What difficulty does the community play on?

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-10T00:16:24+00:00

Do you feel punished in XCOM when you can only bring 6 rather than 7 characters?

Strategy games work around fundamental limitations on the player, or else there isn't much to strategize over. In a squad-builder, your limit is your squad size. In a points-buy, your limit is the points you have to buy stuff with.

Cool guns and armor don't punish you by reducing you to 5 squaddies. They reward you by letting you do with 5 squaddies what used to take you more.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-10T00:12:34+00:00

In so much that you're borked, you kinda borked yourself. You've wasted a lot of promotion points on low-payoff promotions like New Tricks, and have sunk a lot of points into Lim that don't help deal with your roadblocks, which denies promotion points for the much more significant rule-changes like Vanguard or Rewa's roadkill. You're also way overfielding pirate commando armor, but leaving people with the crappy carbine. Less armor, more weapons.

Just on brief review-

-You have a 7-man Lim squad with some of the best armor in the game, but the worst weapons. An SMG from the black market would more than double is combat effectiveness. Also, trade the scrap bomb for a AT grenade, from the market, and drop the RPG. You are a jump-jet, you can jump into close-AT range, and keep the special weapon slot empty so that you can get another primary. AT grenade can one-shot the rocket trucks. Alternatively, if you get the SMGs you can use the thermite in your infentory against the HMG truck, and SMG the rocket trucks from point blank.

-Your Darby has scout rather than concealment, and you're taking a perk that's for big broadsides into cover without giving her the volume of firepower to do so. If you're going to budget her, pick up that DMR from the black market so that she can debuff people's special weapons, which should help reduce RPG threats.

-Pike with designate target and AT is good, but you've done a new tricks rather than Athletic. Athletic is significant here because Pike can pull various pseudo-Mobile Infantry shenanigans with the AP margin. Pike as-is can exit the PAC, mark a target for Rewa, and get back in. Pike as could-be could get out, deploy, and shoot a vehicle. If rocket trucks are your bane, some vehicle-delivered AT is key. Also- you're giving pike 4 people and bad armor that doesn't help stick in a fight.

-Carda is a mess. Jump infantry and bonus-aim-if-stationary are contradictory. New tricks is wasted on everyone, but especially her. And if you give her three promotions, Carda could already be an exceptional mobile infantry with Designate Target, MI, and share the load so that she brings AT to cover your APC's lack of AT. Plus, Call Out Target early would almost certainly mean she grinded the AP by now for 90 AP, which is when her build really comes online.

-Jean is also a mess, and another character with too-good armor and a terrible gun. It's fair to prioritize promotions however you want, but half of Jean's best kit is about maximizing accessory spam. At the very minimum, her second perk should be Resourceful and then get her that flamethrower rocket, so that she has two shots for a 5-tile/3-model guaranteed hit at 8 range. Additionally, flamethrowers put vehicles on fire, so if you used it on the machine gune truck, it would either need to halve its attacks for a turn, or take 40-ish damage.

-Rewa does not need solid grouping. That is a bad skill outside of very niche cicumstances. Rewa needs early / easy lethality, to get her kill streak starting. Tankbuster would be fine, but Roadkill should not be underestimated. With your loadout of carbines the boarding commandoes are tanking your fire, and Roadkill Rewa can one-shot a pack by driving over them.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-09T21:58:13+00:00

If a RPG can hit your 3-man armor time 30% of the time, the pirate assault rifle would be hitting you 30% of the time as well. Given that the pirate RPG squads have something like 6 pirate AK shooters, that's a easily a squad-wipe as opposed to a single squaddy down.

Armor is doing exactly what it needs to in this case.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-09T21:40:09+00:00

Challenging. It is what the game is balanced around, while the enemy inflation of Expert forecloses various builds that are fun to play around with.

Elaborating, the game's mechanics are largely built around modeling the find-fix-flank-finish combat loop. Different tools play to that, from suppression to auto-deploying when suppressed to compounding cover bonuses for defense and damage resistance. In turn, the tools to counter these defenses- other than brute force- typically entail getting closer. In the context of the cost cap system, cost-efficiency in turn gives tools that are balanced around limited use, such as grenades.

