My first real OpenXCom challenge. Superhuman Ironman vanilla.

[humbe]

Destroyed a very small UFO going to South Africa around 14:00 April 8th.

9th of April we finish construction of second hangar in Weinan and Great Falls.. We decide we'll build a 3rd just in case, as they're cheap and takes a long time to build, and cost little maintenance. We also hire 20 soldiers in the remaining 4 bases (except Carney in Antarctica that hasn't built a living quarter yet) and adds on another 4 in the existing 2 bases wit soldiers. I guess we should try to equip some soldiers everywhere to be able to have some base defense.. And we have money to spare currently.

11th of April and we finish researching Ultimate Craft. Would be nice to have one, so we decide to cut short production of flying suits so we can start building one around 02:00 when the current one is finished. No real point in prioritizing researching alien origins immediately as we have no leader nor commander present. So lets research the small launcher with stun bomb first, so capturing one later will be simpler. Putting 100 on launcher and 50 on the bomb, as I assume it's simpler to research the ammo. As we're doing both anyhow, starting them in parallel should lead to a bit less wasted effort.

Starting building Avenger at 02:00.. Can only use 64 engineers as it takes up a lot of space in the workshop. That'll take 22 days to produce, but we'll finish another workshop in 9 days, so we can possibly speed it up so we can finish in April.

12th of April, all the new recruits came in. Now we have quite a job preparing them.

[humbe]

We have way too little weapons for all of these soldiers, but to get a start we're dividing what we have.

- We've got 4 heavy plasma and 14 clips for each base.
- We've got 4 laser pistols and 1 laser rifle for each of the 4 bases not having a skyranger team. (Skyranger teams have 14 laser rifles each)
- And we're buying 11 regular rifles with 22 clips, 30 smoke and 30 proximity grenades for all the 4 bases not being geared.

That should give them some starting gear to hopefully make it possible to survive a base attack if it comes. Will try to get them some armor and more laser rifles, medi kits and the like when we have time.

15th of April we finish researching the small launcher and the bomb. Nice. Researching alien grenade next. We have stored up 42 of them, so is nice gear to split among bases for base defense. We're typically saving them for a rainy day when we face highly armored aliens anyhow. Equipping the San Marino team with two small launchers. The Weinan team have no alien containment facility so they have little use for it.

16th of April and decoders detect terror mission.


It's currently over Australia. Will we be able to intercept it and shoot it down so we don't have to fight a terror mission with civilians? These are snakemen, so they'll be having chryssalid units too, which complicate matters. San Marion team will fight it.. Equipping all with flying suits to be able to stay safe from the chryssalid. Phew.. We manage to intercept and shoot it down. Thus we can await morning before we fight it, and we have saved all the civilians, and we can get UFO parts in the loot too. I guess there will be a leader too on the mission. If we detect him, we can see if we can stun him to get closer to final mission.

Before we've started the mission, we turn to 17th of April where we invent Alien Grenade. Lets start researching Alien Origins to get that out of the way.

Just as we're about to attack the crashed terror ship, we get this report:


Oooh.. The first very large UFO we've seen. Currently close to the north pole. This one I think is likely to carry a commander. However, if I'm to capture him I need to use the main assault team, as San Marino is the only base with alien containment. If I'm doing that though, that means the Weinan team has to take on the crashed terror UFO with Cryssalids.. Eew.. The Weinan team has 5 flying suits which will come in handy though.

Shooting down the very large UFO is not doable with current crafts, so taking it on later is not an option either. I think Weinan will reach terror UFO while still daylight and before crash site is done. And I think main assault team has fuel to go after the very large UFO instead, so lets give it a shot.

[humbe]

We're facing the very large UFO first. We're landing in the southwestern end of the map. Noone in sight, but that can quickly change. We're facing floaters so they can be anywhere.



It's an abduction mission, so I guess no terror units? We'll see. The floaters terror unit isn't all that anyhow. We drop a live grenade on the floor and picks up another one, primes it and throws it down. Lets ensure we don't flop the exit.

We move one to each side, using extra TUs in flight suits to get down. We don't see any, so when Uma goes out, she decides to go up a level above the smoke, and immediately we see 3 enemies. Mutual surprise there. Got no reaction shots from the side thankfully.



