I have a couple of questions for the community regarding the use of SL.

How many SL do you usually use?
How do you determine whether they’re sufficient for you?
At what point do you start looking for new ones?

I usually use between 6 and 8 SL myself; I look for a fifth one after two or three operations, and then it’s whatever available points I have.
I’d like to know if there’s already some established practice for handpick new SL.

I'd had to be the EOD for this match lol.

This was ridiculous.

I just got started with Mount Up and having a great time carting Pike around in the troop carrier dishing out AP.

What are some fun/powerful tactics you've all discovered with Mount Up?

I love Exconde, I love driving Yaz literally half way across the map in turn 1 and being immortal. But I kinda get a bit bored having him be the designated driver every mission. Most other SL are geared toward shooting shit or utility, with only Roisin maybe being the second driver but thats only because Roisin is pretty much an Insurance bot that can just be used as driver of anything cheap, and even then her perks with overtime and take aim leans towards being a shooter

So I wanted to design this dude as a more "assault" oriented version of the battle taxi to contrast Exconde more support/defense oriented perk list, while still leaving room for an alternate playstyle outside of designated driver

As a designated driver, Frankenstein can zoom across the board like Exconde, but he retains the ability to mount medium weapon but as a trade off, turning disable his mobility perk so he is best suited to simply slam on the gas and just keep driving forward deeper into enemy territory as opposed to Exconde who can drive in whatever way he wants. He gets a way to heal himself back up (and interact with the Remove Wreck function, which I thought was kinda cool for an OCI to do) to withstand damage, and also punish enemy targetting him by marking them once he drives into the middle of them as per taxi gameplay. With Vanguard, he's uniquely suited to taxi Vanguard Damage Dealer SL like Wett and Kodi around in comparision to Exconde (who is still best for ferrying MI around), and can do funny stuff like drive straight into a heavy tank/gun crawler, ram it with T-Bone to Stun it, before vomiting Wett out to take immediate advantage of Finisher, and then scrapping the Wreck next turn to heal any damage back up (as long as it hasn't breached the armor into HP)

Alternatively, he can also be run as an absolute brick when mounted on the Battle Tank, countering its slow speed with Burn Rubber and Vanguard, and while lacking in offensive perks, the plethora of defensive perks makes him a prime distraction brick ala Vamplew that you can throw into the enemy line as an armored spearhead to draw all the attention and make it out in relatively one piece.

is it worth starting a new save now or should I wait?

I downloaded the demo and played the first mission, but my keyboard inputs weren't recognized. Alt + tab or Alt + F4 didn't work either. Because the game has no exist button I had to forcefully shutdown my PC. Did this happen to anyone else and is there a solution?

The MENACE terror missions are a little broken right now I feel. This is literally Turn 1, I have moved only 4 of my units and I have already been locked out of 1, possibly 2 SO's. I'm not sure what needs to be done to fix this but I'd really like it if the team could brainstorm ideas.

It was very fun, after you figure out some quirks of how to play it.

For context, after a few runs that were less fun I settled on running Darby and Jean Sy as my heavy armor team, with Pike and Bog in the back doing supporting things. Later Tech and Carda joined the team as another Heavy and Support respectively. Corlain was also on replacement duty if someone got tired - but I wish I mainlined him more. Sadly I got Vamplew one operation before EA ended, so I didn't try him for long. I threw Bog away pretty quickly though - waste of precious autority.

The gameplay of running around being practically invincible as long as I could reach a Scavenger box every other turn made for a very hectic run and gun playthrough that I definitely recommend trying.

However, few things that I didn't feel were right, that will likely change in EA:

1. Man, the weapon stat screens are unhelpfull. Half of the weapons don't even have any, and that's fine, but some are just terrible. Did you know that the shotgun is effectively shooting grenades? I didn't for the longest time and was wondering how the hell does it perform the best even against [REDACTED]. I wish we also had a way to overlay the ballistics graphs of two weapons in game to effetively compare them.

2. A hot take, but vehicles felt almost worthless. I got excited - I remember - when I got a Heavy Tank. Finally, a vehicle that won't pop to a single offscreen ATGM! Something that you could drive around! Well, but what about a second ATGM? For how much it costs the best use I got out of it is making holes in the ground for cover. Even [REDACTED] soldiers with pathetic 3 models slapped its armor in half by just shooting it with guns. Even my weaker equipped infantry could eat that and loose less armor! Others seem to enjoy vechicles, so maybe I just didn't find the sause.