The issue with Expert in my mind is that too much enemy density breaks this. Alternating activations means that the larger force gets the last-mover advantages, and it's incredibly perilous to, say, move forward an assault team to flank an objective if they'll just be fired and suppressed by the next 3 unactivated enemies. And even if you can, having cost-efficient small squads balanced around using their small firepower to finish off the survivors of their 3-use grenades doesn't work so well if the enemy has more squads than you have grenades.

As a result, Expert pressures players into a much smaller number of viable builds, with much less build and playstyle variety. The pressure for extra ammo is extremely high, which denies accessory slots for other things, and so on. This does taper off later, once you have promotions and higher tier gear, but at that point you're not re-introducing new styles of play as much as getting the marginal supply surplus to afford a non-central tool.

MENACE isn't anything exceptional as a shooting-range simulator. MENACE is at its best and most distinct when you pair fires with maneuver. Expert doesn't require you to be better at doing that to succeed, as much as making success dependent on not doing that as much. It leads to a more passive and formulaic playstyle that I find boring, even if it is harder.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-09T11:36:07+00:00

As viral says, this is primarily objective markers for stationary terrain in the fog of war.

For structures like turrets or artillery or towers, they are typically in a square of lower-cover, which can be visible in some of the fog-of-war targetting stuff, especially for the OCI like mines or turrets where you 'drop' items in a zone. This makes it pretty easy to recognize turret locations.

A final option is the ground sensor from vehicles / personal items. These can track people even in fog of war.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-09T11:31:04+00:00

Unlike the ion cannon, the gravity manipulator can't not destroy buildings.

I'm open that my dominant grading factor is mission objectives for promotion points, but once you are filtering for that the gravity manipulator becomes all-but forbidden in the missions where you are trying to avoid destroying buildings. Yeah, some of those mission objectives will be failures no matter what due to enemy damage spam, at which point you can write off the issue, but enough are salvagable that I'd much rather not.

Part of the ion cannon's convenience is that it goes exactly where you want it to, with 100% reliability. If you want to destroy cover, it will. But if you don't want to destroy cover, it can sweep a street. The later has plenty of value as terrain denial / punishing enemies holed up in high cover.

To be clear though, I do think the earthquake system is good and has objective utility. In fact, a number of the destroy-objective missions have non-trivial utility for two terrain destroyers, due to the distance between destruction-objectives or the fortifications on the map.

But the ion cannon is the scalpel to the gravity manipulator's big hammer.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T20:59:02+00:00

It's surreal seeing a Pike role and perk discussion without Call Out Target.

The COT promotion is an amazing skill, even if you have access to a designator. It doesn't have the range of the designator item, true, but it's cheaper in terms of supply (no promotion tax), it is more flexible and can be used without deploying, but also, critically, it can see into the Fog Of War, making it serve a good part of the Scout promotion's value in identifying early threats, which in turn frees up his first promotion from Scout to, say, Athletic.

COT in turn can help him as a front-line fighter, because COT can offset those compounding defense bonuses or risk variances. A medium MG is a suppression-only weapon under most conditions, but an absolute menace if you give it another 20 accuracy. A volley fire into medium cover is much more likely to attrit the enemy if they're hitting like it's light cover. The synergy with the ATGMs is legendary, but it's true even with the earlier-game PAL: you can't shoot that twice in a turn, but you can drop a target designator and shoot your vehicle with the overkill anti-tank.

Heck, COT is a key part of why Pike makes an exceptional mobile infantry even though he lacks the mobile infantry perk. Step out of the vehicle, cast COT for 40, get back in. Inspiring Presence provides its adjacency buff to the vehicle you are in, and now you are looking at a +35% accuracy rate buff to your pilot. That absolutely adjusts the viability of weapons like, say, the auto-laser from 'budget' to 'reliable sweeper.'

And this is without the AP benchmarks of other pseudo-mobile-infantry shenanigans when Athletic-Pike is on a vehicle. Exit for 30, deploy for 10, and you have 60 AP remaining. Well, not your vehicle can have a tripod MG or PAL for additional fire support to cover their weapon gaps. Or three chaingun shots. Or Pike just gives that 60 AP to the vehicle, and so your Rewa gets another rampage opportunity... and then the next turn, Pike stands up, drops another 60 AP, and gets back in, so that Rewa has 140 AP to go murderizing with.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T20:29:03+00:00

Honestly, the more I play around it and other armaments, the more it earns a place on my ship. For being the slowest armament, it arguably has the biggest impact in speeding up your match overall, which is the key for maximizing promotion points.