Ryan moves out and shoots the two floaters, Colin follows and take out the beast, and Uma went on top of the skyranger and looked east without seeing any more enemies. We see no more enemies, so we deploy quite a few soldiers outside.. We hear a lot of doors opening and closing though. Intimidating.

We move towards one of the pillars and get reaction fire from 2 soldiers. We spot them, and manage to snipe them down. A reaper moves towards the skyranger, but it doesn't manage to get close to anyone, and we score a few reaction shots too.

We have moved around the UFO and cleared the outside. Pretty sure nothing is alive outside the UFO as we turn.



The very large UFO have 8 sided legs which seems perfect to hide behind, as one can walk around a corner without having a deadzone to the side (at least as far as I'm aware of). We should thus safely be able to go around it waiting for a mutual surprise. It's not perfectly safe though, as an alien could walk far enough to spot him with enough TUs left to attack, but there should be a fair chance he'll just be in the middle somewhere not having spotted any..

In addition, I've posted snipers in each corner of the map, which can shoot in between any of the 4 legs. Three of the sides have hedges or walls one can hide behind a bit closer, where i have someone posted that can just fly up a level to see if anyone is around. They are even safer from counterattack in alien turn, as they'll have to move quite far from the entrance to expose the cover. Wonder if I should move away from the pillars and let them do all the spotting. Or I could of course enter the UFO. But then we can have bad luck and having an alien wait just inside. We've seen a lot of aliens panicking including a commander, so hopefully we'll be able to capture him.



Lovely to hear aliens berserking without actually shooting because they've previously panicked and dropped their weapon First time I've camped an entire very large UFO I think. What ironman mode makes me do.. The pillars were excellent cover. A few aliens got close, but they were mostly reaction shot before they could do anything.

First very large UFO and no casualties!!.. Yay Though the camping tactics was boring..

Sadly, the commander got killed somehow. Either he came out and got reaction shot, or he was killed inside the UFO by some berserking unit. There were at least 3 explosions inside the UFO. At one instance, three aliens got out at the same time too, and I only had mind probe to check two of them, so the commander could have been the third..

Well well.. No commander, but a lot of experience and loot.. And a ton of promotions as we've gotten a lot of soldiers since last mission. Ooh.. And blaster launcher and bomb found among the loot..

[humbe]

Not that I'd launch final mission in April, but woulda been interesting getting that commander so I could see if I was ready for it within April. I guess I should bring 2 mind probes next time, and maybe even some expendables and try to enter the UFO.

[humbe]

The Weinan team manged well against the terror UFO. Sadly Matt got taken down by a fast moving Chryssalid and became a zombie. We cleared the outside jungle, and then the soldiers in the flying suits flew on top of the UFO exits, and camped it so they could shoot anyone exiting in the back. Worked like a charm.

[humbe]

19th of April we finish researching Alien Origins.
20th of April, we finish workshop in San Marino and hire 50 more engineers. I guess we could have done that 3 days ago.
21th of April we finish researching Floater Leader.
23rd of April we get the 50 engineers. Avenger will now complete in less than 6 days, still within April.
23rd 12:00 we get report of medium scout going to southern Africa with floaters for a harvest mission. We will intercept them on the ground. Sadly it'll become a night mission.


It's a 4x4 tile set, and there's only one tile behind the skyranger, so unlikely that aliens is looking into it. Just dropping smoke on level 0 as our two front fighters don't have flying suits and will dump directly to level 0 when leaving..

There's many floaters around, and one of them manage to shoot Gal, which will sadly have to spend 40 days in the hospital to heal. But she survived barely, and with a med-kit we manage to stabilize her until mission was done.



25th of April we research The Martian Solution. 5 days remaining of April. If we had managed to capture that commander we could actually have started final mission within April, even though I wasn't really shooting for a fast game. Think finishing in March should be doable if focusing on it. Anyhow.. Not in a rush here.. Going to try and get to psionics before final mision I think.. Researching the blaster bomb and launcher first now.

