At midnight, beginning of January 20th, 26 scientists and 20 engineers finally arrive. Laser Rifle progress turns to Good in the now full research lab. Still takes 5 days to finish the last 12 of the 20 laser pistols we ordered though. Hoping we abort that earlier due to inventing rifles.
21st of January we see new activity in Central Asia and Siberia.. We sadly didn't check reports often enough, and probably could have spotted it an hour earlier, but now at 16:42 we're scrambing skyranger-2 and the interceptor to go patrol for it. Will probably send out skyranger 1 too, as soon as we've checked the equipment we have loaded. Hrmpf.. We searched around until 06:00 January 22nd, and past all of Russia more than once, and still didn't find it. I guess we lost it.
At 06:00 we got the 7 new recruits incoming. Jennifer, Ben, Roger, Mel, Harrison, Tom & Uma. Don't look like good soldier candidates, but we'll see what happens.
After the lost UFO, Siberia graph is up at around 48 and Central Asia 4. Not that big a movement so I guess it may very well have been a very small UFO. If it was a small UFO that landed, I would have expected to have found it patrolling.
At midnight, at the very start of January 24th, we finally discover how to make laser rifles. This will make a huge difference during combats. Laser pistols are awesome fast. It's possible to fire of 12 shots in one turn using 4 auto shots. Laser rifles is a bit slower, so you can only manage 6 shots per turn, but each shot is a lot more accurate and deals more damage. It does twice the damage of the regular rifle, and is more accurate for snapshots and autoshots. It is slightly less accurate for aimed shots, but you may be able to fire of two aimed shots instead of one per turn. Our workshop has almost completed making the 17th of 18 ordered pistols. We'll let them finish the 17th before starting on rifles. At 04:00 we finish the 17th pistol. 11 days and 3 hours is the estimate to finish 20 rifles. Might be a few missions before that, but there might be some ready for the next mission.
The 50 scientists will now focus on the Alien Navigator. While there's lots of nice bits to research for us, getting real radar coverage is priority one. Scanning these reports in details is hard work.
At start of January 26th, our hangars are complete, and we can finally dismantle our southern ones. We do, and also start building another workshop. We need another day to finish 2 research labs and a living quarter, at which time we will demolish the original general store and start building another.
At start of January 27th, living quarter and research lab completes. We want to hire another 50 scientists, but as it's already so late in month, we have to await until February to hire them, to avoid paying them a full January salary. Should have been cheaper to hire them late in month
January 28th, 23:23:30. New activity reported in Siberia. Sending out all 3 crafts to patrol. If we find it fast, it should be great timing for a day mission. Ouch.. Terror in Novosibirsk
At least we filled the Skyranger with 14 soldiers, and we did manage to produce 8 laser rifles in time. We expect this to be another sectoid mission, and if so we're expecting cyberdiscs. Hopefully we'll be able to deal with them with our laser rifles but they are fairly armored and may take quite a few hits, so it might be hard to get everyone to survive.
Supposed to save as many civilians as possible too, but if we run fast into the town, we're sure to be shot down randomly here and there. We start in the corner of the map, so I think we'll just hope the civilians can hide a while, and secure our corner and try to slowly take on the town, part by part.
The start looked like a place where cyberdiscs could reaction shot into, so we dumped a smoke grenade on the floor, awaited a turn, and dropped one outside and waited another turn. In the meantime we heard a ton of shots, and around 10 civilian death screams. How on earth were we supposed to save these people? Almost all died in the first two turns?
We deployed, and ensured to keep the most expendable troops in front. We actually scouted and shot down 4 cyberdiscs without a single casualty. Pretty awesome and much better than expected. One was even shot down by a laser pistol alone.
The deaths came from the spotters being seen by aliens during their turn. Again, I guess we could have tried to hold the position close to the skyranger, and awaited aliens to come to us. But just sitting put waiting and moving a bit back and forth to see if there's someone approaching is a pretty boring strategy.
The score ended up negative, so no score gain for the mission.. But the 29 alien artifacts are probably worth a pretty penny.
Daniel, Ben and Roger died. They were all three rookies with poor stats. All in all though, we thought we did pretty well on our first terror mission facing 4 cyberdiscs.
Graph is now up to ~63 for Siberia and still around ~84 for Europe.
