First of all, that means you’re doing fine! There will be later missions where you don’t have to mop up, but right now, the game is teaching you not to forget Reinforcement management. It’s just a fact of this design that about 1-3 enemies will be showing up every round. That’s the basic flow of Midnight Suns: you manage the objective while reinforcements keep pouring in. Most of these will be the “commando” level guys that you can one-shot, but remember that each one is going to do as much damage as an elite. So as a general principle, when you’re planning your attacks, plan for damage reduction first.
The instinct from other similar games might be to whittle away at the baddies with the most hit points, but that misses the point of these one-shotters. These guys are also resources, where you spend your attacks to build up Heroism. As you may know, there are three kinds of ability cards: Attack, Skill, and Heroism. The basic flow of the design is that you use Attack cards on the one-shottie guys to build up heroism, you use Support cards to buff yourself and further build up heroism, then you spend that heroism to pay for the more dramatic Heroism cards to take down the tougher guys.
It doesn’t always work that way, of course, and some heroes mess up the paradigm (paging Doctor Strange!). But it can be helpful to keep that framework in mind when you’re thinking about each card’s place in the overall scheme of things.
Excellent question and I’m going to let you discover the answer to that one. Suffice it to say the boss battles in this game aren’t just boss battles. Firaxis learned a lot about how to introduce and keep relevant a lot of different fun enemies in XCOM. They’re doing some of that here and I love how it applies to the familiar Marvel villains like Venom et al. :)
There are some interesting push/pull dynamics in terms of playing with the same team. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer, and there are advantages and disadvantages either way. But I think if you look closer at the nature of the injuries, you’ll see they aren’t that bad. Plenty of injuries are just a malus that goes away after the starting turn, or something similarly minor that you should feel free to bring that superhero. And later in the game, injuries will actually be a resource you can trade for bonuses!
It is a puzzle! But don’t listen to anyone trying to tell you how much to focus on the objective as opposed to the enemies, or vice versa. That’s always going to be a balancing act, it’s always going to be highly situational, and figuring it out is the point of the gameplay. :)
From there, it’s all about learning how to apply which tools in which situations.
One thing to be aware of is that you might pull a hero into rotation after you’ve been “ignoring” him or her for a while, and that can put you in a sticky situation. So I try to go through all my heroes every two or three missions just to make sure their decks are optimized; this is usually a matter of making sure to upgrade and swap in cards when available. There’s at least one point in the story where certain heroes are mandatory for certain missions, and I got stuck having to play characters I hadn’t fiddled with for five or six missions. That was painful!
Yep, you have the right idea! And if you’re already tussling with Venom, you seem to be making progress well enough. What are your highest level characters? And can you say without spoilers where you are in the storyline? I wonder if that’s a good metric for where people are in the storyline, or if it will vary by monkeying with difficulty level?