28th of April, 18:00 hours we produce our first Avenger. 21:30 there's an inbound large scout harvester into Southern Africa. This time it looks like it may become a day mission, so flying down the team again.. Hmm.. The harvester never landed.. Strange..

At the end of April, we now have interceptors in Great Falls and Weinan with plasma beams (we should have awaited buying them until now though, to save us 1.2 mill). We have built an avenger, and considering whether to move it or the skyranger to Great Falls base to make space for another craft build.

We've researched everything we really need. Though the blaster launcher we're currently researching will also make the final mission trivial, and of course we missed the commander, so Cydonia or Bust is still missing.

We're going bankrupt..



We really need to get money into the bank. If we keep current expenses, we'll need a ~4.7 mill positive balance before next month to stay in positive range, and we need 4.5 millions more to get back to zero now. Lets see what we can sell. Until we're green we'll redirect research to laser cannon and put engineers to work on something helping to pay our bills instead.

We decided to sell our heavy plasma storage, and that actually put us back to 1.7 mill positive .. But knowing that funding don't keep up with maintenance, we'll not stop until we have 5 mill positive bankroll.

First mission in May is a snakeman terror mission in Europe with a medium scout. It's soon day in Europe so we'll attempt engaging it on the ground. I really hope the other activity this month is Sectoid..

Just a few minutes later, we see the next mission. A small scout on alien retaliation mission in australasia. Hmm.. The avenger might be able to get down there in time, but if it shoots it down, we won't get to fight the Ethereal. We'll try to head down there anyhow and test out the new machinery.. Destroyed the Ethereal UFO. Another one will likely be incoming later. I think we'll buy a cannon or two for the Avenger, so we can shoot down even a small UFO later, so we can get to psionics.



What chance do the snakemen have.. None at all.. There was a couple of snakemen in the closest house, so we shot it to pieces with laser rifles .. When we have 100 laser shots to try and kill what we spot, it's hard to survive as an alien..

[humbe]

Yet another floater UFO



After clearing the surroundings, we're camping the exit. Training reaction and rifle accuracy.. Camping exit above and behind seems like almost a cheating functionality of the flying suit..

[humbe]

4th of May we finish researching Heavy Laser..
6th of May we see a harvester with floaters going to southern Africa..  Going down there again.. Thankfully it's a day mission.



Quickly spots first alien. Mel takes the chance of taking him down himself.



With 8 sides to the UFO we can move around it with mutual surprise if we spot anything..



But that tree was even simpler to use as a hideout for a spotter that can just pop above it. The people all up on the top of the UFO don't see the alien if he's close to the vessel.. But if the alien starts moving north he will get reaction shots up there and he'll have to use some TU. No alien had TU left to fire up there. After spotting one, the people on the roof could just move forwards one tile and shoot them down if they were next to wall.



Another excellent mission. Lots of goodies and noone killed..

[humbe]

7th of May, we research laser cannon.. Can start producing it for cash.. But with loot from the last missions, we've now got a cash balance of $8.6 million after selling quite a bit, but far from everything..

Already 0:30 on the 7th we spot another UFO. Still a harvester in Southern Africa.. And I was hoping for another australian mission with ethereals.. I have transferred the avenger down there with cannons, so now I hope to shoot one down even if it's a very small one

Well well.. The commander will have to catch some sleep before coordinating that mission..

[humbe]

Harrison got shot while we were clearing the outside here, but luckily it wasn't fatal, and he could run over to Colin which had a medkit. He'll be out of action for 38 days though. We also had another injury caused by friendly fire, but the armor stopped most of it, so it was a minor injury, but still required medical attention from Colin.



The houses outside the door was really useful. Destroy the roof and we had excellent cover to jump out of with the flying suits to check if anyone got out. Not visible above, but there was a hedge and a house on the other side too. Not close enough to see what happened at the door, but it would spot the alien moving westwards.



Another excellent result.

[humbe]

7th of May.. We spot another UFO..



Yay.. Another shot at capturing a commander hopefully..



Camping the UFO. Having 5 small launchers and 8 stunrods.. This seemed to work really well.. Though a bit boring waiting quite a few turns verifying that noone is below.



