Note: Many of the links are to the Amity Arena Library, a website devoted to the game which includes tracking the history of it through patchnotes and a running history of what cards entered and left the meta. Their website was a valuable resource for this post.

Mobile gaming has taken off like a wildfire since the advent of the smartphone boosted the average processing power a phone could carry. Initially it took the form of crossing over older, more easily runnable games onto the mobile market to... mixed success, but in recent years we've seen both the West and East use mobile gaming to replace the old fashioned movie tie in game. It's easily accessable, has a much wider reach than consoles or PC, you can take it on the go and standards are inherently lower for mobile games than they are a full 60 dollar game.
Since the 2010s, mobile gaming has shifted to what's called the "Freemium" module. The game itself is free to download and start playing, but is insideously designed with obnoxious paywalls or artificial limiters put in place to limit how much you can play each day. If the game is part of a pre-existing franchise, additional money can be made through a premium currency or a chance to obtain high-powered units by rolling a slot machine random chance mechanic. And thus, gacha gaming was born. This sub has had several threads in the past on high profile gacha games, such as the monolithic Fate Grand/Order, Pokemon Go or Genshin Impact. One of the more popular things to roll for in gachas as a consequence is wallpapers for your homescreen, especially for high-grade units as they're usually animated to move a little bit on the homescreen. Today we're looking a low to mid-tier gacha game that rose and fell with the advent of one catgirl. Let's talk RWBY.
RWBY is an online web anime made by Rooster Teeth focusing on four prospective monster hunters who get embroiled in a world-spanning shadow war. It's of debatable quality in matters of animation, combat, voice acting, story, worldbuilding, romance, and it's kind of a little racist if I'm being honest, but one of the major positives of RWBY is that the series tends to have good character design. Series creator Monty Oum set in the guidelines for the show while making it that most if not every design should be made to be cosplay friendly, hence why most of the outfits have things most costume designers haven't heard of like... pockets. And Rooster Teeth, above all else, likes making money. So they know people like RWBY's character designs, enough so that in 2017 plans were made to release a gacha game themed around RWBY called Amity Arena, which would be developed by Korean company NHN Entertainment.
Amity Arena is a PvP tower defense game. Each player controls two turrets and a tower and has three minutes to use units themed from the show to destroy the other player's structures. Whoever took out more wins, destroying a tower is an instant victory. When the game launched, it had three tiers for units- Common (generally held for mooks or low-tier characters in the show), Rare (roughly protagonist-level or elite mooks go here) and Epic (High tier characters usually with an active ability that did lots of damage or stopped enemies in their tracks). The game launched in October 2018 to generally positive reviews from both mobile game players and RWBY fans alike. Fans were happy to get a lot of new official art for the characters in the game and the base gameplay loop was fun. Criticism at the time was largely themed around the lack of content besides PVP matches and some issues with the meta but overall, the launch went well. Each month, the developers would add new units, including popular characters like Neopolitian, Cinder Fall, Zwei the dog, and more.
But everything changed with February 20th 2019, which introduced Neon Katt, the titular catgirl (RWBY characters are themed around fairytales, except for Neon, who is themed around Nyan Cat, and her partner Flynt Coal, who is themed off a potentially racist joke made by Rooster Teeth).
Neon is a character from RWBY Volume 3 who's part of a team that RWBY face during a tournament arc. Her partner, Flynt Coal, was part of the game at launch, and Neon would join him a few months later. Neon in the show is a cocky fighter who taunts the heroes and zips around on rollarskates, which in-game is represented by Neon skating towards the nearest enemy structure to her and hitting it, while all units within a radius of Neon are taunted and provoked into attacking her above all other targets unless they-selves are coded to hit structures. On its own, not a bad idea for a unit, but Neon came with four big caveats:

• Neon was the fourth corner of the square that became known as the Artillery Arena meta, which saw Neon, Cinder (who had an AOE ability she could use which was wide enough to hit a turret and tower and single-handedly killed the entire launch meta of using fragile swarm units), Zwei (an on-summon high damage AOE on any part of the map) and Penny (another AOE ability that instead did chip damage and locked a location down) turn the game's meta into a chip game. Every player ran at least one of the above cards, if only to counter the others. Neon was the universal counter in being anti-swarm and the hardest to stop, especially at launch where her taunt range was so large, it could grab units from the other lane.
  
• Neon launched with a unit weight of "Heavy", which meant that if she was behind a unit she could push it on her way to the turret. This launched a sub-meta where Neon was placed behind a larger unit such as the Ursa (which like Neon was a unit that focused on structures but was made slow to cover its tankiness), to push them towards the turret faster. This was called Disco Bear. They eventually patched this so Neon phased through units by making her a lightweight.
  
• Neon couldn't die. She was invincible until she hit a structure, which combined with her taunt meant that Neon was very annoying to fight and could lock down an entire lane of the battlefield by being placed well and taunting enemies to let you prepare a counter.
  
• Neon was a very cheap unit to summon. Amity Arena uses a mechanic called "Aura" where all units cost a certain amount and it recharges over the match- for instance, protagonist Ruby Rose has a Rare card that costs four Aura to summon, while Weiss Schnee has two rares that cost three and five. Neo only cost two Aura, which made her one of the cheapest units of the game and thus disproportionately powerful for her cost and easy to cycle through your deck so you could spam her.
  

From the word go, Neon is an unpopular unit; she's clearly overbalanced and elements such as the Disco Bear glitch have players thinking she'll have to get knocked down in a nerf- she'll either be made slower, more expensive, or able to die pre-hitting a structure, right?
Neon doesn't show up in the next patch. Instead, before she's fixed, an entire new class of units called Legendaries are introduced, and this is where the game goes full gacha. Legendaries were meant to represent the highest tier characters in the game, the ones who were either the most popular characters or the highest-tier fighters in the show. Or in some cases, the popular ships such as combo cards for White Rose (Ruby/Weiss), Bumblebee (Blake/Yang) and Flower Power (Ren/Nora). Legendaries, representing their value, were impossibly rare and had an infinitely small chance of actually appearing (The most reliable method was to buy the premium chests and hope you'd roll a Legendary, which often cost tons of money), and if you did get one, there was no way to guess which Legendary you'd actually get. Some such as White Rose and Adam were high tier units, others like Hazel or Checkmate were... kinda broken at launch. The playerbase isn't happy at this, especially as free to play players are left out in the cold and reliant on the game giving them high tier units effectively out of pity.
Neon would get a small nerf in the April patch which lessened her taunt range and killed the Disco Bear meta, but her invincibility would be left untouched, even as players submitted feedback regarding how to make it more efficient. The official Amity Arena discord has a weekly feedback section on Tuesdays where players could submit up to four suggestions on how to nerf/buff units and general requests for quality of life such as "Can this character get a new skin from this part of the show," or "Can we have an option to lower music volume that's not just muting all music?" (they never did add that second request) Neon would then remain in this state until the November patch, despite constant weekly requests for a Neon rework, and all it would do is make Neon functionally mortal, in that she had a flat shield bar of 20 that would be lowered by one for each attack before the next hit would kill her. Neon could now die... but your chances of actually doing enough damage to stop her were slim, and regardless, you were now at a serious Aura defecit.
It took seven months for this one unit to get a substantial nerf, all while the game added new units every week and the number of units being affected by patches each month began to gradually sink. To round up some of the major issues people had with Amity that developed throughout 2019 alongside Neon's general existance making life hell:

• Common units were meant to be chump fodder, but could level up the most amount of times with a level cap at 13. This meant longer-term units that had a long time to level such as the Xiong Family card, the AK-130s the Beowolf Pack, or the White Fang gunners, could become shockingly strong if players grinded the money up to reach max level.
  
• A pre-existing divide between free players and players willing to burn money IRL to get access to premium currencies led to a huge disparity in play. Free players have long complained about how hard it is to scrounge money together to level up units at higher costs as even the basic currency of Lien is hard to get large quantities of (you get a certain amount every match win but otherwise you need to burn the Schnee Premium Dust currency for the highest payouts, but SPD is also needed for shop resets, buying crates or unlocking cosmetics). The developers used to do frequent double weekends where all gains were doubled for a weekend, but these became less and less frequent as time went on. Legendaries only added to the divide, as their rarity was bad enough for players willing to spend money (one player, known as one of the largest whales in the community, in trying to get Sienna Khan, reported burning nearly nine hundred dollars on her, while taking nearly six hundred to get the Ice Flower card).
  
• One actual counter was born to fight Neon in the Argus Shield, a stationary unit that existed solely to stall units and take damage. At 2 Aura, it was the first structure to counter Neon, which allevated one of the primary problems with Neon in that no way to counter her was cost-efficient for an enemy player. They buffed the Wall to 3 Aura eventually which killed that hope, and all this happened before Neon's November nerf.
  
• The Summer of 2019 saw a large number of defensive units released; alongside the Argus Shield, several different units were released themed around turrets for the technological kingdom of Atlas, such as the Beam Turret. The Atlesian Burrow Gun was the straw that broke the camel's back and made for a miserable meta as the Burrow Gun would only appear (and be available to take damage) when a unit entered its range. These three units together were all very overpowered on launch and led to a large exodus of players sick of defensive and chip-based metas, especially as what few offensive units that were good enough to counter these metas (such as Professor Port and Adam Taurus) were often nerfed into the ground within a month of release.
  
• Also around this time it became apparent that the developers were unable to meet the quotas that Rooster Teeth was forcing on them. The social media team admitted that a certain number of units needed to be in the game in time for Winter 2019 when Volume 7 was set to start, and as the year went on more and more game-breaking bugs were being found in units, or they were at best horrifically undertuned or overpowered. The Apathy was perhaps the largest case of this, as an unfound bug pre-release meant that the Apathy (who have a passive ability that let them self-duplicate) had no cap on their power, meaning that they could immediately overwhelm defenses and in the case of some phones, be such a resource hog the phone would crash. Many Legendary units were especially guilty of being under-tuned due to low Legendary availability meaning they were simply weren't powerful enough to compare with high-levelled units. Checkmate's ability simply didn't work at launch, and Neon made several more such as Hazel Rainart a joke. May Marigold's invisibility bubble would have been an interesting game changer... were it not for a bug that made it that units placed in the bubble still played their sound lines, meaning players knew what to expect. Things were so bad that when Flower Power launched and wasn't broken or needed an emergency patch, the playerbase were shocked.
  

