The Valkyrie really felt like a death trap, mostly because you can't use its weaponry at all during a ground battle (the Valkyrie comes with krak missiles and craft bolter by default, but you can't use them out of a dogfight sadly)
So i manufactured Chimeras as soon as they're available for manufacturing (after the Guardsmen Strategy research if i remember well), and wow what a difference that's really the transport you really want to use (even though it's slower than a Valkyrie so i'm not sure it can reach a fast disappearing mission on the other side of the world) :
- not all your troops are stuck in the same cargo, you have your troops separated in 3 chimeras , allowing you to cover then more ground (like when using drop pods with the Space Marine faction)
- chimeras have big guns mounted on their turrets, unlike the Valkyrie that is a sitting duck , and you have 3 chimeras so it means 3 big guns that can each deliver a bunch of shots 2 times by turns each.
And thanks to those Chimera allowing me to deploy my troops without dying so much to enemy reaction fires beyond my poor guy night vision, i also managed to assault 2 Large ufo that landed .
Both times they were full of nurgle stuff.
The first one was the most easy of them, filled with guys with knife in hooded robes that transform into
Things you need to kill fast before they "nurglize" your troops when they come in contact, fortunately IG laser guns can deal with them if your Chimeras gun are missing.
There were a couple of
That were more annoying, but nothing the brave newbie troopers couldn't deal with.
The result of claiming that large enemy UFO was rather good, sadly we lost a few recruits from accidental friendly fire. The Commissar let that go because she was one of the troopers that died (was the shot really accidental, i wonder
)
I earned some stuff that allowed me to promote a trooper to Major (in the Soldiers menu, remember to check in the drop down menu the "Transformation Overview" to see what you can do with the troops) and also assign her a level of shielding (nice considering how easy to kill your guardsmen are in their puny default armor)
The 2nd large ufo was harder as there were some more dangerous nurglites in there
One type had very high HP (or armor) apparently as it took a lot to bring them down and the other ones had some summon power, as she could shoot something that exploded and created a mini nurglite, said mini nurglite hacked to death 2 of my recruits in the same turn.
Those ones have a high stealth value, i needed to be rather close to them to finally see them, they killed a bunch of guardsmen with their sniper shots..
There were also some nurgled orgryn, and i don't know what kind of weapon he was using but it was creating at least 4 grenade-like explosion on his shots, one of those guys killed 4 of my recruits in a turn.
Only 5 recruits (the now Colonel survived, i guess the extra shielding i promoted her to really helped) survived this onslaught.
But my guess is that if i had used the Valkyrie none at all would have survived as the Chimera did a good job at killing things dead to pave the way for my troopers.
IG is a very fun faction to play so far, but keeping them alive is hard (so many saving and reloading in those battles
)