My first real OpenXCom challenge. Superhuman Ironman vanilla.

[humbe]

It's time for a bigger challenge for the psi-team...



This got a little messy.. Thankfully the only kill they managed was an expendable in the front line.. But we needed to put many in danger and clear the UFO.. We have a few wounded soldiers on the team now though..

The sectopod were way armored, and took a lot of laser rifle fire before they died.. And as they're not a reaper with only melee attacks it may reaction fire too.

We forgot to disarm all the expendables so they shot a bit around and dumped a few alien grenades on us, but armor took it. But when we figured we could mind control our own troops, which helped a lot, as the aliens left them for reaction fire..



We did manage some mind controls of Ethereals that helped a lot, but it wasn't easy.. The sectopod seemed immune.. At least out of my capability to control now..

Happy with not losing any important players..

[humbe]

Finished another snakeman large scout mission.. And did some psi, reaction, accuracy training.. Should get some laser and regular pistols onboard to improve the training.. Takes a while to set up..

[humbe]

Hmm.. Suddenly, there's 3 abductor missions going on at the same time in Asia.. We shot down 2 of them, and psi-team are heading to intercept the third hopefully catching it on the ground while it's still daytime.. They're a bit late, as it took a while to refuel that avenger.. (It's still 9th of August)

Wondering if we should send the Weinan team after one of them, but we'll wait and see. Crash site should be there tomorrow still..

The Avenger caught one on the ground and everything went well, but I forgot to take a screen of the score..

The psi-team is getting some training though.. Current stats:

                   Starting stats                                   Current stats
            TU Sta Hlt Brv Rea Acc Thr Mel Str PSt PSk   TU Sta Hlt Brv Rea Acc Thr Mel Str PSt PSk  Score
[Max cap*]  60  70  40  60  60  70  80  40  40 100  24   80 100  60 100 100 120 120      70 100 100+
Karl        50  65  31  10  33  45  76  38  38  81  23   58  74  46  10  37  54  77  38  57  81  43  3
Jet         53  64  29  10  48  54  75  21  27  82  21   67  78  48  10  52  63  75  21  41  82  37  6
Nicolas     58  40  30  30  38  42  57  37  24  85  24   72  65  48  30  42  48  57  37  37  85  40  5
Jean Claude 54  57  34  30  41  61  80  23  20  91  21   74  77  51  30  43  68  80  23  43  91  36  6
Orlando     51  49  32  10  34  68  53  25  23  91  21   64  71  46  10  41  79  53  25  43  91  39  6
Jessica B   51  58  40  40  42  48  59  31  35  81  22   65  78  53  40  48  61  60  31  44  81  41  6
Jason       58  65  34  50  47  43  67  26  30  81  21   81 100  60  50  60  69  77  26  71  81  43  9
Rose        52  48  37  50  43  50  63  32  33  84  17   68  72  53  50  45  56  63  32  49  84  39  6
Mel         54  65  30  10  46  61  76  37  37  84  20   69  87  51  10  48  64  76  37  58  84  40  5
Steven      53  49  33  50  46  47  58  27  35  87  16   78  76  48  50  47  54  58  27  56  87  43  5
Wesley      57  63  34  50  40  43  59  21  26  91  22   71  80  54  50  43  43  59  21  48  91  51  6
Chuck       54  61  29  50  40  58  54  23  26  80  16   66  80  43  60  42  59  54  23  45  80  42  6
Jennifer L  57  44  25  10  60  46  52  25  35  84  24   69  72  47  10  62  48  52  25  52  84  61  6
Russel      59  62  25  30  32  65  77  36  36  87  24   71  78  37  30  41  69  77  36  54  87  57  7
Matt        57  61  39  30  52  55  50  38  21  89  22   68  80  53  30  53  57  50  38  38  89  48  7
Christian   51  53  37  20  53  66  76  38  21  82  16   64  76  51  20  56  72  76  38  51  82  35  7
Jessica A   56  59  29  30  45  65  61  21  35  80  19   67  84  49  30  48  68  61  21  51  80  47  7
Viggo       56  62  38  20  34  50  77  40  30  95  17   65  79  52  20  36  54  77  40  39  95  38  4
Sean        59  47  25  20  31  68  74  24  30  95  16   69  69  43  20  36  74  74  24  54  95  48  6
Dwayne      54  56  29  40  31  59  67  32  34  96  23   71  72  49  40  33  63  67  32  49  96  49  5
Lucy        56  46  35  50  54  54  72  38  37  98  22   75  72  49  50  56  56  72  38  60  98  49  8
Clint       59  43  35  20  50  66  70  33  39  98  22   75  68  54  20  50  66  70  33  59  98  54  8
Harrison    50  58  32  50  57  53  80  37  20  95  17   80  97  60  50  65  73  84  37  57  95  41  8


Some are getting psi skill above 50 which is starting to get very usable. Some of the new ones have gotten to 75 TU so they can do 3 psi actions per turn and other skills are slowly rising too..