Unfortunately, the Novemember patch did little to stop the problems with Neon, and a new problem would rear its head for Christmas: Jinn. This unit embodied many of the problems players had: She was a Legendary so it would be hard for free players to get her, and only added to the sheer number of Legendaries that were out there. She was another structure card, and she was horrifically broken. Stopping time for seven seconds in an area around any friendly units, Jinn broke the game overnight, with players horrified at how little playtesting she'd clearly had. Most chip units now couldn't damage structures as Jinn simply could stop time and freeze the turret for the duration of the attack. And to make matters worse? She cost two Aura, meaning it was very easy to cycle a deck and start Jinn spamming.
And yet at two aura she was still one of the only cost-efficient Neon counters... until they patched her to be worth three Aura instead. Talking of the feline menace, January saw Neon get a HP nerf that set her shield at 14. Finally, Neon could be realistically be taken out, still at an Aura defecit but at least it can be countered and now they just have to raise her Aura- why are you buffing her game?
Less than a month later, Neon got, of all things, a buff. Her HP shield was set at 20, and her attacks now did double damage. This is around the point where a lot of players begin to suspect the developers aren't listening to feedback and more long-term players dip out or drop the game. Neon got touched one more time in April, which slowed her down (which itself was a problem as Neon's lessened speed on spawn simply made her better at generating aggro), she dealt 10% less damage and made it somewhat easier to hit her enough to kill her, but a new problem was on the horizon. Because Neon was now no longer the game's White Whale for patches.
Meet the White Fang Gunner Barracks. Added in September 2019, the Barracks fell under many player's radar simply because they were horrifically undertuned. Their gimmick was that every few seconds, a White Fang Gunner would spawn, with three spawning on death. In April, as Neon got her last appearance in the patches, the Barracks got a huge buff and became the centerpiece of the meta; they now spawned two Gunners, which made them immensely valuable for just five Aura. You could overwhelm many anti-swarm units before they had a chance, and shred your way through turrets.
The Barracks would then go six months before this overtuning was rectified, barring one nerf in August that lowered their health to try and stem the tide of units. To sum up every other thing that went wrong during the year meta-wise:

• The playercount was getting so low that players were able to make lists of the AI bots the developers had in place so lower-level players had a challenge (Amity breaks up players by a trophy system where you gain trophies with every win, and by this point most of the active players were in the 2500 to 3500 range. This also meant new players steamrolled through the lower levels only to hit a brick wall in the 3000 range, with the only reliable solution being to willingly lose matches until you were in your optimal range and grind victories until you reached a certain level.
  
• The patches became more and more threadbare, going from 8+ units getting changed each month in early 2019 to three units at most getting changed in 2020 patches outside of the anniversary patch going back to the golden days of eight. The only area where they didn't get more threadbare was in the cosmetics and emotes that the developers were cranking out, all of which were only available through hours of grinding or premium currencies. This was despite the fact that the units were being released slower, going from once a week to once a fortnite.
  
• The majority of units added in 2020 were Epic or Legendary tier, which were the hardest to get for free players unless they got lucky and they were added to the store (and if they had the lien as a Legendary in the store costs a flat 40,000 Lien). One Common and four Epics were released compared to twelve Epics and seven Legendaries. The release of Moonslice Adam especially was annoying for this regard, as Adam already had a Legendary released (at least for Team RWBY, each of them headlined a Legendary when it came to the team attack cards), and this was clearly done to pander to Adam's fans again as his first unit saw a spike in interest in the game. The math was done and showed how artifically scarce Legendaries were made.
  
• The undeovertuning was still in play. Colossus is seen as one of the worst cards in the entire game because of its gimmick. I have literally never seen anyone play it. Flynt became overtuned and now he's a staple thanks to his trumpet's AOE attack being able to hurt turrets and shred most units. Launcher Nora was an especially overtuned unit thanks to her high-damage constant AOE barrage and long range meaning she could annhilate most anything if given enough cover. Even after patches she's still dangerous. September saw the White Fang Dropship Formation added, which was widely seen as a terrible unit and done as an emergency addition because the planned unit for September in the Grimm Seer had to be cut last minute for technical reasons.
  
• The game has barely had significant content added since launch, with the primary gameplay still just being PVP. Barring Battle of Beacon (a mode where you can play as Ruby and Weiss and fend off Grimm which most players just use to grind chests, and no, they still haven't added Blake or Yang) and Plaza (a lobby where you can dress up as a character and run around Beacon), the game has added no new features and quality of life content players have requested since launch (rerolling in the shop, Superior Crates having guaranteed Legendary spawn rates) have been released at a snail's pace (you still can't reroll Legendaries if you're looking for a specific unit). Academies where players can unite to trade units and chat still lacks features that have been requested for years such as the ability to delete messages. And Plaza immediately went to hell because players were doing erotic role play in the chats and after people came forward with proof that minors were being sexually harassed in the Plaza or being coerced into side-channels, the dev response was to... just turn off the chat entirely instead of banning the accounts or implementing moderation. This also removed the chatlog which deleted a lot of the evidence of said harassment.
  

As OctobeNovember comes in, the players are getting more and more furious. The weekly feedback includes a near constant demand for an acknowledgement from the developers given how often it feels like the feedback is being ignored. The social media team get caught several times hyping up how the coming patch would address player concerns, only for said patch to lack those units. The meta has been locked down to the Xiong Family, Flynt, Launcher Nora, Spider-Mines and the hell-cat herself in Neon. Everyone runs at least one of these, people run meta decks not because they want to, but because it's the only way to have a chance of victory.
And then in December, things implode. The patch for the month was set to launch on December 10th with the monthly event missions. But when the clock rolls around, the event missions (which usually take about two weeks to do if you're doing as many as you can a day)... has a six day timer. And the update doesn't come out. The art team doesn't release new unit art. The shop has no special timed bundles. There's no patch notes. And then the Twitter team who've been hard carrying the game through... actually talking to the players and acknowledging the grievances they have... admitted that they don't know what's going on either. The best guess is that the devs have come down with Covid, but no statements to confirm or deny this leave it as guesswork. The timer eventually got reset and people could do the event, but then on Christmas itself, another issue.
Ruby has appeared in the plaza on Halloween (her canonical birthday) and Christmas, and if you go talk to her you get free stuff. But on Christmas people, people discovered that Ruby was talking as if you'd already talked to her. Because they hadn't updated Ruby yet for 2020. She still thought it was 2019 so if you'd talked to her then for goodies, she had none now. They patched it eventually but a lot of people didn't see this fix before the timer ran out to get the free stuff.
Some have resorted to memes to cope with the fact that the game just seems to have died out of the blue. Others have been trying to desperately rally the players and find a way to save it. Some resorted to friendly mockery of the whales who'd spent thousands on a game that seems to be dying (seriously though gacha games need to curb this shit but they won't because whales are godsends for their bank balances).
If the game doesn't get an update in January then two months without new content will mark the end, and the already significant playercount drops will only increase. And it's hard to say if any one thing could have turned Amity Arena's fate around beyond just "Have a better balancing team who can respond better to feedback." Neon began the time of death, but by the time December rolled around the meta was in a horrifically toxic place where if you wanted to make any progession, you had to get down and dirty with the pigs. The team just constantly failed to balance problem units outside of their emergency hotfixes of Jinn, and more often then not they went after units and buffed or nerfed them at random going off playcounts to determine what needed fixing instead of the actual written feedback they were getting. It's clear from the references to the show and some of the attempts to reach out to the community that at least one person in the team genuinely wanted to make the good appealing to RWBY fans, but somewhere during the game's lifespan, they lost their way. Less focus needed to be put on how to milk the players, and instead focusing on making a game sustainable and enjoyable enough to warrant the cosmetics and emotes. The game's failure ultimately isn't on the playerbase. It's on the people who were actually making the game who chose to slack off because they thought it acceptable to do so.
Thanks for reading.
EDIT: HOT OFF THE PRESSES, I JUMPED THE GUN
Had I waited one more day, my story would have had a far more sudden ending, as the game just announced its shutdown for January.
RIP.