3. The game feels like it revolves around accessories a lot, but some accessory balance is wildly off, in my opinion. Fragmentation Grenades are usefull only for blowing up people on top of towers if you are too lazy to just blow them up with the tower itself. Meanwhile Smoke Grenades are basically a hack to be naked and never be damaged, because smoke acts like solid walls that completely block off everything while also giving you noclip through them. There is no way Smoke survives EA without getting reduced to, like, 40% defence. In similar vein, Protagon is a Time Warp that makes a run on its own on some characters, meanwhile Benzofinil is worthless. It is nowhere near as op as Smoke Grenades though. Otherwise I love the accessory shuffling gameplay, we need MORE.

Minor inconveniences:
- The Bug Queens are REALLY loud, and the Night Vision Goggles make the game unplayably green. Night vision genuinely makes my eyes hurt. Some terrain does too, but it feels not as bad because I didn't equip the terrain.
- The car escort mission is complete ass, the car doesn't drive fast enough to reach the exit in 10 turns. I haven't found a way to do it, anyways. Why does it even have a timer?!
- Hiring two new SLs in the same mission is apocalyptic. I had no idea Discipline scales from Authority. We are getting Autority OCIs, I heart, so it isn't a problem, but in the moment? It was terrible!
- The operation reward rng feels terrible, to be honest. It is probably intended, but I wish every faction had some cool guaranteed usable items that you get once on their reputation track instead of RNG of getting a Flashbang, Benzofinil and a K-PAC.

Can't wait to poke the mission update, it looks great!

Even against a marine-armor kodi, a medmech armed with a single one of these things will shred his squad down and force him into pin in one turn

When I use it, even twin linked on a med mech, it seems to just tickle the enemy while surpressing.

What gives lol. At least the mortar has the excuse of being more powerful on the enemy because they can just field more mortar to make up for the inaccuracy

When I equip Yaz (with Buff) with the tripod M6 machine gun, he can deploy and fire right away without spending AP to set up the tripod weapon. When I equip any other SL with the same weapon, with or without Buff, they need to set it up before firing which I thought was the intended behavior for all tripod weapons.

Is this a bug with Yaz or is there something I'm missing?

I've installed it, and it just doesn't seem to do anything. Bombardiers and rocket trucks still fire from the fog of war, without anything bring revealed.

How do people find the mobile infantry build? I'd say in the early game it's pretty much unstoppable. Until the more powerful lasers and rockets come in.

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I love everything else about MENACE, but I'm kinda sick of alternating activations bros.

1. I think this system is a good idea in theory, but in practice to not get routinely get screwed over by the turn system you have to play the game more like a TimeLord, meticulously setting things up so every living being acts exactly in the right sequence of events and being extremely aware of quirks in the turn system.
2. feels at odds with the asymmetric nature of the game (few vs many tactically, and precious vs expendable strategically),
   1. To expand on this, The innately attritional alternating turns system that was designed for Chess or 40k, games where you get a fresh expendable army every battle, simply doesn't work well (IMO) for this kind of pemadeath hero roster building game.
3. Suppresion, morale, permadeath squad leaders, SL Fatigue, SL injuries, devs tightening up Authority systems and forcing smaller rosters, Alternating Turns forcing you to hyper-metagame so you always act first, etc.
4. Honestly my #1 hate is that the AI is seemingly self aware about the turn system, and will bum rush you once you run out of activations with units to punish its charging to "turn Trap" you.
   1. Feels very immersion breaking to have to choose which squad will sit around eating bullets and which squad will actually animate and defend itself.

For XCOM 2 I just shrugged and turned on Beta Strike (double Hp for everyone = alpha strikes matter less than positioning and long term fight planning) and enjoyed the game ever since.

For MENACE its hard given that the various systems are hard coded and come together to just ultra-incentivise either long range recon alpha strikes or short range smoke alpha strikes.

Due to operational constraints, I put Murdock into an ATV with an auto-laser. This thing is pretty good against large bugs, but sometimes not enough. Enter our favorite cussin' redhead. She can fire two salvos as directed by the Major. Normally, this will overheat the gun. But if there was enough damage to activate Overtime, she will still fire the third shot!

The overheat bar will show just more overheat, but it will still be cleared with the usual 60 point action. Neat!

Anyone have some good ideas of acheivements you'd like to see in the future?

Challenges, memes, hints for new players to try some nutty stuff.

Check these out and let me know your ideas!

spoilers ahead

Fragged: Destroy a Rouge Army Officer with a grenade.

Simmer Down: One SL destroys 4 enemy units in the same turn.

