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.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.