While it's nice to know that i've chosen a mission that isn't super hard, I never decide against a mission i'd like to undergo because of the Difficulty rating. The way I see it, if i'm deliberately choosing not to pick a certain mission (despite them presenting the best bonuses) because of difficulty rating, i'm kind of avoiding a part of the game. How do you guys feel about it?

Not really. I usually just pay attention to the reward or panic rating. It's not like I can avoid a high panic country just because the mission difficulty is up there.

If you play above normal you definitely should. On normal I never worried about it too much.

@MentalDisruption said:

Not really. I usually just pay attention to the reward or panic rating. It's not like I can avoid a high panic country just because the mission difficulty is up there.

Yeah this is more important, but there are times when you have to look at if you are going to have the personnel to deal with a tougher mission and that kind of thing. But panic level should almost always dictate things.

If my squad is in a pretty sorry state, and it won't interfere with my panic rating, then I might go for the easier mission. I'm pretty sure a lot of non story missions are randomly generated, so it doesn't really feel like I'm missing out on something by not picking the harder one. Usually I will go for the one with the greatest reward though.

@ArtisanBreads said:

If you play above normal you definitely should. On normal I never worried about it too much.

@MentalDisruption said:

Not really. I usually just pay attention to the reward or panic rating. It's not like I can avoid a high panic country just because the mission difficulty is up there.

Yeah this is more important, but there are times when you have to look at if you are going to have the personnel to deal with a tougher mission and that kind of thing. But panic level should almost always dictate things.

Makes sense. I've only played on normal so I haven't really ran into that kind of trouble yet. I'll make sure to keep it in mind though.

@MentalDisruption said:

@ArtisanBreads said:

If you play above normal you definitely should. On normal I never worried about it too much.

@MentalDisruption said:

Not really. I usually just pay attention to the reward or panic rating. It's not like I can avoid a high panic country just because the mission difficulty is up there.

Yeah this is more important, but there are times when you have to look at if you are going to have the personnel to deal with a tougher mission and that kind of thing. But panic level should almost always dictate things.

Makes sense. I've only played on normal so I haven't really ran into that kind of trouble yet. I'll make sure to keep it in mind though.

There are times you can't help it, like terror missions, but when you play Classic you start to realize how much that difficulty means. My second terror mission (a Very Difficult) was a total squad wipe, something I was never remotely close to in Normal. Most I lost there was two. Not only is the game harder but there are just so many more enemies. That mission had like 10 Crysallids and a Cyber disk.

But yeah that's an example where you can't really ignore that mission.

Only in inverse. A harder mission typically means better and more enemies which means better and more rewards.

On normal, I tend to go toward the country that has the higher panic level. Difficulty on normal usually means just more dudes to kill, but nothing too terrible. Terror attacks, however, suck.

No, I pretty much weigh the rewards against the panic level consequences and choose accordingly. Only if I'm in really bad shape, like if all my veterans are in sickbay, will I avoid a difficult mission.

When I played I always regarded the more difficult missions as more pressing aka more important to complete.

I choose based on the panic level. I'll do the mission in a region with a high panic level even if another abduction site with a lower panic level has a reward I want more.

Well if I have all my dudes recovering from injuries or something, and I have to take some rookies, then I'll definitely pay attention to the difficulty. But usually it's the panic level I pay attention to.

I completely ignored it on Normal since after the first one or two missions I never saw anything besides Difficult or Very Difficult and nothing seemed to ever change regardless of what it said. I'd actually just assumed it was meaningless.

I only pay attention to the difficulty if I have some veterans wounded and need to take some sergeants and below. Otherwise, it doesn't matter to me.

I didn't pay attention to it on iron man classic. Was more worried about the rewards or selecting a mission which had 2 abductions on the same continent to keep panic down.

Getting good rewards in the first two months of classic seems to make the rest of the game fairly easy. But getting that can be kind of hard.

Late to the party but difficulty can be useful to level up, if you find an easier mission throw a full crew of newbies in and see what comes out the other side.