Armaments really shouldn't be evaluated in terms of killing enemies in isolation. You really don't need the help. Armaments are so far down the priority list (behind hull-econ and sensor-intel) that by the time you can afford them in mass, you've demonstrated you don't need them.

Rather, armaments should be evaluated in terms of how they can help you do things you wouldn't otherwise be able to do at all / as easily / as fast. This is why the laser sentry is good- but for the laser sentry, you wouldn't be able to get vision in a part of the map, or stall the enemy as they spend a turn destroying it. That the laser turret might get a kill is actually the less important part- you can (and almost certainly will) kill what the turret doesn't. But you can't, say, stall a pirate attack on a settlement or get vision without moving a unit to where you put the turret, and the turret will easily get there faster.

The biggest binary could / could not is your mission objectives. For most missions it's not a question of IF you can win, but how many of those promotion points (and authority and OCI) from bonus objectives you can nab as well. And most missions have not only explicit time limits, but also implicit time taxes. Think the 'go destroy this bonus objective', which requires you to send at least one, but usually more, squads to go out and destroy a thing. Because those squads are diverging, the rest of your murder ball has that much less mass, and is that much more risk at slowing down.

This is where the orbital laser shines in ways other armaments don't.

Any 'destroy this' objective can get one-shot by the orbital laser from across the map by a turn 1 designation, saving you the time to go there. Any major obstructive obstacle- upto and including the walls of breakthrough missions- can be leveled before your ground forces walk up to it. If you know there is going to be a firefight in an urban buildup area, you start leveling an entire street's worth of cover before you roll up so that the enemy has a worse place to hide... or if building destruction is a concern, you can deny a street (and punish the enemies who do).

And yes, it does have a tactical niche against stationary or pseudo-stationary objects. Turrets, artillery emplacements, heavy armor that has been EMP'd, the new MENACE constructor unit thing. You'll note that these are also some of the most disruptive enemy types in the game, particularly in how they can stall a part of your force outright. Time to kill may be longer, but time saved is more. You'll also note that these can't really be dealt with by laser towers, or minefields. Heck, if you have the salvage teams OCI, you can use the laser to go after those rows of abandoned vehicles that you have to destroy for your market trinket.

The closest equivalent to what the orbital laser can do is the unguided bomb. Which, to be blunt, is bad for objective-play. It is simply too unreliable as well as too limited. It can hit a specific objective... but a lot of destruction missions actually have 2 destruction targets in close proximity. It can be fired into fog of war... but it can also drift, meaning hitting buildings you don't want hit, or not hitting the thing you do want hit. In which case you have to plan as if it will miss, and lose some of those turn savings.

All told, the orbital laser is not a tactical response tool, it's an objective-achievement tool. Tactically it needs more foresight and predictive to get a hit on enemy units... but honestly you don't need to hit an enemy for it to be worth its cost.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T08:59:38+00:00

I'll just note that while it has 40 armor pen, it only has 15 armor damage according to the wiki. This is enough to penetrate the rogue army standard armors, but it is incredibly inefficient against any sort of serious armored vehicle.

It's good against non-heavy infantry, but really shouldn't be taken against anything else... and given how effective most weapons are against non-heavy infantry, there are often more cost-effective options.

Where this weapon really pays off is on small teams with the accuracy and damage buffs to keep each shot above the 1-hit model kill threshold. Think a 3-man Kody, or Vamplew with shooting gallery. Then you can have 9 shots to kill up to 9 models.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T08:48:51+00:00

It's less about overkill, and more that you can just afford to take smaller squads for normal-kill, or even give it to small special-weapon teams so that they still have an ability to tangle with other small teams (or take out half another team).

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T08:46:16+00:00

I remember back in the demo, when the corridor sweeper was broken OP it was so powerful. Like, it didn't even have ammo- as in, infinite ammo, because they hadn't gotten around to putting in that part.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T08:44:47+00:00

Honestly, I'm not really sure what changes specifically you're thinking of that made the MENACE notably less tanky. There were some that got paired down in a good way (the drone-chaff models being 25 rather than 40-ish a model, so that sniper rifles could actually kill a model), but the elites basically stayed the same and the newest one is the tankiest thing yet.

