I realize I'm basically turning this thread into my own personal Long War blog, but it's exciting shit and maybe I can interest more people in giving the mod a try.
So I raided a landed scout and had my first encounter with what is referred to as a trap mission. Despite the fact that small UFOs are pretty tiny, they must have had that motherfucker packed like a clown car because this was easily the roughest mission I've ever had, and if the last activated pod had decided to just bum rush forward to flank my position instead of trading shots and grenades at range, I'm pretty sure I would have had my first squad wipe. My biggest problem with the mission was the fact that I took a well balanced capture team because Long War pretty much requires that you have a steady income of captured aliens. If I had taken a dedicated kill team like what I take to terror missions, things probably would have been much easier. If I'd taken a couple of low ranks to level up, I'm pretty sure I would have had a squad wipe, that's how narrow a margin this was.
First pod was TWO Sectopods and 4 drones. I took out the drones on my opening barrage since they rushed forward into range of most of my squad, but the Sectopods refused to advance. This actually worked out well since I was able to just duck my assault out, take a shot, and duck back out of LoS, while barraging them with a couple HEAT rockets from my javelin rocketeer.
Couple turns later, a scanner revealed the next pod which was5Outsiders and a Sectoid Commander, and to make matters worse, I prematurely activated them trying to get my rocketeer into a better position. Between flashbangs and suppression I didn't take any hits the first round of the firefight, but then the Sectoid Commander mind controlled my Sniper. I aggressively ran my psychic shotgunner scout and my assault forward to kill the commander immediately, triggering the third pod!
5 Seekers, led by an incredibly tough Seeker Navigator. Navigators are basically a midpoint between a squad leader and the full on boss creature like the picture of the giant sectopod I posted a wee bit up the page. Or maybe it was a full on boss Seeker. All I know is, it came out of stealth with an assload of hitpoints and damage resistance and started strangling my scout. I had a couple others get strangled immediately, including my HEAT gunner officer, who turned out to be just barely out of LOS for anyone else in the squad to immediately get to, which made busting up the other Seeker strangles much harder since they get a DR bonus while they're strangling. Long story short the mega seeker that was strangling my scout held the strangle for a couple rounds and got him down to 1 hp before I finally smoked him.
At some point while mopping up the seekers, I activated the single Outsider who was piloting the scout, and smoked him with two shots from Zhang, my MSGT assault. Regrouped the best I could. Now my big problem was the fact that I've gone through all 5 medkit charges that I brought, and I'm playing with Red Fog activated so any more wounds I take will make those dudes combat ineffective.
I know (what I hope is) the last pod is floaters based on the alien noise they make, and sure enough it's not only floaters, its 6 heavy floaters. If they just bull forward with grenades and flanks I'm looking at a squad wipe, but thankfully as I posted earlier they tossed a couple grenades but just shot it out at range, and while I suffered a couple bad wounds, no critical wounds/deaths, which I count as a major victory on an Ironman trap mission.
Shit is intense!