Early Abduction mission on my latest game. I've got a Corporal Sniper with squad sight, a squaddie heavy, and two rookies. One has my medkit and the other has a shotgun and arc thrower.
I've modded the game to allow rifles to all soldiers and shotguns to rookies and supports. I also have several Second Wave options enable, most notably for this mission Damage Roulette, which lowers the minimum damage weapons can do. It might also raise the cap, but I haven't seen that yet.
In any case, we're in a construction yard. No real good spots for my sniper, but I set him up in a corner and hope for the best as we search for aliens.
We soon find a pack of three sectoids right ahead of us in an incomplete concrete structure. We get into a firefight which goes poorly. By Heavy blasts one of them and most of their cover with a rocket, but the medic rookie is taken out by a crit. The heavy also gets shot twice, but for low damage and manages to survive with a single hit point left.
We jockey for position a bit and I have the shotgun guy move up despite some reaction fire. The sniper takes out one alien and the other is open for the next turn, but moving up the shotgun activated the next batch of aliens.
I stun the remaining alien near us and move to deal with the next batch. Sadly, they're behind a building and my sniper can't get a bead on them, so I move him up to the top of a small building with a pile of cinderblocks for cover. My heavy goes around the left and my shotgun the right.
We blast the group hiding back behind the building, but the sniper gets flanked at one point and takes a nasty hit, dropping him to 1 hit point. We also activate another group on a building across from the one the sniper is on.
A nasty firefight ensures, but we manage to take two of them out with no problems. The last one calls for help and runs off.
My shotgun runs up onto that building and takes him out, but we now have three more aliens to deal with.
The quickly take out the shotgun guy, and I'm left with two badly injured soldiers who literally can't take any more punishment.
While my heavy reloads the sniper trades fire with them.
Then one sectoid mind-boosts the other. I see my chance for victory. If I can take out the booster, the boosted one will die as well!
I have the Heavy run over to the side and flank the booster. If she kills him, we win. If she fails, she's toast.
She hits but only for 2 damage, not enough to kill it. Of course she is promptly gunned down.
I have one shot left at this, and have my sniper throw a grenade at the wounded sectoid. Apparently the blast radius wasn't quite correct, because while it showed the alien just inside he didn't take any damage. My sniper was killed the very next turn.
Total wipe. And, kind of my fault, since I really should have run the sniper around for that grenade to make sure it would be good. But it
looked like it would just work from where he was.
*sigh*