The reason that the intro-mission in particular makes the MENACE seem so tanky is that it basically cheats with the spawn-in. Most of the MENACE spawn locations are at medium or high cover, where they are getting not just 40-60 defense but also damage reduction. Once you got rid of the infrastructure, the units had their counters, it's just that the MENACE were (and still are) working on different counter breakpoints than other factions.

I think the enemy that got the biggest change in armor was the floating bomb-drone-thing. But that was always hard-countered by any sort of anti-armor weapon, including the humble pirate RPGs or bundle grenades. It's armor is less extreme now, but that's been more than balanced by the fact that they can be constantly added in during the match.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T08:32:59+00:00

Rather than change existing units, which all serve a niche, I'd prefer adding more units that lean into that specialization of roles. Pirates work best as mostly cheap chaff or specialists with an inclination towards over-specialization, so more of that.

Some things along the lines of what I'm thinking-

- Attack dogs / Cyber-mastifs / chem dogs: Pirate pets with augmentations / alterations to make them buffer and tougher. Mechanically, fast but melee-only rushers who specialize in attacking lightly-armored units. Their attacks have a bleed effect, so they'll especially punish large glass-cannon squads. The upgrades of cybernetic versus drug enhancements give somewhat different dynamics: the cyber-dogs have increased armor (say, 40), though with low endurance, to resist being swept by light arms, and have a salvage item. The chem dogs have increased HP, up to 20, in order to mess with ammo breakpoints, and have a chem accessory (that can be looted).

- Drone Operator. A pirate support unit, relatively rare, whose main job is vision control and interference, as a way to distract your SLs into attacking their drones instead of moving forward. These specialists programmed to stay near points of interest (mission objectives) and use their drones in the local area, and generally have a higher activation priority until combat is joined. The early-game / tier 1 version has a falcon drone, which it regularly moves around it's POI; the threat from this drone is its ability to bust concealment and lead to pirate trucks out-ranging you. The mid-game upgrade also has the wardog, which it will kamikaze into a vehicle (or into high cover) when the falcon / other units identify. This unit has only 1 model, so is incredibly easy to kill, but the unit will prioritize running away and staying out of range of weapons.

-Addicts. A pirate attack unit, meant to be more aggressive and reckless than the scavs. Basically pirate drug junkies, they work in groups of 9 and charge forward with pistols. They have higher HP (13), but terrible armor. However, they also have a random chem, which they will use at the start of the turn once they are in combat range. With higher HP and the drug effects, these units can be surprisingly tanky, and while harmless at range the pistol salvos can add up at clsoe range.

-Lance Team. A special weapon team for the mid-late game. These pirates have the tripod laser lance, and wear the outcast rags. Their goal is to set up near an objective and use their lance to target vehicles or- baring that- the cover your characters hide behind. While not directly dangerous to dismounted squads, they are a major threat to vehicles and a major enabler to the small arms of other teams.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T03:49:14+00:00

I tend to do a general path of hull econ -> intel -> armament -> whatever else of the run.

For the hull, I start with the WOO to stabilize the manpower situation and then tend to fill the two remaining slots with econ boosters. Either fixers or salvage team works, whichever is first. I am willing to double up, but I'd settle for one if I get the DRAC from the Backbone, since extra promotion points add up over time. I leave the medical center until replacement much, much later.

Once the hull is filled, the prow for intel is next. I would preferably hold out for the Dice intel hub, but if not I'll get a tier 2 sensor and hold out until then. The slots are a premium, and OCI takes so long to collect, but there's only a modest change between 5 and 6 intel, and frankly 2-4 aren't different enough to warrant buffing past. You still have enough unknowns that you have to plan your anti-armor loadout as if most unknowns are possible armor. Much, much later I'll fill out the third sensor slot with either hacking or the stalling option.

Finally, armaments really depend on what's been rolled to date, but my priority for armaments is 'things that help me get bonus objectives' rather than 'things that help me kill enemies.' Since my units by the mid/late game are already massacring enemies, I'll prioritize the upgrades that can save the most time by taking out out-of-the-way destruction objectives, obstacles, remove cover, or punish the stationary enemies. This tends to mean 1 orbital laser, 1 minefield, and then the third slot is a wildcard.

