In my last mission I run into situation where 2 Sirens comes out from nowhere and take control of 2 soldiers instantly.
This leave me only with 67% of my force. There’s no way how I can kill it with only four soldiers, moreover they were with 2-3 Artrons support. Even killing head is superhard sometimes, furthermore it not release my soldier from possesion.
Next turn they take control another 2 units and left me only with two soldiers.
There’s just situation where either I should make “a-strike” and instantly kill Sirens to prevent this shit otherwise they make same to me decreasing my force strench with every turn I not manage to kill Siren.
Yes, I can play supercarefully moving squad “square by square” with overwatching on every single corner, but such gameplay is just booooooooooring.
Possible changes:
Every creature can possess only one soldier at all, it’s already very punishing, I lose 17% of my force for few turns.
Ability to counter possessions, mental shield or ability to use something to take it down
There’s shouldn’t be backfire from other soldiers when possessed soldier shoot. I don’t see any logic here.
It’s normal. Don’t see why it must be changed. If 4 soldiers can’t kill even one Siren than it’s your mistake and nothing more. Also, there are bionic head that prevent mind control
Because of that I research bionic clarity head through missions in the beginning, and I provide it to my soldiers asap, except snipers , in this case I prefer accuracy through SYN armors, until end of the game, final mission, 9 soldiers with clarity head
I understand that you discover game right now, so please don’t tell that tough medium alien enemy is broken. It is already nerfed significantly to what we had after release.
Real problem is small size of the squad and high cost of replacing lost soldiers, but that doesn’t mean that sirens are completely broken.
You don’t have to crawl on the map just keep your guys not far away from each other, so they can cover their backs and kill immediate threats. Just like Magor said if you can’t kill at least one siren with your remaining 4 soldiers then you do something wrong.
The more units they possess the faster your squad will regain control over controlled soldiers. So there is no need to limit units controlled per controller.
there is bionic head which prevents mind control completely,
berserkers at some point also have skill which makes them immune,
with priests you can regain control (control them back),
with high enough WP can prevent Siren from mind controlling your units, just don’t spam abilities and kill some enemies first so Siren will have lower WP than your soldier.
and finally if you have snipers just shoot at siren’s heads, that effectively prevents them from mind controlling your units
To that I can agree or at least let us control when return fire work.
Did you ever consider firing a virus weapon at a Siren? They rely on Will Points (WP), which may be high at around 30, but is their weakness to exploit. The virus weapons reduce WPs. Or perhaps soldiers with the virus ability and multiple burst weapons like a shotgun etc?
With one of these guns, they’re also incredibly easy to capture assuming you have brought some ranged stun weapons too. Some of the equipment in PP needs consideration to understand the design purpose of this quite complex game.
Sirens are manageable now but I am still not sure I would call them “fun”. There’s something about bullet sponge enemies that just isn’t fun to fight in any game.
Also, it’s pointless advising on equipment like virus rifle and bionic head to defeat the Siren. You won’t have access to these when you first encounter them.
Destroying the Siren head is the only viable option for early encounters.
Ok, I see there’s a plenty things how I can deal with strong enemies.
But the problem is I don’t have bionics and anything else except starting weapons and armor on soldiers.
And there no indication what “level” I need to deal with specific mission, why game thrown me into this before I have normal ammunition. I just see that I have to do something in account to decrease pandoravirus level and trying go on every single mission available once my soldiers fully healed.
For that you can either use something to shred the armor (grenades, hell cannon, deceptor, serker shred armor skill), use melee or bash (a very effective technique is jet jump a heavy with Brawler and high strength, bash the Siren [damage from bash is weight of weapon * strength, so using a hel cannon to bash with 20 str and Brawler does 150 dmg] and if she isn’t dazed or there are other enemies around, cast war cry.
If you shred the armor, they go down very easily with an AR (can be as little as 2-3 bursts) or shotgun (no more than 2 shots).
Also, a Siren MCing a unit or even two is not the end of the world.
I covered them in my guide, but I didn’t update to include the nerfs to Sirens from last patch.
Edit:
And that’s all you need, especially for the first Sirens that you meet. The problem with Sirens, as with many other things in the game, is that PP does a poor job of explaining its fairly complex mechanics. And by the time you learn them, it decides to “reward” you with Terminators that don’t require any tactical thought, but that’s another story…
The first missions can have Tritons, Arthrons with golden acid grenade launcher and Sirens. Even if there is no mist within 3000 km. No lairs exist to have spawned them. That’s unfair to a player with little or no experience, let alone fire power. However, the roadmap indicates this will be addressed.
Yes, I understand the problem of injured soldiers requiring time to heal. My personal solution is to really focus on buying and having a few spare soldiers to swap out if there are too injured.
But, use medkits before you finish the battle to heal injuries and then they can go straight back into combat. Soldiers don’t need to be 100% perfect with health and always carry 2 medkits - they really are your best utility.
But the biggest enemy in the game is time! While time ticks forward, the enemy is progressing. Be very efficient with time and don’t just let the clock run.
Maybe I am not playing the game as well as you but (99% of the time) you cannot kill a Siren in one turn when you first encounter them. Shredding armour with grenades, bashing, shotgunning at close range all require you to put soldiers close to the enemy and is way too high risk to be viable (at least in an ironman game).
Again, the only viable counter is disabling the head on the first turn. At the point Sirens appear, you can usually do this in one turn with a sniper and quick aim. Two snipers are usually necessary control risk.
All too often the Siren is no fool and takes cover after it mind controls. Especially now that it can only pull off MC once per turn. Are they still able to MC without line of sight? Also pray that it’s not one’s snipers that get MC’ed.
If you let your sniper become MCed that is mostly the player’s fault. The sniper shouldn’t be closest to the enemy. Worst case put another soldier close to the Siren as a sacrifice.
Like I said, I don’t think Sirens are excessively hard anymore. Just not particularly fun either.
I play HonestMan, which is ironman but restarting the mission when bugs and such. Also, I play with a lot of restrictions (like not using skills more than once per turn, keeping speed 20 or below, and a few others). And I have been playing since release for about an average of 1 hour a day so I have gotten pretty good at the game, that’s true.
When it comes to Sirens, what happens is that when you spot one, your impulse is to deal with it ASAP, because it can do MC and everybody hates that. So typically you engage it at fairly long range, using snipers, casting quick aim twice and aiming at the head, because SR damage is too low to kill it.
Once I couldn’t do that because I self restricted myself to using each skill only once per soldier, I had to come up with a different way of dealing with them - at least in the early game. (Later on I can kill them at any distance anyway no matter what self restrictions I apply because of the overflow of SPs, skills, equipment).
It turns out that the easy way to deal with Sirens for me is to not engage them until I can finish them handily in one turn at close range, even if they get to MC someone. So I do kill them in one turn (and usually with very little trouble) in the early game, just not in the first turn.
To be true they always control one of my soldiers. They are too fast and use cover too well to keep them away and kill on the distance (unless you use super skills). I let them do that and then all my soldiers hunt that siren. Next I deal with other aliens.
Not necessarily true. Especially in some of the New Jericho maps where the Siren can appear on the flank. Comes around the corner of a building, mind controls and then retreats back, totally out of any unit’s LoS.