Enemy within is really fucking good though. My only real complaint after dumping hundreds of hours into it is that the difficulty curve (which makes or breaks these kind of games) is a bit screwed up. The start is too hard, the end is too easy. I need to play impossible to get a fun challenging game, but first mission and month 2 become super RNG:ey. I really hope they get a good difficulty curve out of xcom 2 because it's so god damn important.
Other than that I really hope they keep the tight design with few meaningful choices. I know a lot of people like it but I don't really want to manage 30 soldiers, 15 planes and 18 missions.
honestly at this point I've come to the conclusion that XCOM itself is a bad game because there always being a minimum 10-20% chance that, no matter how well you position and strategize, one of your soldiers just randomly dies in a round doesn't make for a fun game. Yeah, you can rush armor and use vests and stuff so you don't die in one hit, but then you don't have frag grenades to bail you out of rough activations or laser guns by the time you hit enemies that you really need them to kill in a reasonable amount of time
I'd much rather the aliens be a little more accurate and do a little less damage because getting one-shot just feels awful. It'd also make for better macro strategy without the fatigue system because you'll have naturally non-lethal wounds more often that force you to have a deeper roster.
Basically what I'm getting at is that for a strategy games having life or death mostly reside on literal coin flips in the majority of situations is dumb
Normal UE/EW really isn't like that except maybe the first few missions. Once you get MECs and smoke grenades you're pretty golden and those come early. And before that hunker/snipers/grenades are still amazingly effective.
If you're having trouble in the early game with die rolls you're probably not hunkering or dashing enough or suppressing enough.
Edit: I don't want to say that EW doesnt have some randomization and that its early game isn't brutal but to say it's all random isn't quite right
honestly at this point I've come to the conclusion that XCOM itself is a bad game because there always being a minimum 10-20% chance that, no matter how well you position and strategize, one of your soldiers just randomly dies in a round doesn't make for a fun game. Yeah, you can rush armor and use vests and stuff so you don't die in one hit, but then you don't have frag grenades to bail you out of rough activations or laser guns by the time you hit enemies that you really need them to kill in a reasonable amount of time
I'd much rather the aliens be a little more accurate and do a little less damage because getting one-shot just feels awful. It'd also make for better macro strategy without the fatigue system because you'll have naturally non-lethal wounds more often that force you to have a deeper roster.
Basically what I'm getting at is that for a strategy games having life or death mostly reside on literal coin flips in the majority of situations is dumb
A solider dying doesn't mean you die though. Lose is part of the game and can be mitigated by having a back up squad.
No. It is bad. It's 100% super poorly designed in many ways. Mechanics aren't consistent. The game punishes you for no reason with no recourse. The design around having "not having one way to win" gets replaced with having one way to win. The enemy are given combinations of abilities which are not fun or fair and the game is made hard for the sake of it being hard.
There are too many disparate and pointless mechanics that don't need to be included. Much of the difficulty in the game is built around enemies for which there are no tactical options but the rng to deal with.
It's just there is no other XCOM out there that can offer replayability. Core EW is just too easy/not enough tactical options at the start. It's short and there isn't enough strategic paths to make it an interesting optimization project anymore.
So we play long war.
How is rushing laser cannons only one way to win? That's a tiny fraction of the game.
And you don't even need to do that if you tweak the air war slightly
Call me crazy, but if you have to "tweek" the game past it's in game metrics to get it to work right there is a fundamental problem with your game.
That having been said, Xcom's first few months are ridiculously swingy; I'm playing the game with a buddy and we've had idiotically good fortune. Stuff like Russia requesting a sattelite in the first month and offering 200 fun bucks as a reward inside of the first 10 days... which immediately went towards getting a third sattelite uplink going.
Meanwhile, I'll be playing another game where my team is limping home from the base assault and a terror mission will fire up on a continent that was in the red.
No. It is bad. It's 100% super poorly designed in many ways. Mechanics aren't consistent. The game punishes you for no reason with no recourse. The design around having "not having one way to win" gets replaced with having one way to win.