This is mostly my reactions and rationalizations to the Brave event and how it's affected me a a player of DMK. I've been playing for nearly a year. I've experienced Onward, Pocahontas, Hercules, two Tower Challenges, the Lock Shock and Barrel Halloween event, Mandalorian, and now Brave.
At first I was okay with not completing things since I just didn't have storyline characters unlocked or leveled up to be of any use. But starting around that second Tower Challenge, the one where they offered Rabbit for a second time in a row, things started feeling off. The Halloween event was brutal. Lock, the premium character, was surprising in that he not only was 500 gems but despite being useful to the point of being necessary for one of the tasks he ended up being not that useful for the rest. Meaning even people who purchased Lock found out they couldn't get Shock unless they got lucky with drops or burned through a ton of elixir buying the needed tokens. Then the Mandalorian came out a few weeks later, and I didn't participate much but I did hear that once again the premium character wasn't as useful as expected. Kuiil needed to be leveled up before he could be properly used, and he had some token conflicts with characters.
And now we are at Brave, where people who had both premium characters and the premium attraction and the parade float and discovered they could not finish the event. They did everything right, and it wasn't enough. The RNG was just too strong - there were too many stages where people got screwed over by RNG or bottle necked by arbitrary cooldown times. Some people even had full Frozen collections to help, and were struggling! I had Fergus, Dingwall, and the Ring of Stones at level 2. Up until the last hour, I had no idea if I would be able to complete the event or if I would come up short.
And I realize it's only going to get harder.
This isn't fun anymore. I've never played a game where I needed to wake myself up repeatedly during the night, to stand a chance at completing it. For days at a time. I've never played a game that made me wonder if I could 'get away' with sneaking my phone into my phone-hating teacher's class because lectures cut into a character's task completion. This is supposed to be a game, not a job.
With Brave, the difficulty is entirely intentional. Gameloft didn't want people completing the event. Gameloft wanted people so frustrated that they caved in and bought a sack of gems. Merida herself was 10USD, and without any tokens her costume was 970 gems. Two 500 gem deals bring her costume to just under 40USD. Let's say you did your best, got all the Glitched Fabric, but still came up short 7 comfy fabrics. That's still 560 gems that Gameloft wants you to spend.
You just busted your ass for the "privilege" of giving Gameloft an additional 24USD of your money. Nice hustle.
And then there's the fact that Gameloft made sure only Frozen characters can get Glitched Fabric. And not just Frozen characters, but you needed Anna and her traveling costume (so 2 legendary chests, minimum) or the Fire Spirit with the Enchanted Forest attraction upgraded to level 1 (another 2 legendary chests).
You could also have it dropped from the Dressing Room if you have it at level 2, but with an 8 hour cooldown most people couldn't collect enough fabric before the event ended and were forced to spend more gems. Some people were lucky enough to have the Dressing Room upgraded all the way to level 5, which requires a total of 475 relic tokens to do. And the odds of getting WIR relic tokens have decreased, now that Gameloft has added Brave relic tokens to the chest pools.
And when an event ends...does it even feel good having those event characters you earned? Thanks to the 75 character limit, you're going to spend the next few weeks leveling them up and then be forced to box them up and send them Home by the time the next event starts. There are so many storyline characters that have so many tasks needed to collect more tokens, but event characters are mostly isolated and very rarely are able to collect tokens for characters not in their collection. So their main purpose becomes slot machine bait: they'll eventually be the next helper collection for a future event (that you'll have to lose sleep, buy all the premiums, and even then burn through more elixir or gems or even real money in order to complete), and anyone who wasn't able to get all the characters can try their luck opening a legendary chest.
I'm not even done with the story. I'm at the brink of my game getting bottle necked because I have over 75 characters which can be out and about doing tasks. But with recent events, they prove it won't matter how far along in the story I am. It won't be enough to complete events.
Now, each new event character feels like it bloats regular chests. All those event character tokens taking up space, all those event relic tokens that you don't need anymore because the relic token system is utterly broken and Gamelot isn't interested in fixing it.
All for what? For shoring up for the next hustle. For making sure you have fewer gems ready for the next event, tempting you to give in and pay cash. And maybe this is because I've only been playing for about a year while others have been playing much longer, but it is discouraging knowing that I'll never be able to complete many collections because it all lies within the slot machine legendary chests. At first I thought Tower Challenges were going to be a chance to make up for it, but I realized Gameloft hardly ever offers Tower Challenges and when they do happen you get...one or two returning characters plus an attraction, common tier. It's been a year and Gameloft has offered a grand total of 5 returning event characters. They have also added 25 event characters.
Free legendary chests are sporadic, sometimes a few will be offered as milestone prizes during events but for the most part we get one, maybe two a month. But not in January though, we get nothing this month. Spending gems is the only way to really complete a collection, but of course you don't want to spend your gems because you need those for the next event, but of course what's the point when the 75 character limit prevents you from really enjoying and showing off your completed collections. DMK operates on FOMO: fear of missing out. If you don't complete a collection during its event, it is extremely difficult to do so after without spending money, and Gameloft ensures that the rate of free offers is outpaced by new events. "If I don't get the comfy, it won't be available again for years. And when they release it again, it will be just as hard to obtain, so I might as well spend money/gems now." That's how they get you. "If I don't get Merida now, she'll be in a Legendary Chest, but she'll only have a base 2% chance to get, so I might as well spend money/gems now." Same thing.
I've come to realize I don't feel like I'm playing a game anymore. I feel more like I'm trying to see how much I can get away with an abuser. This is no longer a fun time waster, but something negatively influencing my life. Between the 75 character limit, the lack of usefulness for premium characters, and the absurd hoops needed to complete an event to screw people over with RNG and tempt them into spending more gems/cash, this isn't a game anymore it's just a chore. I don't see DMK getting better. So, I'm done. Let it go, as a certain Snow Queen would say.
I hope I don't come off as sounding dramatic. I only want to rationalize my decision, and help others understand if they are feeling the same way. I am not demanding that anyone quit or stop spending their own money if they still find enjoyment and satisfaction. I am not angry at anyone, but I will note that the more people spend real money the more it encourages Gameloft to rig things with less and less fairness. If anyone is feeling reluctant to stop playing or reduce playing due to the time and money they have already spent, this is a phenomenon called the sunk cost fallacy. It's harder to walk away from something when you feel you have invested in it. But this is a tapping game, and the only investment is whether you still find it fun and rewarding to play. You're never going to get that money back, there will be no payout at the "end". The only real loss is your money and time if you continue to play a game that is no longer fun.
In case anyone was wondering if I was able to get Merida's comfy costume at the very end, it doesn't matter if I did or not. Because I'm walking away.
I thank everyone here, and hope whatever decisions you make, you base them on your own satisfaction. Stay healthy and happy.
And in case anyone is wondering what else to do for a time waster, I picked up the inexpensive Stardew Valley and have been having a blast with it. Yes, I traded my kingdom for a farm.

Greetings Commanders,
A Russian winter storm is heading your way this week, and we've got the lowdown on how to heat up your roster so you can put your enemies on ice. But don't touch that dial afterward, because we've also got an event that'll turn your roster into stars, Blitzes, and lucrative events on the way. Let's start things off by bundling up with your favorite babushka and meeting two of S.T.R.I.K.E.'s upcoming recruits...

YELENA BELOVA & RED GUARDIAN

Add the might of the Russian motherland to your roster with Yelena Belova and Red Guardian!
Yelena Belova was chosen as a teenager for the Soviet Union's Black Widow Ops program, which aimed to create the world's deadliest female spy. There she underwent specialized training in the infamous Red Room to be the potential replacement for Natasha Romanoff, the original Black Widow, who had gone rogue. Through years of intense training, Yelena became an expert spy and master combatant.
Alexi Shostakov was one of the Soviet Union's most talented and celebrated test pilots when he was enlisted by his government for a secret program. The KGB trained Alexi to become the second Red Guardian, the Soviet Union's counterpart to Captain America -- an elite fighter and figurehead meant for priority missions.
Red Guardian and Yelena slot into the Skill-Military team. Yelena is a cunning Blaster whose Damage is amplified when Stealthed, while Red Guardian is a stout Protector who Taunts on Spawn and heals allies.
Filling in the ranks of the Skill-Military team are Punisher, Killmonger, and Mercenary Soldier. Most of the Skill-Military faction have a new mechanic that represents their use of tactics in combat, where they can take an enemy positive effect and apply it to themselves and all Skill-Military allies. Befitting a band of soldiers, the Skill-Military team will be a formidable opponent in Alliance War.
For a full breakdown of Yelena's and Red Guardian's abilities, check out this video (English only): https://youtu.be/LyxOFjIcwIQ
MOJO'S WINTER SPECIAL
This holiday season, skip the same old holiday movies and tune into the upcoming event everyone will be talking about: Mojo's Winter Special! Wow the crowd with your combat skills to carry home tons of fabulous prizes.
Screen Time
Earn Screen Time currency by spending Campaign Energy (excluding Event Campaign Energy), winning battles in Blitz, and completing the following Daily Objectives: Daily Raid Battles, Real-Time Arena Contender, and Daily Arena Battles.
Screen Champions Milestone
Earn rewards based on the total number of Screen Time currency spent opening orbs. Rewards include character shards, Orange unique gear, mini-unique gear for Gear Tier 14 & 15, and Gold Promotion Credits.
Primetime, Syndication, Re-Run Orbs
Become a rewards star by opening the limited-time Orbs with Screen Time to earn gear, orb fragments, Elite Credits, and more!

BONUS EVENTS

But wait, there's more…
Re-Energize - The cost to purchase 120 Campaign Energy (excluding Event and Isotope-8 Campaign Energy) will remain at 50 Power Cores for 24 hours.
Ion Influx - The cost to refresh Isotope-8 Campaign Energy will remain at 50 Power Cores for 24 hours.
Catalyst Cataclysm - Earn 3x Basic Catalyst Parts from select Campaign nodes.
Train and Gain - Earn 2x Training Modules from Campaign nodes.

UPCOMING BLITZES

Overwhelm enemies with an electrical storm or a literal storm with these upcoming Blitzes. Rescue is flying in first in the Sonic Resonance Blitz where you can upgrade your Power Armor Support specialist with Rescue shards. And immediately up next is the Weather Goddess Blitz featuring Storm. Rain down blows upon your foes and fortify this extreme weather X-Men Controller.

BONUS EVENTS

Terrigen Storm
Start preparing to recruit Ebony Maw by bolstering your Inhumans with the Terrigen Storm event! For 24 hours, Inhuman character shards rewarded in Campaign Nodes will be doubled in the following nodes:
Ms. Marvel: Mystic 2-6
Quake: Heroes 6-6
Karnak: Nexus 8-6
Payday & Merc Mayhem
Build up your bullion supply for the month with the upcoming Payday event, where you can lead your top Mercenaries into battle for a chance to earn piles of Gold. And, as usual, you can get ready for Payday with the Merc Mayhem event, where you can earn 2x shard payouts for Mercenaries in the following Campaign Nodes:
Korath the Pursuer: Villains 5-9
Mercenary Lieutenant: Villains 3-3
Mercenary Sniper: Nexus 4-6
Bullseye: Heroes 4-9
And that's a wrap! Tune in next week for the final blog of 2020 where we'll be going over the events that'll lead you to greener pastures… a.k.a. 2021.
Until next time…
Good luck, Commanders!

Warning: long rambling stories ahead. I am bored and waiting to get through my first day back at work since before Christmas. You've been warned!
I've been going to the casino pretty regularly for the past few years. Before that, I played occasionally. I exclusively play slots. I view it as a night out - first with friends back when I brought $50 and played penny denom minimum bet spins and prayed to win $20, and then eventually shifting my mindset to playing higher bets and denominations. I hit my first jackpot handpay a couple of years ago. I hit $3700 on a $27 bet on a Geisha machine. I've hit a few other jackpots here and there, culminating with my biggest jackpot ever this past summer. I hit $12K on a $50 bet on a Pompeii slot machine.
Well, the long story short is that I have fallen out of love with gambling. I have somehow managed to have a positive ROI on gambling. I track my withdrawls and win on a spreadsheet. To put it bluntly: I have been extremely lucky over the past few years. I know that slots are not a viable way to win money in the long run, so I made a decision a few months ago to "retire" from gambling at the end of 2020.
I went to my local casino last Wednesday. It just so happens when I hit a jackpot that I usually do it within the first half hour or so I'm at the casino. Well, it happened again. After going up $600 or so on another slot machine (I don't remember the name), I went to one of my most hated/favorite old school slots - Zeus dollar denomination. One of my worst moments in all of gambling was a few years ago. I got a bonus round on the Zeus dollar denomination on max bet of $45 a spin. I was BEYOND excited. I've seen Youtube videos where people have won tens of thousands of dollars in that exact scenario. Much to my shock, I won nothing. In that game, you don't win anything for triggering the bonus. So I actually *lost* $45 on getting the bonus. I cashed out and left immediately.
Anyway, last week I hit a modest $4500. It was exciting...but not as exciting as I thought it should be. I was cool, calm, and...detached. The wins didn't mean much to me, and the losses mean absolutely nothing. My wife and I are in the EXTREMELY fortunate position that losing $500 or so every week or two at the casino is affordable. I'm not ignorant to how lucky we are to be in this position.
After getting paid out, I played a bit longer. But that hand pay drove home the realization that I had a few months ago: it was time to stop gambling. If I can't get pumped about a big win like that, and if I'm not even phased a little bit by losing, it's just not worth gambling any more. I used to go for entertainment, but even now gambling doesn't provide that much.
As I sit now, I am up roughly $18K over three years of slots. Not bad, but not life changing. Enough that I bought my wife a Burberry and Louis Vuitton handbag on separate occasions. The rest if stashed in savings or in an investment account somewhere. But I am 100% committed to being done. At least for 2021, and probably longer.
If anyone is interested in hearing my thoughts on how to win...I don't have any insight to share. It's luck. I got lucky. I know I got lucky. The usual tropes about setting win and loss thresholds is good advice. Sometimes I chased payouts and hit them. Sometimes I chased and lost. But I managed to hit more than miss, and for that I'm lucky. And thankful.
Anyway. I don't have a major takeaway or anything. I don't have many people I can talk about this with in my personal life, so I figured I'd share a bit of my story here.
If you do gamble, please do so responsibly. Good luck, and try to have fun. If you're not having fun, it's probably not the right way to spend your time or money.
EDIT:
I just wanted to say to anyone who reads this in the future that I appreciate the nice responses and PMs from people. It's nice to share a positive experience with others! I sincerely hope that if any of you choose to play in the future, you choose to do so responsibly. Gambling can be a hugely problematic lifestyle for some people. Stay safe. (end of preaching here).
I also want to take a second to address some comments from some people about slots being skill based. This is 100% false. The concept of slots being skill based in any way is demonstrably untrue with three seconds of reasonable thinking. If we accept that there is a hypothetical slot game which is based on skill and not pure luck, what are the consequences of that? First of all, this information would leak out. There would be no way to contain it. If one person can solve the system, another an as well. Subsequently, someone would write a book on the subject. Think about all the poker and blackjack strategy books out there. These are games where skillful play can increase your odds of winning. Last I checked, there aren't any books or Supersytem-level analyses from prominent individuals willing to stake their names and reputations on publishing a "slot technique" book. There's a reason for this. And also - think about this: casinos still carry blackjack tables for a reason: they still have an edge to win. If there is a surefire way for individuals to win when playing slots, casinos would 100% for sure take these games out of circulation. Casinos are not in the business of giving away money. Any claim there is a foolproof way to win money playing slots does not make sense when critical thinking is applied to the circumstances.
Slots are not like card games. Finding and playing only games where there is a "must win by" progressive is not the same thing as skillful play. That's more akin to something like card counting in blackjack. Many people who design slot machines and engineer the software behind the scenes have posted on Reddit and elsewhere that wins are based on random number generators running behind every spin. There is literally no skill involved - you win or lose each spin based on pure random luck.
I am saying this because there are a number of people who come to this subreddit to look for ways to cheat the system and get easy money. I see posts like this fairly often, and I'm only browsing this subreddit occasionally. Gambling is not, and should not, be a way for anyone looking to make a quick buck. If you're looking to get an edge playing slots because you need to pay bills or make a quick buck, you are already in serious trouble. Do not buy into the delusion that you can get an edge or guarantee a win. People saying this are snake oil salesmen who do not care for you or your well-being.
Anyway. I'm going to stop monitoring this post. I'm still open to receiving PMs or messages, but I've had my fun with this so far. I could do with fewer trolls, but this is the internet. I knew what to expect. Bon chance, everyone!

