Breaking news at this hour:

The other half went reasonably smoothly as well. Her idea of summoning reinforcements was to call in a couple of Chryssalids that ported in right next to Dr. Doom and Marishka—which worked out for them about as well as you would expect, given that those two are our melee specialists—and her battery charger thingy proved extremely susceptible to being blasted all to shit with a beam cannon, leaving her standing there with her dick in her hand about six fewer health than the max damage Marishka's fusion blade can do.

Oh yeah, and her habit of going into stealth and ignoring overwatch worked out markedly less well with a Specialist who knows Scanning Protocol on the squad. :)

So that's one, and before I called it a night this evening, I launched the equivalent mission to crash Starscream's crib. Don't know if I'll get back to that tomorrow, but everybody's in position to start ransacking the joint as soon as I do.

In between, with everyone on the A-team exhausted from taking out Blackarachnia, I sent Hat Films & Friends in to knock over the original ADVENT blacksite, which, between one thing and another, I had never quite gotten around to doing. (War of the Chosen has a few optional starting configs, similar to the "Second Wave" options that Enemy Within added to the startup screen for the original game, and I'm playing with the one that makes the Project Avatar doom counter 24 boxes long instead of 12.)

That went... not entirely smoothly, but nobody died! On our side. Lots of somebodies died on the other one. Of special note: the Shield Bearer who got 86ed by his own Heavy MEC pal. Nice hacking, Gordon!

And afterward, Trott and Smith were friends, which meant I couldn't resist throwing a bit of Hatter dorkiness on the poster.

In between that and launching the Hunter mission, we had a couple of routine missions, one of which was kind of annoying, since it was one of those stupid "pick up crates that are mysteriously lying around a ruined city" ones and, as always with those, there were zombies a-go-go. Worse, most of the A-team and Hat Films were still Tired from the Assassin job and the blacksite raid, so I ended up sending a fairly ill-assorted group without much of a theme, most of them toting borrowed equipment. I did not have high expectations for that mission.

Well, friends, I'm here to admit that I was wrong about something. When the stars align,, if you get the right mission on the right map, late enough in the game that your guys have decent weapons and decent upgrades on those weapons, a useful palette of skills, and a trick or two...

... I almost can't bring myself to type this...

... the Lost can be pretty fun.

One of the many Modern Zombie tropes they conform to is that they're attracted to loud noises, particularly explosions (much as they are in Left 4 Dead). After the first time you fight them, there's a sonic gizmo you can research that exploits this further. In certain situations, both of these techniques can be combined to extremely good effect. For instance, on this particular Hijack the Chests mission, the last ADVENT pod was a couple of advanced troopers (standard chumps, just with more HP and a point of armor) and an Archon (badass alien, looks like the hood ornament from the Reticulan equivalent of a 1920 Pierce Arrow). They were clumped up in the ruins of a department store, but even one of Otto's plasma grenades couldn't kill any of them, let alone all.

However, it could knock them all down to a handful of HP and interest the approaching horde of Lost in their location more than ours, a change of priority that Asuka was then able to emphasize by tossing one of the sonic gadgets in there next to the Archon...

... at which point we could all sit back, relax, tag nearby crates, and let a couple dozen zombies beat the aliens to death for us. When it was all over, they'd killed enough of them, and gathered them together well enough, that Mercier could wipe the remaining Lost out with a Void Rift and voilà, mission complete.

Between that, and the yes-I-am-a-big-enough-man-to-admit-it exhilarating last-stand-ish thing the gang fought with a previous wave of Lost in the parking lot of said store (before tripping the Archon pod), I'm... well, not completely sold, but I have no trouble saying out loud that that particular mission was a lot more fun with the zombies than it would've been without it. When your guys have guns with expanded magazines and autoloaders, you can stretch that "free action on kill" business out almost indefinitely, and that last encounter was comedy gold.

Although having gotten that much action on a simple shopping trip did strike whichever squad member designed the after-action poster as more than a little bit silly.

--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.