Part 14: Operation Vengeful Sleep

Operation Vengeful Sleep



Polsy



It's about time we took one alive!

Capturing aliens is always a good thing. It's an amazing boon to research early in the game, and later in the game it leads to more research and even if you already have all that R&D covered it leads to free weapons. You can always manufacture your own plasma weapons, but they're very expensive so taking them from the aliens is always a good idea.

I make capturing an alien look a lot harder then it ought to be. The damn floater kept running away and I knew that it was dangerous to chase it because of the likely chance I'd reveal more aliens. Open field captures like this one can be tricky, and worse when the alien decides to be a dick about it. Capturing aliens can be a lot easier if you find them indoors. Inside a UFO or a small building and typically you are working with much shorter distances to cover which can make capturing the alien a lot easier.

It was covered in the video but I'll spell out the numbers here as well. When capturing aliens you needs them to be at 3 HP or less. This isn't a strict necessity but Arc Throwers have a chance to work not too unlike normal shooting chances. At 3 HP the chance for a stun is 70% and the chance goes up 10% for ever point of health less the alien has. If the alien has 4 or more health the Arc Thrower can work, but its odds of working drop sharply for every point of health it has. Whittle away targets you intend to capture carefully, pistols, disabling shot, or things like suppression with the appropriate skills to carefully remove tiny controlled amounts of HP. Or, alternatively, don't change a thing in you play style and just wait for the inevitable series of gun shots to leave an alien at under 3 HP and then go run up and taze it. It really depends on how proactive you want to be about the whole capture thing.