Having re-played that horrible base defense and won, I'd have to agree. And the one strat is "do everything":
If you don't build enough labs early on your research will fall way behind, and you lose
If you don't build enough satellites, you won't have enough money or alloys from shooting down UFOs to continue, and you lose
If you don't rush laser cannons so that your interceptors can actually shoot down those UFOs, you lose
If you don't keep a good mix of soldiers in reserve and make sure to rotate rookies in for training missions you'll hit a fatigue spiral when you need your A team most, and you lose
If you don't find ways of coping with enemies with ridiculous amounts of DR, you lose
I think the chief problem with Long War is that is straight up doesn't tell you shit. Important shit. Like that chrysalids can have lightning reflexes now, or that berserkers have jumpy legs, or that outsiders regenerate, or that some floaters/mutons have covering fire, or that heavy floaters have bombard, and not knowing any one of these things can and will result in a soldier death, panic spiral, squad wipe and subsequent campaign loss. This is not a mod to play in ironman mode, this is a mod that just when you think you're doing well throws you a tactical curveball that isn't necessarily impossible to beat, but probably means you need to retool your entire squad from whatever it is right now to survive. But at the same time the game will also throw you strategic curveballs on the geoscape, and if you fuck those up you might have to restart your entire campaign. This is why I've come to think of Long War not as a challenge of skill that can be beaten by being good enough at the game, but simply a puzzle that can be beaten by anybody who invests enough time into putting in the necessary trial and error to beat it. I've lost campaigns to all of the bullet points above, but I get a little further each time.
The highest base crit chance you can get it 20%. Iirc. And hunker makes you immune unless you're flanked so go ahead and hunker.
You are going to be forced into taking high cover hits in the early game, the way it works in EW makes it very swingy and RNGey especially because of how hard the early game is in general compared to mid game.
I've talked about this in xcom thread before but for the nth time rushing satellites isn't the only or even the best way to win... This game does not railroad you into one decision.
Its a pet peeve for me when it came to comments about xcom, complaining about having to build satellites is like complaining about being forced to build workers in starcraft. And it's even viable to not rush satellites, on impossible no less.
Jake in the Firaxicon talk mentioned the strategy game and how they've opened it up a bit, its more like a competitive board game where it doesn't quite hide the fact that the aliens are also trying to win. Hopefully that helps with the difficulty curve. I do hope that they focus on tightening up the later game, I don't really like Long War's solution of basically cranking the length and difficulty up to eleven after the 3rd month or so, but its progression from early game to mid is a lot stronger than base EU.
Yeah I really hope they nail the flow. The whole thing with you having to prioritize between stopping alien advancement or going to grab some loot/missions for yourself sounds great.
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OnTheLastCastlelet's keep it haimish for the peripateticRegistered Userregular
honestly at this point I've come to the conclusion that XCOM itself is a bad game because there always being a minimum 10-20% chance that, no matter how well you position and strategize, one of your soldiers just randomly dies in a round doesn't make for a fun game. Yeah, you can rush armor and use vests and stuff so you don't die in one hit, but then you don't have frag grenades to bail you out of rough activations or laser guns by the time you hit enemies that you really need them to kill in a reasonable amount of time
I'd much rather the aliens be a little more accurate and do a little less damage because getting one-shot just feels awful. It'd also make for better macro strategy without the fatigue system because you'll have naturally non-lethal wounds more often that force you to have a deeper roster.
Basically what I'm getting at is that for a strategy games having life or death mostly reside on literal coin flips in the majority of situations is dumb
curious how often you hunker down
am betting it is a low percentage of the time
meanwhile i hunker all the time.
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mastertheheroProfessional Video Editor & Book AuthorRegistered Userregular
honestly at this point I've come to the conclusion that XCOM itself is a bad game because there always being a minimum 10-20% chance that, no matter how well you position and strategize, one of your soldiers just randomly dies in a round doesn't make for a fun game. Yeah, you can rush armor and use vests and stuff so you don't die in one hit, but then you don't have frag grenades to bail you out of rough activations or laser guns by the time you hit enemies that you really need them to kill in a reasonable amount of time
I'd much rather the aliens be a little more accurate and do a little less damage because getting one-shot just feels awful. It'd also make for better macro strategy without the fatigue system because you'll have naturally non-lethal wounds more often that force you to have a deeper roster.
Basically what I'm getting at is that for a strategy games having life or death mostly reside on literal coin flips in the majority of situations is dumb
curious how often you hunker down
am betting it is a low percentage of the time
meanwhile i hunker all the time.
