Also hints on the reticulan vats mission? I have a batch of 12 well trained but inexperienced peasants and despite a good effort they didn't cut it. I get the feeling I was doing something wrong. I managed to take the center room and tried to hold out there, but they kept coming and the knocked out ones got back up.
1. After you stun someone, take your time to wrestle them into overstun. If it's a sectogre, wrestle them some more. They're by far the worst enemy to fight, since they're so tough. Wrestling only deals small amount of HP damage, but kicking them while they're down gives you valuable time before they recover.
1.1. Stand right on top of them and target yourself to avoid targeting wonkiness.
2. Bondage consumes 3 freshness per turn. A peasant who didn't participate in any battles before only has ~20 turns before she becomes useless, which is a pretty tight time limit. So I'd advise having them get some combat experience beforehand.
3. Loot everything. Electroguns one-shot just about everyone except sectogres, tazoguns deal a lot of HP damage, causing downed enemies to stay down for longer, canteens let you pick your peasants up, and melee weapons... they can stun people too, but I prefer wrestling.
4. As said before, if you feel like things are going dicey, retreat. Grab whatever smooth captives and elder you can and abort mission.
What I tend to do on this mission is have 2-3 people chill out in center room and stun\restun people, while everyone else runs around. After all I'm on the timer, not reticulans.
My first attempt didn't go that well either, because my group of trained, but inexperienced peasants ran out of freshness and were too slow, too sluggish, and too tired to do anything. By the second time I got my next group to be really experienced (some even had maxed-out stats), so it was almost a breeze.