Yalto Thulun fight Impossible? (FIXED)

[keegstand]

Apologies if I spelled the name wrong, this is during the Spirit of Cadonya questline by the Cadar explorer with the sweet bowler hat. Jon-Something.
I just want to say something seems wrong with this fight. I'm no noob, my away team was undefeated, zero casualties over hundreds of fights, easily blew through the pit fighting questline without getting close to losing a single fighter, hunts full strength Terrox Xeno on explore missions, usually ending fights full health + morale, including through each previous step of the Spirit of Cadonya questline.
And then the Yalto Thulun fight. Not only was I 0-4'ed, every enemy attack hit, every attack of mine missed (by HUGE margins reviewing the combat logs), and my captain which has 30+ quickness, wisdom, and fortitude, plus unique armor + specialty gear and +initiative granting On Init talents was essentially OTK'ed by the combined efforts of 3-4 actions on the enemy team before I could land a shot. After seeing how the rest of the fight went, I now realize it wouldn't have even mattered because the enemies' evasion made them untouchable.
They were rolling 35S+30 to evade my attacks to start with, which spiraled quickly once they started stacking buffs as I can't debuff if I can't land a hit. My final attack scores were missing by 2-4x what I would have needed. This wasn't something a couple 10-20% buffs here or there would have helped.
Again, I'm not new to the game. This is a crew combat build I've tweaked after completing the Jyeeta questline without a single crew combat casualty in another run on the same difficulty (Hard).
I'm geniunely stumped as to what I could have done to win the fight, keeping in mind that these things are won/lost long before the fight actually begins. I will say that this was the first time I have done this questline, my other runs have had too many time sensitive quests at the same time to juggle, and I missed out on this.
Just in terms of the difficulty curve, though, this fight is such a huge + unexpected outlier that it just does not seem right.
EDIT:
This was evidently fixed by the Dev after other folks chimed in with similar experiences and data points. THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to the discussion and to the Dev for hearing us out! Great support!

[Trese Brothers]

We haven't seen any major death spikes around Yalto Thulun (which you did spell correctly). There are a lot of factors as to how dangerous he might be, including the Danger rating of the planet where the mission ends for example but none of them should havea massively outsized impacts.

What level was your crew? Did you see what level his team was? What weapons / armor were you carrying?

[keegstand]

My away team levels were 30-ish, little bit less. I'll have to screenshot the load outs. My captain had the +3 init +10% armor unique mantle, and was wearing the razor armor from the pit fighting questline.
I mean 35S+30 evasion rolls? That can't be right. How do you even get 30 weak dice? Enemies had 30 Quickness and 30 Stealth/Tactics? And enough levels for 35 to their main evasion stat?

This was on the mobile version btw, I play both (great game!)

BTW i appreciate the response!

[JimmysTheBestCop]

Where's your bounty hunter at? He can debuff without attacking.

Can't comment on hard difficulty bit on impossible you can find yourself severely out leveled depending on how much combat you go after. It's easy to be 20+ levels behind the enemy.

I can say in those situations you need your team to be fully synergized. Plus you always need a way to buff and debuff constantly.

Init is ok to buff. But you need to be buffing resist debuff, armor, fortitude, accuracy. And constantly dropping debuffs with the bounty hunter.

Certain buffs and talents and a blade dancer with 1 lvl in job can't miss and drops a -4 init on enemy while debuffing their parry and dodge.

If your build soaks damage it doesn't matter if they can hit you. Cause it'll all be minor dmg easily group healed. Which gives you more time to buff/debuff. Battle of attrition you will take down 1 of them first and then it's over.

[MasterShake]

"appologies here, made too much missreading"
If your combat team beats xenoes and not just that, but "grounded" ones , this can't be right - I didn't find any difficulty spike during that fight, even had some time to play around. Heck, even final showdown in Buried Demons gave me more trouble everytime.

[darion-neclador]

I did it without losses on impossible. But i defo agree that the vaunted Buried Demons fight is a lot harder.

[Tuidjy]

I am not sure I even remember that guy. Is that the Prince whom you kill, and then the daughter sends the bounty hunters? If that's the one, I did not even notice the fight as being out of the ordinary hard.

But the answer to your problems is buffs and debuffs. You NEED the ability to wipe enemy buffs off, without necessarily hitting, and you definitely need a couple of bladesmen in the front lines to target melee if the enemy dodges bullets too well (and vice versa)

35S+30 is not all that great, I see such enemies on Impossible all the time, and my own bladesmen defend at 40S+30 as well.

As for the enemy buffing, Unfaltering Ire is your friend. Wipes all debuffs from the two front line enemies, and reduces their damage potential.

[Gilmoy]

Yah, routine L40 Terrox Hunters on the ground go up to 42s+9 melee, 42s+27 parry. Rare outliers go up to 48s+11. (I guess those are the xenos who spawned with 6 Blades.) Corollary: xenos really do have poor stats in the teens, go figure.

27 standard dice to parry is reasonable, e.g. 18 Evasion + 18 in either Strength or Quickness.
Swordsman does get 18 Evasion at job rank 35 (of 36).

42s+27 is tough to hit when you're only L25, at 30s+11 melee attack yourself.
Your 1st job is always to buff parry%, stay alive, extend the fight, and let your rifles shoot their blades. Later, you buff attack% and hit them yourself.

