That may not always be an option (spent your meds on a friend already, etc), or not fast enough vs bleeding.
Strategically, it's of course better to save the agent. But tactically, it can make your position worse than outright losing one.
Yes, you have to dedicate one or two people to rescue the agent. That's your duty as a commander, isn't it? And if you don't overextend, you almost always have that luxury. There's also roles for drained agent, not everyone needs to be on frontline all the time to be useful.
I meant max damage vs Heavy Tac Suits, which you claimed was 65.
Yeah, it's 58, sorry. I assumed ninja throw to be a little higher that in the wiki, thus got 65.
Do Assassins come at you from the back all the time? And 95*2*0.5 - 16*1.4 ~= 72, not 67?
AI tries to avoid reaction fire if it can (when walking), so it will try to attack from the sides, or back, if it has the opportunity.
Some people like to rotate back to expected frontline, get hit, and get the baddie with reaction fire, sectoid-style.
But yeah, you right, the max is technically 72, I don't know why i have taken 20*1.4 for that, I didn't intend to count the back.
In any case, what makes melee dangerous is that they can slash you more than once due to flat and low TU costs, so max damage on one swing is not the most important metric. As you said yourself for the throwing knives. Getting into melee is always a crapshoot until you get such high armour values even a max damage hit does negligible damage.
The point is that surviving an assassin is my main concern there, and bio-exo clearly improves that. The fire is also something of a concern, but surprise - exo covers you there also.
All that's left is kinetics, now that's a true crapshoot. I play with smoke, so enemy almost never sees me, and shoots blind. And they have such abysmal stats that I wonder how do they even manage to hit sometimes.
And even if they hit, they actually have to deal damage.
It's true that there multiple tools against assassins, but most of them are crapshoots. Randomly checking on scanner? Randomly throwing incendiares? Scouting each turn to hope and see one? You can get maybe 3/4 assassins with that, but one or two bastards usually still manage to slip through and wreck a havoc.
This is a pretty stupid argument if you consider it on the complexity of iron man. The bio-exo suit on the manor is just garbage.
Wrong. It's evident you didn't try. I explicitly noted for you that I cleared 4-5 lotus manors on ironman superhuman, in bio-exos.
And yeah, I was also heavily skeptic about it until I tried.
If you see an assassin, then with a 90% probability you immediately get 3-4 throwing knives.
That's the point of a bio-exo suit, it has huge cutting resist.
If you miraculously survive, then the agent needs to be treated on the next turn, and often by two different people.
Wow, and do agents never need treating normally or something? How's this relevant? I don't know about you, but my agents don't ever go alone, always have backup and medkits nearby.
Assassins are neutralized either by accidentally shooting a minigun, or they are put into a stupor in the doorway by a dog barking.
You can also scout them with rat or a scout drone, they have reasonable anti-camo, as well as see through smoke better then dogs.
Any other encounter with an assassin with a 95% probability is the death of an agent.
Yeah, for you. Because you do not use bio-exos.
It's ridiculous to assume that bio exo will really save you from meeting an assassin.
I didn't "assume" anything, that's battle tested. And with enough luck, you can survive Chupacabras.
On Iron Man, agents with health above 50 are a huge rarity until the discovery of delta radiation.
Wrong again. All my (senior) agents were above 65 health at this point in the game, and at least two had 74, see attachment. That was my first manor attempt.
Some of the guys on this trip survived long enough to see Cydonia, hehe. There, they were max 118-130-156 health, depending on race.