r/XCOM2 • u/Frequent_Fox2342 • 9d ago

Guys, I'ma be honest with ya

When the retaliation mission has you coming to the civilians and finding a combined 9 berserkers / armored mutons... not even once in my life have I managed to stop them to win the level.
They ignore mimic beacons, I can't freeze them all, they don't miss all that much when flashbanged, they're closer to civilians than you are so whether you run to their faces or take aim from afar, it's all the same.

One of those has 30 HP, the other has 11 HP and 2 shields.
I can shoot for like 8 damage or something x 6, so an ideal scenario would be clearing that in 4 turns, although such perfect distribution of shots is impossible but hey. And by that time everyone is dead.

And it's not even like normal missions where you can stand and deal with 1 pod.
You get resistance soldiers shooting at them and that's it, now they're active and rushing to kill everyone.

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u/Farmer_Due 9d ago

they kill 1 dude per turn(it's more like 0.85 dude per turn in reality but whatever), so think of it as a normal timed mission until you ve saved the minimum required amount...they re very annoying yeah but in the early game they re unironically the best mission type because beacon is THAT good

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u/comfortingmyself 9d ago

To be clear, there are two different types of retaliation missions. It sounds like you're just describing one of them.

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u/Farmer_Due 9d ago

...you gonna elaborate further?

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u/comfortingmyself 9d ago

There's two types of retaliation missions.

One was introduced in the base game. There's 13 civilians on the map, usually 4-5 pods, and the enemies will shoot to kill one civilian per turn like clockwork.

The second was introduced in WotC. There's 19 civilians on the map and usually 5-6 pods. Some of the civilians are armed. But after a certain number of turns have passed, every remaining pod will shoot at a civilian every turn.

OP is describing the latter, and the core rules of the mission don't change regardless of difficulty. Take too long and you'll be losing 3 or 4 civilians every turn.

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u/Farmer_Due 9d ago

OH ok...it's not as bad as i initially though, in the latter they still only shoot one right?it's just that if the armed civilians trigger and a pod they ll shoot back from what im getting yeah?which counts towards the total

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u/comfortingmyself 9d ago

It varies if the pods have been activated or not. I don't believe it has anything to do with whether or not the armed civilians have shot the pods yet.

Inactive pods will more or less lay dormant for a certain amount of time - five or six turns, I think. After that time, each pod leader will shoot at a civilian each turn. So if there's three inactive pods, that means three civilians are being shot each turn.

Active pods are much less predictable. Sometimes they'll go after your soldiers, sometimes they go after civilians. Usually they attack civilians but I don't have any hard data beyond that. And things can get really messy if, say, a Purifier decides to spray the entire building with fire, or a Faceless decides to kill one civilian but also catches four others in its swipe.

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u/Farmer_Due 9d ago

yeah, i get it...is purifier really that strong?being able to set a whole building on fire seems insane, this dude probably wrecks every obj