I think any military solution needs to focus on achieving and maintaing orbital supremacy. Victories on land aren't really significant when your opponent can just throw kinetic kill vehicles at your stuff.
Depends on who can authorize the kinetic strikes, and how much they're paying attention to the war. Personally, I wouldn't give ADVENT command access to such things, if I were the Ethereals. Probably not the Chosen, either. I mean, their servants betraying them is not a new thing for the Ethereals, including at least one known Chosen who betrayed them in this setting. And I think even an Ethereal might die if they got hit with a kinetic strike. Plus, they do seem to need humanity alive, at least for the moment, due to how many bodies they go through on a regular basis, so they can't get too crazy with Rods from God.
Those are a common problems with this type of top-down controlled evil empire, honestly. If the guys in-charge are lazy or busy, it can seriously bog down decision-making, and they have to be wary of betrayal if they give their servants too much power. It's not like the Ethereals have absolutely not exploitable weakpoints in that regard.
Ethereals and ADVENT are a part of interstellar ftl capable empire.
There is no realistic method for XCOM to win other than convincing ethereals to leave them be.
Uh...that's not necessarily the case. It sounds like they used to have one, sure. But it's unclear to me if they still have one, or if they're taking their entire fleet and tech base with them wherever they go, based on what's been said in "Written by the Losers". The phrase "The Ethereals once had a major multi-system empire..." seems to indicate they either no longer have an empire, or it's grown much, much weaker.
Either way, though, their entire leadership seems to be either on Earth, or wandering around looking for more species like humanity. And their empire, whatever the size, seems rather likely to be very top-down controlled, with all the power in the hands of the Ethereals. Should we deal with the guys on Earth, it should take the guys who left about an equal amount of time to the occupation to return. So, a couple decades. Assuming they took roughly a straight-line path, of course, but I'd say they'd at least have a few years to prepare.
Given that they can't totally trust their subordinates, and their opinions on personhood, I don't see anyone but an Ethereal being able to order fleets around, though maybe they have subordinates they trust that much. I suppose the guys who left might be able to order a closer fleet to attack Earth from where they are, but they also might not. There are a lot of variables to the current situation, and we don't know most of them, so I see no reason to make any solid conclusions for the moment as to the feasibility of any plan of attack.
You mean how they R&D and build combat equipment? How they coordinate combat missions? Those aren't exactly great examples of non-combat activities.
Note that I consider Jade focusing on the war in the plane preview perfectly proper. There was no reason for her to consciously think about e.g. their relief efforts and helping independent settlements, if XCOM do that.
...Did I really delete all my comments where I say this? I guess I probably did? Yeah, no, I'm aware they're building weapons. I was going to say as much, then deleted the comments. Not sure why, though. Still technically not combat.
Hell, not even all their R&D is likely to be weapons development (medical advancements, for example), and it's entirely probable not all their coordination is going to be combat missions (infiltration, scouting, smuggling people out of ADVENT-controlled territory, though the first two are definitely more innately linked to combat than the last). Resistance efforts, like any military endeavor, require a lot of logistics and behind-the-scenes work, not all of which is necessarily focused on open, or even guerilla, combat
As to racism, while it's wide-spread in the academies, it isn't institutional. And I'm pretty sure that XCOM has a "shoot first" policy against any alien species that they encountered so far, which is a form of racism. Imagine a sectoid wanting to join XCOM and tell me with a straight face that they'd consider it.
Sectoids, maybe not, but I could see that with a couple other species. Sectoids being able to control minds kinda makes one joining a massive risk for any Resistance movement to take. But they work with the Skirmishers, so them accepting an alien Skirmisher-equivalent doesn't seem entirely outside the bounds of possibility. Might be unlikely to work out, but I could see it happening.
Agneyastra's scanners can analyze neither Elerium nor alien alloys properly, and that's what most of their tech is made of. Besides, if we had the proper tools, don't you think Agneyastra would reverse-engineer things faster than XCOM? Tech/information assimilation is one if her specialties, after all.
Maybe. But they have a decade or two head-start on her, and there's more than one of them. Plus, they have the tools for analyzing and working with alien tech, as seen by the piece of alien tech they made their base. I think a collaborative effort between her and their R&D would likely end up being even more effective than either group working alone. Also, I was more thinking about giving them better computers for faster and better modeling than scanning tools.
No, he's basing it off Jade's look from Eternity where she found out that the Ethereals are deliberately letting XCOM survive. She suspected it after the first look and got confirmation on the second.
Uh...not seeing that in the update. Like, I looked. It says they were sandbagging at first, but nothing about them keeping XCOM around now. I think I vaguely recall a WoG on the subject that backs up you, but it's not in the update. That said, even if you're correct, that doesn't mean XCOM is in as bad a situation as this one outpost, nor that XCOM is entirely screwed and unable to succeed.
This looks like trolling.
XCOM has a "shoot first" policy against the alien species they have encountered so far because the alien species they have encountered so far have been hostile. If they encounter a new kind of alien then they would probably assume that the new alien is hostile and attack but that would be because the Ethereals control the local space, alter genetics to create new creatures and have pulled tricks like that before. It wouldn't be because they believe all aliens are inherently inferior to humans or nonsense like that.
Racial discrimination and racial prejudice are also not the same thing e.g Laser hair removal is much easier for white people than black people because their skin reacts differently to light. People use Tibetan mastiffs to hunt bears rather than chihuahuas because Tibetan mastiffs are actually better at hunting bears. Note I'm not defending any self serving bullshit like white supremacy. To be specific discrimination against aliens would not be racism it would be speciesism.
Sectoids are a genetically engineered slave race completely brainwashed by master psychics that know what they are doing. The possibility that one would want to join X-COM is exceedingly remote. The probability that one would want to join X-COM and it not being a trick by the Ethereals is practically 0.
I dunno. If they're still pulling the same sh*t they did canonically with the chips in brains, or something equivalent, maybe an alien could break the brainwashing, same as a Skirmisher, by yanking the chip, or by a chip malfunction. Certainly, we know the Chosen aren't necessarily loyal, though why one of them turned so quickly on the Ethereals isn't clear. Sectoids are a huge gamble due to their psionic powers, but a Muton, Archon, or Viper, I might see them accepting. Probably only after some serious test to confirm their independence, mind you, but I could see it happening.
Ah. Good to get confirmation that their empire has crumbled, though this raises a number of questions about their infrastructure and ship-building capacity. Maybe they bring it with them, along with their alien armies? Definitely something to look into.