By L36, my Captain was at 44s+11 melee attack herself. (Funny/sad: After templating 30 30 30, there's only 22 left for Strength)

30 standard dice on Ranged Defense is a bit eyebrow-raising.
If 35s+30 was really their Ranged Defense, that's a bit shocking.
The general solution is to chop them down with your blades vs. their 3s+30 parry

And find ways to debuff them without hitting. Every Impossible run with a melee captain has the same midgame problem: your 2nd blades doesn't have the 10 Blades from template, and she can't hit xenos reliably, from ~L20 until she's ~L34. So you usually want BH/XH rifle guy + Captain applying debuffs: BH doesn't need to hit, and Captain can hit. Then they can do the same vs. human crews.

[keegstand]

Wow, ok lots of responses here. I'll just go one by one I guess.
My captain was/is (he survived) level 30. Prior to this fight I can't remember the last time he's missed a shot. The officers with him were only a level or two behind.
I never looked to see what level the enemies were, I only looked at the logs when I noticed nobody could land a hit.
The Dev asked what danger level the Exploration zone was that the encounter wound up on, it was a 10.
I'm not sure if the expectation is to pile all of your officer's job ranks in a single combat job in order to maximize primary hit dice + evasion to guarantee you will always be above not just the standard encounter, but also any extreme outlier possible with the apparently variant difficulty range of missions, but before (and since) this fight I've found that to be unnecessary, at least on Hard.
Buried Demons was the Silvaine/Estelle questline, right? The robots? By comparison that fight was no problem for this exact team, probably around level 25 or so when I did that.
Didn't check logs nor do I remember the Danger rating of the planet for that one though.
Being hit every time I was shot at was not the issue, and that wasn't really surprising for my setup. I go for armor + deflection equipment and buffs, with a strong CM+Doctor always with the team.
The responses about using a BH ability to purge buffs without needing a hit roll is a good tip, I suppose, but I think you guys are missing the point. I couldn't hit them even before they started buffing themselves up. Melee vs Ranged didn't matter.
On top of that, the combined efforts of the entire team was able to take out my Captain after allowing for a single action (and he went 4th overall), who specialized in Health + Armor + Speed.
After that first round, the remaining 3 stabilized a bit, got their buffs up, and dragged the fight out longer than I expected given how quickly they blitzed my captain down.
I'm not saying this is the norm for this fight, or that I would see the same thing on another run, but I wanted to point out that there seems to be an outcome on the extreme end of the variance that left me utterly helpless. After looking at the numbers, I still don't believe there was any combinations of tactical decisions I could have made to change the outcome. Between the difficulty of the enemies and their apparently good/great Init rolls vs my terrible ones, it kinda feels like a 'reverse lotto' situation.

[Trese Brothers]

Thanks for all the data. The Danger 10 was likely a very large contributing factor here.

As you've said, you had little issue with crew combat before this so it sounds like you had an effective build and the expectation isn't really that you shift it massively. There might be things you could do better -- gear, weapons, On Init Talents but that's all improvements not a full rewrite.

I will investigate the issue to see if I can reproduce a Yalto fight that is of outsized difficulty.

[keegstand]

Appreciate the reply, and thank you for reading.
To clarify, when I say 'tactical decision' I only meant after the battle started. Differentiated from a Strategic decision, which would have been my build, gear loadout, job + talent point distribution, etc. If I knew it was coming, I could probably have made different Strategic decisions from year 1- day 1 to change the outcome, sure.
But again, my captain had the unique pit fighter armor, the unique +3 init +10% armor specialty gear mantle, and 2 different +Initiative granting On-Init talents, and I purposefully prevented my other away team members from taking on-inits (with the exception of my subbed-out Xeno Hunter) so my captain's would always fire. I mean he had max hp, max armor, and outside of getting lucky with +init talents, max init. And he still got (semi) OTK'ed.

Again, great game and I appreciate the time to look into this very likely extremely low percentage issue.

[askftw]

As another data point, this fight completely crushed me today with a 31ish level crew that's been cutting through everything else. I didn't think to grab logs and could easily believe I didn't maximize going in, but thought I'd mention it. Will try again soon and pay more attention this time.

[askftw]

And yep, Danger level on the planet was 10.

[Trese Brothers]

Perhaps there is an issue here with Danger 10.

I've also just been looking at this again and am noting that the Yalto team is pretty set in stone, with only one slot open for the AI to fill --

<AI filled> - Bodyguard - Exo Scout - Sniper

This may be a very deadly combination in the hands of the enemy AI, given their position and its way of thinking about Talent selection.

The solution here is likely to move the Sniper to <AI filled>

[MasterShake]

I don't understand.
What does danger rating have to do with anything? Do AI stats aside level (because it's insignificant by all means) depend on danger level or something? Do they get hidden bonuses to their attack/defence dice?
AI combat styles definitely aren't rocket science, it can't have anything with their slots or tactics. No offence - AI isn't smart and no talent selection can help them against player if they don't have overkill stats and thus dice.
What people say - they beat xeno teams. Ground xeno teams. That means theese people should know what they are doing in crew combat, because ground xeno teams always has decent and up to overkill stats.

[Trese Brothers]

Danger would affect the level of any ground combat in that location. No special Attribute bonuses are given to Yalto's team. They play by all the same rules you do.