Yay.. The commander is right in front of us.. We actually take him down with a stun rod.. Next turn we carry him away into safety just in case there should be an explosion here..



Noone managed to see me hugging the wall one level above ground, and when we found someone they had typically expended all their TUs getting there, ,so we could easily shoot them down.. The risky bit is clearing around, but that worked out ok..

Pausing launcher and bomb and starting researching the commander..

A bit later a terror ship comes for Southern Africa.. We intercept it with interceptor, and takes a day mission with the Weinan team as the main team is still regrouping after the last mission.



The start isn't promising. We've forgotten to prime a smoke grenade prior to starting mission. We take a chance having Russel trying to shoot the snakeman down, but he misses too much and the snakeman shoots him dead..

Later in the mission, Karl tries to make a run for it to get behind the UFO entrance, but is surprised by an alien coming out, and he's a gonner too.. Sad.. Well.. Other than that, we manage..

[humbe]

9th of May, Floater Commander has been interrogated, researching Cydonia or Bust..

10th of May, at 05:00 we see an Australian mission popping up. We scramble the Avenger with it's cannons now stationed in Australia.



We shoot it down on Tasmania. Lets see if we can get to them before the wildlife there kills'em



We pick up the main assault team and send them on the way.. But while they're travelling we get a new report. The Weinan team might be able to catch them while landed, but it looks like that would be a night mission. I think we'll just shoot it down, and let them handle it a bit later.

[humbe]

It woulda been a lot easier facing of a sectoid mission with a single sectoid leader able to do psionic attacks.. Now we're facing Ethereals that have good armor and all of them may attack us with psionics.

As it's the first mission against anything psionic we have no clue who is psionic strong of our soldiers. In a sectoid mission we could have opted for using conventional weapons only, which our armor can handle, but we need decent weapons to get through Ethereals armor.



Until we know who our psi weaklings are, I guess we should try to not end turn holding a weapon. It seems we only use 2 TU to drop a laser rifle, if the value is static that is. Picking it back up is 8 more though.

The start looks ok. We are looking up towards the northwest corner, so we can get our back against the map border fairly easily at least. We start of dropping smoke at ground level. Ignoring level 1. Only expecting Ethereals to be able to see in from the side from the east, and our scout in power suit that drops to level 0 immediately should hopefully be able to expedite any..

It's also an open question who to shoot and who to try and stun. It would be very nice to stun one early so we knew we had one to interrogate, but the last one will be a lot easier to stun than the first one we see. How many aliens might we be facing? We shot the UFO down, so some might have died in the crash. How many do we dare shoot before having to stun the next?



We leave two soldiers in the skyranger and move the rest out, dropping their laser rifles before ending the turn. Oh.. We forgot on the two first scouts going out. There's two buildings here, and north of the eastern building there's hedges around the tile covering it up, so there may be many aliens within 20 tiles for all we know..



I think we got many psionic attacks against us, but we only noticed Colin panicking. An alien moved ouf of the whole in the wall we created and around the corner. Noone shot at us.



Nice position for small launcher. Hopefully we can stun him, and then we can kill of anyone else we see.. Tough bastard.. At least we have many small launchers.. After 5 small launcher shots we finally stun him.. One missed, at least 2 were direct hits.. Well well.. At least he's down. Lets hope he doesn't wake up before we've cleared the surrounding area..

Hmm.. We don't always manage to end up with enough TU to drop weapons.. This is a dangerous mission..

We spot another alien and kill it. But when we spot a third we don't have anyone with TUs to shoot at it, so we just move a bit back and wait. In the alien turn another alien shows up out of the house to the east where we have blown out some walls, and shoots Charlize. Thankfully her armor took the hit. Colin is now under alien control, but he don't have any lethal weapons on him. He may have a stun rod or small launcher in his backpack though.



The southwestern corner looks likely to be clear of aliens. At leat no doors that have opened and we've seen a lot of the area..



The second alien that walked out of the house we stunned too.. This one took "only" two small launcher hits. Good to be able to have stunned at least 2 just in case an explosion or something happen. They are a bit too close though. Once we've cleared a bit more we'll carry one west I guess..

