Final mission DEFEATED. Earth SAVED. Satisifcation level: 100%.
How it went: Oh god the fucking bugs on that mission. I swear to god I think the enemies started hacking my computer itself towards the end. Fucking strobe-lights and the level just generally collapsing into something to give an epileptic person an episode. Just like, nasty shit.
It went extremely well besides that though. I would have breezed through it if I had not
seriously underestimated how close together the pods were, and often I would, despite taking precautions to the contrary, activate a pod on my
last move. Over and over. Fortunately, I managed to handle it well despite that. I don't regret my roster choices at all now. Bringing a Medic would have robbed me of the powers of my Combat Specialist, who really pulled his weight on this one: Shutting down a Sectopod and an absolutely crucial Capacitor Discharge on a couple of Codices. I did miss him when I had some acid troubles, but overall a good addition to the team (beside, the medic got his moment to shine in the penultimate mission). Psi-Ops did her thing well, Null Lance is just wonderful. My Bladestorm did manage to come in handy though: Chrysallids, her name was death.
Spoiler details:
I liked the Commander Avatar. It really cleaned house when I needed it to. Dimensional Rift just crushes the opposition, Null Lance is beautiful guarenteed damage, and Mind-Control is always there to turn things around in a pinch. I was able to keep the enemy Avatars mostly harmless: they never really did anything other then shoot (and usually miss), and teleport all about. Frankly the Andromedans gave me more trouble. I liked the ending cutscene a fair bit. I suppose TFTD is on the market. I'm still vague on what the Ethereals wanted, but at least it was a lot more defined then last time.
Time to play some multi-player, then start thinking about A): What mods to use for my new game (and whether to go for Commander or Ironman, or both), and B): what
I what to mod.