...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

WTF Firaxis indeed.

Anyway, for the 'missing door' problem on my run... grenades solved it.

--sofaspud
--

In my defense, that was the end of the room the team spawned facing away from, and toward the doors that led into the dead end, and what the hell kind of spawn placement is that?! Never before in my hundred-and-some hours of playing this game has the team spawned facing in a direction they were not meant to at least roughly proceed in, or with their backs to a door (which was invisible in the fog of war because they weren't facing it).

Anyway, problem eventually solved. Alas, the stars did not align so that Gunny ERM-E had a chance to go three for three in SUPER ROCKET PUNCHing Chosen to Final Death in their own living rooms; when the Hunter respawned after we wrecked his relaxation pod, he was all the way in the opposite corner of the room from where ERM-E was standing.

So, instead, Rei casually overwatched his face off. Just like she did the first time I played that mission, in the other campaign. So there was a pleasing symmetry of a sort, just not precisely the kind I was hoping for. :)

ERM-E had his moment of glory for the mission in phase 1, anyway, when at one point he used a Shredder Gun to wipe out an entire squad of Chryssalids (which our Reaper had spotted but not activated) through a wall. I didn't think that would work, but their health bars blinked when I put the cone on the side of the wall ERM-E was facing, so I figured it was worth a shot. As it were.

Anyway, all that said:

>I suspect
>(from what poking I've done in the code for modding purposes) that
>it's related to the pathfinding subsystem. You know, the same one
>that sometimes decides that destroyed second-story tiles that are no
>longer there are perfect places to move the mind-controlled squaddie
>to?

I do love the pathing in this game, and I mean that sincerely even though the reason I love it is because it's so entertainingly stupid sometimes. Squaddies who choose to hurdle every single obstacle in their path rather than go around any of them. Squaddies who run straight through fire without seeming to think the instruction to do so is in any way odd until—to their evident surprise—they discover themselves to be actually ON fire. Squaddies who climb entire three-story buildings, trot across the roof, and then jump the 25 or so vertical feet back to the ground without a moment's pause, then cross the street and climb back up onto an elevated freeway, and somehow that only counts as one action because after all they only covered about 10 horizontal squares. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

Mm. And when your own guys start using it, you think, How the hell did that guy not just kill all of us with a tool like this at his disposal? What a goddamn scrub. :)

(Also: That's a mighty nice shotgun you had there, Assassin. You might have found it useful if it had ever, ever occurred to you to employ it.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That's -exactly- what I was thinking when I got that thing. Jesus it's ridiculous.

>
>(Also: That's a mighty nice shotgun you had there, Assassin. You
>might have found it useful if it had ever, ever occurred to you
>to employ it.)

Precisely. It's a shotgun with rifle ranges and she never used it because her movement was so ridiculous, if she could see us, she was in range to melee us that turn.

Better than the Warlock, I suppose. His minions are really, really irritating since he can summon them anywhere on the map, but once you get to him, his great assault rifle means nothing. I never even saw what spells he has up close because every time I got to him I transposed positions with him using my Templar and...well, he was in the middle of my forces at the beginning of my turn and he had the 'take ridiculous damage if attacked more than three times in a turn' weakness. And I mean -ridiculous- damage. Like, I'm sniping him for 18. Eighteen. He had no hope.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

The Warlock should absolutely be dropping some kind of nutso psi amp, nothing as clumsy and random as an assault rifle. That's just basic themeing at work.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I'd speculate that they probably tested some sort of Chosen Juggernaut and then decided it was too crazy, but then I remember that they left the Alien Hunters bosses in the game and conclude that these developers could never reach that conclusion about anything. :)

Anyway, the super psi thing probably treaded too close to overlapping the Avatar for them to want to go that way. I mean, they don't want you to have access to one of those things before the last mission...

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"If you work for ADVENT, and you've suffered an accident at work... yeah, that was probably us."

--G.
Templar Jon appears to think he's the last airbender
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Grabsack gets up by the window, behind which is standing the "Warlock". Having been shot twice already this turn, he'll take extra damage if I manage a third, and hey, that big gun is fairly damaging on its own too. 87%, looks promising, let'em have it!

Miss. Well, shit. Last man to have an action this turn too, so that's not promising. "I am NOT impressed!" gargles warlock-boy.

Except, I'd stuck "Hair Trigger" in the gun for him, which gives an, in this case, 15 % chance of a re-do. Which triggered.

Ok, take two! DON'T miss, this time, ok Grabsack?

