Is it just me or is the Insurgent campaign really difficult?

[RaptorSolutions]

HB and MERCS are both supposedly more difficult, more stars for one. But let's compare
HB and MERCS:
Starts with level 4 troops
Starts with some of the earlier research
Starts with vehicle access
Have ways to make accessing new regions easier, cheaper outposts for HB and mobile HQ for MERCS

Insurgents:
Starts with level 1 troops, and not the good ones but 2 assaults
Starts with no research
Starts with no vehicles, looks like a story unlock going by how doing the first vehicle research didn't unlock them
Afaik no ways to make accessing new regions easier.

Oh, and I'm particularly pissed because my second mission was Terror Dome, which is escorting some slow SHIVA in the underground/internal map, when you don't have explosives to clear things out yet. And let's not forget you can't skip the damned thing because it's a colony down mission.
Like seriously? It's the hardest campaign I did so far. I rerolled for Helen's Hope for that one which is a thousand times easier.
Oh, and third mission? Want's me to take basic gear against a 50k hp green biomass... Luckily one of the side missions gave me a SHIVA so I just nuked that damned thing.

2 star my ass. It should be a 5 star since MERCS is 4 stars.

[RaptorSolutions]

On that note, are the weapon mods that good that it makes it much easier like the special things of the other campaigns? I've been using them and it makes slotting weapons easier or whatever, but it seems to rely on the weapon being good in the first place. Do weapon mods make them better?

[The Grand Mugwump]

It varies, but the GAR's performance increases immensely with weapon mods.

[RaptorSolutions]

Any examples? And I suppose it's not worth replacing a minigun or autocannon on the heavy is it?

[Kill with Fire]

Electric Rounds + burst makes it a good lockdown weapon for human players since they can use alternate modes, you can also remove the regular rounds on the Autocannon to make it fire Explosive rounds only, and cut its size down to 4 so then you can mod it back to 6 with other mods or throw it on an Assault for regular.

Minigun you can buff the suppression to make it easier to deal that critical 10-20% bonus damage.

Insurgents you get a % buff to your damage and health based on how well you're doing I believe, and the super weapon also boosts your damage and health when fired.

Technically you can skip colony down missions, but they'll hurt real bad.

Insurgents potentially has access to the weapon mods much faster than any other campaign since it's tech locked, so you can theoretically tech rush to them. I haven't played in awhile though, since Insurgents is possibly my least favorite campaign.

[The Grand Mugwump]

The special rounds are the biggest boost to the GAR, and it pairs extremely well with passive builds that boost light weapons. Burst isn't that great when playing solo unless your class has abilities which synergize with the higher critical hit chance that burst fire gives. Though I suppose burst does lower the energy consumption from the alternate firing mode.

Suppression frame on weapons which are already good at suppression like the minigun and LMG is a no brainer in my book. Trading off -10% weapon damage for +10% suppression, +15% stun and/or +20% frozen damage bonus for the whole team against the target is pretty good in my books.

[RaptorSolutions]

Well, I do basically use overwatch all the time so keep that in mind.
I did somewhat stabilized on the campaign now at least, I got rocket launchers and the ammo creators for it so it's okay now.
The previous story mission, the one in the terrarformer interior was a total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at the end though, Fluffy swarms? What about Thanatos swarms instead? I died after mission complete and they were jabbering on but apparently it still counts too so whatever.
But seriously, these internal missions are somewhat fun, but they seem to just randomly turn into ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. My worse story missions are the internal ones actually. Even on the MERCS campaign I had issues where I just ran into defence cannons, the one's which are like the reaper's big bad cousin. Not really complaining about that one though, I was just careless, should have checked before opening the door... The Thanny swarm was total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ though.

One thing I hate about these campaign missions though are how they punish you for taking it slow by swarming you with dogs, but also punish you for rushing with vehicles and turrets. How do people even deal with vehicles which are basically insta kill anyway? I either rocket them from far or use vehicles, but there must be some other way I'm missing. Or do you either bring rockets or get ♥♥♥♥♥♥?

[RaptorSolutions]

Lmao, apparently a colony basically in the middle of nowhere is lost. I've only been setting up outposts where new story missions show up too, thought that would be enough. Whatever, I'm not really enjoying this campaign anyway so I'll just trudge to the end of it.

[The Grand Mugwump]

Originally posted by RaptorSolutions:

One thing I hate about these campaign missions though are how they punish you for taking it slow by swarming you with dogs, but also punish you for rushing with vehicles and turrets. How do people even deal with vehicles which are basically insta kill anyway? I either rocket them from far or use vehicles, but there must be some other way I'm missing. Or do you either bring rockets or get ♥♥♥♥♥♥?

Bot secondary weapons can do some damage to vehicles and turrets. Also, hellfire bot (or any bot really) with the bulletproof talent is almost completely immune to most ranged attacks. You can order it to move closer to the vehicles and turrets to draw fire away from you and the rest of your squad while you deal with them or move past them.

[RaptorSolutions]

Interesting. Also I don't know what happened but I tried asking them to hit the Reaper turret with a High Profile Hellfire and they just exploded it somehow. Did learn that apparently bots do not auto attack turrets though.
Anyway, I finished the campaign, some good story missions in there. Also managed to save the colony I mentioned in the other thread because apparently the colony down mission isn't fixed, so save scumming gave me another mission instead.
I did like some of the story missions, the final 2 was good. But it was also the only campaign where I did not 100% the colony bonuses and research, supplies isn't exactly hard to come by tbf, but it was tedious because you needed to know what side missions give a good chunk, and hope they didn't spawn on the other side of the map.
Also I can't help but feel that in many ways the later story missions are actually much easier compared to the other campaigns, I wonder if the devs expected most people to not complete everything and so made them easier to compensate. Nice ending with the double Hellspawn too, though fortunately not at the same time. Was surprisingly easy actually. Didn't even need to drag them all the way to the wall, they melted surprisingly fast. I was actually expecting a bloodbath when I first spawned in and saw just how much defenses there was at the wall, and I didn't even notice the wall mounted defense turrets, but yeah, wasn't actually that bad, and was actually fun for once in this godforsaken campaign.
At least I didn't need to fight an Overlord.

[Kill with Fire]

Using the Radial menu/Alt-button menu to order bots to attack something causes them to use their secondary weapons on the target, if you equip them with explosive weapons like grenade launchers or rocket launchers then they'll use those, although if you use the F1 default command to have bots attack a thing they'll use their regular guns.

[RaptorSolutions]

Huh, you don't have to select the individual secondary weapons? Looks like I've been wasting my time all this time...