Typically the squads that don’t have full load outs are because they’re the C / D list squads. Casualties happen in those parts.
All that being said -
(just trying to make a list here and noticed they’ve screwed the html… anyway another story)
1 - If my squad loses or takes casualties due to something stupid or a bug I’ve no moral issue restarting the mission. Sometimes you take a fair shot and have to own it, but some other things definitely just feel ridiculous.
2 - Arguably this is what I do when I start losing, complain on the forum but again it comes back to the point of ‘why’. Because it feels like bad design with many oversights I’m putting the game down in hope they fix it rather than re-jigging all my troops and adopting whatever other cheese tactics.
To be honest I prefer a game where you can snap back from casualties and squad wipes with no restarting at all, instead of a game where you can’t possibly lose one soldier or one squad because you’re screwed on global scope and you restart reload.
For example I squad-wiped on gift mission. I was doing it first time after DLC got released. I was with 5 best guys there and thought it would be like HD defence where you sometimes have 5-7 pandorans only. Instead I was hit with like 15 without any warning that it would be that hard. Wasn’t prepered for that and had very bad luck. And with no escape route also. So basically game screwing you completely. And imagine you play without teleportation. Losing best squad and equipment is most of the times end of campaign if you play with weird rules because game is not balanced for them. But without them there is no real threat to any squad wipe which is also terrible. I’ve played this campaign further and on 24th January I have 10 active basess, 28 soldiers, 7 planes, whole globe covered.
But teleport obviously is lame way to deal with this problem. The game should not have teleporting but be at the same time designed and balanced in a way that losing even best squad is not game-ending event.
Last game I lost my heavy (+all the gear, on Legenday…) on “the gift” mission. It was quite a loss, but the game continued none the less. An early wipe would be catastrophic. But if you’ve done the work of cultivating more good squads then so long as you have 1 good squad then continuing on can be done. The XCOM 1 super squad which fights every battle doesn’t work very well in PP. There are too many battles, and unlike XCOM’s magical ship that can respond in time to any mission on the plant, PP ships are not that fast. Also, I’m pretty sure that if one did lose the “top 6” soldiers it would be a devastating blow. The rookies are so terrible in the later game, so one would need to take all the soldier reward missions no matter what in order to try to rebuild to something that can fight.
One time I had a priest + 4 assaults on a haven defense. Only the priest survived by beating a triton to death with a med kit since his gun got destroyed earlier, but not before he loaded up the triton with virus. It was poorly composed for the fight since it was only supposed to be a support squad. I kept playing.
but again it comes back to the point of ‘why’. Because it feels like bad design with many oversights I’m putting the game down in hope they fix it rather than re-jigging all my troops and adopting whatever other cheese tactics.