Yeah, have to agree with the hunker down bit. I watched Marbozir win numerous campaigns on impossible difficulty with second wave option handicaps and rarely did he ever lose a soldier. Great tactical movement and strategy will always keep your soldiers alive.
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OnTheLastCastlelet's keep it haimish for the peripateticRegistered Userregular
edited October 2015
You hunker when you don't have overwhelming force or the ability to neutralize threats. Then you unload. Hunkering doubles defense and negates all critical hits. It is very hard to die when hunkered unless they blow up the cover or you're facing very high level things with low level armor. This is also why I bring 2+ smoke grenades and 2+ chem grenades per mission.
If you are playing the game trading pot shots, even when you are 80% to hit and they are 20% to hit... you will lose soldiers. You eliminate their ability to make a shot by being dead or reduce their success rate to single digits and their ability to hurt you out of the lethal zone.
The highest base crit chance you can get it 20%. Iirc. And hunker makes you immune unless you're flanked so go ahead and hunker.
You are going to be forced into taking high cover hits in the early game, the way it works in EW makes it very swingy and RNGey especially because of how hard the early game is in general compared to mid game.
I've talked about this in xcom thread before but for the nth time rushing satellites isn't the only or even the best way to win... This game does not railroad you into one decision.
Its a pet peeve for me when it came to comments about xcom, complaining about having to build satellites is like complaining about being forced to build workers in starcraft. And it's even viable to not rush satellites, on impossible no less.
On the first mission sometimes. But hunker and grenades are super powerful in negating both the necessity to take full cover shots and the ability to kill aliens via cover destruction that I just can't see it being necessary besides the first mission where you don't set your layout.
Dash to out of line of sight to set flanks. Hunker when you don't have a good shot/suppress lone enemies. Grenade cover, etc etc etc.
Grenades are definitely an area where it seems like Long War tried to make them non-optimal, but failed.
I just about always made sure everyone brought grenades in EW, because the ability to consistently destroy cover (and/or finish a wounded alien without the risk of missing) was too tactically valuable not to have available as often as possible.
Long War responded by making the grenades a much less-reliable source of damage and making them destroy cover much less consistently.
But instead of making you diversify your tactical options by bringing other items, all it seemed to force you to do was bring MORE grenades, because now the enemy's cover sometimes won't break until the second one, so you definitely need everyone to be carrying as many as they possibly can
Hunkering is boring. I mean, I get that it's effective and I'll never be able to play on impossible without it, but that just isn't the game I want to play.
The highest base crit chance you can get it 20%. Iirc. And hunker makes you immune unless you're flanked so go ahead and hunker.
You are going to be forced into taking high cover hits in the early game, the way it works in EW makes it very swingy and RNGey especially because of how hard the early game is in general compared to mid game.
I've talked about this in xcom thread before but for the nth time rushing satellites isn't the only or even the best way to win... This game does not railroad you into one decision.
Its a pet peeve for me when it came to comments about xcom, complaining about having to build satellites is like complaining about being forced to build workers in starcraft. And it's even viable to not rush satellites, on impossible no less.
On the first mission sometimes. But hunker and grenades are super powerful in negating both the necessity to take full cover shots and the ability to kill aliens via cover destruction that I just can't see it being necessary besides the first mission where you don't set your layout.
Dash to out of line of sight to set flanks. Hunker when you don't have a good shot/suppress lone enemies. Grenade cover, etc etc etc.
I know, I've played the game for hundreds of hours. In fact I aim to never take an unhunkered shot. Early game impossible EW is still out of whack more difficult/RNG than mid game impossible. I love this game and I'm totally behind you that the whole thing is really clever and well done, but if I have a single complaint from the original game it's the difficult curve over the campaign.
First mission on I/I is ridiculous, even for Marbozir. Not because it's not fun (grenade meta vs sectoids is awesome really), but because its a big coin toss you can't recover from. And I'd be completely fine with that if lesser difficulty levels had more challenging mid/late games. As it is I can only get a good game out of impossible since when you finally get on your legs that mode has an appropriate amount of difficulty for me. If anything they'd want it to be the opposite for xcom 2, slightly too easy early game for really rough mid game. Simply because you have a lot more control over your mid game which would force decisions.