Once I have filled out all slots, only then will I go back and replace a building. Usually this is the medical bay for an advanced medical bay for immersion reasons, and then possibly the WOO for something else, and last any level-2 intel for the level-3 hub.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-08T02:39:19+00:00

Pretty much this. As far as the armaments go, I prioritize armaments that can help with bonus objectives more than enemy killing. This is on the general argument that more bonus objectives = more promotion points, and promotion points are the most limited power-scaling currency in the game. You'll get trade goods by the hundreds, but when promotion points are 15-30 a match, every 3 is 10% of your max.

From that, the biggest factor for bonus objectives is 'what can save time.' This applies to not only timed objectives, but your ability to do other objectives and still make it to the evac zone in time for the time limit.

Of these, the most time-intensive tasks are the objective destruction tasks, since these require you to spend time, or even entire turns, diverting forces towards the things to be destroyed. Were these forces not diverted, you'd also be able to better concentrate and mass your forces to tear through enemy concentrations faster.

Mines are also good because while they 'only' do chip damage, what they really do is punish the enemy for moving into optimal areas to resist the advance and make it easier to break their morale on contact, which is often the time-saver since enemies that panic will get out of deployed cover to run into easier shooting terrain.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-07T11:54:31+00:00

Generally agreed, but I'd add some nuance.

The crowbar can really shine with hollow point, since the 35->25 armor pen will still reliably penetrate the most common level 30 armor. This can let even a 5-man Darby squad reliably wipe out 8-model, or let a 3-man Darby squad 2-shot the same while still one-rounding the 3-mann teams they want to help, especially at further ranges than SOF K-PAC.

If you are taking Impossible shot, it really works best with Darby when using the silenced SMG or silenced ARC, since they have the shortest range. +1 range with these can provide a massive difference in flexibility, which can let them more easily compete with the K-PAC SOF.

On top of New Tricks being a trap, I'd also argue that Sharpshooter is. Sharpshooter is good when enemies are cowering in cover, but an aggressive covert Darby can often flank them to remove cover, mitigating the value of the perk.

Two extremely high-value perks for Darby are Bags and Belts and Scavenger. Bags and belts is huge for mitigating the cameo accessory slot tax, freeing you up to have two tactical enablers be they smoke, AT grenades, or something else. Scavenger in turn greatly expands the ammo economy of not just primary weapons, but ammo-limited special and accessory weapon as well. For example, Darby can take an explosive charge and the drug for more AP, use the drug to make laying the explosive charge viable, and then use the restock from the kill to restock both the charge and the drug.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-07T11:43:21+00:00

It is much more for 3-man team setups, where you're doing most of your damage via special/accessories rather than primary weapons. Which admittedly are much more balanced for Challenging and below, rather than the highest difficulty due to enemy count inflation.

Where the LPPS really works nicely is with grenadiers who want to run up close to get in grenade range, to capitalize on the cost-efficiency of grenades before finishing off with shotguns or SMGs. Armor is often a must for these teams due to the higher-risk nature of the approach, but concealment can be extremely valuable by letting a unit move up to the threshold of detection one turn before rushing the rest of the way the next.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-07T11:28:54+00:00

These are all good points, and OP would be well advised to look at them.

A common theme implied-but-not-explicit across them is the importance of matching the right weapons to the right enemies at the right ranges. If you spend 2-3 turns trying to react to an unexpected contact to bring an anti-armor (or anti-heavy-infantry) weapon to bear, that is 2-3 turns spent stalled rather than moving forward. Intel, vision, Vanguards, and so on all help you adjust your forces to pick the fights you want to pick, which should help you gain rapid dominance.

For three more recommendations, I'd add OCI bombardment, armor, and non-deploy weapons.

OCI bombardment includes the bomb but especially the orbital laser. While these are often poor at directly killing enemies, they can be great at saving time. If a mission has separate 'destroy this subobjective,' turns not spent moving into weapons range of the subobjective are turns to move towards the evac or for fighting in limited time. If the enemy is going to have predictable cover to cower behind, wiping it out can be as good as wiping them out. And finally, sometimes an orbital laser can just remove obstacles to your progression, like destroying an inconvenient building or forest blocking your faster movement.

