Man I don't know if this is LW2 or what....
Had a rescue mission for a scientist, 8 man squad.
Get to the target location after killing 8 guys worth of pods.
Firebrand takes _8_ fucking turns to arrive after locating the VIP.
Kill three more spawned pods of reinforcements while defending the building where I found the scientist, for a total of 8 more kills.
Then a resistance squad from one of my resistance cells, led by one of my soldiers shows up! Yay, I actually get reinforced for once!
In the last two turns after I've popped smoke, 2 MORE pods show up, 5 guys per. This one is like a Muton, 3 Vipers and a Sectoid. After finishing them the kill count is now in the 20s.
On the last turn, another size 5 pod drops while I'm evacing off the roof. I've literally got Advent in my evac zone while my guys are ropeing out.
Mission kill count is like 27 at the end.
I dunno what it is about LW2 and scientist rescue missions but they throw fucking everything at you. 2 reinforcement spawns at a time, pod sizes of 4 to 5 and up.
Then the next mission, destroying an advent relay, I bring an under-strength squad because all my guys are committed and I was given like 3 days to infiltrate the mission when it popped. But I have to beat it because there's a Dark Event attached to the mission. Historically whenever I go in under-strength due to infiltration times it goes badly, so I'm a little worried about this mission. I manage to take 5 soldiers by burning some intel to boost infiltration and get it above 100%. Upon starting the mission I have at least 5 enemies standing directly outside the spawn point. So I sneak my guys all the way around the flank of the map and almost get pincered between a patrolling pod and a drone who is straight up just following me, nearly catching out my slowest guys. I exploit a gap in their awareness that is literally one tile wide between patrolling squads, civilians and the drone and manage to break free with everyone still concealed. I spend the next 5 turns sprinting around the edge of the map to stay ahead of the drone, get all the way to the back of the objective and smoke the two pods of 5 guys guarding it. Hack the relay, shoot down the drone when it finally shows up, wait two turns and evac out with 5/11 enemies killed and no reinforcements, no injuries.
Sometimes the difficulty in LW2 seesaws back and forth like that. Some missions (with True Concealment) you can take your time, find optimal positioning, and enjoy some drama as psychic drones keep the pressure on you to keep moving, and not having a squad of 6+ soldiers doesn't screw you. Other missions......if you're not running 8 soldiers or they aren't camped together on overwatch, good luck. I've tried those scientist rescue missions with as few as 3 guys due to infiltration times and there is simply no way they can deal with the # of reinforcements they throw at you with that few soliders. What kind of mission it is (timerless race to the evac point, locate, release and defend the VIP while you wait for Firebrand, or a very simple "find them, free them, make it to the designate evac point" mission) is rarely made clear. So if you're trying to be clever and go in with as little as possible, you can get a nasty fucking surprise when the mission starts and you discover "oh, I'm going to have to sit here for 8 turns while they throw wave after wave of reinforcements at me."
And yeah, I reload for bad turns of shooting sometimes. Had one pod in the previously mentioned mission where they dropped directly in to the middle of my overwatch. 6 guys unload on the same sectoid, and of them, one gets a grazing hit. Every other shot misses as I watch my soldiers draw a bead on the moving sectoid, then at the last second their aims snaps to where he touched down on the roof (not where he's moving) and they unload. I basically had people turning around to overwatch shoot behind themselves against a target that is now in front of them. Point blank. I reload for moments of sheer ridiculousness like that because, cmon, how the fuck do all these ranked soldiers miss point blank shots even on overwatch. I swear it was a bug because I never seen guys shoot at the origin point of a moving enemy on overwatch to that degree, where they're 5 tiles away from where they started but soldiers are still shooting at that point.
But if I had to point to the #1 thing that makes me reload, it's pod reveals. That more than anything in this game affects how likely you are to lose fights and take wounds and casualties. Engaging three pods of any decent size (LW pods get up to 6 now that I've seen) is just asking for trouble. Even under normal, non-concealed circumstances, the difference between having to deal with one pod or two in the space of one turn can be the difference between a clean mission and a bloodbath. I love assaults but they often have to hang back because in the course of doing their job they'll activate additional pods and completely fuck up a fight.
Lastly....I dunno how you're supposed to keep up with LW2 sometimes. I started with a roster of 40 guys, now up to around 60, and they are all constantly engaged in missions. I don't have enough equipment to spread out amongst all the squads, so I still have to field guys with Assault Rifles and Kelvar against Muton-tier packs. On the one hand, LW2 really solves one of my biggest disappointments with XCOM2, in that supplies MATTER, how much gear you have MATTERS. You don't just get free global upgrades to all your equipment and dismiss lower level tiers of gear the instant you upgrade past them. Every supply point counts in LW2 and you can spend a fucking life time probably doing all the Proving Grounds projects, building all the ammo variants, utility items, armor and weapons you need to outfit your force. Never mind all the research that costs supplies, Avenger upgrades, radio relays, and all that other stuff. And I love that, because it's a lot closer to original XCOM. Resources mean something rather than becoming mostly superfluous about haflway through XCOM2 if you were doing well.
On the other hand, when you've got 2 Dark Event missions that need doing, a special council AND a retaliation mission pops all at the same time, and 3/4 of your best geared soldiers are already deployed on other missions......well, there's a reason I save scum for the Geoscape too. So many missions in LW2 have secondary effects if you beat them, or, fail or ignore them, that it takes a while to read between the lines and be like "Ok, while I could go after more resistance personnel and they're giving me a ton of time to infiltrate it, mmmmaaaayyyybbbbeee I should keep my soldiers available for something that matters a little more." TBH right now I ignore 75% of the missions that pop. In an ideal world I'd do them but between the numbers of guys I have available, their notoriety, what gear is available and how much time I get to infiltrate and whether the mission is critically important, I have to especially picky about what I invest my soldiers in to. I imagine when I've built a lot of Chameleon Suits and have gotten a lot of Advanced or better Suppressors, this game is going to get a whole lot easier. But that feels so very far away right now. The Resistance is a bottomless pit of needs in LW2, and I dig it.
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Topic: X-Com Chimera Squad (Read 733812 times)