That's 2 stunned and 2 shot so far.. Looks to be just a 4x4 tile map, and I guess we see the outline of the ufo in the tile north of the northeastern corner. So far so good...



Phew.. That was actually it.. Ending turn and we were done.. Switching research to Ethereal Soldier.. Just after we launched to go home, our interceptor caught up with the large scout on terror mission in Europe and shot it down. Sending Weinan team to handle it, as the San Marino team is still over Australia and may not be back to fight that mission in daylight..

11th of May we finish researching Ethereal Soldier. Psi-Lab next.



No issue finding the 31th UFO at least. We move out in smoke and start clearing the area. What really bites me is that when we spot an alien, and we try to snipe it down from above, one of the snipers manage to miss big twice, both times hitting Steven in the back, and end up killing him. Is it possible? When hitting a friendly target way of the path to the alien, one should think one thought twice about where to point that gun.

Steven have been a valued member, been transferred to Weinan to help out. Have amassed 15 kills. He wasn't a brave soul, but he was good at his job..



With all the loot we have amassed from the latest missions we're now just above 20 million in available credits, and we have sold far from everything. Each of our main 6 bases now have 6 heavy plasma + 18 clips, 1 blaster launcher with 4 bombs, 10 alien grenades, 1 laser rifle, 4 laser pistols, 30 smoke and 30 proximity grenades and 11 regular rifles with 22 clips. We haven't researched all the bits yet though.

I guess we should send a bit extra to Alice Springs, as there's a current retaliation mission there. Sending another 10 heavy plasma and 20 clips over there..

[humbe]

13th of May we spot another retaliation scout in Australia.



What to do with it? Fighting Ethereals is dangerous business, and we do not know psi strength of soldiers yet. Maybe we should just shoot it down over water. Hope this doesn't end up in an actual base defense against a battleship full of Ethereal soldiers. They would control the heck out of my soldiers.

We end up shooting it down over water, and while we remember, sending 2 plasma beams for avenger down to Australia.

15th of May we finish research of Psi-Lab.. Sadly too late to finish building them within May, so we won't know our soldiers psionic strength before end of July.

Building a psi-lab in all of the 6 first bases. Starting a hyperwave decoder in the 7th Antarctica base, which just built it's first living quarter, and we can thus hire 20 soldiers there.. The psi-lab wasn't terribly expensive to build, and we don't have a lot we need the money for at the moment, so maybe we should just add another one in each base to be able to train all 20 soldiers at the same time. Well.. We started the first, but it would actually have ideal to wait until June 5th or something, to just make it before end of month. Helps us nothing to finish the build early in June. But what done is not forgot at least, and we don't need to remember to reserve the money.

[humbe]

We have likely won this game long time ago. Except for psionic bits, we have a lot we can show up on the final mission with. But lets just expand a bit more to be sure, and at least get to where we know our troops psionic strength.

Have been quiet from activity for a while now. 20th of May we finish researching Cydonia or Bust. Going back to Blaster Launcher and Bomb.. We can now start the final mission anytime we want. We have the Avenger, and we know where to go. 21st we research blaster bomb. Setting all to research the launcher. The 25th we finish researching the launcher itself. It's gonna be a while before we can use a Psi-Amp, but lets research it as we have nothing else we really are waiting for..

On the 25th, there's another large scout on retaliation mission in Australasia.. We don't really want to fight Ethereals without knowing psi strength, so lets just shoot them down into the ocean..

28th of May we research Psi-Amps. Not really needing anymore yet, we start on motion scanner, and I guess we'll research plasma pistols and rifles afterwards with their clips. At this time we could cut down on our research team if we want to. We're currently paying 4.5 million dollars a month to have them, but as we don't require more tech, we could really dump all. But to be able to research a bit, we could dump at least 100. But as we do have the money, lets just keep them for this month, and rather do it next month, so we can clear out that list a bit..



28th of May we spot something interesting.. An alien base mission seems to be starting in North Africa.. That means many large UFOs we can exploit for loot. Looks like this one is going to be a night mission unless I shoot it down. If I shoot it down, I guess I will delay the base mission a bit, but if I have understood it correctly, it won't abort it. A large scout appeared just after. We shot down both so we can handle them in daytime.