Weekend offline with XCOM

As the title suggests, i have been offline over the weekend. At least as far as gaming anyway. This was because one of the powerline network adapters i use to hardline my rig to my router went kaput. Thankfully Steam now gives the option to start in offline mode if it doesnt detect an internet connection rather than just locking you out, so i decided to continue my XCOM:EU Long War mod campaign.

I was ending my second month after what I thought was a good start, id even managed to do a terror mission without beam weapons. Then I get another terror mission, this time in Brisbane, on the military base map, with over twelve Chryssalids and still without beam weapons. You can guess how that went.

At this point I'd like to say something that will probably turn up some noses; I reloaded the last XCOM HQ autosave, adjusted the squad to be long range heavy then had another go. The Skyranger dropship landed at the police station instead and my squad got swarmed from the front door by the Chryssalids, again.

I remembered that terror missions give you a few days to do them so i decided to advance time & perhaps get some of my higher rank troops off of downtime. All i got was a bunch of my interceptors shot up, Australia withdrawing from the council and an abduction mission in Brazil.

On arriving at a fuel station somewhere Brazil, my squad deployed in good order while approaching the diner and kiosk. Next thing I know, I've lost 2 of my guys to Mutons, leaving the other four to crack at them with their guns. Now against Mutons, I may as well have given them Nerf guns for what it's worth. My guys were dead before they could reach the Skyranger for extraction.

 So I deleted that game, I'd got myself stuck in a corner that I couldn't get out of. Since Mutons had now shown up, they would be in pretty much every mission and I could not hurt them with what I had. I couldn't build laser rifles, despite researching them, as to do so required 15 engineers on staff and I had 12. I couldn't build a workshop as I didn't have the power and construction on my thermogenerator was still 3 weeks away from been completed. Those of you that have played the Long War will understand due to the extended construction times and the rate that jobs come up that my troops would be protein goop long before I could possibly begin to equip them.

I have started a new campaign which i will cover in a series of posts, each post covering a week or two of in game time. I will also be going through the different mechanics of the mod compared to vanilla XCOM. This time around I'll be rushing to 'pew pew lazor' beam tech and also, the steam vent is easier to get to.

If you would like your name, or someone else's, to be given to my soldiers when they have ranked up to squaddie then please list in the comments below. I'm not doing ironman due to the UI sometimes going a bit wiggy  and then I can reload should a misclick happen, however I will accept defeat when it happens for the good of the funnies.

Signing off.