I've tried them a few times now, and they seem kind of unwieldy. I can see how you could use the boulder and the hook to set up chain shots, but I feel like that by nature they might be a bit broken. The main damage dealer is the lightning whip, but it chains through objectives as well as enemies. So if melee vek are attacking an objective, you can't kill them without also destroying it.

Am I missing something here? Or is it just a very collateral damage heavy squad to play?

My first victory was Blitzkreig.

Chaining electricity can be incredible when the setup's right. But you really need to make sure you equip your Lightning Mech with a secondary weapon as soon as you can. For me, Electric Whip and Mercury Fist was a fantastic combo.

My first victory was also Blitzkrieg. My primary problem was dealing with defensive mission like defend the train or bombs etc. so I just stopped picking those mission and had a much more present time. They are also all about moving the enemies into a chain, so I always got the building immunity for the chain whip. I also had a cross shaped smoke cloud launcher by luck for the harder to reach guys. i also didn't care if my other mechs received lightning damage either as I usually make sure to get +2 health when using them.

I won with them last night. My keys were prioritizing getting the upgrade for the chain whip that lets it chain through buildings, as that opens up a ton of options on most maps to get some crazy chains. Then build up health on your other mechs so they can also serve as conduits for lightning. Your grapple mech is armored, so I think they almost designed him to serve that purpose to pull together bugs and let the lightning flow. Then you can pump up damage on your mechs. Towards then end I was regularly pulling off combos with nearly every enemy on the map. But yeah, I generally took a ton of damage on mechs every map between that and emergence prevention. There was a lot of taking things out, taking a ton of damage, and then repairing while blocking holes to manage threats. It was a lot different from how I manage the first group, where I rarely got hit at all and prioritized movement.

I would avoid the train/bomb/satellite launch missions for the reason you noted, because even the building upgrade doesn't prevent you from damaging them. I made it through a few of those missions, but it was a lot trickier than it needed to be because of that. Other than that it is just figuring out the ways you can use the rock/grapple abilities to create chains or avoid damage, same as you would with the initial team. And getting a secondary ability on lightning and grapple mechs is helpful, as there are times those abilities aren't useful. I had the judo toss on lightning so he could serve as a secondary threat mover, and a missile on grappler to provide additional movement possibilities are the ability to deal with distant threats.

Yeah the relatively low damage output of the whip and the fact it doesn't move anything turned me off them. The whip can hit lots of targets but this game seems like it's far important to take out enemies than it is to chip damage from lots of enemies. Might try it again

I was running into the same issues with the early lightning whip. Doing such a small amount of damage to multiple enemies just wasn't good enough. Seems like you really need a couple of key upgrades in order to make that weapon at all usable on harder difficulties.

Good to hear they're working out for others, but I tried them again a few times and woooof. On normal most of the enemies start getting three health very early on, meaning I couldn't kill them with the whip even if I lined them up. I like the boulder artillery a lot, but the hook feels like it needs +2 mobility or flight to make it useful. I found that most of the time I just couldn't reach a spot where it could have a meaningful effect, and even occasionally just got in the way, and caused my lightning whip to chain to objectives when I didn't want it to.

So far I've beat the game pretty handily with Rift Walkers, Rusting Hulks, Zenith Guard and the Flame Behemoths, but I'm still struggling to make it past the first island with Blitzkrieg. I think maybe my issue is that with the other squads I would almost always go for the high-threat missions, and focus rep and cores above everything else, it seems like with Blitzkrieg you need to be a lot more selective because some objectives are nearly impossible to protect with them.

Blitzkrieg are really good. I had an almost perfect (1 building hit) game with them, all 4 islands. Give the grappling tank a pilot with an ability, as that is the weak link.

I havne't had any luck with anything but the default squad.

Of the squads that I've unlocked and tried thus far, Blitzkrieg is my least favorite. I may give them another shot after reading some of the posts here.

Blitzkrieg are OK, without the attached achievements I'd never play as them voluntarily though. Every stage with them seems to either be perfect or a wipe/abandon timeline. I also seem to end up with the most impossible starting positions with them for some reason.

Although I'm more surprised that nobody here has brought up the elephant in the room with Blitzkrieg. That one of their achievements is based on real world time.

I've unlocked all the squads, and Blitzkrieg is my least favourite. I just don't care much for the feel of that squad.

Blitzkrieg has 2 main issues.

First, some protection missions are so absurdly difficult due to lightning. It basically makes your lightning mech useless and you have to rely on the other 2 mechs to clear enemies away from the objective, which is a problem when you consider their second problem.

Their main issue is that with stock equipment, they have no way for a single mech to damage and disable a single target the same time. This means that for each target, you have to either damage it, push it, or dedicate multiple mechs to dealing with it. This is a big problem once enemies start to have 3 or more health while you can usually only deal 2 damage per attack. Sure, you can get some crazy damage numbers with lightning, but it's spread out over multiple targets, and won't kill most bigger enemies, so you're left with a bunch of 1 or more hp enemies that haven't moved or been disabled. It's super easy to get overrun when you can't chip away at their health while also knocking them off target.

The individual mechs are all great, but they don't quite fit on the same team together. If the lightning mech's first upgrade made the electricity only damage the vek and then the building immunity came default, it might be enough to fix them since you could dedicate cores toward upping your damage rather than the necessary health upgrades.

Also, tip for the 30 minute challenge: Do well on the first island enough to get some upgrades going, and then bomb the second one, only concentrate on your mechs and the grid, ignore objectives. The faction rep won't help until the end of the second island, and you'll probably just want to abandon timeline once you get the achievement, so just focus on speed and not losing all your grid power.

They definitely rely on getting secondary abilities more than most squads. The chain lightning can be fantastic but it’s not suitable for every situation so if you can have an alternate method of dealing damage/moving Vek around on that mech it becomes far more viable