Strike Teams - why they matter

I am working on an 'everything we know about Strike Teams guide' but it will take me a while to get it in post-able state. In the interim...

* There is clearly some kind of diminishing returns with Effectiveness. Example, you can have a +10 trait that applies but it won't take you from 80 to 90, it will take you from 80 to 89 or 80 to 88. Still not sure what the curve is, per difficulty, per team level, ???

* I don't believe you could ever purchase in-game items thru the app. Currently you can look at them, but not purchase them.

* I personally don't see much downside to sending one 'suicide squad' strike team on every possible mission regardless of success chance -- I'll do Golds with 38% (at level 20, that's with some negative traits in play) routinely. Worst case: you fail and pick up another negative trait BUT most traits only apply 1/12 of the time (except for the 'Hysteria' traits which apply 1/3 of the time per faction). Medium case, you fail and nothing happens. Best case, you get lucky and get 5 or 10 MF.

* There doesn't seem to be much (any?) difference in success chance between non-Apex and Apex missions.

* If you care about the in-game bonus XP/credits you should ideally play the Apex missions yourself to get those, and send Strike Teams on non-Apex missions. (Again, just my opinion. But, I will violate this rule if the Apex mission is super annoying like Gold vs. Kett with -25% health and shields, F. that!)

Low on Supplies applies to every mission.  (-5 effectiveness)

Yeah, and their UI on this was very confusing, because in the spot where it shows "+15 percent exp/credits" it would add COMPLETED below it once the mission was done, which initially made me think that the bonus was a one-off. 

If you don't have enough teams or pay enough attention to them, it's still useful to do the missions the first time yourself, since that frees up the teams to do the non-apex missions.  The APEX missions often seem to take 2x (or more) the length of time to complete. 

I really was hoping they were going to add 2 each of the APEX missions for each difficulty.  Not every mission has the xp/credit bonus.  I'd gladly do a lot more of those missions, but I don't want to run the same faction/map/modifier over and over.  I honestly think some modifiers should have significantly better bonuses too.  That "no revives" modifier on a Gold mission really should have a +50 percent bonus, not +20 percent, given the high chance of failure on it.  It was nice getting 66K credits, but I had teams fail multiple times before I got into a group that pulled it off. 

Oh, cool, I'll get it updated then.  Thanks!

Edited to add: Yeah, the app store shows an update, but when I try to run it, it just shows as pending (despite being plugged in and my settings correct to update).  So it looks like it might take an uninstall and reinstall to get it updated. 

Edited edit to add: Oh, my Play Store was bonked out and I had to clear its cache, apparently nothing on my phone has updated in a few weeks, based on the amount of shit that wants to update now.

I started in on strike teams via the app before owning mea.

I did progress up in apex rating a bit in that time.

I don't have any data since I didn't consider it at the time, and have already started in on multiplayer...

Did you check if the Mission did have the "We need a hero" trait? If it did not, the item should have no effect.

I just did test it as the quests were up and bought the level 4 "I need a hero item" for my level 10 team. 3 missions did have the "We need a hero trait" and they had their chances increased (9-15% gold, 11 to 21% gold, 91 to 93% bronze). The other 6 missions did not have a change in success chance. If the chances that are displayed are correct, the item modifier should only work missions that has the same trait as the item.

Nice to see new missions. I now have one team that due to his negative traits and how they design the missions, he feels relatively useless except on a few silver missions. His fail rate for gold due to being careless, low intelligence and remnant hysteria locks him out of so many missions. His traits are generally all badass ones. So he is my brute force guy, but with so many missions being either remnant, intelligence, or no room for error, he is basically wasted.

Wanting more diversity in my teams and to coddle some of them so they get far more bronze, silvers before going to gold (and hopefully improving their chances at gold) I decided to have five teams since I don't really need that MF and it's just accruing pretty fast with the new missions. My best team got whatever the negative trait was for accepting bribes because nobody else suited the mission. She is always 50-66% for most golds. 70% for a few specific ones. I also gave her empowered shields to see how much it bolstered her success chance. It got her up to 70% on a few. But she got that negative trait like within a day (or a few missions that day) after I put it on her. 

I suspect adding missions is a way to make up for the percent rates and give you a chance to get more positive traits. 11 negative traits with some of them cancelling out the positive ones as we see above is pretty ridiculous. It means that not only does that team have a ton of strikes against them, but that they are also not good at anything specifically. Or maybe they are good at one thing. Therefore they likely have some horribly low percents for success and dependent on the traits, I would guess that would even carry over to bronze. Imagine having a team that can't even do bronzes because of negative trait triggers?

My 'suicide squad' team has basically turned into the stereotypical 'dirty cops' from the movies.



They've seen it all (Grizzled Veteran) and none of it scares them (Fearless).

They take bribes (Corruptible), are sloppy and crass (Careless and Raucous), and they're racists (Xenophobe). But in their own minds, they're the best (Hero Complex) and so far, they've gotten away with it (Lucky).

I was a little worried that the last couple of failures only received -5 traits but all they need to do was smoke a little more electronic weed along with some hard partying and the fail team got back in the game with another -10 negative trait. Good job on #12!

Haha, this is exactly the kind of narrative I've been telling myself about my suicide squad, except mine is more along the lines of Captain Quark from Ratchet & Clank, a bumbling fool who people keep sending on important missions for reasons no one understands. 



I'm terrible about tracking things in a disciplined way, but I'm pretty sure that the APEX rating going up from Strike Teams is related to them leveling up.  I don't remember to check every time, but from what I've seen so far, it hasn't gone up from just completing APEX missions, but does seem to have raised from them leveling. 


Edited to add: Oh, and I did end up buying a piece of gear (despite me telling everyone else not to, but I had nearly 600MF and figured screw it, it's for science).  But I managed to cock it up I think.  I just looked at a Gold mission, saw the conditions, and bought a piece of gear for one of my good Level 20 teams, but didn't realize I also had the matching trait.  I'm not sure that gear is working because of that, or its overriding the positive trait.  The gear should be +20 (or +40, it's very confusing because of the changes they made) on that condition, then +10 from the positive trait.  But the best I'm getting on missions with that condition is around a 74 percent, which doesn't feel right at all.  If someone is going to buy gear, I'd strongly suggest not trying to double up a trait for now. 

What's the point really? You pile MFs up, and pile them up, but to what end?

Maxed out the crates. Going to have to start the campaign today to clear out inventory. It's strange how there's no inventory cap for consumables but there are for these things.