LWR 1.49 Impossible July - September
My campaign ends in early September after fumbling both the Gangplank and Furies missions.
Well, I made it a few months further this time. I didn’t take notes this campaign, and so I am just going to summarize what happened each month as best I can remember and with some assistance from the Campaign Summary.
July
A battleship showed up on July 3 and shot down my satellite over the US (my home country) which seems like bs, but whatever. I probably wasn’t going to manage my full European expansion this month anyway. On the same day the aliens flip Russia, which only had 22 panic. This is actually good news. The aliens have been steadily taking over countries, keeping Incursion between 100 and 120, typically.
I take an A-Team on a Data Recovery on July 6th and win, then take a weakish team on a Light Abduction which I decide to run away from (first evac this campaign). No deaths or serious wounds but against a cyberdisc and surprisingly mean and aggressive pair of sectoids I can’t make any headway. After running out of “Tank” and ammunition, I decide to split. Demoralizing.
I win the next abduction, and a crashed raider on the same day, without any deaths. Newfoundland goes well a week later. A landed raider ends up costing me an Assault. She dies after two nasty outsider flanks.
I win the Alien Base Assault on the 24th, liberating Russia. That missions goes smoothly until the very end, which is extremely messy - fighting a pod of sectoids along with the sectoid commander. My squad is atop the platform with the alien entertainment console, and we break LOS almost completely, and then drop down to attack. My best gunner is KO’d by a couple lucky shots but survives. He is chopped into a Goliath who never sees the battle field.
I am putting the Advanced Perception Gene Mod on all my tanks and find that works well.
With the North America continent bonus, the air game is much more manageable.
August
This is the month I am going to expand to another continent - exciting. I queue up everything needed and find that I am now poor. Can only buy 3 interceptors for Europe (9 total), and hope that will be enough.
This month I complete a pair of abductions, council mission, downed Raider, Data Recovery, downed Scout, Terror, Deluge, Confounding Light, and another downed raider, all with no deaths. Maybe the best month of LWR I’ve ever played. These are not easy missions. Well, Confounding Light was super easy, but every other missions was challenging, in particular the downed raiders.
The first raider was on that tiny map with hedgerows. God I hate that map. There were no good options of how to approach things. So I just push forward, along the edge of the UFO that has cover, hoping for the best. I stumble into one of the worst activations of the campaign. First I activate the command pod, then midway through my turn, I activate a cyberdisc pod on top of the UFO. Super ugly. Somehow I manage to pull that mission out of disaster territory using my tanks to absorb all the incoming fire. Also the 2 remaining pods (thin men, drones) don’t immediately join the fight, and then don’t get to scamper, and that allows me to nuke them.
On the 2nd raider the motion tracker reveals 2 pods outside the UFO right on top of one another. So I decide to go the other way, charging the command pod and leaving those 2 pods for later (might as well if I have to fight them both together). This was a solid plan, but there was one problem - an unexpected pod of drones on top of the UFO which quickly joins the fight. I play it well, and the drones derp, so I win that skirmish handily. The remaining 2 pods are mechtoid plus drones and floaters, and I do end up fighting them all at once as expected, but on my own terms and in good cover.
At the end of the month I expand to Europe, and finish building some advanced Gauss weapons plus an alloy SHIV. Things are looking really good, though we are now at AL 6.
September
The first mission of September is Gangplank, and the first room on Gangplank has a leader cyberdisc pod as well as 3 mutons, 2 of which are elite. The blue cyberdisc only goes on overwatch its first turn, perhaps toying with me, but on it’s second turn it crits my sniper who was in smoke, with a 28% shot. This is followed up by another cyberdisc (out of sight drop-in) moving into range and hitting a 50% shot, killing the sniper. Also a mechtoid pod activates.
I have to stop playing for a bit to cool down. Damn. I should have placed a tank closer to that leader cyberdisc, giving it a free hit, rather than hoping it would go on overwatch again. Such a small mistake, and such a large consequence. Eventually I decide that my squad needs to run. It’s agonizing as hell, but without my Sniper’s firepower I don’t see how I am going to kill everything in this first room1, let alone the rest of the map.
The next mission is Furies. It lands within the same hour as Gangplank (How does that happen?) The mission goes reasonably well until I enter the UFO, at which point a pod of scattered floaters activates, which also activates 2 seekers and a muton well out of sight. There are still 2 berserker drop-ins just hanging out on the roof, and 3 sectoids that ran away or dropped in. There are about 10 active enemies but I can only see one floater and so that is the only enemy I can kill. On the alien’s turn, 2 sectoids pop out of sneak mode and hit a couple nasty shots, knocking my Gunner down to 1 HP. Super frustrating - those sneaks ran away from me. I didn’t break LOS, they did. Anyway, I kill them both, and throw my last battle scanner which reveals… nothing. This is really bad. The motion detector was telling me that enemies are nearby, but I couldn’t tell if those are the berserkers on the roof or the newly active seekers, which are too damn fast to ignore. I had used the first 2 Battlescanners on a pod of 4 seekers earlier in the mission, so now I am all out, and need to find these two seekers (one a leader) with the sucky proximity sensor.
I can only find one of them, and once I find it, I can’t actually shoot it. It’s behind a wall but near all my soldiers. Great. On the next turn both the seekers move in, just as the berserkers drop down, and things go all to hell. In the midst of the chaos I make one critical mistake. After suppressing a berserker and a seeker, I shoot at the berserker thinking he has no chance to charge (there being 10 active enemies) but he does charge (perhaps there were only 9 active enemies?) and this ends the suppression, which otherwise would have killed both those enemies on their turn. The seeker shoots twice (LEU) killing my tank medic (Durand) and putting me on tilt.
I suppose I could have my remaining soldiers run away, and keep going with this campaign, which was going awesome up until these 2 missions, but for whatever reason, I feel like I’ve had enough for now. It’s not just the difficulty and punishing mechanics that I’ve had to deal with. I am also dreading the obstacles looming in my campaign’s future. The bubble tanking, and the overpowering, and the mind controlling, and the psi lancing, and all the other nasty stuff that I’ve seen happen to Stefan, or read about on the Discord, all of which are waiting for me, with dark menace.
I plan to write one more post with my current assessment of the game, for what it’s worth, then step awhile from LWR for awhile.
Along with the 2 discs, mechtoid, and 1 remaining muton elite there are about 6 other assorted enemies.