Hi, all.
I'm on my first playthrough of Xenonauts, Veteran difficulty with save-scumming, as preparation for an Iron Man playthrough.
I've noticed that in UFOs with teleporters between decks, aliens like to surprise me jack-in-the-box style if my squad approaches a teleporter pad. I suppose it's using similar AI behaviour to the aliens that hang around the door of a UFO, waiting for a rookie player to bring his squad right up to the door.
This isn't too much of a problem with shooty aliens, because I generally throw a smoke onto a group of soldiers as they approach a teleporter. But Reapers are different, because their melee attacks aren't affected by smoke (I assume) and always hit (I assume). Both times a pop-up Reaper came through a teleporter in my current game, it died to reaction-fire, but I couldn't help feeling that I'd avoided losing a soldier only due to luck.
The best tactic I have developed so far for foiling these surprise attacks is selecting two guys with the best available armour and high TUs, and sending them through the two teleporter pads, looking around a bit (sometimes there are no aliens), immediately going back through the teleporter, and remaining on the two pads. Fortunately, this doesn't allow the aliens to telefrag my soldiers. After that point, I can take my time arranging my gadgies around the teleporters so that I can send them through together and deal with any camping aliens. This is not without risk, but in my experience, alien reaction-fire that hits and manages to kill a soldier is rarer than dying to a jack-in-the-box alien who shoots at point-blank (although it's much higher risk in the early game when you have poor armour).
Does anyone else know of any better tactics for dealing with this situation?
How exactly does reaction fire work? Do aliens/soldiers get a roll for every tile that an enemy moves in their line of sight, and is it affected by distance? I noticed the modifier depending on the weapon type.
ps. It would be amusing if it were possible to send armed C4/grenades through a teleporter. But alas, it only seems to work for soldiers and aliens.