He didn't. In fact, he did SO well in his shooting that he replied to the warlock, "Impressed yet?" Not that it could hear him, being mostly dead.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Expending a bit more time and effort, and maybe look for a few workshop mods, and who knows how much closer one could get. There is NO voice-mod for him though, I looked. Pity, really, he has a good voice.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

>NO voice-mod for him though, I looked. Pity, really, he has a good
>voice.

Well, while there are many, many hours of him speaking out there, I guess there's probably a very small proportion of Dirty Jobs footage and/or Deadliest Catch narration that would be relevant to the situation. :)

--G.
"Menace 1-5, be advised, we have a limited window of opportunity before ADVENT responds."
"I'm here to slow you down, cost you money, and generally retard the process."
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Dunno what you're talking about.

>"I'm here to slow you down, cost you money, and generally retard the
>process."

Seems completely relevant to ANY military operation, no matter WHAT the greater situation at hand.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

True, but it's usually said to the opposition.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

I don't really do the Let's Play thing, at least not the mutation it's become on Youtube, but this sort of LP is right up my alley, sir. I am mainlining this crack. You are providing some good shit.

I, uh, I think I'm trying to say that if you keep feeding my addiction, I would be very happy. :D

--sofaspud
--

Heh, I'm glad you're enjoying it. I haven't been playing as much the last few days—that end-of-semester push and all—but that's done now, so I'm probably going to either try and finish up the OWaW-themed campaign, or start a new one with a more mixed-up character pool and try for some heavy transfictional synergies (as the marketing people would presumably, uh... not actually say).

In the meantime, I have got a bunch of random screenshots and posters kicking around from earlier, though until you said that I wasn't sure whether everybody might just be sick of hearing me ramble about playing a video game. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Notice what they're all carrying. :)

For those of you not familiar with the utility items in XCOM 2, that pink circle with the silhouetted head in it is the icon of an item called a Mindshield, which does just what it says on the tin: makes the soldier carrying it immune to psionic attacks that affect the target's mind, such as Insanity and Mind Control. These are basically the only things the Warlock does that aren't minion summons.

And the hilarious thing is that he doesn't know you have them, so he'll keep trying to panic, stun, disorient, or control your troopers all day. It didn't matter in this particular mission, because everything ran like such clockwork that he never had a chance to do even one single thing, but on a previous Retaliation Site mission where the squad encountered him, it was a source of endless amusement. Imagine a great big mean shit-talking dog who can't figure out what the tempered glass patio door is or why he can't get into the house. Yeah. Hours of fun. :)

Also, note that Yoshika and Lynne are wearing two of the Alien Hunters special armors, the RAGE suit (which is made from the corpse of the Berserker Queen, I shit you not) and the Icarus armor (made from the remains of the Archon King). The Icarus suit looks pretty good if you take the goofy helmet off it, which fortunately you can do. The RAGE suit, well, there's basically nothing you can do to prevent that from looking like a skinned gorilla—as you can see, changing the colors from the Berserker's Slim Goodbody default palette helps a little, but not much—but what I really object to about it is that it makes Yoshika look like she's got a package. I'm not down with that, and neither is Lynne.

(Also, you can't see them there because of Yoshika's stats box, but it has "bare feet" shoes, which is dorky in the extreme. Always makes me think of that fake radio ad in GTA Online. "Toe Shoes! They're shoes for toes—and twats!")

Still, it's effectively another WAR suit, with the added bonuses that it has a chance to make Berserkers panic on sight of it and adds a melee attack to the repertoire of whoever's wearing it. Which can be handy, if—as here—the character wearing it doesn't already have one.

As an aside about the Icarus armor, I miss having equipment that enables squaddies to properly fly, like you could get in the first game (and the '90s one, come to that). The Icarus suit simulates Iron Man-style jet boot jumping instead of its wearer climbing ladders and stuff, and it has what's basically a teleport power that's animated as flying up out of frame and then dropping back into it on the destination square, but it's not the same.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

One of my favoritest things ever was to load up a squadsight sniper as high as they could get and just let them sit there on overwatch. Probe forward with the other squaddies and watch heads pop from across the map.

So very satisfying :).

That said, the tactic backfired on me spectacularly in the final mission, in the second-to-last room, where a hovering sniper can 'see' into the next room. Of course, if you can see the Ethereal, the Ethereal can see you.

Guess who failed their Will save? Guess who was above and behind the rest of the squad? Guess who had In The Zone?!

Doh.

