I haven't met battleships yet
Anyway, I'm getting very suspicious of the medium difficulty, the aliens seem to conveniently wait until the day after all the damaged x-com craft have been repaired. And since Valkyrie 2 was almost destroyed - the health bar was 1 pixel high - during the last encounter, I had a quiet and scientific week.
I'm working on the propulsion system at the moment, another wrong guess I suppose. I'll start on the energy source next, thanks for the hint.
After being able to use the cloaking field (I had a mere 100 pcfs in store by the time my scientists finally figured those things out) my real time tactics made the final transition towards the 'fat bastard'-mode; my 2 squads of 6 (now all with toxigun, pcf, disruptor shield and something for pyro effects) just find a nice tower or corner to sit on / around and wait. Then I switch of all the pause messages, set on double time and play a browser game on another computer. That usually sorts those aliens out :whistle:
Anyway, I don't ambush people, I just brutally gun them down with vastly superior firepower. Also, there is one Sectoid-Hybrid with a mind bender tied to her leg. When I need a scout I send her. She has been able to convince some aliens to drop all their stuff (explosives all armed) and run towards the rest of her squad.
Still, the psi control lasts less than a second, guess she needs more practice (Power 40, strenght 32, defence 38; she spent a lot of time in combat training so she could defend herself and keep up with the rest, now she's assigned to the psigym)
Edit: About battleships: What do they look like? Is it, by any chance, a purple disc (usual meaty texture) with a dome on top? By sheer coincidence I just have two of those and two green ones (with 2 domes) flying around my 2nd base burning it to the ground. So far I've lost the garrison of 10 soldiers (died when they tried to run to another building) and a few scientists (biologists) were killed when the building collapsed over their taxis (I transferred most of them to the main base, but quarters are full). Miraculously, those few scientists which had to stay behind in the building are still alive. After using almost all my heavy ordinance (including 2 retribution and 2 justice missiles) and heavy casualties (fortunately on megapols side, the attack was staged near a megapol arms factory and now there is a dozend (or was a dozend) police hovercars taking part) I've downed one purple UFO... now fire's being concentrated on a green one...
I'm just glad I have some financial reserves, I never really wanted to know how expensive repairs to a base are :ranting:
And there's nothing more depressing than loosing points for damage to the city and knowing that that was your base...
Now then, I have some alien invaders to repel :Titan:
....gits...morons... mongs....arghh
issed:
Edit 2:
Final result:
One purple and one green UFO downed
A few Kilotons of alien equipment captured
A Megaspawn being gently encouraged to give me information as I write
10 dead soldiers - zero practical experience but they'd spent weeks in the training area...they couldn't have been that bad to deserve to die like that...
6 dead biochemists (4 got away via Taxi)
- 534 points for 'damage to city', that's a bloody third of the damage penalties I have accumulated so far
At least they didn't infiltrate anything, they were too busy burning down my base....
Edit 3:
My god! My god! My god! My god! The aliens are REALLY determined to flatten my base! Not 50m away from two really fat UFOs and one of the purple ones came out of a portal. How do I get rid of those fat bastards? (Description: Really fat, orangy-brown colour, have a big (!) red spot as a symbol on the static map). How on earth am I supposed to shoot them down? I just gave one of them all I had in store in terms of firepower (after a brave police car had downed their shields before being vaporised :eeeeeh: ) but I barely scratched them. After a while the aliens seemed to decide that they wouldn't want to risk the paintjob on their mothershipthingie and retreated :Brain: What am I supposed to do...? (5 days 'til I've got the big Qphysics lab, provided the base lasts that long :help: )