How are piratez balanced, in general? What's the idea around difficulty?
On one hand, if you savescum, you can get insanely op units that capture everyone - veteran catgirls(should've been called catgals really) in grav boots have 200 tu and insane reactions, i give each a stun baton and they stun entire map on second turn. If you encounter armour you just use medical slicer or a wand of pain. You just have to be careful to not go below 40 tu when someone not in melee range can see you, to not eat reaction shots. But you still have to savescum, it's pretty much mandatory, since there's no way in ufo interface to know whether you missed an enemy. A room might appear revealed, but there was actually a guy with a shotgun hiding in there. This isn't even a tu/skill issue, but a fundamental issue with the engine itself. And it takes A LOT of time to get your recruits to the point where they can do this, you could feasibly put new recruits through the art of trouncing/mma+gladiatorial training, but that's like a month of downtime. And recruits themselves are capped(except peasants). In the original ufo we all just bought a shitton of rookies, and had a gunline with good stat laser guys sitting inside smoke, while rookies walk around the map and scan everything with motion detectors, but you had easy access to lasguns, rookies, and you could bring a lot of bodies to a mission. I would lose 2-4 soldiers with bad stats per typical mission.
You could say "well just shoot everything like this is ufo", but the game seems to heavily incentivise live capture of pretty much everyone. Your infamy bonus is barely enough to pay for brainers, council payments are a joke, and then every new facility costs upwards of a mil, and stuff is just expensive or takes a long time to manufacture in general. AND you need a metric shitton of live captures for your research. AND you have random uninterceptable assaults against your bases, so you need at least 30 peasants at each base. AND the game advances at a rather rapid pace, you need larger transports on day 1, you need better armours or guns, you need motion scanners, smoke grenades, etc. Also the guns are pretty crappy, while one catgal can stun 4-5 bandits per turn and jump into cover, a good shooter with a good gun will still take an entire turn to kill one bandit. A bad shooter will just die to reaction fire. Maybe i could give everyone metal armours or heavy suits, but by the time i get this stuff enemies will be packing lasers and plasmas. And there's stuff like turrets, which can only be feasibly destroyed via pre-primed explosives, a lot of setup with an rpg, or a smartly moving top-tier gal with a hammer. Or mercenaries who are only vulnerable to poison damage. Or enemies like mongorns - a fucking APE, first time i saw them i just stunned a few and stood in the open, well they threw rocks over half a map and killed half my team. I mean what are their stats, when even my veterans can't pull off shit like that?! Also each mission is absolutely swarming with enemies(i'm on the middle difficulty). And just now in my savescum campaign i had a raider invasion into my main base, and the raiders had 6 blaster launchers. If it wasn't my main base, this would've been a base gone. Or, another example, i had an etherial ufo with sectopod in it. 3 Cagals with sabers and medical slicers made short work of the thing, but how the hell would i deal with it if i had just a bunch of noobs with default guns? This is in august or so mind you, but i was getting a rank up every month, maybe etherials and blaster raiders are tied to your captain's rank.
I wanted to play ironman like a normal xcom, started a few games and i'm either outmatched on tactical level, where i don't have enough soldiers and or tus to stun the enemies carefully and not lose gals, or i'm going bankrupt on geoscape. Are you just meant to sit around with your 3 brainers for months or what?