All of y'all's year reviews made me want to do the same, so I wrote down a few sentences of everything I played last year. I was surprised it was so much as my partner moved in with me and I expected to have a lot less time, but that actually didn't happen and Corona did its thing. I'm a bit late to the review party, but I needed time to write down my thoughts and didn't want to do it in one session.
Standard platform is PC, everything else is labelled.
Done:
Darkest Dungeon – halfway through (most tier 2 bosses). it was a nice and interesting start to a game I thought I liked, but 40 hours in I realized I was in fact not having fun. It was repetitive and the payout was very low for me as rewards felt small and especially upgrades to the village took a lot of time. I did play the game with too much emphasis on keeping every character alive, in a game that wants you burn them, so maybe that’s one me. But maybe it’s just not my type of game. Visuals, presentation and the IDEA of the combat system were nice, though. 5/10
Kingdom Hearts 3 (PS4) – finished story. Kingdom Hearts has become a burning pile of tires, but I hold it dear since the first game and I want to know what is happening. The visuals are amazing and the combat system is engaging, at least, yet a bit much at times, with way too many special interactions going on at all times. But KH3 is basically if the story has an alignment which is just true chaotic. The main story is…there, for most of the game, but nothing happens with it. Each world has its own story and both them and the overarching plot are almost completely irrelevant to each other. What a pity. Also, so many minigame and once-and-gone game mechanics, what the hell. I had fun, but it could have been so much better. And they skipped over most FF elements. 6/10
The Wolf Among Us – 100%. Played it with my partner who had already finished it years before. It’s one of the prime Telltale games and the first that I wasn’t familiar with the source material with. It has a very interesting lore and visuals for sure. Other than that, very much a standard Telltale game and you either like it or you don’t. I did enjoy it a lot with its interesting plot and characters. 8/10
Starlink: Battle for Atlas (Switch, digital version) – finished story. I like me some occasional space game. Starlink was an oddball in many ways for me. I probably wouldn’t have looked at it as I thought it’s just a toy merch game, but Starfox and the existence of a toyless version drew me to this. I know I could have played nicer looking version, but the tie-in with Starfox was actually not that shallow and came with a small unique storyline, so that’s the most Starfox I will get until Nintendo releases (and doesn’t fuck up) another full game. Due to its toy origins, the game has a few unique quirks, like the weapon, ship and pilot switching on-the-go to match enemy vulnerabilities and combat styles. The mix of planetary and solar exploration and gradual faction growth with even a few RTS elements sprinkled in worked for me. It was a lot of fun! 7/10
Injustice 2 – finished story, some achievement hunting, trying out all characters a bit and dabbled in the multiverse mode. I’m not a huge Beat’Em’Up player, but some concepts are too interesting to pass up. Given how few Heroe League (Avengers and Justice League) games come out well, I had to take my chances here. The story is…forced, but it works for this kind of game. The interactions between the heroes are pretty entertaining to watch. I can’t really judge if the combat system was good or not or balanced or not, but it worked for me, although some fights were pretty frustrating. 7/10
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales – 100%. Gwent really got to me in the Witcher 3. It was kinda sad to see that this is an entirely different card game (although closer to the online Gwent), but it was still a great one. Telling the really interesting story of Queen Meve, the game not only expands the lore of the really intriguing Witcherverse, it also tells it through this mix of roaming through a map and army fights presented by card battles. The visuals weren’t all too exciting, although the art style worked for me. The score was awesome, though, maybe even better than the one from W3. I can absolutely recommend this game to any person interested in card games and in the Witcher. 9/10
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden – finished story and most content. I have so many tactical RPGs on my backlog, all with very interesting settings, but animal mutants in a postapocalyptic Sweden? That’s one of the freshest ideas in a while. The top hat wearing duck really sold it to me. Unlike many other games of its genre like XCOM, the areas are connected with each other like in more classic RPGs. Stealth kills played a huge part in this game as open combat makes the game a lot harder. It’s not a very long game, which I appreciated. However, the initial premise of its animal mutants really fell short as there were actually not that many in the game. I also would have liked to have more of the characters in my team, but the stealth advantages made some characters a lot stronger than others, so there was little choice in which people to take. Itemization and progress were alright, the combat is pretty much as in XCOM etc. 7/10
Cities in Motion – played some scenarios. Preparing for Cities: Skylines, I figured I should play this first. It’s an alright public transport planning simulation that made me excited for planning stuff throughout several cities. However, I have some serious issues with it. For once, this game punished you hard for planning public transport like in real life and creating ridiculously tiny lines (like 2 stations per metro line) was the only way to any meaningful amount of money. Also, the German scenario pack has 12 scenarios, but only 4 cities (other packs are similar). It’s interesting to revisit cities in different eras, but to rebuild everything every time is annoying. And the tasks you get are borderline asinine, like building a line with three stations in far ends of the map, which I circumvented with temporary lines that I immediately deleted after completing it. In its core it had great potential, but felt lazily executed. 5,5/10
BATTLETECH – finished story, some flashpoints and fooled around with mech components for a bit afterwards. Been a while since I dived into MechWarrior games, maybe a good 17 years. Battletech is…GOOD. Maybe my favorite game I have played that year. The campaign is great, has a good plot, but also gives you an open galaxy to explore at your own leisure. The hunt for new mech chassis in the midgame was the most fun I think. Building mechs, balancing your finances, keeping your people alive and trained, random events on board of your ship and upgrading your ship all felt meaningful and well interconnected. It’s also a turn-based tactical RPG, but it works with its own rules (like weapon groups and destroyable sections) and does so very well. 9,5/10
Batman – The Telltale Series – 100%. A solid game for both Batman and Telltale fans. The story was original enough and I always enjoy a plot that isn’t focused on the way overused Joker – who has his part, but a very interesting one. Not really much more to say here. 8/10
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) – finished story and most of the map. Finally, I tackled this behemoth of this generation. I haven’t played a Zelda since Majora’s Mask and the reason for that was a lack of drive to finish either of the N64 installments. Now, 20 years and a friend with a copy available later, I felt urged to play it as I wanted to give back the copy. Didn’t expect much despite the hype, but I have to say this game is (almost) as good as people say. It’s one of the few games that really lets you do whatever you want in the order you want (after a brief tutorial). My partner is playing it right now and it’s interesting to see how different our approaches to the order of quests and also specific challenges are. It rewards creative problem solving due to its physics engine. It is not perfect, especially the weapon system is weird and non-permanency in weapons feels just odd. NPCs are not very well written. The world is rather empty and while that has a plot reason, it feels like there should be more at times. But despite that, the game is a lot of fun and deserves its reputation. 9/10
Monster Hunter World + Iceborne (PS4) – defeated everything up to Furious Rajang, about 350 hours played with a fixed group of 3 and sometimes two other RL friends. Probably the game played most intensely this year. I bought a PS4 Pro in February and soon after – also thanks to Corona – I started playing this with two other friends, almost daily for several months. I had played Tri a decade ago and liked the general idea, but hated a lot of outdated conventions (both from Nintendo and the game itself) back then. World does most things I hated so much better. The monsters are engaging and (mostly) fun, the weapons are diverse and have their niches, the progression system is addictive, I love the Palicos & the private suite customizations and there is so much to see and find in the few maps they have. Great game if you like the combat and if you don’t focus too much on story because that one is paper-thin. 9/10
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (PS4) – finished story. I liked U2 and U3 a lot, so this was a must-play after getting the PS4. It’s probably the most graphically impressive game I have played so far. The combat felt a little forced at times, but I guess that’s the genre. Although sneaking felt more possible and rewarding than in previous titles (as far as I remember). The story is a typical “one last gig” thing, but I liked the inclusion of Drake’s youth and especially how they concluded the Drake saga (maybe?). It’s a very solid game and definitely a must-play for PS4 owners. 8,5/10
EVERSPACE – finished story, post-story and most side missions. I don’t like losing progress, but like Rogue-likes with in-between progression systems, so despite my first hesitation, I picked up this game as I was craving a new space game. Though having a VR, I never got to play it in that mode, but still, I had a lot of fun with it. Some runs were intense and discovering new elements always put an excited wtf face on my head. The in-universe explanation for it being Rogue-like worked for me and getting funds to improve your ships between runs was addictive enough to try again and again. Same with weapons, they were different enough to try out different ones. Just don’t expect too much content out of this, it’s not a big game. 7/10
GRID (2019) – finished base game and some of the season pass content. I was a big fan of the first Grid and played all games in between. But like them, this one did not manage to be as engaging as the first one. While I enjoyed playing through the different leagues and liked the variety of cars and inclusion of a team mate, I did get bored to go through every cup as some of them had a severe lack of cars within them. There was no upgrading of cars, money was meaningless for 99% of the game and a overall career feeling of the ‘story’ mode was absent. At least I didn’t have to basically only race against Ravenwest anymore and other teams were still relevant. I feel like Codemasters could do a lot more with the foundation they have created here, but fail to connect the races in a meaningful way. 6/10
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (PS4) – finished story and most side quests. This was one of my most wanted PS4 titles before Horizon: Zero Dawn came out. I loved Star Ocean 1, 2 and 4 so much. 4 in particular was just great enough to fill the small void that FFXIII had left back then. I heard about the mediocre reviews of IaF. And it was…actually mediocre. What I forgot or never knew was that I got released as a PS3 game in Japan first. And it really, really shows. The game was UGLY. Not ugly ugly, but playing it directly after Uncharted 4 was quite a shock. Not that it matters too much. However, the second problem I have with this game is directly aim at its soul. The other games had you jumping between planets and several distinct locations. And IaF started very promising, hinting at similar qualities. But then, it just…went into its climax and ended. Sure, some parts are in actual space. But you have seen about 80% of the locations within the first quarter of the game, which is ridiculous. It’s such a pity as the game’s story and combat are actually very enjoyable and I loved just grinding, which is quite unusual for me. But the narrow scope of the game wastes a lot of potential and that’s a real disappointment to me as a fan of the series. It could have easily done so much better. 6,5/10
Risen – finished. Oh boy, this game was sitting in my backlog for a LONG time – probably since its release I wanted to try it out. Unfortunately, this is a case of being TOO patient. The game is horribly outdated nowadays, the combat is not much fun and punishes you hard even on easy difficulty. The quest flow, general plot, start and choice of character skills are good, but I do think everything else – graphics, item flow, combat, sound, art design - was pretty bad. This was two years before Skyrim, but it feels like it’s been 10, honestly. I am still curious about Risen 2, 3 and Elex, however. But I might skip the first two after this. 3/10
Team Sonic Racing (Switch) – finished story. Yes, story. It’s as good dumb as you would expect from a Sonic racing game. Weirdly enough, I performed a lot better in handheld mode. The minigames are frustratingly hard as drifting is way overdone. The actual racing is nice, but no match to Mario Kart 8, although I do appreciate the idea of teams with ultimate boosts and item sharing. 6,5/10
Yakuza 0 – finished story and most major side activities. God, this game completely surprised me. I was absolutely 0 interested in crime settings, but Humble gave me this gem of a game. My partner suggested to try it out together, but lost interest in it, so we stopped for 2 months. I then picked it up again by myself and got increasingly invested in the story, the combat system and the bajillion of side things to do. THERE IS SO MUCH TO DO! And most of it is fun, doesn’t overstay its welcome too much and helps develop the main characters a little bit. The Real Estate and Hostess Club minigames are basically entire games-within-a-game, the pocket racer would also work by itself and the Karaoke songs were absolutely adorable and are a must-see in all of gaming. While I thought that the game got bloated a bit due to the two characters both having their own full-blown story, but sharing a single game, the interconnection made it kind of necessary to not separate them. But the game felt a bit long thanks to that (and all of the minigames that felt kinda mandatory at times). Anyway, I am now completely hooked on the series and look forward to the next entry – although I really need some time off lest I encounter the good old Assassin’s Creed-like fatigue. But given I couldn’t give two shits about Yakuza – even though I fucking majored in Japan Studies – this is an amazing feat. 9/10
Additional note: Getting into Yakuza memes alone is worth playing this, but the more I read and watch about this game and the series, the more and more I appreciate this franchise.
Endless Legend with a few DLCs – finished two full games (~38 hours). I was in the mood for a 4X game and this one was poking in my side for a bit. Endless Space was quite enjoyable and the overarching plot kinda works? I enjoyed expanding, researching and the quest system as well, but it felt just like Civ5 in general, with a few exceptions of course. It was weird that the ‘ages’ weren’t really differentiated visually and that you kept using the same units throughout the whole game – also there are not many of them, but there is an intriguing RPG-like customization system baked into it instead, which was cool enough. The winter and sea fortress system was also refreshing (but probably brought in from DLCs). Factions had some differences that went beyond what Civ would do, but the really deviating ones (like lava or fungus people that need different ways of city building) were hidden behind DLCs I do not have. Two games were enough for me, but I may come back in the future. 7/10
Need for Speed: Payback (PS4) – finished story. Being a PSN+ freebie, I got a bit excited over the silly F&F story that I felt like seeing with my own eyes. And the game delivered on that - but not much more. My last true NfS was Hot Pursuit (2010) (and my NfS favorites: Shift 1+2), so it had been a while. But I realize that I do not need that speed anymore. While the game was ultimately enjoyable, especially cruising around, finding stuff and customizing the cars, I especially disliked the offroad races with their weird rubber band perfect traction AI which was really frustrating. The driving in general revolved too much around drifting everything, but I guess that’s full arcade racers for you. And the automatic car reset was a bit too eager at times. 5,5/10
Rise of the Tomb Raider (PS4) – finished story and Croft manor side story. Also a PSN+ freebie. I have played the first game and was quite entertained by it. As I played Uncharted not too long ago, I was able to compare those two games a bit and while Uncharted looks undoubtedly better (and I prefer non-supernatural stuff in this kind of game), I think that Tomb Raider is the better game overall. This might be due to the usage of a skill and weapon customization system, which made exploring places and looking for XP, resources and parts fun. I also think that limiting the game’s world to one location (outside the prologue) helped immersion a lot. The game has quite a bit of a different feeling than the first TR, but mostly due to Lara being kickass from the start instead of allegedly being a frail grad student that 20 hours later massacres armies of armed and trained mercenaries. I liked it quite a lot of the backstory with her dad and caretaker were quite interesting as well. 8/10
Not done / on and off:
League of Legends – almost exclusively ARAM, sometimes bot games for trying out stuff. Not much to say to this, it’s a notorious, but ultimately good MOBA. The new items overhaul was a bit of a big change, but now I am getting the hang of it, I think. Some of the new champions of this year are fun to play, like Samira, Lilia and Seraphine. One of my friends quit the game for good, I think, so only one other is left, and it’s the go-to game if it’s just the two of us. Sometimes I play by myself, but I try to play more single player games then.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch) – some 70 hours to built my house, the island is my partner’s. This is my first Animal Crossing and after hesitating at the beginning, I did enjoy it quite a lot. It’s very relaxing, you can work towards small goals, but without any stress. Interactions with other villagers will become repetitive, but at the beginning it feels very sweet. It’s also nice that Nintendo supports the game with free updates every month. 8/10
Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution! (Switch) – played through story mode until midway ARC-V. I have my YGO phases every now and then where I watch a show and play a corresponding game at the same time. The Switch game is pretty nice as it lets me play through all TV shows’ stories, lets me play with most characters’ decks, has reverse duels for every story battle, but I also can always use my own decks which is sometimes very necessary as some matches are VERY one-sided. There are also challenge battles against very good decks which are as difficult as I imagine actual competitive dueling. Two things I don’t like about this particular YGO game: No free battle vs. CPU and only 30 custom deck save slots. The Tag Force games were still ahead in that regard. Still, it’s a solid entry that can provide hundreds of hours of entertainment for YGO enthusiasts and is a great travel companion. 8/10
Undertale – I just can’t get into it, sorry. This is my second attempt and I got a lot further than last time (about one third in). But something just doesn’t click with me. Maybe the humor feels forced, maybe the retro graphics do, or maybe I get too hype-talked by people. I don’t know.
Super Seducer – almost done with the first one. We mostly play it together or with other people, to have a good time. I got this from Dunkey, but I have to say the first one isn’t even that funny. A lot of the explanation in how to approach women are cringy at best and predatory at worst. I guess it does teach how to behave better for some very inexperienced guys, but in general it shouldn’t be used as a guideline in how to get girls to talk to you.
Katamari Damacy REROLL – almost done. It’s a fun game for a silly afternoon. The controls are garbage, but it doesn’t matter too much. The humour is great and rolling up increasingly bigger things is weirdly satisfying.
Borderlands 2 – Playing with friends every now and then. It’s still fun and I haven’t explored all characters yet (although leave me alone with Krieg), so there’s still more to get out of it.
Jackbox 1-7 – I was a huge fan of the early YDKJ games 20 years ago, so I’m happy they are still around and have adapted new technologies to further their game concepts. The Jackbox games have become staples in many parties and were a major driver during corona to get people together online around the globe to play a few rounds of whatever minigame we wanted to enjoy. Some games are not good, of course, but the ever-growing library of minigames always manages to add refreshing new titles to the list. My favorites are Quiplash, T-K.O. and Champ’d. 10/10
Risk of Rain 2 – unlocked all characters, had a couple of runs with friends and by myself. I have to say I might not like the game too much. The characters are interesting and the upgrade system is addictive, but losing progress without much being gained from a run (except lunar coins and unlocked characters/skills) feels like making no progress at all, in a way. It’s fun to play with friends and you can somewhat relax and chat while jumping and shooting around. 6/10
Beat Saber – half of campaign mode, but mostly custom songs. I LOVE Beat Saber. It’s the reason I got a VR system this year (a used 2017 Vive, but I don’t need more for that) and I had a lot of fun (and exercise!) with it. It’s sad when your wanted songs have not been mapped or mapped really bad, but the existing database is really big and a lot of fun to go through. There are a lot of gameplay additions (like one-handed, 90° and 360° modes), but the standard mode is still the best (or most-supported). The latter half of the campaign is dumb as hell, tho - hitting a specific amount of combos within a very small threshold in both min and max is such a dumb thing. Mods make the game a whole lot better and some stuff should really be in the base game. 9/10
Audica – played through campaign mode and some custom songs. Not as good as Beat Saber, but it’s still very enjoyable. It’s hits the same spot, but with a twist. Mod support is not a big here, but still there. 8/10
Cities: Skylines + most DLCs – still working on my first city after 40 hours. Depicted as the penultimate city builder, I had to get into this at some point. I have to admit, it’s pretty good. As good as imagined? Maybe, maybe not. The base formula is not that complicated, but the DLCs add a whole lot of flavor to it. I can definitely recommend it, but I still have a lot of time ahead with it.
Postponed:
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Switch) – I started and had a lot of fun with it, but stopped after roughly 5-10 hours as my partner was taking over the Switch with BotW (she played Witcher 3 before, so I was able to player with the Switch in the meantime) and switching cartridges all the time is a pain in the ass. Will continue soon and am very excited to do so.
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Summary: 2020 was probably the most intense gaming year for me so far, mostly thanks to Corona. My top three are probably BATTLETECH, BotW and Yakuza 0, with some honorable mentions to Beat Saber, MH:W and Jackbox. My gaming year 2021 is going to look similarily awesome and I already planned to play so many very high-profile games: Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Paper Mario: The Origame King, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Starpoint Gemini Warlords (almost finished this one already), Darksiders 2, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Gran Turismo Sport, Persona 5 Royal, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Borderlands 3, GTA V.

