Operation Severed Stranger (AKA Operation Missed Opportunity):
I promote to Major and take extra conditioning. With Carapace Armor I'm floating 15 HP!
The Base upon opening the save. I did go ahead and started two more builds, and I'll explain the reasoning here.
I begin a Power Generator to finish the block of 4, because I wanted to prep us to either uplink or nexus and to do that we need more engineers. We currently have 24 (before the end of the month, where we'll get at least another) and a workshop will give us another 5 and the 30 that we need for another uplink next month (and it's +4 Satellite Capacity). The requirement for a workshop means that we need the extra power generator.
Speaking of the workshop, I go ahead and pawn 3 thinmen corpses for $15 and the funds necessary to start the workshop itself before the end of the month.
Alien Nav Computers finish and I set us to Thin Man Autopsy.
At the end of the month, I launch satellites to keep Mexico, Egypt, and South Africa in the fold. This locks down Africa, preventing abductions there. We also get 3 engineers. This is important, btw as it means we'll have 24 + 4 + 5 = 33 Engineers after the workshop finishes.
We get a B for the month. Not bad. Also a ton of cash comes in ($761) so we can afford to entertain the idea of a Satellite Nexus instead of an uplink. For reference, Satellites are $58 per right now. (4x: $232, 7x: $406).
The end result is that if we want a nexus, we need an abduction mission and the engineers from it before the 9th day of the month. There's still time left, but if that passes, we should just build the satellites and uplink while digging down.
With some of the cash, I go ahead and equip the rest of our interceptors with laser cannons.
Thin Man Interrogation completes, and I put us on UFO Power Source using the thin man research credit. Elerium Generators will let us get our power situation under control, and possibly reclaim some adjacency bonuses for workshops or labs later on. That and I think they're a prereq for powered armor, so hell yeah.
That research finishes and I start us on a Muton Interrogation. I forget which credit it gives, but the other research is either really long or an autopsy/interrogation. I vaguely recall the Muton Interrogation being useful pretty quickly, so I set it to that thinking we can clean the rest of the research up after we grab the continental bonus for South America.
As we start in on the research, we detect a UFO and down it with our new Laser-Cannon equipped Ravens.
I go ahead and build another heavy laser for Mardoc and head out with the following loadout:
We carefully approach the downed UFO.
A pair of thinmen show up after our advance.
I'm not normally a fan of suppression, but the ability to knock out cover is pretty damn awesome at times.
Rapid fire is pretty much always right, just do the math in your head to be sure. I remember someone graphed it out and the rule of thumb is that if you want only one hit and don't care about ammo, you rapid fire pretty much all the time except for the hardest and easiest (non 100%) shots.
As we loop around the downed UFO, floaters try to sneak up on us from behind. Haphazard puts an end to that foolishness on overwatch.
Sometimes it's hard to get the Sniper into a good position on UFO levels, but by looping around we can use Ug to cover us as the enemies boil out of the Saucer.
Unfortunately, sometimes Ug is a bit
too good, and he snipes the Outsider through a door as the Outsider wasn't in the Nav Room where I've pretty much only found the command alien... I've raided a huge number of early UFOs and this is the first time the command alien wasn't in the Nav room if the Saucer had one...
Cry some more I guess. How come that bird couldn't eat it instead of the outsider? :P
We find a clear out a pair of sectoids in another part of the ship, and that's the mission.
Promos for Haphazard (Deep Pockets), Mardoc (Shredder Rocket or Suppression), and Gustaran (Deep Pockets).
A pair of deep-pocket, sprinter, supports will let us land a ton of captures, if we want them.
The Save
