@the_nubster said:

I had to turn the end turn warning back on, because one time late at night, I had done at least one mech's turn, realized I could've been way more effective and wanted to reset my turn, but my brain misfired and I just clicked the end turn button instead of the reset turn button. IIRC, it cost me that entire campaign, because 1 or possibly 2 of my mechs hadn't moved or taken any action at all, and I took huge amounts of grid damage because I was addressing none of the threats. I forget if I died in that mission, or maybe I might've limped out of the mission with like 1 grid power left, but I'm positive I didn't make it to the end of that island alive.

So my tip is: Do not play this game when you're tired. Do not click the end turn button when you meant to click the reset turn button.

No shit? Good to know the global heal item works that way. Speaking of healing, I think it's still kinda weird that the regular heal ability can only be a self-heal. Maybe it would be way too good if you could spend a mech's turn healing an adjacent mech that desperately needed healing.

Like Alex says in the Quick Look, don't be afraid to play the game on Easy if you're really struggling and still learning the nuances of the game. I've finished the game on Normal, but I definitely think the Normal difficulty is much harder than what most other games today consider their "Normal" difficulty.

Good to know! That makes sense considering they call it disabled and not destroyed. So I guess the actual answer is if a mech is disabled at the end of the encounter then the pilot dies.

I think the Networked Armor is neat, as far as passives go.

I will say that I've beaten the game once so far, and the key to that for me was the "damaged structures gain a shield" passive.

During the final battle I was sitting at pretty good power to start with, and then I was able to ignore a lot of power core targeting and focus on keeping the real objective safe. I did get near critical, but they basically wasted their turns going after them.

@bisonhero said:

I might have to report you to the dean, because this just seems like academic dishonesty.

Question: The islands' difficulty scale is based on the number you've completed, right?

In other words, if I wanted to get more familiar with the unique mechanics of the acidic or frozen islands, I could just start there, right?

@matthewgm: This is correct. The more islands you've completed, the more often the game will spawn "alpha" versions of enemies that do more damage and have more HP, and also the number of concurrent enemies on the map will gradually increase. You can do the islands in any order and the difficulty will scale appropriately. The only thing that differentiates each island is its unique mechanics.

But for example, one trick I tried out was using the Rusting Hulks. Since they can electrify smoke, I left the R.S.T. Corporation island (the desert one) until last out of the 4. As the last island it will have the toughest enemies, but it has a bunch of sand that becomes smoke already plus the extra smoke that your own units generate. I had smoke all over the place and I feel that it it made it easier to generate a lot of damaging smoke to deal with the toughest enemies.

@matthewgm: Yup. I haven't unlocked the acid island yet but now I always start on the Ice one, just because it's easier to deal with low-level enemies while juggling the robots.

Take a hit every once in a while! Your mechs heal fully between stages so feel free to use their health as another resource. It is almost always better to take a hit on a mech than to lose a building (provided the mech survives).

I got the Acid Tank secondary in a run, and holy cow, that was a terrific pickup. Having a 4th unit on the field makes a ton of difference.

This maybe a silly mistake, but smoke doesnt only prevent attacks, it also prevents repairs, not knowing this costed me a pretty good run with the Blitzkrieg squad.

I have never felt more robbed at the start of a mission. Wow, thanks game, so many options /s.

Is there any punishment for mechs taking damage or dying other than killing the pilot? Sometimes the island commander says something like "Great, since the mechs have taken no damage, we can put those resources into other things..." but I'm not sure what that's alluding to. If there's no punishment I'll gladly start sacrificing my no-name no-bonus pilots toward the end of a match.

@wollywoo: The only time the island commander makes that comment is when the bonus objective for a mission is "end the mission with less than 4 mech damage." On any mission that doesn't have that objective, your mech health at end of mission does not matter since all of it is automatically repaired between missions. Pilots are indeed somewhat expendable (especially the ones with no unique abilities), but their upgrades that give you 1 mech reactor/1 movement/2 mech HP can be helpful towards the long term success of your squad, so try to avoid sacrificing pilots unless there is something very worthwhile you are saving by doing so.

As far as I know, no. However, if you're going for a longer run, even the nobody pilots can gain a rank up and be more worthwhile. I almost always find it more beneficial to take a hit on a mech than a building.

Of course there are certain maps that have "mechs take no more than X damage" as a condition, so watch out there. That's usually when I see the comments about how glad they are that the mechs didn't take damage (or grousing if they took a lot).

As alluded to by @bladededge, I highly recommend keeping an eye out for (spoilers for one of the achievements) mountains that are already cracked when you go into a map (that doesn't also have a "break X mountains" objective). My understanding is that every so often, one (and only one) of the mountains on a map will be cracked and have an extremely subtle glow coming from its center. You need to break that mountain open and manually retrieve the pod inside to get a new pilot and getting the Distant Friends achievement.

I recommend keeping an eye out for this early, as it's completely luck based whether you find one of these mountains on a given run. It sucks having completed every other achievement and then having to grind through runs hoping you come across this thing you need for the last one (like I am doing). If I'd known what to look for, I almost definitely would have found one already in one of my dozens of prior runs.