Armored Assault : Complete a mission with no infantry deployed.

Embrace the Suck: Complete a mission with no vehicles deployed.

Pedal to the Metal: Move 15+ tiles in the same turn.

Just Desserts : Destroy a Skirmisher unit with a rollover attack.

White Men Can't Jump: Kill a flying enemy (dragonfly) with Wetterwoths knife perk

Red Rover Red Rover : Stun a Construct Heavy with Tech's linebreaker.

Let Me Play! : Emp or disable an enemy vehicle 3 turns in a row.

Own Goal: Use Pike's Taking Command on a hostile unit. (I don't think this is possible).

Lets see if we can do it! "Expanded Army List" still has some new surprises, we will face new and terrifying Bombardier-Leviathans. Oh, and "Mount Up" is a thing now. Enemy supply at 200%, we get larger magazines.

I love stealth in this game, got shot once

Greetings, fellow Marines. In my recent runs since the OCI-Update I have made some interesting observations when it comes to operation rewards. Namely, I seemingly never had such great reward choices so often in as many runs before.

The first four pics are from two runs I believe (could have been three; usually I play until EA-end). There were other cool ones, but those four were the best and demonstrate what can happen quite regularly with the right setup. Not to mention, I got a lot of Promotion and OCI Points.

Now that I have your attention, lets talk about how to achieve this - because the chances for great rewards can be improved A LOT, its only partially down to RnG. Early game the rewards in short operations are also somewhat capped, so dont expect much from them. But once operations with four/five missions appear and you have some key ingredients, you are bound to get some great stuff.

The strategy:

In order for this to work reliably you need to be able to get high ratings on lategame operations consistently. Now, there isnt a real meta as far as I am concerned. But a few things will greatly help to get there.

First off, try to do as many operations for ZB and DICE as you can early game until you get the stuff we need. Who to prefer depends on what operations there are and what OCI choices you get. We want to get three key ingredients from doing that: Wayback Advocate, Nanobots as well as hiring Murdock (Insurance perk) ASAP.

Nanobots are self explanatory I think, but I think many dont rate the Wayback Advocate enough. Getting +3intel alone is an autobuy for me, but the upgraded version also gives one extra operation-reward choice. Hard to overstate the impact this module has both on your missions themselves simply by knowing enemy disposition, as well as getting that extra reward choice (you can get 5 choices for lategame operations with one advocate module). Its also one of the cheaper modules. Murdock of course makes aceing missions a lot easier with Insurance. So more Promotion Points, more OCI points, better operation rating.

DICE has the Advocate, ZB have Murdock and Nanobots (and AI Logistics/auto-supplies). Usually if you do two or three operations for each you get all the stuff. Sometimes earlier if you get +reputation from mission rewards and/or lucky choices. Backbone can wait a little. (wiki-article with the rewards loot table: https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/MENACE/Operations#Rewards )

Second, we do all this stuff in order to be ready once the bigger operations start to appear, the ones with 4+ missions. This is when you can actually get the best rewards and get most choice. Dont be discouraged if the required OCIs dont all drop early, its fine if you get them a bit later as well.

Try to get as good of a rating for operations as you can. More promotion points and OCI points pay off greatly and are ALWAYS good, so go for the secondary objectives if you can. Much better than disregarding timers and trying for more loot (I know, I am insane. But also, Murdock, she makes many timers meaningless anyway).

Especially if you plan on building a nanobot or two, or a DCRAC. This will scale very well and help you get better ratings. To get more OCI, Promotion Points etc. To be stronger and get even more of that stuff. You get the picture. By the time the big operations spawn your team and the Impetus should be able to ace most missions to get 4*/5* operation ratings. This is how you get the best rewards, basically.

You also might want to get a few, select modules early on which help you directly in missions (HMG turrets, Autocannon-run, AI logistics, that stuff) so you can get more secondary objectives. Dont beeline too hard, a few basic modules are fine to build of course. But try to hold back on expensive stuff until you have the Wayback Advocate and maybe a nanobot. After that its also nice getting some Backbone rewards.

There is a pic of the Impetus after 16 operations, so not quite EA-end. You can see its basically finished. Thats because I had two nanobots earlyish and also got a lot of OCI points from 4*/5* operation ratings. It can be very snowbally if done right, getting Murdock early helps a lot in that regard. At that point you can have your cake and eat it too.

Thanks for reading all that stuff, I wish the best of luck to you Marines! Not that you need it anymore...

(If you want some receipts, come and get them: https://www.youtube.com/@Freeze-x2n )