Recently I took a break off posting to Instagram, I’m a photographer with a small following (1,270 as I write this) and the algorithm has slowly throttled my engagement, I like and engaged in friends photos, I comment occasionally but don’t really go beyond that, I’m sorry but I don’t care much to spend hours of my life investing in to Instagram to reward me.
Here’s what I did:
I switched to a personal account, changed my password, went private. Didn’t post for 2 weeks
Then switched back to a business account, my first post back “exploded” I got thousands of impressions, multiple likes and most of my impressions came from my hashtags.
The next 3 posts were posted using similar hashtags but changed around completely:
The second post 3 days later, nothing 4th post a day after that, nothing 5th post the next day, 113 impressions.
Instagram does a technique commonly found in gambling machines called “honey potting” which is where they occasionally reward you but more often don’t, this keeps you engaged in the challenge of trying to chase the honey pot.
Here is an extract from a gambling and addiction website:
The addictiveness of a slot is that it challenges you. At times the game would not provide any winnings and suddenly it gives you a massive payout. This becomes a rush, making you feel as if you knew that a win was coming, which is why you keep spinning.
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Once one approaches the base level cap in their stats, a whole new world awaits them in the Upper River. However, newly minted Railway Directors may be at a loss on what the best way to lay track to Hell is. ("What do you mean I have to gather all the materials myself?") This guide hopes to clear up some of this confusion by analyzing all the potential paths to getting Railway Steel and how efficient they all are. Since this post is ridiculously long and mostly consists of boring mathematical analysis, feel free to skim over it to the TLDR, which will tell you which grinds are the best for getting Steel quickly at whatever stage of the Railway you're at. Ingots per Action (IPAs), Justificandes per Action (JPAs), Steel per Action (SPAs) and locations where the grinds are unlocked will be in bold.