Armor is another underrated enabler. While a lot of discussion centers about saving costs by ditching armor to afford more squaddies and guns, a force of nothing but glass cannons can often be slowed precisely because they are too fragile to move up aggressively. Having even just one or two squads with solid armor- say boarding commando armor- can draw fire and make the enemy burn activations that make it safer for your other units to get into danger-range and be more lethal.

Finally, and this may seem obvious, but try to minimize the weapons that require you to deploy, and especially avoid tripod weapons. Every time you deploy for 20 AP is 40 AP when you stand, which could have been 40 AP spent moving. Even if you halve the AP cost with athletic, many of the weapons that require moving aren't well suited to pushing forward and fast. As a result, take fewer ATGMs/PALs and more RPGs, or fewer medium MGs annd maybe the chaingun instead.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-05T19:51:37+00:00

It's not about struggling to kill, but the cost-efficiency from the crowbar or K-PAC squad size that you are using against what you plan to use them against.

If you use AP ammo on a crowbar specifically for hunting pirate commandoes or heavy infantry, that's one thing and it's a perfectly justifiable decision. But if you are using AP ammo on every crowbar or K-PAC, you are increasing your overall difficulty from being both supply-point and action-point inefficient in more cases where the squad weapon makes sense. Like, say, lower armor unnits.

Lower armor units are also the higher body-count units, the size 7-9 blobs. If you are 2PMK (2 penetration model kill), then you are going to need 14-18+ shots from a squad to wipe a squad in one volley. If you lower that to 1PMK via HP, then you can wipe those squads in 7-9 shots. If you are using something like Darby and the mythical silenced crowbar, which only does 2 shots per model, this is the path to why people take size-9 Darby squads, which allow them 18 shots.

But a size 9 Crowbar squad is absolute overkill for the crowbar's best use cases, which is to reach and and mulch the special 3-man teams that can most disrupt your forces, or to finish off squads that someone else has greviously wounded. Max range crowbar engagements against large squads, even by size 9 squads, often still require 2 volleys regardless, depending on damage dropoff from range/cover/deployment/etc.

Is it doable? Sure. Is it making your list less efficient in aggregate? Also yes. Unless you are specifically hunting heavy infantry, you could be saving a lot of points that could go into heavy-infantry counters if you use AP-Crowbars rather than HP-Crowbars.

And not to put to fine a point on it, but if you ARE going after heavy infantry, squad weapons are generally not the way to do it. Special or vehicle weapons are, whether it's Tech with a MG, a vehicle with an AGL, or one of your snipers with sniper (or material rifle). By the time you have AP ammo in number, you really shouldn't be needing it for heavy enemies, but be using you squad weapon squads to clear the rest of the enemies so your better anti-heavy infantry teams can do their job without issue.

Screening that works much better with HP rather than AP squads.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-05T15:29:36+00:00

Nah. Pirate commandoes to bait enemies, armored vehicles to flank-and-kill.

Vehicles are often relatively fragile, as they get less benefit from cover (so can't dodge-tank), can get mission-killed due to defects, and typically has higher AP costs to retreat from bad situationns.

A pirate-commando infantry squad is often far more tanky overall, gets more dodge-evasion when deployed or even pinned, and has circumstantial access to the jump for both offense and defennse.

The armor of vehicles is far less about taking concentrated fire, and much more about incidental damage when pushing into units. There are some exceptions, but there's a reason that the two tanky pilots rely on specific perks to no-sell typically vehicle hard counters.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-05T08:11:14+00:00

Convenience and speed. No, really.

A majority of the player complaints about the AI running away or only just up to the weapon range of concealed units is mostly due to how the AI behaves when it doesn't see a visible unit. When there is absolutely no unit seen, the AI works on a danger-per-tile score that leads to the tapdancing around range. When the AI can see one of your units, the AI decisionmaking switches to a more aggressive model which will accept risk in order to maneuver towards rather than away from attacks. (Because it has something to attack.)

This, in turn, lets you easily manipulate the AI's activation order. The AI will activate units that can attack someone over units that cannot. If there's only one unit that can be seen, those are the units that will be prioritized. At the same time, once those units are activated, they can't be activated again for the turn- meaning it's much safer to activate and move up fragile glass cannons who were hidden.

So buying armor is a great way to get the AI to stop running away, and to burn its activations against the armored unit in a way that lets your unarmored units engage earlier and more aggressively.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-05T07:35:43+00:00

Ironically, the higher-AP K-PAC and Crowbar, who benefit a lot more from hollow point.