--sofaspud
--

This is actually a big step up, in my opinion, because in the first game the Sectoid Commander and the Ethereals would cheat: if you had dudes who were immune to mind control they'd never even try. Which, I mean. The item is still technically doing its job in that case. But c'mon, give me ONE free wasted action on their part at least before they go "oh. That's... that's clearly not going to work."

-Merc
Keep Rat

Over in the mixed-character-pool test campaign, a supply raid. I hate these missions; all of the peremptory missions (i.e., the ones that pop up while you're trying to do other things and you have to do them NOW NOW NOW or Movie Voiceover Guy will be... disappointed in your progress) are annoying, but the supply raids seem particularly pointless. The rewards aren't that great, you're not countering a Dark Event, the missions themselves are not very interesting, and the justification given for docking you points if you skip them—that you passed up an opportunity to Disrupt ADVENT's Operations—rings somewhat false given the disparity in size and resource base between ADVENT and XCOM. You're basically just getting your squad some experience and giving the RNG another chance to drop a Chosen and/or Ruler on them. These missions always piss me off when they come up.

This one, at least, was not one of the "run around a zombie-infested city tagging crates, while Bradford bleats endlessly at you about the ones you couldn't possibly have reached before ADVENT picked them up because your dudes do not have infinite mobility" ones, which are my absolute least favorite missions in the game. It was one of the old supply raids, from the pre-WOTC game, which are basically just kill-all guerilla ops missions with the added wrinkle that if you blow up too much stuff along the way, the not-impressive-to-begin-with completion rewards get reduced to even less worthwhile levels.

So we're out in the middle of an open patch of alien-landscape-ified ex-grassland somewhere in what used to be the American Midwest, attempting to secure a stopped ADVENT supply train. The security presence isn't too bad—couple of scrub-tier troopers, an officer, couple of Sectoids. The worst baddie that turned up in the first group was one of those nanocloud robot ninja things.

And of course then the Assassin dropped in.

The Assassin can be a problem even on a wide-open map like this, especially one with a convenient long, narrow obstacle (the train) in the middle of it, because with her bullshit mobility and at-will stealth, she can come sprinting out of nowhere, shank one of your dudes, and then use her bonus move to break LOS behind the train and stealth up again. Repeat. Repeat. And since in this playthrough she's immune to Overwatch and explosives, this can go on for... a while. Sure, you can spread your squad out until you've got eyes on most everywhere, but then they're too far away to do much in the way of mutual support. It can be a hassle.

On the other hand, she did drop in all the way at the other side of the map, which meant that even with her absurd movement rate, she wouldn't be in range to pose a threat for at least a couple of rounds. Plenty of time for us to deal with the rest of the train's security mooks and get into some semblance of a decent position. Nipa, you're farthest forward, she's probably going to target you first. Keep your axe handy. And now we wait.

And wait.

Hmm. No sign of her after two rounds. This is awkward.

In this campaign, Chris Trott from Hat Films is a Specialist who I've had going down the Combat Hacker skill line. At the time of this mission, he had just been promoted to Lieutenant, which unlocked the Scanning Protocol skill. This is a skill that doesn't really seem terribly useful a lot of the time. In the original version of the game, about all it was good for (other than increasing the Specialist's sight radius a bit) was prematurely uncovering the Faceless (shapeshifting infiltrators disguised as civilians) on terror missions. There's another thing it does, though, which was also not helpful very often in the old version, because there weren't many mobs it applied to:

It reveals invisible enemies.

The downside is that it's only got one charge, and it doesn't cover the whole map, so if you fire it too soon in a situation like this, you've blown it. Still, it's been two turns now with no sign of anybody. The map's not that big. The Assassin must be somewhere close by now. Trott? If you would be so kind.

She appeared maybe five squares away from Nipa, in prime position to attack her first thing next turn.

Or, since it was our turn now, for Nipa to go over there and chop her in the face with a Fusion Axe.

In the following passage, dialogue that actually happened in the game is in bold, while dialogue that only happened in my head is not.

TROTT uses SCANNING PROTOCOL. It's super effective!

ASSASSIN appears.

ASSASSIN
Oh, fuck my life.

TROTT
(with audible satisfaction)
Dead muthafucka.

NIPA throws her spare FUSION AXE at the ASSASSIN (which is a free action) and hits.

ASSASSIN
Is that your best? I am disappointed.

NIPA jumps over the crate she was using for cover, takes two strides, and WHACKS the ASSASSIN with her remaining FUSION AXE, but doesn't quite kill her.

