How can you say it was worth the price when you see who died?

I'm liking this game a lot and I'm not even playing it! J, shush or I'll gun you down again!

So the fight continues. New recruits are recruited and promoted. Pevil and Satis are the only two originals left, but they both kick serious ass. Satis is an artist with his laser sniper rifle, pulling off consecutive head shots and whittling down the enemy with abandon. Pevil, meanwhile, is excellent at sprinting around the battlefield and laying waste to the enemy with the plasma rifle.

Several missions go fairly well.
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The new rookies are getting promoted, but life on the battlefield is getting harder. Even with most of the infantry wielding light plasma rifles (and Pevil wielding a regular), the enemy are getting tougher. They also hit harder. Though Pevil finally gets her promotion to Colonel, Derf dies... again... as do J and Ox. And again. And again.

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Ganz is actually becoming a major asset at this point. So, with the unfortunate and untimely deaths of so many soldiers, Satis, Pevil, Peltz and Ganz are the glue holding the squad together.

On a positive note, I've now built a psionics lab. It takes 10 days to evaluate a candidate's psionic abilities, which is an eternity. I immediately put Peltz, Satis and Pevil through the tests, which makes the next few missions rather difficult, since I'm missing my heavy-hitters. Of the 3, only one has any psionic ability. Satis.

I haven't taken him into combat yet, but I am very much looking forward to exploiting his new skills.

Haha, Satis surviving this far and actually being the only one with Psionic abilities is almost too good to be true. I have strong suspicions of you using me as a meatshield to cover for his escape!

Anyway, Pev seems to be quite the killer and Satis a clinical sharpshooter. Do you have any idea how the psionics will complement his class role? Can he do them long-range? Or does he just become a Psionic (not sniper)?

Poor Derf biting it over and over again. I guess things are only gonna get worse for me and him at this point, with the opposition being even more brutal. Let's just hope one of my incarnations turns out to be a kick-ass psionic or something.

Keep it coming! Also, what difficulty are you on? Are you on ironman mode?

I'm playing on normal mode without ironman. I'll be replaying it on classical with iron man turned on. In defense of my difficulty settings, I've never reloaded a save, though I occasionally made a save when the mechanics weren't entirely clear.

For instance, if you want to capture an alien, you have to be close and use the arc thrower. But until you're close, you don't know what your hit chance is. Some aliens can't be stunned that way, and most have to be in a weakened state. Still... even with stuff like that, I never ended up reloading.

Regarding Satis, I still haven't put him in combat, but your psionics don't affect your primary role. I'm still a fully leveled sniper...the psionic tree is a secondary skill tree you can level up to unlock additional in-combat skills.

Cool. I'm guessing the late game is too spoilerish for many new updates on your progress? If so, thanks for not exposing me to them haha.

lol... blame me being lazy among other things. :p I completed the game on normal mode. It's interesting. I won't spoil it, so there's not much I can really say.

I did restart with classic and iron man, but haven't played too much. The difficulty level is significantly higher. In the first mission, if an alien was in half cover, my rookies with their rifles never had more than a 45% chance to hit. Even if they were on the other side of the same cover. I lost 3/4 of my squad on that first mission. Once I can, I'll unlock automatic promotions to squaddie from the officer training school or whatever it's called.

At any rate, flanking is very important now, far more than it was in normal mode.

Do you read ctrl-alt-del()? There were quite some pointers there for Classic Ironman.

thanks for the link. I'll definitely check it out.