DallasDMac
Footballguy
My second go around is going much better. I mean, honesty, it had too. But I don't know if I just had it easy my first couple of Commander playthroughs or what. I've had to learn to accept the fact that since starting Ironman at this level, I'm going to have missions that simply can't be won. For instance, I had a reprisal mission where I "failed" to save 6 civilians within a few turns of the mission beginning. The enemy troops and the civilians were so far back on the map, I honestly don't think I could have sprinted there in time. And this was the first Muton mission, and my dudes were woefully under-powered and under-armored. I think I was able to save ONE civilian. It's the first reprisal mission that I ever had where I lost more than four civilians. And I lost 12!Thats xcom....
Don't want to jinx it, but I'm like 3 or 4 missions away from my first perfect run (no soldier deaths) through classic ironman.
I'm using the long war classes (8 base classes instead of 5) and increased the squad size by 2 ( so I can take one of each class on missions) as well as the mod that adds a bunch of different enemies and 1 or 2 additional enemies per pod. So it's not a true comparison to the base game but I did my best to balance it out. I've had a few very close calls but everyone keeps surviving.
It's just very tough to balance out the end game ( where your soldiers and gear are ridiculously overpowered) without making the early game impossibly hard. I waited until very late to trigger the alien leaders so I had good enough gear to survive them. The archon King took down my sniper but she went into bleed out mode rather than dying