Bailing on Predesignated Evac Missions

[Sines]

So, one of the things I like that Long War 2 brought into focus was the ability to evacuate your squad early. This was in XCOM 2, but you were really more expected to win every fight, even on Ironman, so it didn't come up much.

However, missions with a designated evacuation point make this harder. Instead of hunkering down in a defensible area while you wait for help to arrive, now you have to move across the map, taking fewer defensive actions, less cover, and activating more pods. Failing a mission where you can assign your own evac point isn't usually so bad, as you can avoid death relatively easily when you can 100% focus on stalling the enemy. But when you got to move across the map, it's rather trickier.

This was particularly bad on my first 'defend the recruiters' mission. Not only do you have to push across the map, once you get the recruits out, you then have to wait several more turns for evac to arrive for XCOM. There is no option at all to bail on this mission. No "Yup, I can't do this, sorry resistance, you're going to die". Contrasted with defend the intel missions, where you can just bail if it goes bad.

It always kind of bugged me that you could only designate evac points in some missions, but it wasn't really a big deal then. But when losses are to be expected, it's actually effecting things. I'm not really sure what the solution to this is. Escort VIP in particular are necessarily dependent on pre-determined evac points, otherwise it'd just be "Drop an evac on yourself and defend". However, prison rescues could easily just have the evac point dropped outside of the prison, and Escort VIP could be removed in favor of putting all VIPs in prison to begin with.

Unfortunately, such an option might really hurt Shinboi's ability to do Prison and VIP missions stealthily, as they now have to break concealment and survive for a while, instead of just rushing them to the evac point. So, not exactly ideal...

Overall though, I just want something to make pre-designated evac missions more safely failable. As it stands, I'm far more likely to give a "Hack the Device" mission a go when I'm not sure if I can make it, than a "Rescue the VIP" mission. That there doesn't seem to be any narrative reason for one to be any harder than the other is why it bugs me so much.

[Zarnak]

Firebrand isn't too popular around the Avenger. I actually often get to rescue my own troops she left behind in previous missions.