Ironman: on pushing on through, squad wipes and wanting to rage quit ...
Last night, after 1500 hours of Long war 1 and 1400 hours of Long War 2 I achieved my first ever "Long War" victory by beating Long War 2 at Veteran level on Ironman.
There were many times in the campaign where I was really upset / wanted to rage quit after a bad mission. I guess we've all been there. What I wanted to show in this post was how often I had casualties, and how bad they were. I hope that this will encourage anyone having a bad day - you can recover from a pretty significant number of casualties and squad wipes and still come back and win a campaign.
If you read through the butcher's bill you'll see that I had a pretty regular disasters - high ranking squads getting it horribly wrong and coming back in body bags. I definitely did not have a run where my only casualties were low level / inconsequential. After some missions I was walking away from the PC to avoid hitting something. I died, my son died, my best AWC soldier died - it was brutal.
There's also been a lot said about "bugs". I played 214 missions in this campaign (35% Flawless, 18% with a fatality) . Of all the missions where there were casualties / wounds I wrote what I thought the reason was, including the frequent ones:
- Activated a pod by advancing too far (most frequent).
- LOS errors (my mistakes & situations where the game had a view where I thought it shouldn't)
- Should have used a battlescanner
- Needed another flashbang
- Mission too hard for squad
- One mission where I killed my own guys with a rocket deviating badly.
Real Bugs were few:
- I had one game where burning lasted one action not two - and a soldier got wounded. Seems to be an issue with setting panicked units on fire where clearing panic seems to take one action.
- I had one where a burning Naja shot my guy. 2 guys died.
- I had one where 4 guys died because I could not find revival protocol on my specialist (things snowballed when a second guy was hit and then more when i tried to pick up bodies etc). I subsequently installed unlimited icons to get rid of this problem. I probably should have saved when I couldn't find the icon and fixed the problem, but I played the missions and it went pear shaped. I think I would have lost 2 less soldiers without this bug.
- One mission where 3 guys got killed on a buggy extraction zone. Note to self watch out for overhangs of buildings when rushing to extract.
This is really a pretty small number of missions affected. There's been a lot of talk of campaing ending bullshit bugs - I didn't experience anything worse than my own stupidity, and a bit of bad luck.
I should point out that I actively developed 7 squads of 9 by the end of the campaign, and that up until around November I would do any mission that I could get that had more than 4/5 days for infiltration, which obviously helped with depth and breadth of the squad.
In all of these missions, I had
| Month | Res/Rk | Sq | LCpl | Cpl | Sgt | SSgt | TSgt | GSgt | MSgt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| June | 1 | 1 | |||||||
| July | 1 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | ||
| Aug | 2 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 2 | |||
| Sept | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 2 | ||||
| Oct | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 3 | |||
| Nov | 2 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 1 | 1 | |
| Dec | 5 | 1 | 1 | ||||||
| Jan | 1 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 1 | |||
| Feb | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
From a squad wipe point of view(5 or more soldiers dead):
-
July - 2
-
Aug - 2
-
Oct - 1
-
Nov - 3
-
Jan - 2
-
Feb - 1
TLDR; If you're struggling and having squad wipes you can come back from a lot of them. Ironman has the best stories, there are very few bugs and you can recover from a lot of dead high-ranking soldiers if you keep at it.
Posted Aug 15, 2017, 8:01 AM UTC · edited
One of the things that got me about LW2 in the latter stages of the game was replacing losses and raising new squads. How do you do it? Running even an "extremely light" mission once the M3 enemies appear tends to give you a small number of M3s, rather than a mix of 2s and 3s. I find that squaddie level soldiers are hopelessly outclassed in that situation, even with decent weapons.
Putting FNGs in with your veterans is doable, but this just seems to take forever and can put the entire squad in danger anyway.
I found on veteran that you can run a medium level squad up until october / november. This leaves a bit of space on a XL-Vulnerable mission for 1 or 2 lower level soldiers.
Squaddie technicals, assaults, rangers, shinobis or gunners can do a bit for the team if you give them a mark 2 gauntlet, decent gun, shotgun etc. Grenadiers are a "one mission" investment as I think you really want rapid deployment, but with incendiary grenades they are pretty good even without perks as long as the mission does not break down. Specialists, sharpshooters and psi do very little until they level up, so my preference is to buy them or get them as a mission reward. Unfortunately later in the game (say post oct) I was relying a lot on purchasing soldiers from black market. So it was 2-3 new soldiers a month which was not enough to keep up with casualties. That said I usually found 1-2 more as rewards during the month and made sure I did those missions.
I guess it helps in the early game to go wide - I bought every soldier I could until I had 7 full squads of 8 (9 after psi). These squads had one of each class.
By the end of the game casualties had meant that I was down to 3/4 squads of good soldiers - November and January were bloodbaths for me and I felt I was just hanging on. (Which was cool and thematic)
I would also invest intel in lower level soldiers - pick a good 6 man team, put two low level soldiers on and pay the 25 intel so they could infiltrate. But I feel its an expensive way to do it.
I paid the tactical infiltration cost at the GTS early so I always felt one slot on the team was for a development soldier.
What I would really like and is my suggestion to pavonis is to make the eliminate spy missions and smash and grabs 1/2 force level missions which would let you take squads of lower soldiers. This would need to change the spy mission to allow soldiers, and I think this would make them a bit more fun. On smash and grab I would like to see 1/2 the level enemies with 1/2 the rewards.
Yeah, in my new playthrough I figured that recruiting more soldiers early on in the campaign would be the best thing to do. Though that and buying veteran units from the black market later just means you're asking more from your already limited supply income. Then again, so too does literally everything you need in that game.
I definitely agree that SnGs need to be worked on. By the end of the game everything from small storage depots out in the middle of nowhere to avatar-project-critical facilities have elite units stationed - pretty much to the point where calling them "elite" is a tad meaningless. I feel that a better option would be to make it so that the difficulty of the SnG mission and potential reward can vary. For instance, a small depot outside of the city centre might only house a few small supply caches (nothing fancy like alloys, elerium, or PCSs) and have a correspondingly small defending force with few (if any) elite units. Raiding this type of place should give you a small reward with a low level of risk, while raiding a more secure facility close to an ADVENT security zone should offer more valuable rewards but be protected by more elite units as a result. It'd be kind of like how in XCOM:EU/EW different UFOs are harder to raid than others, but provide greater rewards as a result. You could even extend that variation in risk/reward to some of the other "routine" missions such as intel raids.
If anything, it would allow your new guys a chance to get some promotions in without sending them straight into the fire and hoping for the best.