Also you think it's possible to never take a non-hunkered shot on impossible, really? You take the risk of taking an unhunkered shot every single time you take a flanking shot, and flanking shots are typically how you kill grenaded aliens.
Hunkering is boring. I mean, I get that it's effective and I'll never be able to play on impossible without it, but that just isn't the game I want to play.
Without hunkering you'd have a lot less movement, I doubt the game would be more interesting without it.
I've beaten Impossible a fair few times (admittedly, just in EW, not in Long War - still on my first Long War playthrough) and I rarely if ever hunker - the point is that if you're allowing return fire even at low accuracy, you'll eventually get hit and die. Hunkering is one way not to take meaningful return fire (since it often pushes their accuracy down to 1%) but if you move cautiously and bring enough explosives you can usually just as easily avoid return fire by leveling all the enemy cover and wiping out the triggered pack before it gets to take a turn.
I'm not on impossible in Long War yet but the basic tactic seems to be the same - bring sappers for reliable cover destruction, use the high single-turn damage output of infantry to wipe most/all of the pack out, use your gunners to suppress whatever's still alive so it can't hit anything. The biggest variation seems to be that you also have to bring HEAT and/or Shredder ammo on everything that can get it because before too long you'll be going on missions that are nothing but half a dozen cyberdisk and mechtoid packs.
Grenades are definitely an area where it seems like Long War tried to make them non-optimal, but failed.
I just about always made sure everyone brought grenades in EW, because the ability to consistently destroy cover (and/or finish a wounded alien without the risk of missing) was too tactically valuable not to have available as often as possible.
Long War responded by making the grenades a much less-reliable source of damage and making them destroy cover much less consistently.
But instead of making you diversify your tactical options by bringing other items, all it seemed to force you to do was bring MORE grenades, because now the enemy's cover sometimes won't break until the second one, so you definitely need everyone to be carrying as many as they possibly can
not really, grenadiers with the sapper ability are the only explosives you need. one can carry 4 explosive grenades.
Have they gone into how the missions work, are they still "eliminate everything" types or are they more do objectives and get out types. I could see the guerilla theme going well with invisible inc. style missions where alien reinforcements will fuck you up if you don't get your shit done.
They mentioned somewhere that the missions type will vary. I remember reading about sabotage mission, don't remember where tho....
I saw a kid get handed a JB poster by who I presume was his parents outside my store today....he tore it in half infront of his horrified parents.....There's hope for our youth yet!
I think they actually mentioned procedural objectives at one point, though I also can't remember where.
I believe it was in the demo they streamed. It began as a "Blow up that thing" mission, but when they did enemy reinforcements showed up, critically wounded one of the guys, and it became a rescue and escape mission.
forgive my prattling but this really is a good time to try a long war game if you need a fix before xcom 2
the second wave option to remove EXALT entirely gives you a ton of breathing room. you get little radar items that identify clusters of aliens in the fog of war for you so you can avoid clown cars, and you can turn on the second wave option to give your airplanes a 15% boost to hit.
oh and turn off repairs, which there's a second wave option for too!
Yea there are a lot of decent second wave options in the newest long war. Now if they would have only not changed it so that you mechanized units and only your mechanized units had a 90% defense debuff for overwatch* shots the game might be more tolerable.
* it's on "large" mechanized units which conveniently includes shivs but not seekers or drones (which are about the same size) and cyberdiscs don't seem to get the penalty either.
Basically people were using shivs and mecs to take overwatch shots by running them through smoke, since they have inherent defense bonuses.
So they said "fuck that I am going to make you use a scout and also totally obviate lightning reflexes on your scout MEC, because a scout will have a 3% chance of being one shot and a Shiv does not"
Least they could have done was made it not apply to shivs since they're small(and this would have actually given them some use)
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FandaHang a shining starupon the highest boughRegistered Userregular
So i have been playing some Long War recently and just ran into newfoundland with only 2 infantry not fatigued.
So i set up one PFC for full running (15+3[subgun]+2[vest]) and made a dash for it by hiding along the edges of the map while the rest of the team overwatched at the skyranger. The idea being that, things go bad the rest evac and i lose basically nothing.
By abusing sight lines i make it all the way there and flip the switch. "well might as well try the run back. Same path".
