Can I gold medal story mode

[CTHOMP]

Or do you need to play nightmare mode to get gold medals?

I'm 2 missions into first legacy set and only have like 30K, but have gotten two flawless victories. Either point gain needs to increase significantly or I need to restart with higher difficulty to get more kills (and risk losing points to injured soldiers and deaths).

[Bobbers]

You can get gold in story mode. The later missions really pick up the pace and stronger enemies give more points, of course there are also more of them.

[Cookie]

Gold medal is perfectly possible to achieve in Story Mode. The game does cut it rather close, though, to the point you need 'near' perfect performance. Early bird boni help, too. Though I would not recommend going for early bird in the last campaign. Your team is considerably weaker compared to the prior when it comes to frontal assaults. Whereas during Bradford's Quest for Whiskey (or what I call the first legacy campaign) you can pretty much just barrel through.

[CTHOMP]

What's early bird boni?

[The Renderer]

Originally posted by clthomps:

What's early bird boni?

Kill stuff quickly.

[CTHOMP]

Within first turn or two seeing them, or find as many aliens asap and try to to kill them all.

Like, if I take time after killing a pod to reload, reposition, do I lose points compared to if I push forward to find next group without reloading, repositioning.

[Jaq]

I completely botched the first mission (only 1 surviving soldier), did the rest either flawless or with 1 wounded, and ended up with 191k out of the 220k needed for gold. I was deep into negative numbers after the first mission, so the gap is smaller than it looks, but you definitely don't have much room for error. You want Excellent or Flawless ratings only. I probably should have restarted my campaign after that fiasco, but I didn't understand how the new mode worked yet and kept going.

[gimmethegepgun]

Early Bird bonus is that you get up to 50% extra points for killing enemies and completing objectives (but not rescuing civilians) in the first few turns. The bonus drops by 10% each turn until it hits 0%.