Yeah the brain was removed. It's a shame really, I prefer progressing towards an objective over hunting down every last enemy, we fought so long to get to this base and we didn't even get to kill the enemy leader in-game :/
Well anyway after I realised we had to kill everything we finished up smearing the enemy across their base. After many hundreds of years, earth is finally free!
For those reading this thread who were using it for information here's how the final missions went on level 5 (jack sparrow) difficulty:
1) The landing - We landed right next to the elevator pyramid. The map had only mercenaries and it seems they don't see so well in the dark so we just walked into the elevator building with no effort to stop us, had to kill a couple of enemies around the building but it was pretty bloodless
2) The base - So we kept getting a message saying the solar governor is making us lose morale, but we were bravery maxed and killed a lot so we didnt notice it even tho so many of us died. The solar governors chambers are empty. The alien base is pretty tiny, 1 main floor consisting of about 20 square rooms in a 4x5 grid. There are elevators up into mostly empty rooms. There were about 10 sectopods and 20 star gods of varying ranks. We killed 5-6 coordinators in total and it seems they can successfully mind control a 100 bravery, 50 voodoo power, 40 voodoo skill, annihilator armour soldier tho only rarely, and just standing your soldiers close to each other makes them miss their shots at each other. There was only 1 star god guardian with a blaster bomb launcher. There were about 5 novices, 5 operatives, 5 coordinators and 5 guardians down there. In the end the only thing that could do real damage was the sectopods so we just formed a line and swept the map, ignoring the star god ghost beams and shooting any visible sectopods or guardians before advancing. We didn't sweep the rooms for invisible star gods, we just advanced to the next doorways and if we got shot with a ghost beam from behind I sent some of the people in the back to deal with the nuisance. With so much magical cake we could easily heal the small damage we took from beams. I suggest when you play this you form up your group and then just sweep the map. Heavy plasmas seemed to perform better at killing sectopods than 37mm rifles, perhaps due to their anti armor properties, and although the 37mm rifle was an effective weapon against star gods the heavy plasmas killed them just as easily so I might as well have gone all heavy plasmas
Anyway good luck if you plan to do this. It's really quite easy and I could've done it with a lot less preparation really. Even harbinger armor would be fine altho it will result in you losing some people to sectopod reaction fire, there just isn't enough sectopods to stop a group of 36 harbinger and heavy plasma soldier if you focus fire on each sectopod one by one as you advance so that you only take reaction fire from it once before it gets killed. The sectopods had only a 33% or so chance of killing us in 1 hit anyway, and went down in around 20-30 heavy plasma shots which with auto-fire means you only need to focus fire with 4-5 soldiers to kill one, and you have 36 so it's really easy to nuke them on your turn!
Still kinda bummed out I didn't get to kill the solar governor, I brought a black power bomb specifically for him which I have had since the beginning of the game, perhaps I'll finish my UFO defense superhuman game someday (I made it to the psi grind phase)
Thank everyone so much for the help, couldn't have made it without all your support!
