Hi there, and before I start griping let me just say that thus far I've loved this mod. I really enjoyed XCOM 2 when I first played it, but ended up not really enjoying how formulaic it felt on subsequent plays and never really played past my first commander playthrough. This mod really has brought me back into loving the game, and while I doubt I'll ever be much good at it (I've given up on doing anything other than vet, with no desire to attempt any higher) I just wanted to say I appreciate how much work has gone into it and I think it's awesome.
But, on to why I felt compelled to register a forum account;
I've had what I consider "tough missions" in my campaign thus far. I've liberated one region, have a solid team-and-a-half and feel like while many missions have been pretty difficult I haven't had any that I thought were unreasonable. Until now.
While my 2 "good" squads were off doing other things, I ran into a recruitment retaliation. It claimed "very light" enemy activity, and I've done supply/intel retaliations before with the C team and they weren't too terrible, so I elected to try that for this one.
Apparently, big mistake. Although, I'm not sure I could have won even had I brought the whole A team. The map began with 20-25 relatively strong aliens (mutons, sidewinders, mecs) on it and they dropped reinforcements starting on the second turn and every two after. Yikes. I figure, well, okay, the point must be to bolt to the evac point; I'll use a couple rookies to bait the chasing squads.
Things got pretty dicey by the time I made it to the evac; every alien on the map had managed to zero in on me (the pods were running on turn 1, from what my shinobi found). Still, I made it, though I took some pretty heavy losses trying to get the hell out of dodge. The problem was that as soon as I evacced the last civilian, the evac point disappeared, leaving my 2 remaining soldiers to wait another 3 turns for an evac that spawned elsewhere. Were it not for a sectoid panic, I might have got one out, but no luck.
Now, while I appreciate that I did "technically" win, and that on some level this mission was on some level "beatable", what's striking to me is how absolutely ridiculous this mission was in comparison to the retaliations for supply or intel, which tend to be relatively easy. I think this mission was considerably worse even than an actual haven assault. This seems seriously out of whack. Maybe you're not supposed to try to just run? But given how intent the pods seemed on finding me, I'm not sure I ever had a shot at a clean win, regardless of what I tried.
Maybe consider toning this one down a bit? Anybody else experienced these and found them reasonable?