It's possible!

[khearn]

Mission 2 on hard:


I'm getting faster as I increase the difficulty.

That's mainly because of familiarity, plus I'm trying more for speed this time through.

I'm impressed with ntsheep's 11 turns, even on normal. I think I could shave a turn off if I had been able to move my engineer the full distance each turn, but those darn xenos kept getting in the way. But to get down to 11 I'd also have to get lucky rolls on taking down the TP.

Oh, I also saved a turn because I had 605 RP available the turn the dialog said I could deploy an engineer. I've always had less that 600 on that turn before, which slows the whole show down by a turn.

One thing I've noticed is that these speed runs seem to result in less levelling up, which will hurt later on.

[ntsheep]

My first hit from the Engineer must have been a critical because it reduced the enemy TP down to 50%. This is where a little bit of luck comes in, but I still think it should be possible for anyone to get it in 11 turns. I have also noticed that even though the game says you can now get an Engineer, it was always just a few points short. Just like you, I did manage to somehow have over 600 one time.

[warhog]

May 28, 2015 14:36:12 GMT -5 ntsheep said:

My first hit from the Engineer must have been a critical because it reduced the enemy TP down to 50%. This is where a little bit of luck comes in, but I still think it should be possible for anyone to get it in 11 turns. I have also noticed that even though the game says you can now get an Engineer, it was always just a few points short. Just like you, I did manage to somehow have over 600 one time.

Hmm I wonder how many hp xeno tacts have? Capture 1 (and 2) does 1-4 damage and templar tp has 5 hp without upgrades. So unless the xeno tp has an even number hp less than 10, there has to be some sort of crit and/or soak mechanic involved when using capture.

I haven't paid enough attention to the % when I've made my attacks to figure out the minimum % loss per attack, which should to be 1hp

[En1gma]

Level 2 on Nightmare Ironman:

[En1gma]

I have been contemplating the heat map posted by Cory Trese, so I thought about how to best use it to my advantage.

Once I spawned the Engineer, I moved the Soldier from the middle of the outer Tact Point ring to the very bottom, them blocked the entrance with OW. Worked like a charm. Both spawn points were dragged down into the Soldiers AoE. This allowed him to hold the Tact Point single handedly while everyone else stomped their way up the map.

[fallen]

En1gma - nice work!

[ntsheep]

Way to go En1gma!

[CdrPlatypus]

En1gma impressive AI trolling!

[ntsheep]

Here's my score playing on Hard difficulty. Level 3 took 3 tries because of silly mistakes I made, level 4 took 2 tries.

[Cory Trese]

Here is my score on Hard for the next deploy -- to give some idea of what the scope of the next phase is.



There are two 5 level Deploys + re-balanced and expanded Tutorial.

There is a Boost In mode that lets you skip the Tutorial, go directly to Level 4 and enter the new Deploys.

You can also take Tutorial Squads into the Deploys

[ntsheep]

Hurry with Phase 2 Cory Trese so we can beat match your scores

[contributor]

Well, I defeated the Alpha on Nightmare Ironman tonight without losing any Templars. It honestly didn't feel much more difficult than Hard. Turns were 14, 14, 22, 22.

[johndramey]

I'm here to brag and agree with contributor. I'm finishing up my phase 1 nightmare ironman squad and, while it has been a lot of fun, there isn't a huge difference between hard and nightmare.

Here is my level 2 nightmare ironman victory.

[contributor]

Here's my Artifact Chamber run on Hard.

I felt like it was pretty solid, maybe even the score to beat. I could have done it in 8 if I would have understood the mechanics of the orange square finishing zones. I learned that if I'm rushing my whole squad to such an area the last move should be somebody in the orange or within the orange. On turn 9, my first move was to send my engineer further back into the orange. He did and we immediately won because everybody was close enough. Apparently the game only checks when somebody moves onto orange, it doesn't look at the total state of the game when others are just getting close.

[fallen]

contributor - nice work! Seems like the balancing changes are working well?

Yes, only a move in the extraction zone can trigger an extract.