and rangers!

With the Advent doomsday clock ticking down, I learn valuable intel about a Blacksite Facility. The trains I've been intercepting have been transporting something there. I send my top squad members to investigate.

The horror! After the VIP we abducted told us that one of the ingredients of the special sauce could be found on the trains we were thinking maybe cumin, or cardamom, instead we find... Dun dun daaaaaah... human bodies being transported in some sort of goop. Stacks of cylinders like this are next to the train tracks and an ominous looking building is just beyond.

A building full of tanks of humans! What! These aliens are up to something no good! How much more nefarious can it get! The alien abductions that we used to hear about were supposed to have stopped, but clearly they haven't! Just what IS going on here, I'm still pretty sure it has something to do with advertising Advent burgers, but maybe, just maybe there's something even more sinister afoot?

Finally, we find a vial floating in some sort of force-field that may be a link between the special sauce and the horrors we have witnessed here. Tari grabs the vial and we fight our way to the extraction zone.

The fighting in this mission was tense, busy and non-stop. We fought every alien type we'd seen so far, but I'd brought my best troops and we succeeded with no fatalities!

Sure, we took a ton of hits, but I was pretty proud of my team after this one!

We've set back the alien doomsday clock a few hours, but, wouldn't you know it, another "urgent" mission pops up as soon as we touch down on the Avenger. Fortunately my B-team can head out with First Doc (as he was uninjured) and I'm sure things will go just swimmingly =)

We're getting closer and closer to discovering just what is going on here!