My current game has went on to January 1st 2000.... Recently the eggheads at R&D have made major breakthroughs, I have been intentionally slow with research, not skipping anything, now I've got railguns, lasers, mind guided missiles and Ironfist, going towards powersuits and UFO construction and so on. It appears that I managed to capture so many aliens I got almost all the tech tree opened up by now, there's still a long list of things to research. Its so cool that three labs + 150 scientists still are not enough to make it quick and simple. I love the feeling of goin in for a long haul and not getting any easy pass to the endgame. Now three of my bases have strike capability, two with ironfists, three with skymarshalls, 30 soldiers in each base.
This is my first FMP game where I finally get a lot of Snakemen, this time around they have the damned bugs with them, I haven't seen a single of those fire spitting dinosaurs yet. Last time I played this far, it was all dinotanks, now its Chryssalids.
I had to slightly tweak my tactic, less smoke, way slower pace, dogs kept alive no matter the price and my team sniping away from afar. The mind guided missile is fantastic! Slightly lower damage doesn't matter that much as I have two heavy weapon guys toting Advanced launchers. Shot down terrorships are quite fun to play with when there's huge gaping holes where the UFO engines were, easy as pie to clean up the second floor, just guide some missiles inside and watch the fireworks.
Interestingly, Floaters, Chtonites, Chasers and Sectoids have taken a leave while now its all snakemen left and right. There's also a huge number of retaliation scouts doing rounds, I keep shooting them down and mostly ignore the battleships to save the fleet for more important stuff. I would really love to get to try out my defensive strategy with snakemen companied by Chryssalids. Then there's also MiB and Muton retaliation in the works. Plenty of them, I think at least five different groups are on the lookout for my bases. Still no mind shields so these will eventually come out of the woodwork. I love difficult base defense missions as they can be a real challenge. I almost feel compelled to just let them keep scouting and find me.
By the way, I have only seen them once, but what's the thing about Sectoids who have some type of armors on them? Almost like a Sectoid version of personal armor or something.
I researched one of them but that didn't give any extra information. I wish they would appear again. Also my unlucky run in with Sectoids who got Sectopods with them ended in those few times, but oh by the gods that kind of crew is insane to take on! I don't know about now as my guys have plenty of laser weapons, maybe that + tons of explosives will work on the metal menace pretty well.
The cactiless desert crash still keeps happening, but its very random. Some times it wont happen, other times it does. I'm just trying to avoid missions on deserts for now. Perhaps when I finish this game, I'll reinstall everything and see if that bug still keep appearing.
Its been amazing run so far. The game balance feels just right, I keep getting punished for every mistake and I got to play smart and be ready to change tactics any moment. The weapons are just awesomely put together, when ever something feels powerless, there's a updated version coming up to counter the difficulties and turn the tide, that until the aliens come up with new nasty surprises. Looking at the statistics, in the last two ingame months the casualties are lower. For now, its calm before the storm as I've clearly postponed a lot of alien missions by constant interceptions.
EDIT:
Now this was a surprising and nice move, its all numbers game I suppose. So far I remember shooting only one small Reptiod scout down somehwere months ago, suddenly out of nowhere, Reptoids do a retaliation on my main base.
I had never had a fight with them before and to see them first time for real in a base defense mission was really cool. I presume there will be a ton of retaliations on the way, every few days there's something scouting and there's a plethora of races at it. I got my first touch of the Rail sniper rifle, that thing is a beast! All low/mid tier aliens drop like flies.
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I started a new game on the side of the old one as I'm bit more aware of the tech tree now... Mutons sure are a royal pain in the ass.