Assumptions

This guide assumes that you can access all areas of Parabola (Chessboard, Waswood, etc.) and the Bone Market before starting the Railway, a fully upgraded lab with at least Profound Students unlocked (meaning 22 research per action for Modified Watchful of 250) and can reach Modified Attributes of 250 (Watchful, Persuasive, etc.) For methods that require Echos, I'll be using the Wilmont/Doubt Street grind to convert, which gives 4.05 EPA and is very likely available to any character that is in a position to start the Railway, and any materials that can be bought from the Bazaar are assumed to be bought from the Bazaar unless a grind greater than 4.05/2 = 2.025 EPA exists for it (eg. Nevercold Brass Slivers or Jade). Also, action counts disregard actions spent dealing with menaces as well as travel actions, making the IPAs or JPAs best-case scenarios.

Bones

For those of you that are new to the world of endgame players, you might be wondering why there's a section about bones in a guide about getting Railway Steel. Selling skeletons at the Bone Market in the Department of Menace Eradication is a good source of endgame items like Bessmer Steel Ingots needed for progression up the Upper River. Most endgame players have moved on from utter confusion to resigned acceptance of this fact, and thus, this section describes action costs for certain bones that are particularly useful in your endeavour to make Steel in all possible ways other than forging it yourself.
 

• Unidentified Thigh Bones: Baby's first bone, these add 1E to the value of your skeleton, and the only virtue of the vanilla ice cream bones of the skeleton world is that they're easily obtained, the Pedagogically Inclined Grandmother being willing to part with 2 at a time (3 on a rare success) for a Persuasive 210 check. Assuming 250 modified Persuasive and a rare success probability of 10% (source: author's posterior, data would be much appreciated) this gives 2.1 UTBs for 1.4 actions or 1.5 bones per action.

 

• Jurassic Thigh Bones: Baby's second bone, these skeletons add one Antiquity and 3E to your skeleton at the cost of a 25 research project in the Lab and an UTB. While they are nominally more valuable than UTBs, the research project takes 4 actions with a maxxed Lab (unless you got the Fate boost to cross over that magic line of 25 research per action), which means that you're getting 0.5EPA converting UTBs to JTBs instead of plopping UTBs on directly. Their real value comes in that they provide Antiquity, which gets the Enthusiast of the Ancient World interested in your skeleton. He also pays out in Unprovenanced Artefacts per Antiquity of your skeleton, though they don't help the EPA much, pushing the EPA of UTB->JTB conversion to a only slightly less bad 1.13EPA. In total getting a JTB takes 4.67 actions, assuming modified Persuasive of 250 and you get the UTBs from begging Bone Nana.

 

• Brass Skulls: Got a lot of Echos and not a lot of time? Slap a Brass Skull onto your skeleton and watch it's value skyrocket! Easily obtained action-free from the Bazaar for the cost of 62.5E, an additional 200 Brass surcharge is levied if you succeed in the Mithradicy check attaching a blindly ostentatious trinket onto your deadly serious forgery. This check adds 5E to your skeleton's value, which is more than the 4E you'll need to replace the brass you spend in addition to making your skeletal art easier to sell. As most Bone Marketeers know, the primary function of Brass Skulls is to convert Echos to Skeleton value almost 1:1, meaning the action cost is actually in grinding the Echos to convert, making this more efficient the better your grind is.

 

• Human Ribcages: No Constable, I don't know who I got this from. This skeleton base starts you off with 12.5E and needs 4 limbs and a skull before the skeleton is ready. They can be bought at the Small Stalls at the Bone Market for 3000 Jade or 60E from the Bazaar along with an action if you need a Skeleton Torso but don't feel like scrolling through the wiki to find which rare success gives you one. Alternatively, you can get one from the Commissioner of Police for 5 Constable Favours if you have the favour to burn. If you were going to buy a Ribcage from the Market instead it's not the worst use of favours, however.

 

• Mammoth Ribcages: If you've got a lab and know a bit about manipulating the Treacheries with the Red Science, you can use the Treachery of Measures to upsize a spare Human Ribcage you just happen to have lying around. The torso itself gives 62.5E value and 2 points of Antiquity for a project that takes 425 research or 21.28 actions with a Modified Watchful of 250 (20.95 actions if you can reach a Modified Watchful of 300). If you have to buy the starting Ribcage this torso takes 36.09 actions to aquire in all.

 

• Headless Skeletons: If you're pressed on time, this Torso is perfect. A package deal that comes with it's own arms and legs, it is inexplicably worth 10E less than a Ribcage by itself (2.5E), however, this means it can be bought from the Small Stalls at a cost of only 1000 Jade or 20E from the Bazaar and 1 action. Unlike the Human Ribcage, you can just slap on a skull and push it out the door, which can be useful for buyers that have a minimum payout regardless of echo value (which is most buyers except the Enthusiast of the Ancient World, that stingy little miser).

 

• Bone Fragments: Basically bone dust, these are needed to do things like get Parabolan Orange-Apples, or create new skeleton parts down at Ealing Gardens with more Red Science trickery. A grindable source is to slap a Brass Skull onto a Headless Skeleton and cart it off to the Hoarding Paleontologist at a rate of 249-259 Fragments per action (assuming one needs to grind back the Echos used to buy the materials). If you have a low Dangerous, you can instead convert Echos directly into Bone Fragments at about a 100BF:E ratio by slapping Brass Skulls onto a skeleton worth at least 62.5E and failing the Dangerous check to dismantle it. This is less efficient with higher Base Dangerous, however, even with Modified Dangerous of 200 (easily achievable with a Talkative Rattus Faber), one will fail the check 45% of the time. Given that "success" will give Whispered Hints that sell for around the cost of the Brass Skull, one can gain Bone Fragments at a worst-case rate (failing Mithradicy checks) of 263 Fragments per action. (Success in the Mithradicy check gives 277 FPA).

 

• Ivory Humeri: If you give a certain Bohemian Sculptress a Parabolan Orange-Apple, she'll gladly (Persuasive 210 check) supply a fake Ivory Humerus that adds 15E to the value of your skeleton. (It seems that rampant usage of her forgeries to inflate Skeleton prices caused a bit of a market bubble that popped a few months ago. Be responsible with your skeletal forgeries kids!) Now, you can get these Apples from your Base-Camp, but how? Using Bone Fragments uses up 1100 Fragments along with 2 actions for 5.97-6.18 actions to get your hands on one. With Persuasive 250 it takes another 1.4 actions to trade it in, meaning this grind gets an Ivory Humerus every 7.37-7.58 actions. With the buffing of the Newspaper grind, one can use the Journals of Infamy gathered to sideconvert to Correspondence Plaques then upconvert to Aeolian Screams to get Orange-Apples. This gets you an Apple every 6.23 actions assuming perfect conversion, and therefore an Ivory Humerus every 7.63 actions.

 

• Ivory Femurs: The Bohemian Sculptress, given 3 Orange-Apples and 700 Bone Fragments for raw materials can be convinced (Persuasive 225) to produce a masterwork of osteological forgery that adds 65E (a whole Brass Skull!) to the value of a skeleton. Assuming one uses the Bone Fragment route for gathering Orange-Apples, one can get their very own Ivory Femur for 21.94-22.70 actions assuming Modified Persuasive of 250.

 

• Thorned Ribcages: If you were lucky enough to get an Iron-Toothed Terror Bird back during Whitsun, you can grind Thorned Ribcages by constantly hunting the Bird in Parabola. The chase has a Ferocity of 20, meaning that it'll take 4.8 actions to finish with a modified Dangerous of 300. A more easily obtainable modified Dangerous of 250 gets you a ribcage in 5.26 actions, which isn't that much worse. I'll be assuming that one can reach a Dangerous of 250 and take the 5.26 action estimate, which comes with an average of 2.26 cp of Nightmares as well.

