Medium size missions

[mtgmaniac]

Hi. I love the long war mod and managed to win 2 playthrough on veteran. As many have mentioned i have noticed the binary missions type between 1-3 man stealth missions and 8+ man missions type, although one mission type i particularly like is the network tower where you are forced to fight with a smaller squad. Here are a few suggestions of scenarios that could encourage player to use medium size squads (5-6) more often or use different specialized squads:

Wipe advent scouting party scenario
We are force to send a maximum of 5-6 to avoid alerting Advent which would allow them to retreat. The fight level would take place in the forest and the amount of enemy would be the same as a data leak mission or could even be compose of single strong pod (12 aliens) to keep the scouting party theme. The rewards could be the corpses themselves which would be a alternate source corpses to supply raid or this could be an alternative to the prevent data leak preventing a retaliation mission.

Destroy prototype
This mission would counter a dark event. The idea would be to limit the squad to 5-6 and the goal would be to kill a specific enemy on the map equipped with the dark event upgrade. For example, you have to kill 3 mutons centurion with poisoned rounds. The setting would be an advent facility and you could bail out as soon as the targets are dead, however since you actually have to kill certain enemies you can't just stealth it.

Destroy Advent hardware
Advent is moving sectopods/mecs by train, a small team of 5-6 is able to infiltrate a train in a city and wait for the train to stop at a refueling station to strike. Obviously the setting would be a train map. The fight could be a single sectopod or mec squad in the early game. In the late game you could add advent guard of have a pod of 3+ sectopods or have a pod comprises entirely of mecs. The reward could reducing advent strength, a mec for the resistance, some supplies or even some hardware such as an incendiary grenade. This would encourage players to use specialists for the hacking.

Destroy Advent fueling station
I don't know how hard this would be to code, but you know those explosive tank that you sometimes see in a mission. What if you could make a map with like 20 of those and have the goal of the mission to destroy them all with a squad of 6. The amount of enemy would be like normal but because of the explosive nature of the map you would have a stream of enemy reinforcement after you break concealment. This would encourage bringing class like technical or boom grenadiers or equipping more grenades for the aoe and the difficulty would lie in destroying all the tanks while dealing with advent reinforcement then evacuating before advent overwhelms you. The reward would be reducing advent strength by 2.

Ps: sorry for the spelling/grammar english is my third language

[AlexTFish]

I love these ideas!
Assassinating specific aliens sounds like a nice way to require the player to actually kill something. The Frost Bomb might be overpowered in such missions - not sure.

I suspect the other ideas would be rather technically challenging to implement, but if anyone can do it, Pavonis can

[stevemoonpig]

These are all really excellent ideas, especially like the Destroy Prototype and Destroy Hardware missions - in general I'd like there to be some more missions where you know in advance something about enemy composition so you can gear up appropriately - eg Sectoid Cloning Facility raid where it's all/mostly sectoids and commanders.

[wobuffet]

Destroy prototype
This mission would counter a dark event. The idea would be to limit the squad to 5-6 and the goal would be to kill a specific enemy on the map equipped with the dark event upgrade. For example, you have to kill 3 mutons centurion with poisoned rounds. The setting would be an advent facility and you could bail out as soon as the targets are dead, however since you actually have to kill certain enemies you can't just stealth it.

Destroy Advent hardware
Advent is moving sectopods/mecs by train, a small team of 5-6 is able to infiltrate a train in a city and wait for the train to stop at a refueling station to strike. Obviously the setting would be a train map. The fight could be a single sectopod or mec squad in the early game. In the late game you could add advent guard of have a pod of 3+ sectopods or have a pod comprises entirely of mecs. The reward could reducing advent strength, a mec for the resistance, some supplies or even some hardware such as an incendiary grenade. This would encourage players to use specialists for the hacking.

These in particular sound like great ideas!

Something like "Destroy prototype" could also just be implemented as "kill all 3 of these (Dark) VIPs".
(Possibly easier variant to code: evac zone is preset, Dark VIP spawns in evac zone, and killing the VIP is either preferred to capturing the VIP or the only option)

"Destroy ADVENT hardware" could be just the opposite of the missions where you don't want to blow up the glowing loot: the more you destroy, the more (strategic?) benefits you accrue.

[wobuffet]

Another (possibly easier-to-implement) idea would be to make "Neutralize all enemies" an optional objective on stealth-able missions, offering greater rewards (Intel? Supplies? Corpses?) at greater risk.

[Sines]

The only problem I have with these is that they are hard-coded to prevent you from bringing more than 6 people, rather than simply encouraging squads of size 4-6. You could do this with ANY mission type, and call it a medium size mission.

That being said, I do like these mission types, and the theming generally works well for a medium sized combat squad. While I generally prefer a soft 'encouragement' restriction, which can allow you to go over it for specific reasons, I also know that it can be very hard to balance things like that, and that hard limits are sometimes the best solution to the problem.