On an Ironman run. Day 45. It's going well despite some recent setbacks.
This is a game of sometimes you beat the RNG, sometimes the RNG beats you.
I had two strokes of luck in the first days of the campaign, one purely happenstance, one a calculated risk. The happenstance one was when I got jumped by six raiders while on a regular courier job... and everything went wrong for them from the start. First round I got in a series of crits at 20-40% hit chances, and they whiffed everything. Second round, same thing, at which point they were down one guy, with four white-flagging and only one fighting. And as a cherry on the cake, most of their equipment survived. So what would have been an early end turned out to be a very nice boost.
The calculated risk was an extremely lucrative caravan job just after getting my head count to 12. It was good for 2880 crowns, and it went well: two bandit fights on the way, lost two expendable meat shield bros, but scored some nice equipment and a very sweet pile of cash.
After that it was smooth sailing until day 40 or so, with a major highlight a fight against a group with two bandit leaders; scored some more nice gear there.
The recent setback was kind of the mirror image of the first lucky fight -- a group of bandits that should have been easy to beat got in a series of unlikely crits that brought down two of my veteran frontliners; however my morale held and I beat them with no further losses. Those bros will be missed. Fortunately I have a cash cushion of nearly 10k and some spare gear so I will be able to replace them, but it was a setback, no mistake about that.
This follows the first time I retreated from a fight -- an otherwise simple base clearing job, but the base was in a swamp, and this time my reliance on a single sniper backfired: they had several, and just stayed put shooting arrows at me, whereas my marching into the swamp would have been suicidal. So I withdrew without losses and took the rep hit.
With the latest setback, I've lost five bros so far, with the other three all being cheap mediocre level 1 recruits, plus a few permanent injuries of course. This is not bad. I just hope I won't get another setback like that because that will be a lot more difficult to claw my way out of.
The more dangerous contracts are a lot more manageable now than they used to be by the way. I didn't ever take three-skull jobs on ironman runs before, but now I do if the parameters look reasonable, and I'm surviving them pretty decently.
Edit: Made it to day 65, at which point, Ende. Partly bad luck, partly screw up by me. Artefact recovery job with necromancer.
Bad luck plus screw-up 1: the map. I thought it'd be flat but it was hilly, and I mistakenly clicked through before noticing. Ended up in a really bad position with them up a hill and me down. Still they were few and I was many, so I figured, foolishly, that I'd manage an uphill assault.
Screw-up plus bad luck 2: I didn't pay sufficient attention to the topography, and thought that an enemy was 2 levels down so I ignored him. Turns out he was only 1 level down, and he managed to push back my frontline and get at my lightly-armoured pikemen.
Pure bad luck 3: my flanking party set up to get the necromancer whiffed a series of attacks and the enemy managed to get the necromancer into safety with my flanking party tied down by their shieldmen; proceeded to raise and energise a nasty fallen bandit, who proceeded to wreck my pikemen.
Lost four veteran bros, decided to call it off. Still, it was a good run. My strategic mistake was that I got cocky and took unnecessary risks; I would have beaten that fight easily had I just noticed that it was on hilly terrain, fallen back, and tried again on flat, or failing that, when on that really bad map, retreat and try again for a better one.
By the way I would really like it if BB was the least bit intelligent about positioning your and the enemy formation on the map. It just feels really fucking stupid to start out in a trench between two hills with half your force on a ridge 2 tiles up so they have to march allll the way around to get the formation together. Or, for that matter, in a bog waist-deep in water when there's solid ground three steps away.