And it works. Zero kills, zero deaths, zero shots fired
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DuriniaEvolved from Space PotatoesRegistered Userregular
I would love to see a recording of that. :biggrin:
For business reasons, I must preserve the outward sign of sanity.
--Mark Twain
These Dark Events initiate random modifiers to your gameplay experience, and run the gamut from something as small as improving ADVENT soldiers’ gear in the field to more dramatic gameplay changes such as deploying a UFO that will hunt the Avenger.
ADVENT can also negatively affect XCOM supply drops and, in a far more chilling Dark Event, hide extra Faceless amongst the populace of each mission. Rapid Response poses another massive threat to XCOM, guaranteeing ADVENT reinforcements will be deployed during all Guerrilla Ops missions. We’ve also heard reports of ADVENT employing Viper Rounds – poisonous ammunition made from Viper venom.
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Other than that I really hope they keep the tight design with few meaningful choices. I know a lot of people like it but I don't really want to manage 30 soldiers, 15 planes and 18 missions.
Normal UE/EW really isn't like that except maybe the first few missions. Once you get MECs and smoke grenades you're pretty golden and those come early. And before that hunker/snipers/grenades are still amazingly effective.
If you're having trouble in the early game with die rolls you're probably not hunkering or dashing enough or suppressing enough.
Edit: I don't want to say that EW doesnt have some randomization and that its early game isn't brutal but to say it's all random isn't quite right
A solider dying doesn't mean you die though. Lose is part of the game and can be mitigated by having a back up squad.
But it's just part of the game so I accept it. Would be different without it.
How is rushing laser cannons only one way to win? That's a tiny fraction of the game.
And you don't even need to do that if you tweak the air war slightly
That having been said, Xcom's first few months are ridiculously swingy; I'm playing the game with a buddy and we've had idiotically good fortune. Stuff like Russia requesting a sattelite in the first month and offering 200 fun bucks as a reward inside of the first 10 days... which immediately went towards getting a third sattelite uplink going.
Meanwhile, I'll be playing another game where my team is limping home from the base assault and a terror mission will fire up on a continent that was in the red.
Or wind up with nothing but supports.
Having re-played that horrible base defense and won, I'd have to agree. And the one strat is "do everything":
I think the chief problem with Long War is that is straight up doesn't tell you shit. Important shit. Like that chrysalids can have lightning reflexes now, or that berserkers have jumpy legs, or that outsiders regenerate, or that some floaters/mutons have covering fire, or that heavy floaters have bombard, and not knowing any one of these things can and will result in a soldier death, panic spiral, squad wipe and subsequent campaign loss. This is not a mod to play in ironman mode, this is a mod that just when you think you're doing well throws you a tactical curveball that isn't necessarily impossible to beat, but probably means you need to retool your entire squad from whatever it is right now to survive. But at the same time the game will also throw you strategic curveballs on the geoscape, and if you fuck those up you might have to restart your entire campaign. This is why I've come to think of Long War not as a challenge of skill that can be beaten by being good enough at the game, but simply a puzzle that can be beaten by anybody who invests enough time into putting in the necessary trial and error to beat it. I've lost campaigns to all of the bullet points above, but I get a little further each time.
You are going to be forced into taking high cover hits in the early game, the way it works in EW makes it very swingy and RNGey especially because of how hard the early game is in general compared to mid game.
I've talked about this in xcom thread before but for the nth time rushing satellites isn't the only or even the best way to win... This game does not railroad you into one decision.
Its a pet peeve for me when it came to comments about xcom, complaining about having to build satellites is like complaining about being forced to build workers in starcraft. And it's even viable to not rush satellites, on impossible no less.
curious how often you hunker down
am betting it is a low percentage of the time
meanwhile i hunker all the time.
Yeah, have to agree with the hunker down bit. I watched Marbozir win numerous campaigns on impossible difficulty with second wave option handicaps and rarely did he ever lose a soldier. Great tactical movement and strategy will always keep your soldiers alive.
If you are playing the game trading pot shots, even when you are 80% to hit and they are 20% to hit... you will lose soldiers. You eliminate their ability to make a shot by being dead or reduce their success rate to single digits and their ability to hurt you out of the lethal zone.
