Yesterday, I took on the Project Vulture mission with a team of 10 (yes I play with a mod that doesn’t limit the number of soldiers deployed) on NORMAL mode (2nd difficulty level).
I try to ban OP skills, so no rage burst, no 100% stealth, no dashing the whole map, rally spam, mind-crush spam, … other stuff.
I start the map and don’t over expand, I cleanly take out a heavy and see some other troopers (and an Armadillo) that are farther but I don’t want to over expand. Still I put a decoy with my infiltrator to take some bullets just in case. And so begins the enemy’s turn…
2 new Armadillos, 4 new heavies (so 4 rockets to my face, the decoy taking one - fortunately I’m not packed together), 4 snipers (fortunately my positioning prevented them from having line of sight), some assaults (dashing twice and shooting twice) and technicians.
I am swarmed, I have lost a few limbs with rockets, my decoy died (glad I had put one, should have put two), I know that if I let them an other turn I get wiped out. I can’t afford the heavies spamming 4 other rockets on me, the snipers now in good position to take shots and the armadillos taking shots (I was lucky most of the first one’s shots were missed the first time - next time I’ll have 3 shooting).
I was trying putting some acid on the Armadillos, but frankly, I don’t have time to wait for the acid to do its effect. I take out the cannon of the three of them (pretty harmless now) and I resorted to mind-crush a few soldiers by bringing 2 priests at the same packed place to have the rest panicking (yeah, I don’t want to die).
From there it became much easier. Simply follow some of them, kill 3 and have the rest panicking again until I wipe everybody including 2 armadillos, the third one running away.
All this story, to say:
- playing conservatively is a death sentence
- the first enemy trooper that detects you and you get bombed by a Chiron or heavies, sniped by a LOT of enemies
- the enemy turn seems endless and you cross your fingers that nobody dies (had a soldier at 10 HP - phew)
- I had nearly perfect positioning (that’s why snipers couldn’t shoot me) but still took a beating because of 4 heavies (Fury is too cheap)
- You need a full infiltrator team to do so
- playing aggressively from the start by dashing would have enabled me to
- detect more enemies
- start the panic loop before I get swarmed
- DoT is useless (acid, poison, virus)
- most enemies have no self preservation
- enemies are still as dangerous
- you simply don’t have the time for the effect
- hope they change that and apply some additional effects as specified in this post: Serious Balance Fixes Needed- Acid
- Fury should be more than 1AP
- did I mention I’m playing on NORMAL difficulty ?
- no priest, full retreat
What I like in FiraXCOM is that you can take a position where the enemy has low probability to do heavy damage (even if you trigger multiple pods - unless they are all around you, but in that case you screwed really bad and get what you deserve).