How to beat crashed ships?

[Quasarrgames]

Okay, so every time i make a colony in alpha 6 on randy random challenging, the same thing always happens. Somewhere between day 100 and 150, i get a small raid that i easily take care of. However, right after the raid i get a crashed ship part. After that, my colony falls within a week. This is the way i deal with it, and this is the way that my colonies always fall:

So after the previous raid there are corpses everywhere, so i spend a day or two cremating them and making sure my colonists are prepped for the assault, all the while pounding the ship with mortars.
After that i send my colonists to the ship to start the first wave of assault. I always get 3 centipedes and 2-3 scythers, and the scythers force me to retreat due to the fact that their charge lances are so powerful.
after that i recuperate for a couple days, and then i send a second assault. By now colonists are starting to mental break. the second assault usually goes okay, but at the end colonists are mental breaking left and right, and the psychic drone gets stronger. and then everyone dies or goes insane. the end.

What am i doing wrong?

[Shinzy]

Don't engage in any fights while the drone is still intact, just shell it with mortars until it's destroyed entirely, so you don't have to deal with the mental breakdowns

[Bodog999]

Normally after bombarding them for a while the mechs attack me :/ bombarding them from a distance is not the awnser for me. I normally bomb them for a few minutes with the mortarts and EMP mortars then I just shoot them to death with pusle guns

[Darth Fool]

Try sniping from a distance with M24s.  With a little bit of patience and micromanagement one can usually pick the ship apart safely outside the range of the more devastating mech weapons.

[Mikey3131]

If you keep the blasting charges in game, you can just blow it up. I place two or three around it without ever touching the ship, and nothing comes out. Then *kaboom* ship gone, just a few mechs left around.

[Darth Fool]

If you have time, you can build a wall of unpowered turrets around the ship to similar effect, setting it off with a sniper.

[milon]

@Quasarrgames, see this thread:
http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=5656.msg54486#msg54486

That should give you some good ideas.

[SSS]

Just finished my first playthrough of Alpha 6. It landed really close to my base, so I ran power lines around the ship and constructed 13 turrets. I had two guys with M-24s, two with LMGs, one with an M-16, and one with a Pila. After the first volley against the ship, I micromanaged the turrets to focus fire on the closest centipedes. The colonists focused on the scythers. I ended up taking down all of the centipedes (3) and scythers (3) with only a couple turret losses- no colonist deaths.

...I was a tad paranoid after my first try, during which more centipedes reinforced the ones from the ship (entering via an additional raid), so after restarting and taking down that raid first, I bribed the colony's favorite faction to the moon and called in three waves of additional help beforehand. My guys had already taken down the ship and it's defenses by the time they got there, but hey, you gotta cover your bases just in case. xD

Silver and metal solves everything. :3

[fatwilf]

EMP is the secret.

I took down 3 cents and about 5 scythers with no problems.

2 colonists on EMP mortars, one with EMP grendades, the rest just blasting away at close range.


All 7 of my guys walked away without a scratch.