On the first mission sometimes. But hunker and grenades are super powerful in negating both the necessity to take full cover shots and the ability to kill aliens via cover destruction that I just can't see it being necessary besides the first mission where you don't set your layout.
Dash to out of line of sight to set flanks. Hunker when you don't have a good shot/suppress lone enemies. Grenade cover, etc etc etc.
I just about always made sure everyone brought grenades in EW, because the ability to consistently destroy cover (and/or finish a wounded alien without the risk of missing) was too tactically valuable not to have available as often as possible.
Long War responded by making the grenades a much less-reliable source of damage and making them destroy cover much less consistently.
But instead of making you diversify your tactical options by bringing other items, all it seemed to force you to do was bring MORE grenades, because now the enemy's cover sometimes won't break until the second one, so you definitely need everyone to be carrying as many as they possibly can
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
I know, I've played the game for hundreds of hours. In fact I aim to never take an unhunkered shot. Early game impossible EW is still out of whack more difficult/RNG than mid game impossible. I love this game and I'm totally behind you that the whole thing is really clever and well done, but if I have a single complaint from the original game it's the difficult curve over the campaign.
First mission on I/I is ridiculous, even for Marbozir. Not because it's not fun (grenade meta vs sectoids is awesome really), but because its a big coin toss you can't recover from. And I'd be completely fine with that if lesser difficulty levels had more challenging mid/late games. As it is I can only get a good game out of impossible since when you finally get on your legs that mode has an appropriate amount of difficulty for me. If anything they'd want it to be the opposite for xcom 2, slightly too easy early game for really rough mid game. Simply because you have a lot more control over your mid game which would force decisions.
Also you think it's possible to never take a non-hunkered shot on impossible, really? You take the risk of taking an unhunkered shot every single time you take a flanking shot, and flanking shots are typically how you kill grenaded aliens.
Without hunkering you'd have a lot less movement, I doubt the game would be more interesting without it.
I'm not on impossible in Long War yet but the basic tactic seems to be the same - bring sappers for reliable cover destruction, use the high single-turn damage output of infantry to wipe most/all of the pack out, use your gunners to suppress whatever's still alive so it can't hit anything. The biggest variation seems to be that you also have to bring HEAT and/or Shredder ammo on everything that can get it because before too long you'll be going on missions that are nothing but half a dozen cyberdisk and mechtoid packs.
When an enemy shoots at your soldier that is not hunkered down.
not really, grenadiers with the sapper ability are the only explosives you need. one can carry 4 explosive grenades.
http://2kgam.es/1LiQIri
Have they gone into how the missions work, are they still "eliminate everything" types or are they more do objectives and get out types. I could see the guerilla theme going well with invisible inc. style missions where alien reinforcements will fuck you up if you don't get your shit done.
I believe it was in the demo they streamed. It began as a "Blow up that thing" mission, but when they did enemy reinforcements showed up, critically wounded one of the guys, and it became a rescue and escape mission.
the second wave option to remove EXALT entirely gives you a ton of breathing room. you get little radar items that identify clusters of aliens in the fog of war for you so you can avoid clown cars, and you can turn on the second wave option to give your airplanes a 15% boost to hit.
oh and turn off repairs, which there's a second wave option for too!
* it's on "large" mechanized units which conveniently includes shivs but not seekers or drones (which are about the same size) and cyberdiscs don't seem to get the penalty either.
Edit: Oh wait. I misunderstood. Still shitty, though.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
So they said "fuck that I am going to make you use a scout and also totally obviate lightning reflexes on your scout MEC, because a scout will have a 3% chance of being one shot and a Shiv does not"
Least they could have done was made it not apply to shivs since they're small(and this would have actually given them some use)
I love the motion tracker. It's brilliant.
That said, I do sometimes wish it gave three-dimensional readings.
So i set up one PFC for full running (15+3[subgun]+2[vest]) and made a dash for it by hiding along the edges of the map while the rest of the team overwatched at the skyranger. The idea being that, things go bad the rest evac and i lose basically nothing.
By abusing sight lines i make it all the way there and flip the switch. "well might as well try the run back. Same path".
And it works. Zero kills, zero deaths, zero shots fired
--Mark Twain
https://xcom.com/news/en-dark-events-advent-counter-operations-in-xcom-2
Apparently that's just a few of them.
Welp, saving Earth WAS a nice idea.