Didn't have any real plan to be honest, just wanted to see how far I could go. I've also never completely finished the game, despite starting it many times, due to being distracted by other games or things in real life and turning towards them. Up until now, I have always save scummed JA2, but save scumming in any game lost its charm to me long ago and now in gaming I derive most of the joy from doing ironman challenges.
Before starting, I was very concerned about the elites you mentioned, because I remember how deadly they were on my previous playthroughs. I didn't imagine that regular enemies/red shirts would also pose a serious threat. It's insane how far they can throw grenades/flares, which is perhaps the most dangerous thing they can do aside from using mortars iirc. JA2 is the only tactical game that I'm aware of that gives grenades (at least for enemies) this ridiculous range, it's longer than the effective range of pistols and machine guns.
So after conquering Cambria I got attacked in one of its sector by Deidranna's forces during daytime. 13 enemy red shirts (one was camouflaged) versus 20 green militia of mine and 5 mercs that were in a combat ready state. It was a total disaster, all of the militia got annihilated and one of my mercs (Meltdown) got killed. In the end we only managed to kill something like 3 enemies. Most of the militia had pistols while most of the enemies had rifles. It was hard to shoot with my mercs because the enemies swarm you on one side of the map while your militia is spread out all across it, so you have to be very careful to not focus their fire on your men. On the front when the combat takes place your militia can be easily picked one by one by enemies with superior numbers before most of them get to the actual fight. This is why auto-resolve gives much better results than manual combat. Now I control 3 sectors of Cambria out of 5, got militia in only one sector and the enemies are closing in one me, things are not looking too good.