Not to mention health and strength which is now great all around, so all of them can carry a decent set of gear, and with health approaching the max cap, together with decent armor they have a good survival chance against plasma fire too.

A heavy plasma is set to do 115 damage, meaning it does from 0 to 230 damage. A flying suit has 110 front armor. If shot in the front, a soldier with 60 health needs to take 170 damage before dying, giving a ~73% chance of survival if he can be mended with medikit fast. A plasma rifle is stated to do 80 damage, which is 0-160, so if we get that in front with flying suit we are guaranteed to survive a single hit.

The Avenger is ready again reasonably fast.. Should we do a night mission, to be able to handle them fast? I'm pretty sure we're able to handle both tomorrow, so think we'll aim for taking out next just after daybreak.

While waiting for daybreak we get this:


Will there be a lot of ships creating the base on the same day we have 3 abductors to handle? Or is the scout just scouting and it'll come later.. Thinking the latter.. Lets shoot it down in hopes of delaying base. Destroyed..

[humbe]

In the morning we went for another one of them:



Easy floater mission with training for the psi-squad..

[humbe]

Yet another floater abductor mission, and again starting with 2 aliens having clear view into skyranger.. This would easily have been a dead soldier a month ago..
Now however, we can just mind control from the back of our skyranger, and use them as scouts and ensure area is clear before we step out.



While the aliens have a meeting discussing how to handle the situation, we get our guys in position..



Some reaction/rifling training here.. And psi training to boot...



Wasn't much loot to gather up though...

[humbe]

The next UFO we were up against a large scout with Ethereals on a retaliation mission.

An excellent opportunity to train.. We have now brought 20 pistols, and 21 pistol clips.. For the 21 on the mission that aren't expendables in front of the skyranger..

We mind controlled and moved all aliens within the UFO and dumped all their weapons, and then positioned around the UFO to train reaction and rifling after we had done enough psi-training..
To boot we will also do some morale training as the Ethereals try to panic our soldiers..



21 empty pistol clips later, and half the Ethereals are still alive.. Not much damage in those pistols, so everyone got their training.. So time for the execution squad to get rid of the remaining ones.. Sadly, the expendables with crap psionic skill were constantly mind controlled and panicked, leaving less such attacks on the dudes we wanted to train.. I guess we should have left them behind so they'd have to try controlling the psi-squad instead.. It wasn't an issue as they had no weapons on them, but I'm guessing it meant less bravery training for the rest.



This pretty typical score doesn't make out how excellent this turned out..



Psi, rifling, reaction and bravery training for everyone.. Though only a few of the psi-squad seemed to be target for panic attacks..

[humbe]

At this point, the psi-team is looking awesome.. They mind control the Ethereals fairly easy.. I'm guessing the final mission can be done easily any time we feel like it from now on...

Oh.. And we got a ton of cash, so just to use it for something we built a grav lift and 3 fusion beam defense modules on each of the 7 original bases.

[humbe]

Next up is muton terror mission.. Going after it with psi-squad before it involves civilians..



Another good opportunity for training.. Mutons and silacoid have more than enough armor and health for all 21 to empty a pistol clip.. Good reaction/rifling boost, and psi training hurding them together..



Mutons were exceptionally easy to mind control.. Silacoids not that rough either.. The celatid had good resistance though, and were fairly tough to mind control at range.. They have ranged weapon I can't remove anyhow, so had to kill these off before starting to train...

[humbe]

We spotted a battleship with Ethereals on the way on retaliation mission towards southern Africa. That doesn't worry us that much as the psi-squad is thankfully located there.. But I don't think they have located the base yet, so probably just scouting.. However, a battleship of Ethereals will be a nice test for the psi-team and a chance to train towards Cydonia mission..

We'll be able to see to what level the Ethereals manage to psionically affect the squad.. And we can also train bravery alongside psionics, reaction and rifling skill..