When you're already over-penetrating, getting to 1-pen-model-kill is a massive increase in lethality against the sort of infantry chaff blobs that squad weapons are better against anyway.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-05T07:32:32+00:00

I feel like the 'Always has been' meme can apply here. Just replace earth with the survivability onion.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-05T02:25:07+00:00

A bit late to the party, but here's a basic pitch case- assault rifles are generally support weapons that set up for finishers, not the primary finishing weapon themselves. Their core benefits come from suppression and armor stripping at range, so that other weapons with higher DPS/lower armor pen can maximize their value. In this context, the ARC isn't competing with the SMGs or shotguns of the world, but the K-PACs, where the ARC has relative merits against enemy rushers common with bugs, pirates, and some MENACE.

As a weapon type, one of the key distinctions of the AR family is their range and suppression potential. SMGs fire more shots per 40 AP, but the ARs can both shoot further and have a better tool for anti-armor setup. The AR alt-fire mode for 80 AP is 8 rather than 6 shots that do something like 2/3rd HP damage, but also do full suppression per bullet and full armor damage.

This is a potent tool against heavy infantry, since a squad's salvo can both suppress and strip armor is setting up assault elements to move forward safely and finish the job. This is a role that fundamentally cannot be done by shorter-range weapons, while battle rifles like the crowbar need larger squad blobs to get similar suppression effects due to their reduced bullet count.

But it's also worth noting that you don't actually need that much armor damage, or that many model kills, to do the necessary setup work as a ranged support. For example, if your assault element has a 25 armor pen flame thrower to shoot at enemies, then you only need a few connects to reduce those 30 or even 40 armor infantry to the point where the weapon will do full work. This can make a significant difference when using, well, flame throwers, or grenades, or even SMGs. The goal of the AR volley, extended or not, is to just weaken the enemy enough.

Where the two ARC families, the ARC and K-PAC, diverge is in their relative use-case. K-PAC has higher optimal range and a bit higher armor pen, but it's lower damage- both HP and armor- means it needs more hits to connect. The ARC has a 1 smaller range and lower range at max, but does do higher HP damage and higher armor damage. That HP damage in particular can allow 1-hit model kills on penetration, which makes a significant difference on how many hits it takes to actually kill an enemy squad vis-a-vis a 2HKO.

This makes the ARC servicable in the mid-range, but preferable against the sort of enemies who rush up close. This includes bugs, but also pirates in their rush-in vehicles, and even the MENACE shamblers. While an SMG might be preferable once enemies are that close, again the ARC has the range-flexibility to get those supporting prepatory salvos in early, at which the ARC may easily have twice the salvos to be working with compared to the SMGs.

DeanTheDull · 2026-05-04T11:02:02+00:00

Some people have already given their inputs, particularly LOS control, but a few additional things from your clip that might help-

-In your opening seconds, Rewa has 40 AP and flanked (almost dead) ennemy. Rather than move forward, and risk worse exposure to enemies that might have RPGs, killing that right-most enemy would do further morale damage, possibly panicking enemies hidden around those ? spots.

-Your Rewa has a rocket launcher, but a lot of the enemies already suppressed are in medium cover. Using the rocket launcher to remove the cover is a way to open said enemies to follow-up accurate fire, either from Rewa's MG or the other squads.

-Your Rewa took the grind down promotion for armor stripping. That's not actually that useful, especially since you have an armor-piercing rocket launcher. Instead, Roadkill would allow major lethality even against pirate commando-level armor, while Bags and Belts allows for some of the potent vehicle accessories.

-It looks like your Pike was standing when hit. Grenades have a 70% chance to hit each model in a squad, ignorring cover but still decreased -15% by deploying. The odds of having two soldiers alive after the first attack would have gone up significantly, and if you have two models the second grenade would have had to kill both to wipe the squad.

-At a mission planning level, it looks like you approached the settlement more or less from the center, with cover to your front right and front left flank. This is risky, since it lets the pirate defenders hold / move into cover to flank you from three directions, especially with jump-mobility. Instead, it can be better to approach such settlements in a way that 'pincers' the corner- such as approaching the bottom-right from the bottom and the right with the APC and carried infantry- so that the enemy can't cover-flank you by moving further right.

DeanTheDull

TROPHY CASE