Base Design
For some reason my games crash sometimes when there are base defense battles, so I intentionally shoot down everything that moves ASAP. Unfortunately, a single interceptor with Avalanche missiles can't take down a battleship that is closing in quickly.
That said, in my latest Superhuman game (I think I have the patched-up version where the difficulty really is higher, because Snakemen shrug off a lot of my laser rifle hits), in April 1999, I got my USA base hit by an alien battleship with snakemen and chryssalids(sp?).
All I can say is, good thing that the battleship hit my USA base, because I intentionally build my expansions with an access lift all the way on one side, a hangar below, and a long hallway leading to the rest of my base. So aliens have to go through hangars and then to the access lift and then face a three-section-long corridor.
[6][ ][ ] E
[ ] E [ ] E
[ ] E [ ] E
[A] E E E
[H][H] E E
[H][H] E E
A = access lift
H = hangar
6 = six rookies
E = empty space
I had about 14 rookies with laser rifles and some prox grenades.
I immediately tried to throw some prox grenades as mines to stuff up the access lift area, then I placed my soldiers off to either side of the main hallway to go into hiding (and prime prox grenades in their hands while they were waiting for aliens to walk by). My last six rookies I placed at the end of the corridor, so far away from the access lift that the aliens AND humans can't see each other. (Three soldiers kneeling, three standing right behind the kneeling soldiers.)
A snakeman shot a soldier that I messed up on (I thought I had enough TU to run around a corner, but he stopped just short and got shot.) A chryssalid ate another soldier, but my six shooters down the hall mopped him and the zombie up.
Every so often, one of my rookies midway down the corridor would poke his head out and look at the access lift, usually spotting 2-3 aliens. He then went back into hiding in his little nook while my six rookies down the hall blasted the aliens. Since the hallway is narrow, even misses sometimes kill the aliens standing on either side of the intended target.
With those few rookies all along the hallway being able to "spot" for my shooters down the hall, and with the shooters being so far away from the access lift/hangars that aliens couldn't see where my lasers were coming from, it was only a matter of time before all the rest of the aliens died one or two steps outside of the access lift.
Casualties: 2
Kills: 22
I didn't even need the prox grenades, and in hindsight I probably should not have mined the corridor because the prox grenades destroyed a ton of valuable Heavy Plasma and Alien Grenades in the process. :not_ok:
Moral of the story: build your base so that there is a long corridor that aliens from the lift/hangars have to go through to do anything, and then it's like shooting fish in a barrel. (That, and I lucked out that I wasn't fighting Ethereals or Sectoids, since it was only April 1999, a lot of the soldiers had low bravery, and I had no psi labs yet to weed out the psi-weaklings.)
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