Getting Bessmer Steel Ingots

• Sell Skeletons to the Enthusiast of the Ancient World (Before Railway): Avaliable as soon as you open the Bone Market, this well-dressed dinosaur nerd pays out in the very Bessemer Steel Ingots you need to make your own tracks, because apparently he only buys skeletons from fellow industrialists that don't have forges for some reason. Your goal is to find the appropriate bones to cobble together to get him to part with as many of his Ingots as possible, and since the number of Ingots he gives you is proportional to the Echo value of your skeleton, one only wants a token point of Antiquity to get him to buy the fraud, then maximize Echo value with the other skeleton slots. Assuming all Artefacts are sold, analysis on some recipes include:
  
  • Brass Skull + Human Ribcage + Jurassic Thigh Bone + 3 Unidentified Thigh Bones: 169-179 Ingots for 120-124E and 15.67 actions or 3.73-3.87 IPA
  • Researching all 4 Unidentified Thigh Bones makes the payout 181-191 Ingots for 112.5-116.5E and 27.68 actions or 3.26-3.38 IPA
  • Swapping the UTBs for 3 Ivory Humeri to the Skeleton gives 241-251 Ingots for 120-124E and 35.78 actions or 3.68-3.78 IPA
  • Using 3 Ivory Femurs instead gives 541-551 Ingots for 120-124E and 79.49 actions or 4.96-5.00 IPA, which is pretty good as long as you can sell the thing. (If you fail all the checks in making the skeleton, good luck with the Shadowy 810 challenge!)
  • One could use a Mammoth Ribcage as the torso and solve the Antiquity problem with one go and add some value to the skeleton in the process. Brass Skull + 4 UTBs gives 253-263 Ingots for 117.5-121.5E and 32.95 actions for 4.08-4.18 IPA
  • Using Ivory Humeri instead gives 365-375 Ingots for 117.5-121.5E and 59.76 actions or 4.11-4.18 IPA
  • Ivory Femurs give 765-775 Ingots for 117.5-121.5E and 118.04 actions for 5.20-5.24 IPA
  • If you absolutely hate the idea of selling skeletons with every bone (ha!) in your body, you could sell the Enthusiast Jurassic Thigh Bones directly. This process gives 1.76 IPA, which is horrendous, but if you're really allergic to skeletons...
• Stealing From Mr Iron's Warehouse (Before Railway): If you don't want to deal with Top Hat or his miserly payouts, you can instead directly steal the Ingots you need from the only other entity that has a forge in the Neath: Mr Iron. This option is avaliable in Parabola if you have base Shadowy of at least 200, so is technically avaliable before you even start the Railway venture. The daring raid gets you 100 Ingots with an entry fee of 15 Identities Uncovered (for knowing which warehouse to hit). The main problem here is getting Identities Uncovered to steal from Mr Iron, of which the best source is probably publishing Seditious Editions of your Newspaper back in Doubt Street. 2 turns of the presses gets you 276 Scraps of Incendinary Gossip (along with 2 Revolutionary Favours and +2 cp Suspicion) in 37 actions, which then convert into 50 Identities Uncovered in 5 actions which allows 3 warehouse thefts. With a Modified Shadowy of 250 the warehouse thefts take 4.09 actions each (including failures to steal), meaning this gives 300 Ingots in 54.27 actions or 5.53 IPA. Assuming perfect conversion of materials (eg. 276 Scraps to 55.2 IUs in 5.52 actions), this gives a long-term average of 6.39 IPA.
  
• Smuggling in Industrial Materials (Jericho Locks): If you don't want to get your hands dirty with petty thievery, you can instead outsource your crimes by smuggling in Ingots from the Surface. This requires that you've visited the Fiddler's Scarlet at least once before, and so requires you've reached Jericho Locks already. Another practical concern is that for you to succeed in the skill check, you need to have an appreciable amount of Banditry in the Upper River (though unlike most other options on the card this one doesn't increase Banditry). 24 Surface Blooms will get you 130 Ingots, free from the influence of Mr Irons. Now, where to get those Blooms? An easy grindable way is to sell skeletons to a Bohemian Sculptress back at the Bone Market. She'll accept any skeleton with no antiquity (the polar opposite of the Enthusiast), and so opens up a lot more Skeleton recipes freed from the tyranny of the JTB. Analysis of sample skeletons below:
  
  • The Ol' Reliable Brass Skull-Headless Skeleton combo gives you 29-31 Surface Blooms at the cost of 82.5-86.5E and 5 actions. Assuming perfect conversion of materials this gives a long-term average of 5.91-6.07 IPA, though it's not a perfect grind as one needs to wait for the appropriate card in the Upper river to cash out the Ingots.
  • Using the Ornamental Orangutan recipe as listed on the wiki gives 57-59 Surface Blooms for 122.5-126.5E and 38.48 actions for 4.34-4.43 IPA, while swapping the Ornamental Orangutan's limbs for Ivory Femurs gives 137-139 Surface Blooms for 122.5-126.5E and 96.76 actions for 5.59-5.63 IPA. So using the extra actions to add on Ivory limbs isn't worth it beyond the satisfaction of selling the Sculptress's frauds right back at her.
  • Licentates, as with anything related to the Bone Market, have a distinct advantage here as well. Since the Bohemian Sculptress isn't particularly picky about which skeletons she buys, Licentates can make a mish-mash skeleton of their victims and sell it for 6 Surface Blooms in 4 actions total. Repeating this 4 times and smuggling in Ingots gives a IPA of 7.65, minus the travel action to the Upper River.
• Smuggling with Snuff (Jericho Locks): Instead of generating the Blooms for Ingots by selling skeletons to the Sculptress one could also make consignments of Scintillack Snuff to smuggle for Blooms. This requires a Recipe that itself requires Scintillack Snuff to research in the lab, which can be gotten as a gift during track-laying to Jericho Locks, or as a rare success from giving out Railway Dividends. In either case, there are no reasonable grinds for the raw material until you reach Station VIII (unless you want to graduate Shifty Students ad nauseam), where you can sell stolen Fillips of Effervescence for 5 Knobs of Scintillack. Assuming a 50/50 chance of getting Fillips when stealing, and a 1.31 Extraordinary Implications per action grind (Wilmont's End/Doubt Street, except instead of selling the Journals of Infamy you upconvert them instead), this gives an overall yield of 3.67 IPA (as shown by u/Mr_Paramount in his analysis here, and including the actions added by grinding EIs and the 50/50 Fillip shot). A problem with this grind is that for all steps except for getting the Fillips and making Consignments of Scintillack Snuff in the lab the grind is entirely card-based, as well as needing to manage Banditry this grind generates. If you're the type of person who doesn't particularly care about Banditry (good luck getting Rumors of the Upper River), then this grind inches up to 4.10 IPA.
  

Getting Justificande Coins

• The Chessboard (Before Railway): In the dreams of spies and patriots, one can grind a Justificande per 6 actions by repeatedly taking one for the team before starting the Railway, for 0.17 JPA, though one does need to clear away the wounds generated by being repeatedly backstabbed.
  
• Stealing from the Admiral's Widow (Before Lab and Railway): If one isn't fond of the idea of being repeatedly backstabbed in the land of dreams, one can put the Robber in Robber Baron (if it wasn't there already) by relieving an Admiral's Widow of her husband's keepsakes. For 5 Docks favours and a heist you can obtain 3 Justificandes and a smattering of other documents worth 25.60E in exchange for at least 19 actions (At least 5 to get the Favours, 5 to get Casing needed to start Heist, 2 to actually start it and 7 to finish the heist) for a pure JPA of 0.16. While this is almost certainly worse than 0.16 JPA given that one will likely need Inside Information for the Heist now that the heist deck size is 3, the other rewards (like the 2 Legal Documents) may be worth it, and if you have Dock Favours lying around this is a perfectly good option.
  
• Capering Relicker (Ealing Gardens): If you've set up the Station at Ealing, an option opens up on the card "A Gift from the Capering Relicker" that gets you 3 Justificandes plus some other currency worth 14.5E. While the Bone Market option is more profitable overall (22E), given how annoying finding Justificandes are this is probably the better option if you're making your own Steel. Overall this gives you 3 Justificandes for 11 actions (10 to get to Someone is Coming 4 and 1 to trade for coins), giving a pure JPA of 0.27, though this is entirely card-based.
  
• Selling Corrective Histories to the Veteran Revolutionary (Ealing Gardens): Once you've been established in the Upper River and have the 25 Renown item from the Revolutionaries, you can grind Justificandes by selling the Veteran Revolutionary Corrective Histories that you made in the Waswood back in Parabola for the cost of 2 Identities Uncovered each. For each Corrective History sold the Veteran Revolutionary will give you 1-3 Justificandes and 1-3 Forged Justificandes just to clog up your inventory. Assuming one makes Identities uncovered by making Seditious Editions of their Newspaper and upconverting, this method has a JPA of 0.18-0.54, or an average of 0.36 JPA. Note that this isn't a full grind as one needs the appropriate card to convert the Histories into Justificandes. This also hinders the Liberation of Night, which is a boon or a curse depending on what kind of person your character is.
  
• Donate Special Dispensations to the Veteran Revolutionary (Magistracy of the Evenlode): If you've gotten as far as the Evenlode and have 7 Constable Favours you really want to dump for some reason, you can get Special Dispensations and donate them to the Veteran Revolutionary for 2 Revolutionary Favours and 1-5 Justificandes (along with 1-3 fakes for good measure). This gives a best-case JPA of 0.13-0.63, and is almost certainly much worse action-wise compared to giving the Veteran Revolutionary Corrective Histories given the difficulty in obtaining Favours, but if you've curried a lot of favour with the Constables and are looking for Revolutionary Favours instead you could do worse.
  

Making the Steel

Now that you've obtained Bessemer Steel Ingots (by fraud, theft or smuggling) and Justificande Coins (by being stabbed repeatedly, theft or drug-impaired historical work), all that remains is to actually turn it to Steel. Now one might wonder if it's better to Make Tracks or Make a Lot of Tracks. Making a Lot of Tracks saves a fourth of an action in terms of Steel produced and has a better Coin/Steel ratio while Making Tracks has a better Ingot/Steel ratio. However, since making tracks in bulk has such a better Coin/Steel ratio than making smaller amounts of track (0.2 Coins/Steel vs 0.25 C/S or a 25% difference) as well as the fact that making small amounts of track doesn't have that much better an Ingot/Steel ratio (22.5 I/S vs 23 I/S, 2% difference) means that making tracks in bulk is almost always better, even though the bulk of your actions will be getting Ingots.

Action Economy of Steel

Now here's the part where it all comes together. Selling to the Enthusiast and getting stabbed on the Chessboard combine to get you 0.145 SPA, while on the other extreme, Licentates with access to Jericho Locks can make tracks at a rate of 0.266 SPA by smuggling in Ingots and selling Corrective Histories. Most endgame players will be able to make tracks at a rate of 0.230 SPA by stealing from Mr Iron as well as doing business with the Veteran Revolutionary. How many actions do you save by switching grinds? Most stations need 30 Steel to get to. The Enthusiast/Chessboard combo gets you 30 Steel in 207 actions, while the Mr Iron/Corrective History grind gets you there in 131 actions compared to the 136 actions the Bohemian Sculptress's grind gives instead. Licentates can get there in only 113 actions with their improved Ingot grind.

Stealing Steel

(Balmoral) There's one last method of obtaining Railway Steel, which is to steal finished Steel from your competitors on the Moloch line. As described in my other post, one can obtain 17 Railway Steel in 77 actions by creating a cover identity with connections to the Dispossessed, which requires an Ambition item or an Urchin favour. Including the action needed to deal with the Banditry this generates, this gets you Steel at a rate of 0.22 SPA, which is better than any pre-Railway grinds (Mr Irons + Chessboard gives 0.20 SPA), however, once you've reached Balmoral you can get Coins more efficiently, meaning it's more efficient to make it yourself. (0.22 SPA is about how efficient the Boehmian Sculptress grind is, however). There is something to be said about just skipping the process entirely, since you can use this Steel on your line without any extra steps.