ASSASSIN
Aagh! You will not do that again!

GRYPHON
(has no line of fire)
Y'know what, I think she will.

GRYPHON uses TEAMWORK.

GRYPHON
You can do this!

NIPA
(singing under her breath)
♪ I've been working on the rail-road...

ASSASSIN
Oh, fuck my life.

NIPA gives the ASSASSIN another CHOP. The ASSASSIN takes bonus damage because this is the third attack in a row to hit her, not that it matters in this case.

ASSASSIN
Impossible!

She DIES and TELEPORTS AWAY. Nipa racks her FUSION AXE on her back.

NIPA
(calmly)
Feind eliminiert.

(tr. "Enemy eliminated." There's no Finnish voice set in the game, so she speaks German. Look, it was either that or Russian.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I have a Resistance Order card, Double Agent, which gives a random chance that an ADVENT unit will join your squad on any given mission. I thought when I installed it that that meant one of the enemies would switch sides during the fight, but in fact, you start with your squad plus a scrub-tier ADVENT trooper in the deployment area. The first time that happened, I didn't actually notice until a couple of turns in, when I went to move one of my guys and was like "wait what?"

I don't have a screenshot of it, but another Stun Lancer joined us for a Retaliation Strike mission at one point. Now, given that these missions involve rescuing civilians from a settlement that is being raided by ADVENT, you would think that might cause some confusion and/or consternation, especially when he started running up to cowering civvies to trigger their run-away-to-safety script, but no! Turns out they were perfectly happy to be rescued by a completely stock Stun Lancer with no visual cues that he's on their side.

(Also amusing: if Double Agent fires on an mission where you have to EVAC, it won't end until you take your ADVENT guy with you. He doesn't appear in your roster afterward, so Matt's theory is that you drop him off at the Skirmisher farm off-camera afterward, where he can run and play with the other defectors.)

Speaking of fun with EVAC, uh, Gryph, you dropped something.

(That's from one of the "rescue a VIP and his unconscious bodyguard" missions. G roped out with the bodyguard over his shoulder, and then said bodyguard fell back into the EVAC square, still in the "over someone's shoulder" position, while Firebrand was giving the mission-accomplished speech. Fortunately, it was just a graphics glitch and did not really lead to the poor bastard being left behind.)

At the end of every month you get some status screens, showing how many missions and stuff you accomplished, how much funding you're getting, which Chosen you've discovered and what they're doing, and what nefarious things ADVENT will be up to next month. That middle screen appears every month after you first encounter one of the Chosen—even after you've tracked down and killed all three of them.

"Our top story tonight: Generalísimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

To be fair, with those three, it doesn't hurt to check every now and then. My version of Gordon Freeman has fed the Hunter his shotgun so many damn times...

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

That's nice, because it means ADVENT can't just rock up before you even get to that end of the map and murder the person you're there trying to rescue, but it's also occasionally very weird, when the tides of battle flow directly around someone you haven't gotten close enough to activate yet, the aliens ignore them, and they just stand there like they're still waiting for something to happen.

The other day in the OWaW-themed campaign, when we had killed the Assassin and the Hunter but the Warlock was still alive, he dropped into one of those missions, in a very complicated ruined-city map infested with Lost (naturally). By the time the squad got within range of him (because when the Warlock spawns he farts around at the back of the map for ages summoning exploding zombies and crap instead of advancing like the other two), we had found one of the soldiers and we knew where the VIP was (though I hadn't tagged him yet), but the other soldier was nowhere to be found.

The downside to the free soldiers in these missions is that although you get to keep them if they live, and some come preloaded with ready promotions to quite high ranks, when they spawn in the mission itself they're Squaddies with a class, but no skills and the starting weapons and armor. These are not really much good at the start of the game, but by the time your squad is equipped with plasma weapons and power armor, they're basically worthless against the kinds of enemies you're up against—and doubly so if a Chosen shows up. They're good for popping the low-level Lost (who only have two or three HP each), but that's about it. So the fact that I had an extra Grenadier on my squad wasn't much help, because he had the crappy starting cannon, but by the same token, the fact that I hadn't found the other one wasn't that big a problem, because her weapons wouldn't have been all that much help anyway.

So, the Warlock. He spawned out back of a ruined factory at the edge of the map, not unlike the scenario in which Lynne got that amazing long-range critical on the Hunter earlier in the campaign. I sent Perrine (that campaign's Templar) in to flush him out and do a bit of the old ultraviolence... and of course a huge pack of Lost spawned in the building, where they had not previously been, at that exact moment.

