Have decided to engage the mech core. I don't honestly know if it's a good idea. I've been told the rewards are either disabling all mechs forever (cool, but kinda boring as mechs are by far the most challenging enemy in the game) or a pretty shitty buff to the mechanitor (really? is it at least permanent?)
So far we had no trouble with the small outposts. Our melee squad simply facetanks the bullets with their shield belts and destroys everything. I'm only moderately worried about the "mechhive birther"s that are in the middle there; I wonder if they produce a raid's worth of mechanoids at once? That'd be cool.