So we gave it a go and shot it down with the Avenger. That makes it take quite a bit of damage though, so the Avenger will be out for repairs the next 12 days.. We've ordered the avenger in San Marino to relocate to Harare for now.. Hoping it arrives fast..



We were hoping to disarm the Ethereals having the commander alive, but sadly I think he got killed by reaction fire from mind controlled aliens. Or maybe we forgot to check everyone and he was killed during accuracy/reaction training with pistols..

In either case, after we had emptied all our pistol clips, there were 6 leaders left, and we disarmed all our own soldiers and let the turns pass to see if they managed to control anyone.. Some learnings:

  - They didn't mind control anyone (I had left the expendables on the base so only psi-squad members were in)
  - They did manage to panic some, but only a handful, which typically were the weakest among them. Didn't they target the rest and try, or were they immune?
  - Then my forces panic, they may throw grenades they have on them. I nearly got a casualty figuring this out, but we saved Jessica B with a medikit.. She'll be in the hospital for 17 days though..

With commanders they will be able to do a bit more psionic damage, but it looks good. We control them far easier than they control us.



I wasn't expecting Elerium as we shot it down, but no artifacts? I'm pretty sure we got some weapons and a mind probe at least, but it doesn't show up in screen.

[humbe]

I decided to track some soldier data in a spreadsheet to make it simpler to get a good overview



The score bits are some subjective bits I've added. For now being:

Potential score is a value for how big a potential this soldier has to be the perfect soldier. Dominated by psionic strength, then starting TUs, and then some points for current bravery/reaction/rifling accuracy skills as they are a bit trickier to train than the rest.

Current score is the current stats modified with the weights on top, but removing additions from strength above 40, and ignores value of psionic skill if psionic strength is below 70.

The total is the weighted potential + current score, modified to get values maxing out at around 100%.

This is the psi-team on top, then the San Marion team and the Weinan team on the bottom. The latter teams scoring bad as I've set high importance for psionics.

Once the month is done and we have 110 new recruits with known psionic strengths, we can feed the data into here to get an easier overview as to whom to keep on the payroll.

[humbe]

Yet more missions...





We took down a sectoid scout..




Are we getting a muton base in North America? They are nice targets for reaction and accuracy training with all their health at least. We haven't spotted any base yet, but haven't patrolled for one either.. But haven't seen a battleship yet, so guessing it hasn't got far enough to be built yet..




Fought the supply ship in the arctic..




And some scouts..



A terror mission in South Africa.. Though we shot it down, so we avoided the civilians..




And yet some scouts.. Some on retaliation missions I think..

We've lost some soldiers walking first out of the transport, but thankfully only expendables we took along. With our psi-squad we are fast in total control after having spotted some aliens..

We had an incident in one training session against a muton scout though.. We were pretty sure we had disarmed all the muton, but suddonly a grenade went of in our line, wounding 3-4 soldiers. They all survived, but many members currently in the hospital. We had no armed grenades on us as far as I can tell, so must have been a muton with a grenade, though I was pretty sure noone had any.. Well well.. Shit happens..

[humbe]

Score from a sectoid battleship on harvest mission I think it was..




Another Ethereal scout on retaliation mission.. Another training opportunity.. We actually stunned the expendables that were psi weak to try and make them attack the rest.. They did try, but all they managed was to panic one of them.. Seems the psi-squad is fairly immune to psi-efforts from ethereal leaders.. Meaning they should be fairly unlikely to be mind controlled by the commanders too..


Towards the end of the month, we got a floater retaliation mission which we shot down.. Only 4 surviving floaters that was quickly shot down..



They aliens got to the US and made them draw out of our agreement.. Rrr.. The retard president over there boasted he did the best deals and saw no reason why our fight benefited him personally. No matter.. Now we have solid funding and can take on the final solution anytime we want.. Dunno what to use the remaining $48 million for.. We even shelled out for base defense all around last month.. Which will finish building in 16 days in our 6 main bases, and in 32 days in Carney (Antarctic base)

A massive score though.. And the other nations are close to make up what the US added..



We got reports of an alien base too...

[humbe]

There's a lot of retaliation missions coming in, many with battleships and many with Ethereals.. So decided to take the now well developed psi-team and split it up a bit..

Sending two experienced members to each base, and six to the San Marino base to start of a second assault team.