There was, um... lots of mayhem. In the end (after shooting about a dozen Lost; the Templar's auto pistol is not very good, but it doesn't require reloading, which is handy in that kind of situation, anyway), Perrine gave the Warlock a good chop with her plasma gauntlets, then got a free action via Teamwork from Amélie and chopped him again...

... and left him on one hit point.

Curse you, RNG, why you do this.

Templars have a thing they do called Momentum, where after a successful Rend (melee strike), they get a free move. It can only be a move, they can't take any other action, but it gives them a chance to strike and then get out of range if their victim survives or has friends. They also can pick up a skill called Parry; it's a guaranteed block of the next attack made against the Templar, but they have to use it instead of Momentum, so they can't move from where they ended up after the Rend—which is right next to the enemy they just shanked, if he lived.

Wherever Perrine went after tangling with the Warlock, she was going to have at least a couple of Lost within run-up-and-punch range, and there was nowhere she could go that would be out of his line-of-sight either, so I decided to leave her where she was, hit Parry, and hope for the best.

The Warlock had a lot of options at that point. He could have summoned a bunch of spectral ADVENT mooks, or a brace of exploding zombies. He could have used his psionic stun power, then carried Perrine off to his dread lair and forced me to undertake a tedious mission to retrieve her. He could've tried to mind control her. He could have just thrown a grenade (actually I'm not sure if he carries grenades; the Hunter does), since Parry doesn't affect AOE attacks.

What brave, brave Sir Warlock did instead was bravely run away, past Perrine, through a window, and out into the freight yard in front of the factory, where the rest of the squad was standing around on Overwatch because none of them could reach firing position on where he was. At which point Chris Barkhorn gunned him down like Atticus Finch taking out that rabid dog, only with significantly less personal regret.

I'll tell you what, the Assassin's cheaty movement rules give her the illusion of some tactical sense and the Hunter might actually be somewhat cunning, but the Warlock is as dumb as a box of rocks. He's dangerous, because his summons are so powerful if you're not prepared for them or have so much else to deal with that you can't handle them in a timely fashion, but as if to balance that somewhat, his AI seems to be no smarter than the scrub-tier ADVENT chumps'.

So anyway. Huge Templar-v.-Warlock battle in that factory that ended slightly anticlimactically. (And Parry wasn't wasted, because it saved Perrine from getting punched in the face by a Lost Brute who wandered in. Which is good, because she was pretty beat up by that point and those things hit pretty hard.

Anyway, believe it or not, this story isn't actually about the Warlock, as such. This story is about what happened after we killed him. The rest of the ADVENT on the map were all dead by that point too, so we just had to worry about the infinitely respawning zombie swarms (at least it wasn't a Horde map), but I had to send someone a block or so back uptown to go up to the third floor of a building, activate the VIP, and escort her out. While Lynne was getting on with that (because she had a grappling hook and the game's best pistol), I regrouped everybody else in the freight yard and they Prepared to Defend Themselves.

Then I remembered that second soldier we never found. Recovering them is optional, but if you opt not to do so, you don't get a free soldier and you have to live with the fact that you left someone behind to die in a zombie-infested urban hellscape. The 501st doesn't really operate that way, and the Lost were more or less keep-under-control-able, so the others fanned out to search.

Well. The five of them plus the first bonus soldier with his toy cannon searched all over that damned map. Must have taken an hour. I don't think I've ever fully revealed an XCOM 2 city map before. And there was no sign of a second soldier.

"All right, you guys, pack it in," I said, and started moving the squad toward the map pointer for the EVAC point. I thought it was out behind the building where the Warlock fight happened. Turned out it was actually...

... on the roof.

See that Sharpshooter standing there?

That's the missing second soldier.

She spawned in the EVAC square, on top of the building where the Warlock battle happened. The biggest fight in the mission took place right under her feet, and she just stood up there the whole time, invisible to the enemy and to me, accomplishing fuckall for the entire mission, waiting for someone to come and stand within two squares of her and bring her to life. Schrödinger's sniper, she both existed and did not exist until the moment one of my squaddies got close enough to her position that the game engine would draw her for me, and she would not fully exist until someone climbed up there and stood next to her.

I've seen this game do a bunch of dumb shit in the 157 hours I've played it so far, but that, that takes some kind of prize.

