When deploying in a mission that requires you to try and save the hostages. I think it only fair to give your troops at least a couple of turns to act before the aliens start blasting the hostages.
I have been on a few missions now were the aliens are sitting in the hostages lap and have killed them before you can get anywhere near them.
It can be the same with stuff you have to prevent from being destroyed. You are four turns out while the aliens spawn right on top of those objects.
You can’t save anything if your not there. I can only think it’s the maps being to small preventing proper spawning points for both sides.
Have also come across this kind of situation, the odds are quite stacked against the player…
However, I accidentally came across some sloppy programming logic doing one of these hostage missions.
A leader of an Independant Haven wanted me to rescue his brother who was being held by an enemy havem. When I started the mission it said in the top left hand corner to evacuate all operatives, so on the starting turn thats what I did, using dash and jump jets I evacuated all my soldiers from the map leaving the hostage alone but alive. Once all my operatives had evacuated I did the next turn. The hostage was naturally killed but the mission was deemed a success.
The game logic goes like this.
Any soldiers alive or dead, on the map when hostage is killed is mission failure.
If all soldiers have evacuated from the map and hostage is killed on the next turn then mission is a sucess!
Since the game ‘assumes’ if you evacuted your soldiers while the hostage is still alive then the hostage was SAVED regardless if the hostage is killed on the next turn!.
Oh! That’s bad. They really need to slap a fix-it note on that one. That sort of thing blows away any immersion and grinds like hell. I’m glad I’ve not come across it yet. Surly it must have been a oversight.