So remember the
character pool thread? And I said I would do an After Action Report (ARR) on it so I can tell people how they horribly die, this is that thread. I will do a write up of a month by month (in game time). You can still join the character pool if you want and die horribly eventually
Difficulty: Legend/Ironman
Options enabled:
Not Created Equal: Randomised starting stats
Hidden Potential: Random increases to stats on level up
Commanders choice: I get to pick a soldiers class when they get promoted
Beta Strike: EVERYTHING (except the lost) gets double HP
Time Turner: Increased time limits on missions, too balance out the fact fights will last much longer due to everything having more hp
Grim Horizon: Permanent Dark Events
Precision Explosives: grenade damage falls off from the centre, cover desctruction is still full radius
Month 1:
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Operation Gatecrasher: The Starting mission:
Objective: plant a bomb on a monument
None of the UM guys showed up for this mission, we start off with a Templar, none other than Nicole Knight, the soldier with the highest kill count by a long shot from my previous campaign.
I have to say Beta Strike already kinda terrifies me, bog standard ADVENT trooper has 8 HP Officers 14 HP and Sectoids have 20 HP on legend difficulty our weapons only do 3-5 damage currently.
Most people got shot up pretty badly and so will be out of action between 6-15 days until I get an infirmary to reduce heal times.
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Back at base we research modular weapons and begin building the guerilla tactics school so we can train rookies to be useful
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Operation: Iron Death
Mission Type: Destroy alien relay
Reward: Engineer
No UM deployed
Here we discover that 20 hp sectoids are made of pure bullshitium if you don't have enough flashbangs to counter their psychic bullshit
If they don't outright mind control it will leave a soldier panicked and unable to do anything next turn or disoriented reducing their already shit tier aim to even shittier tier aim and they can raise both advent and xcom corpses as zombies, zombies with 16 hp.
I really need to make more flashbangs when i get more supplies.
We lose 1 rookie who couldn't hit the broadside of a barn, with their aim I doubt they would even know what a barn IS to aim at in the first place
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Operation: Night Witch
Mission Type: rescue stranded resitance agents
Sitrep: The Horde (no advent or aliens just endless swarms of the lost)
Reward: scientist and grenadier
Some idiots got lost in a strange abandoned city teeming with zombies
This should be a nice breather mission, the lost get no hp buffs from betastrike as that would nullify the headshot mechanic they have (killing a lost with a standard shot is a free action), if anyone could fucking hit them for once, seriously 90+ % and your missing multiple times in a turn. at least the lost do very little damage so it's not such a big deal.
The grenadier we have to rescue is passed out on the ground, this is the real reason we have to save these guys, they were out partying in the ruins, the grenadier got trashed enough to pass out and so his buddy called xcom as a glorified taxi.
But so many lost, so many every turn a new swarm will spawn without end


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Back at base we get a breakthrough in reseacrh giving our rifles +1 damage and then begin resistence communications, we finish the GTS and begin traing chasovolt first so we can deploy him eventually
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Operation: Wolf Walk
Mission Type: Haven assault
No UM deployed.
Just before the end of the month the xeno filth try attacking a resistance haven and we have to deploy to save their asses.
We encounter the Warlock for the first time this campaign, in a stroke of luck he has templars as his adversary, which means he takes bonus damage from them and guess who recovered in time for this? Motherfucking Nicole 'Glyph' Knight my Templar, you could even say Templar Knight. but dang 60 base HP with beata strike.
A stun lancer knocks 1 of my guys unconciouss (different to being killed outright) in one hit after dashing across half the map, "they are a fair and fun unit to fight" -absolutly nobody ever
Warlock hangs back most the time spamming ghost zombies that explode.
We kick his ass eventually (at least templars can't miss their main attack)and barely save the haven.

End of month 1:
We use our first resistance orders the templars give us feedback which makes alien psi attacks damage the caster, I forsee this being VERY useful.

No contact with the other 2 factions yet.
We deploy Nocam and some random rookie on a covert action to locate the skirmishers which should maybe get us Noct.

The first dark events to show up are I can only stop one and at this point I likely won't have a choice of which

I'm already gonna regret grim horizon aren't I?
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