She even got a kill! The mission's very last, in fact. A bunch of Lost climbed up a drain pipe on the far side of the roof, in front of where she's standing, during the last round. Those squad members who could get into the EVAC square with a move left were on Overwatch, to cover those who had to use both of theirs to get into position; they hadn't all left yet because one of them ran out of movement one tile outside the square.

(Yes, I realize they could all have left, and the one who was a little behind could probably have survived to rope out next turn, but that didn't seem like something the 501st would do either.)

Anyway, the ones on Overwatch mowed down most of the zombie wave that climbed the drain, but one of them survived and ran out of movement right in front of our friend there. She could have left without shooting him, but professionals have standards. :)

When I get new squaddies as drops in that game, I redeco them accordingly, so once we got back to the Avenger, new cannon guy became:

And, in honor of her strange combination of good luck and no damn luck at all, I decided the new sniper had to be

(If you've read One-Winged Witches, that will make sense. If you haven't, the short version is that Laura is from the Magyaror (Hungary) part of Ostmark—the World Witches world's equivalent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—and when she was a rookie witch she was the only survivor of a training cadre that was mobilized before it was ready in the desperate final collapse of the empire. She's... not well, emotionally.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"What the hell, have you no sense of personal space?"

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Heheh.

I'm not sure the drop-in points in the old game are random; in the Operation Slingshot opening mission (the one in the cemetery in Hong Kong) and the mission that introduces EXALT (the aftermath of the French military convoy shootout), the alien reinforcements always seem to drop into the same squares. I played both of them enough times to know where those spots were and have someone Overwatching them the round before, which was almost not sporting. (On the other hand, fuck being sporting to Thin Men, am I right?)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'd assumed that the random maps were random drops, and the maps that were the same every time had the same drop locations every time, but you have a point.

>
> (On the other hand, fuck
>being sporting to Thin Men, am I right?)
>

Absolutely.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Oh yeah, that's true. I suspect the way it's built is that each tile in the tile set for the procedurally generated maps does have fixed spawn points, but it would be a lot harder to suss them out and predict them on those maps than it is in the ones (like Slingshot and Progeny) that are always exactly the same.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

The most fun thing about that mission as far as I was concerned was the fact that some of the forces you had to work with in that mission weren't any of your regular soldiers; they were essentially security guards, randos in blue starting-type armor with basic weapons. I liked that because the rank-and-file scrubs (meant in the nicest way :) with the IPO in UF have always been described as wearing blue outfits, so, well, it's basically them.

The best time I played through that mission, in the first EU campaign I played all the way to the end, I had one of the blue-armor mallcops go on a dang rampage, racking up far more alien kills than any of the "real" squaddies. In that universe, that lady basically saved the world.

The equivalent in XCOM 2 happens when the aliens manage to intercept the Avenger with a UFO and shoot it down with some kind of EMP weapon. You have to send a squad out to simultaneously prevent the aliens from boarding and blow up a gadget they've set up nearby to keep the Avenger's power off. In that version, you do get to pick and equip your starting squad, but Bradford keeps throwing out random reinforcements as the mission goes on.

Last time I had one of those, the first two reinforcements to emerge were a couple of people from the bottom of the soldier list. In that campaign, I didn't start with a large enough pool of custom troopers, so the starting roster included a few RNG-built ones at the end; they were still Rookies, since I'd never used them.

They did all right! Not only did they earn promotions (not hard to do when you're a Rookie, admittedly), one of them scouted the Thingy and the other was the last person back aboard, covering the withdrawal to the ramp. And they were so compatible that they came out of that one mission with a level-1 bond, to boot. Let's go D-team!

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

I'd be tempted to recruit enough rookies to fill out D-Team, and send them out there. After all, the usual reward for a successful mission is another mission, right?

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

So is "Clark Gordon" for that matter. Though more "Man of Accounting" than "Man of Bronze."

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

heeheehee.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

it's rainin' 'nades, hallelujah, it's rainin' 'nades

Although, upon reflection, if he survived and you knocked the walls down he'd probably just leave.

(Also, the Chosen are sometimes immune to explosives, which doesn't really make a ton of sense, but...)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The game crashed shortly after that (unsurprising), but it was great fun for a while tossing infinite plasma grenades. Confusing! But, fun.

* * *

"Longshot, overwatch up on that roof. Anybody around that VIP moves, drill 'em."

"Roger, commander." *kerboom*

"... the hell, Wendy? We're gonna talk about this when we get back. Fine. Sickbay, you take it instead, you're closer anyway. We're going to flush this batch out so you--"

*kerboom*

--sofaspud
--the VIP was, uh, not impressed