Firing a ton of psi-weak soldiers.. Got quite a few promising recruits that we have now identified psi strength of, and which now can use a psi-amp. Sent most of them to Harare. The psi-team there is now thus a few experienced soldiers and a whole bunch of recruits. The remaining promising recruits was sent to San Marino. A new batch of soldiers are now training in the psi labs, and we have fired all the known psi-weaklings, including the entire original San Marino assault team. A bit sad to see all the soldiers go that we carefully trained to begin with, but we have enough soldiers to do what we want without them.

Defense buildings are soon ready in the main 6 bases.. We've kept on producing some bits to give all the bases a decent set of equipment for base defense. Now that every base has two experienced soldiers from the psi-core, and we have decent weapons and armor all around, I think we should be good if there's a base assault.

We have not taken out the alien base yet.. It's a muton base, so we are expecting muton supply ships, and mutons are excellent for reaction and rifling training as they can endure a lot of pistol shots.. As we have plenty of soldiers to train now, lets hope we see some supply ships.

Getting a bit bored of training soldiers though. We do have good control, and should soon do the final mission. Most of the wounded soldiers are now back in action. Only Jason remains wounded, but he has yet another month before he's healed, so quite a while to wait for him..

Was amazed by how fast we managed to train psi-skill doing missions. Knowing that you get experience from failed psi-attacks, and that you can panic an alien as many times as you want and get xp each time regardless if he's already at zero morale, we can train 26 soldiers psi-skill to max every mission from a single alien seen. Thus most of the psi-squad maxed psi-skill to 100 during only one month. Thus, once we have identified psionic strength, it's better to detect it in more soldiers than to keep training the psi-strong ones, if you want more soldiers..

[tarkalak]

...

I wasn't expecting Elerium as we shot it down, but no artifacts? I'm pretty sure we got some weapons and a mind probe at least, but it doesn't show up in screen.

Artefacts are only things you haven't researched yet. Once you research something it will not show up as artefact and will not give you points. It is that way in the original, but is easy to miss.

[humbe]

Kind of remembered I've read somewhere that artifacts isn't artifacts once researched but have never noticed the effect before. I guess we could have gotten some extra point by not researching stuff we don't need then, but we don't really need those points anyhow, so no worries..

September started pretty quiet. A few scouts here and there to take care of, most on retaliation missions so we had to shoot them down. I think there was a harvester or two in the mix too..

I'll stop showing a report for every mission, but now that we have psi-control the missions are fairly easy to handle. The once dreaded start of seeing aliens from the transport is now ideal instead, as we can mind control them and use them to ensure it is safe to get out of the transport.

Most have been versus floaters and snakemen though, which limits reaction/accuracy training as the aliens die before all has trained. In latest half of the month we finally spot a muton supply ship in North America. Have been waiting for a chance of better training.. However, to our surprise they don't fly directly towards the base, and then we see a battleship on alien base mission too.. They're building a second muton base there, instead of supplying the first..

Then we decide to just shoot down the supply ship, and let the strike team follow the battleship to take it when it lands. A battleship of muton's is enough resistance for everyone to train reaction and rifling, alongside psi and general skills.



Here we have created fire corridors to not shoot our own soldiers. This is final part when we execute the rest though. We've emptied pistol clip for everyone with reaction shots first, and then we don't need fire corridors as our troops are immune to pistol shots in armor.


Two alien bases.. About time to take one out. I guess underground alien base mission is underground regardless, so we can just go for it as soon as the strike team is ready again..

We've prioritized using the psi-team in Harare for all missions to train the new members that we collected from all our bases due to their psionic strength. That way we can train a lot of psionic skill.. We now have working squads elsewhere, but with quite a few members not identified psi-strength of yet, so if we used them we could not train psi skill there yet.

I've created a small perl script that scans my savefile and creates a csv file of all soldiers in all bases, which I can use to easily cut/paste into excel sheet with more bits. This is how the Harare team currently looks:


The potential score is a simple formula dominated by psionic strength, getting a good bonus for high starting TU, and some points for starting of with high reaction/bravery/accuracy which is harder to train than the secondary stats. The current score is basically the weighted sum of the current attributes (with some minor tweaks to not count psi skill at all if psi strength is low for instance),a nd the total is the weighted sum of potential and current score, divided by a number to get values going up to around 100%.

The formula is not intended to be perfect in any way, but is just a way for me to quickly decide order in transport and who are most expendable, rather than having to evaluate manually.

Oh.. And you may notice that some of the new recruits have fairly similar names to ones that got kicked out or died earlier. Have started giving using enough of last names to make them unique. Haven't figured out names for everyone yet, so waiting a bit to show the troops in other bases