Part 12: Operation Agrippa's Something oughta go here
Operation Agrippa's Something oughta go here
Today it's just a short guerrilla mission. None of the Dark Events that we get to counter are particularly troublesome so I have free reign to select the mission I want based on the mission reward instead of which event to counter. That is usually pretty rare so it's a nice luxury that nets me a badly needed engineer for the Avenger. The mission itself is a display in odd game quirks when you can kind of just see but not actually see enemy pods. This has been a thing since the first game and it's always kind of weird about what happens. Being able to spot HP bars with out activating aliens is pretty cool though, and rare enough that it feels more like an unexpected bonus versus abusing some glitch or malfunctioning feature. All in all, an easy day an easy mission, even if it popped up and ruined all my plans of actually getting things done.
SPARK Aspirant skills
Bulwark vs Adaptive Aim. Well we've talked about this a lot already in the thread and Guava and I going over why each other is wrong in videos. But let's hash it out here for the sake of things.
Bulwark gives the SPARK extra armor and allows the SPARK to be used as high cover by your soldiers. A fairly solid two aspect skill choice. It is clearly the defensive choice of the two and it increases both the sparks survivability and your soldiers by allowing you to have high cover on demand in a given location. Very useful. This skill will come in useful often, anytime you need cover, and anytime the SPARK is shot at. Even with out the SPARK taking direct hits the extra survivability of the SPARK can let you park the SPARK out somewhere more advantageous than you might feel safe doing otherwise. It's a skill that will have a small but constant effect every turn its out on the field.
Adaptive Aim eliminates the cumulative aim penalties when firing your main weapon while using Overdrive. This sounds pretty great at first but there is actually a lot of set up to get full value out of it. First off is that Overdrive has a long cooldown timer. So at best Adaptive Aim will be doing something 1 out of 5 turns. Second, to get the full benefit of Adaptive Aim you need to be shooting three times, or maybe at least twice. The SPARK weapons only carry three rounds of ammo, so if you want to be firing all three shots on Overdrive you need to make sure you start the turn with full ammo. Getting the most out of an Adaptive Aim Overdrive action takes a fair bit of setting up for what is a pretty underwhelming result, ie, 2 or 3 shots with a somewhat low aim SPARK weapon. Overdrive is great, Adaptive Aim doesn't do much to add to Overdrives value. I find the majority of Overdrive actions only involve shooting once, treating it like Run & Gun with move->move->shoot or something like move->rocket->shoot, which do not benefit in anyway from Adaptive Aim.
Winner, Bulwark.