My miner (also a decent shot) and my animal handler are off with all my elephants mining a mineral deposit. Then what should happen but a ship part full of angry robots falls right in front of my front-door sandbag bunker. I build more sand bags around the part itself in preparation for attacking it and pissing them off. Then, I decided to get clever, and place improved EMP mines around the ship.
Apparently the developers thought of that.
Three humanoid robots emerge from the wreck, and a single "caterpillar" heavy robot armed with an incendiary rocket launcher. One of the humanoid robots emerges right next to the colonist who was placing the mine and slices him to bits in seconds. Two more colonists are on the wrong side of my bunker, and jump behind the sandbags they were building. At first it looked like they were putting up a good fight but I'd never gone against the incendiary launcher at such close range before and its accuracy surprises me. The caterpillar lights both of them on fire with indirect hits, causing them to walk out of cover and become downed.
Meanwhile, everyone in the colony has been scrambling to the front door to join the fight. There's only one safe part of bunker accessible to them, the guy who gets there first lays down LMG fire and almost takes out a bot but then is lit on fire. Someone puts him out and takes his place, and then HE gets lit on fire too. Rescuing those two is looking dubious, much less the ones outside. For the first and probably last time I sorely regret not building firefoam mortar shells. Desperate, I tell my brain damaged* gardener to break down a section of the perimeter wall in order to save the downed soldiers outside.
At this point one of my mortar auxillaries manages to land an EMP shell on 3/4 of the robots. The rest of my troops sally forth into the open and spray the remaining bot (which is behind a sandbag) with assault rifles at close range. The plan was to down it quickly but the stupid thing had other ideas and stayed up despite being a mass of bullet holes. The other bots start waking up from the EMP and I decide to cut my losses, grab the surviving downed guy (the other had burned to death) and pull back into the orchard near the front gates. However, the gardener was exposed in the open cutting the hole in the wall so I couldn't retreat further until she was safe. I call everyone, even the untrained, to grab rifles and get to the orchard. Even my mediocre melee fighter missing her left hand I give a revolver and put her on the front line. Even this doesn't seem to be enough and the caterpillar moves into position to light the orchard on fire. I have my negotiator jump on the comms console and tell the nearby offworlders "yo, I know its midnight, but here's a bunch of money. Save our butts!"
Unfortunately, the allied fighter AI... leaves something to be desired, and doesn't really help. The gardener finally manages to open a hole and rescue the only stranded soldier who's still alive. Meanwhile my best fighter was shot in the head by a charge lance and a couple other colonists were killed. Somehow the orchard defense turns things around. With everyone in the entrance dead or evacuated my mortars switch to explosive rounds. A miracle happens and they begin landing dead on shots for the first time in their lives. The two robots that we had already wounded are both downed. Then the caterpiller decides to light my allies on fire and they *finally* decide that's their cue to attack. They bum rush the robots in melee (really bad idea) and then open fire indiscriminately into the whole mess of them. Unable to help without hitting them, my colonists just kind of watch, dumbfounded by the lack of respect for human life on display.
In the end the only medic left standing is... my gardener. But even with brain damage, she's a damn good medic; she once managed to resuscitate someone from a heart attack using herbal medicine. She bandages the worst casualties. Unfortunately this has been a really, really bad day (the alien ship is psychically making my colonists unhappy, plus she was friends with some of the deceased) and she flips out and starts punching a vitals monitor in anger. One of the casualties is a mediocre medic and still healthy enough to walk, so he starts bandaging people. The janitor is down so the the hospital is full of blood. The 3 people inside get, between them, 6 infected wounds. At this point I throw up my hands and have the medic toss a few people in cryopods and then put himself on ice. Miraculously, when the gardener calms down she manages to see to all of their infections. She did so well treating their wounds, in fact, that there's no significant lasting wounds from the fight.
Unforunately, 6 colonists are dead. Out of 18. And two of them are long-timers, one was a quick-learner and an original colonist who was good at almost everything. I think I can keep the situation together in spite of that. Usually my colonists take the bunker as one and fight enemies who trickle in, not the other way around. Without that disadvantage even my current deficit of good shooters shouldn't be crippling.
*its not an insult, a while back she was literally shot in the back of the head
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Topic: How did you last die? (Read 2376355 times)