You answered your own question, you are SUPPOSED to skip bad missions, and that is indeed quite a bit of them. And yes skipping 2/3 of the missions does not sound unreasonable the way they designed it.
This is often the most difficult aspect of talking about balance with this form of mod, especially at it's highest difficulty. Overcoming the stigma of "too hard, git gud" to become "consistently feasible"
I'll counter this with the argument of division of resources. The squad mechanics allows you to keep looking at constant infiltration timers for your preferred op, we'll assume that of your early roster you split your guys up into 3 squads of 6 to have a realistic goal of getting at least 1 squad solid for 1 of the ops available at any given time. Do you split up your initial squad so that each of those squads has 2 squaddies and 4 rookies? How are you getting enough combat experience for your roster? Im pushing into the end of the 2nd month and I'm waiting for rulers to start popping up because I know any mission they pop up on (RNG) is essentially going to be an autolose. If not a run for my life op. There is no feasible way I can deal with a ruler and sectoid squad or stun lancer squad at the same time. Purely based on the rank/xp of most of my men.
tl;dr, there's too much RNG in the early game on the strategic layer for the current curve of difficulty on the tactical layer. I restarted legendary 4 times before I was able to get a string of "x light" resistance missions going in order to build a decent roster. Now that my GTS is up dealing with rookies is no longer an issue, but it still takes a month to get there to pump out 2 squaddies every 10 days. There's not enough the player can do here to curve things in their direction in the early days to keep up with the early campaign. It's easier to just restart and hope the RNG gods favor you a little bit better. Slow access to the GTS punishes the player from being able to solidify their roster into a usable format.
I too tried legendary for a couple times; the first time I charged in even at 4 day infiltration and it was horrible.
Try impossible. There's no conceivable way to win these missions you skip or lose the squad. Even if you somehow can frag, suppress and stun your way through the 20ish initial, the rapid response of enemy reinforcements will overwhelm you. I'm not against this design philosophy, but I'm also losing 2/3rds of the potential income game by just "not bothering" with these missions. This is overwhelmingly counter productive.
That said, I will give the mechanic tons of props for making me use different squad sizes
You just need to ignore anything that literally doesn't give you 100% infiltration time (6 days or so). At 100% infiltration you "only" get 4 man pods for the first few missions which is much better than 6+ man pods.
It's more the pod size + the health buffs at day 1 then anything. The enemy is killable, yes, but difficult, and it pushes you too close to strict timers. I just did a jail break op with 12 turns, light, took me 5 turns to reach the target, and would of taken 3 to extract all units. This is almost strictly sprinting and doesn't represent the combat with the aliens. I had to leave 3 of the civies behind simply because it was too far for them to run under overwatch fire, and I didn't have time to just straight kill the aliens either.
The design philosophy is fine, extracting under heavy fire is a refreshing turn of pace, but turn timers with the quantity of fire that I'm receiving early on is making far too many of these missions be decided by 1 or 2 die rolls instead of any actual form of skill at the game.
In LW1 much of the basic alien improvements started coming on the 2-4th mission, such as the health and will improvements for sectoids, allowing you to get a small pool of not-rookies going before it slammed you with a mixture of health buffed sectoids with drone and thinmen supported pods, it also meant if RNG favored you, you had a good option of being able to cheese the transport landing if you could figure a way to deal with the early cryssalids.
In LW1 you would skip 20-40% of missions on impossible. At least early on, or any just straight battleship or carrier landing was near suicidal [shooting one down usually wasnt much easier], and the AI loved its bait and switch tactics with mediums. Eventually though you're able to build into your preferred strategy you tend to take a lot more risks. Rocketeers with overwatch trees solved problems when used en masse.
The game offers you many many mission opportunities, you do not/cannot take them all, I think you let your screenshot get to your head when you only have 2 missions lost, so you have a perfectionist inside you. That is fine, be perfectionist on the tactical level but not the strategic.
There's alot of health padding in LW1 that you can abuse with certain trees [Extra conditioning], and early and aggressive access to smoke minimizes casualties, particularly when you just use SHIVs endlessly as bait as early on they're the only thing that can reliably one shot drones. Ultimately, its access to the dedicated tank MECs that makes the campaign shift into consistently doable.
The vast majority of those deaths were on those 2 missions... One of them was the base defense. Full squad wipe, mostly max or near max rank soldiers. Closing that campaign with a rebuilt A squad around The Doorn was probably the best part of that campaign. I was no where near perfectionist.
That being said, make sure you have a lot of rebels on intel to help smooth out the mission luck over time. You should only have 1 rebel on recruiting, zero on supplies, and rest intel. And scan hard with avenger in a region you want to operate in. More intel rebels= better duration on missions, ON AVERAGE. You will still skip a lot of missions. Especially when you don't have enough non-rookies to take on missions.
The impact of this is so overwhelmingly minor and "under the hood" early on that its almost forgettable. Its great now that I have the potential to start making advent legions shuffle around, but there's negligible [seen] benefit from the player perspective of doing this. If I hadn't read out the entire LW guide, I wouldn't of had any reason to do this. And even then I'm dissatisfied with the results so far from a purely intelligence perspective.
I have no idea if legendary is beatable currently, but the first few months are I think possible.
More than likely, the perk trees are definitely good enough for things like gunners and grenadiers. And the team has done well before on making the final few missions overwhelming, but beatable. However, imo, the early game needs to be tweaked to allow this this opportunity to be more open.
xwynns wrote:You may want to either read up on the mechanics or turn the difficulty down a tab as Legend in LW2 is really meant for people who have a supreme grasp of the mechanics.
Unacceptable. There are no other difficulty levels.
mattprice516 wrote:xwynns wrote:Legend in LW2 is really meant for people who have a supreme grasp of the mechanics.
Can't really stress that enough. You mentioned the first few missions getting "thrown" at you with low infiltration time. That's not actually a scripted thing, it's under the player's control and is directly related to the number of rebels you have on Intel (and there's some randomness in there as well). LW2 has a lot of those kinds of mechanics - and even the Legend testers who know basically all of them extremely well still can't beat the game sometimes.
This is my point, there's too much RNG in the early game around intel gathering and infiltration times. Which in turn makes far too many missions inconceivable for the first couple of months and turns others that should be reasonable into bloodbaths.
If for example, you're unable to get more resistance personal in the two months or so because RNG has decided that the only ops you get with that reward you're unable to deploy to due to the level of resistance, you have a compounding problem based on the RNG. Weak intelligence gathering stagnates your need for additional resources, which prevents from getting better at intel and shifting resistance members around.