Notes

What if you get bones for free?

In the process of progressing along the Upper River, one has a multitude of opprotunities to uncover bones on the track line. The astute reader might ask if this doesn't make the Enthusiast of the Ancient World a better source of Ingots if you don't have to invest actions in aquiring the bones? Indeed, the IPA of selling to the Enthusiast jumps up if you have the bones lying around (Brass Skull + Human Ribcage + JTB + 3 UTBs gives 6.89-7.02 IPA, Mammoth + Brass Skull + 4 JTBs gives 13.6-13.47 IPA) which is better than any grind listed here. However, if you have the bones to sell to the Enthusiast of the Ancient World, you have the bones to sell to the Bohemian Sculptress, which converts Skeleton Echo value much better since each Bloom is worth 5 Ingots in Skeleton Echo value (plus the 4 free Blooms per skeleton she gives), and each Bloom converts to 130/24=5.42 Ingots when traded (Brass Skull + Human Ribcage + 4 UTBs gives 7.62-7.72 IPA for example).

Summary/TLDR

Stealing from Mr Iron is the best grind for Ingots, made possible by the Wilmont's End/Doubt Street grind. The Enthusiast of the Ancient World is a stingy miser and absolutely not worth bothering with unless you have no other source of Ingots or have lots of bones with Antiquity lying around. Otherwise the Bohemian Sculptress -> Smuggling in Ingots route is much more profitable skeleton-wise. The Chessboard is a good grind for Justificandes pre-Railway by virtue of being the only pre-Railway grind for Coins (though the Admiral's Widow heist has it's benefits), though outclassed by the Capering Relicker and getting the Veteran Revolutionary Corrective Historical Narratives, both unlocked by Ealing Gardens. One can also steal Steel directly from your competitors by the time you reach Balmoral, which is competitive but slightly less efficient than thefts from Mr Iron.

Hey guys, so a couple of months ago I posted a theory concerning why V put the Relic in his head. and the gameplay trailer showed me to be essentially dead on with my analysis. Someone then asked me to post a few of my other theories. Be aware that these are SPOILER HEAVY through inference and implication. I am not leaking anything, I am merely drawing conclusions from in-game footage, character write-ups, dev comments, and the lore. And I will support as many of my points with evidence when I can. Which leads me to...
Dex, Brigitte, Johnny, and Yorinobu.
Part 1: Who gave Dex the job to retrieve the Chip?
I had been pondering for quite a while as to who had actually set up the Heist. Figuring out who set up the Heist seems rather unimportant, but in practice, it's probably one of the largest questions in the game, and I believe I figured out who it was. All of the obvious suspects can easily be ruled out for a variety of reasons, so I went back and started reviewing footage again and began to form the corpus of a theory and now I think I know who did it.
The person who set up the Heist is most likely Brigitte.
What do I have to prove this? Well, the common refrain is that Brigitte wants to use Johnny to get Alt to cross the Blackwall[1] and help fulfill the Voodoo Boy's raison d'etre. Which makes sense considering what we know about the Voodoo Boys through gameplay footage, the devs, and the lorebook. But it doesn't actually mean that the Voodoo Boys had V steal the Relic, it just means that they want it to their own ends.[2] Sort of like how Caesar in NV wants the Platinum Chip, but that doesn't mean he's the one who set up the job for the Courier.
So that tells us the plan. Now, how do we know Brigitte was the one who orchestrated the theft of the Relic? Simple. She tells us.[3][4] Well, I guess not that simple. Maybe she just knows about it. The Voodoo Boys are some of the best Netrunners around. It's possible that they were aware of the chip but couldn't do anything to get it. Nothing says that can't happen. Let's do something a bit better than just knowing it exists. We need a motive. Well, I have one.
Part 2: Why did Brigitte use Dex?
In the Japanese footage from TGS, the localization changes the dialogue of V meeting with Royce to something quite interesting:

Royce: Dexter Deshawn... That fat bastard who ruined half of Pacifica is still alive!? [5] [6]

Dex, it seems, blew up half of Pacifica. Now Royce might be exaggerating here, but he's at least telling us something straight. That Dex is a screw-up. He even tells us that in the English localization too, just not why. This also, I might add, lends credence to Viktor's sarcastic reproach about V getting excited to work with Dex. The man's washed up. I will touch back on this in a minute.
Anyway - Placide very explicitly tells us that Pacifica is Voodoo Boys territory. He will kill us just for trying to steal from them, forget about blowing up the place. Dex is likely a marked man, but the Voodoo Boys didn't take direct action on him as that's not their way. In the Gangs of Night City trailer, we can hear someone tell V that the Voodoo Boys are a myth.[7] They stay in the shadows, do work from afar, direct action isn't their thing. So we know that the Voodoo Boys hate Dex. What's the play here then? Provide Dex with a job that he can't turn down (because he's a screw up), but also won't do correctly (because he's a screw up), and will result in him getting killed.
In the pregame for the Heist (where everyone meets and discusses the plan)[8], Dex says that he is providing the Netrunner and the identities for V and Jackie. Thus he is entitled to the lion's share of the payout. Jackie doesn't like this, but it's not relevant. What is relevant is T-Bug. T-Bug, I suspect, is a plant sent by the Voodoo Boys to work for Dex. I am not saying she is a Voodoo Boys member, but rather she's being used by them. Specifically, because she's clearly a skilled Netrunner, and she must be as her job during the Heist is to stave off attempts from Arasaka to figure out what's going on. That's not something your average Bobby Newmark could pull off. She stands in stark contrast to people like V and Jackie who are greenhorns and Dex even points this out to them. But then that begs the question:
Why did Dex, on a mission as dangerous as this, hire two rookies to infiltrate Yorinobu Arasaka's private quarters and steal from him? Think about what that implies about him. It'd be like hiring your average car thief to break into the Louvre and steal the Mona Lisa. Dex, in theory, should have his pick of the Edgerunners to hire for this mission but he didn't. You can speculate on that all you want, but I don't have proof for his motivations here so I'm not going to.
Anyway. As we know, the mission goes bad, V slots in the Relic, Dex betrays us, and we end up at the dump.[9] Oh look, Takemura. Interesting. Moving on. The point though is that the Voodoo Boys presumably learned of the chip through infiltrating Arasaka's networks, and then decided to kill two birds with one stone. Get revenge on Dex by using him as a cutout to steal something for them that would inevitably get him killed, and also get the chip they were after in the first place. What they didn't account for though was the chip's container getting busted, and then Arasaka responding so quickly. Ah well, best-laid plans.
Part 3: ENTER YORINOBU
We know from the videos that've been shown over and over again, and preview write-up after write-up that Yorinobu took the Relic and hid it in his apartment. Evelyn is sent to gain intel on this (Oh - yeah, who did Evelyn meet with? Right, it was Brigitte.), and she does so by recording a BD of her liaison with Yorinobu, and then feeds that info to V. Yorinobu's involvement piqued my curiosity quite a bit. At first, it seems pretty obvious what's going on here. He stole the Relic from Arasaka because he leads the rebel faction of Arasaka[10] and doesn't want Saburo getting a hold of it due to its almost supernatural power to revive someone. That's something that a man bordering on 150 years old might find useful. I was satisfied with the answer for a while until I realized something.
Why is Johnny on the Chip?
How Johnny is a digital construct in the first place is still up for argument. There's plenty of compelling evidence for the various ways, but for this? It's not really important. What is important is that someone put Johnny on a semi-magical chip. Saburo wouldn't do that, that'd be insane. Neither would Hanako since she's loyal to Saburo. Michiko? Ehhh... not really her MO. You know who would though? Yorinobu. I suspect that Arasaka had retrieved or developed the chip somehow and that Johnny was never on it. Quite frankly, why would he be? If Saburo was notified that Johnny was on this chip, he'd just erase the data and it makes even less sense for him to be on it if they had developed this internally.
Then Yorinobu got his hands on it and transferred Johnny's consciousness to the chip. The goal of course is to get Saburo to use it without knowing that Johnny's persona was now on it, and then allow Johnny to slowly erase the mind of Saburo and replace it with his own. That's what he's doing to V after all, even if he doesn't mean for it. This revenge would have been poetic, and Yorinobu would not only satisfice his revenge but Johnny's. Until V had to screw all that up by stealing the thing and putting it in his head. Oops.
That's all I have to say on this rather lengthy topic, but there is more I could discuss. Such as Meredith being the mole. Who is helping the Voodoo Boys (it's not Evelyn!) and more. If I feel like writing further then I may do so in the future before the game launches.
Have a good one and thanks for reading!

XCOM 2 Vanilla: On Winning Legendary/Ironman
I won my first L/I campaign today, after many losses. There are many great strategic tip writeups available about L/I. Regardless, I learned things that I'd now like to share, in one big post like I've seen others helpfully do. Maybe it helps somebody. Anyways, I enjoyed writing this and I very much enjoyed playing and beating the game. I've benefited a lot from various posts here and elsewhere. I think that one of the great things about XCOM 2 is the depth of it that makes sharing these thoughts fun.
I never played any other XCOM than XCOM 2. I beat vanilla on Commander, then I beat WoTC, and then came back to work on vanilla L/I. Like everyone, I got the stuffing beaten out of me on vanilla L/I. The learning curve is really steep. I almost quit trying to win a number of times. Each time, I would think for awhile and then decide to give yet another tactic/angle/gambit a go. Eventually, I climbed the mountain. It was very satisfying.
I'll give my thoughts topically (eventually). As noted, many other sources document the basics of cover, flanking, enemy habits, build order. This won't be a rehash of any of that. The community resources are incredibly useful, but I think there are minor gaps and maybe I can at least add a couple of thoughts that folks might at least consider.
First, some reminiscences on various losses.

• A muton one-shot critted my elevated, half-cover sniper on the very first pod of the Black Site mission, dooming it - eventual squad-wipe.
• I triggered 3 pods on the second or third turn of an Avenger Defense - a depleted and hopeless crew, only, survived.
• During an exciting run, I took a Council Mission with my new Captain, a 6 team crew, and a mid-power psi-op but, oh, Show of Force was active (I hadn't realized it, sadly) and that didn't work - squad wipe and cut.
• At least 5 campaigns flamed out with me poor and nearly region-less in the mid-game and unable to even build the radio towers needed to fight back the avatar timer.
• Crossing the bridge in the Foundry mission once found me assaulted by three archons, without cover and losing 2 crew. This led to a campaign loss.
• Etc. - for awhile, I wasn't sure that the game could be won, on the current patch level, without some kind of massive string of luck, evidence notwithstanding.

Gradually, however, my play got better. I'd notice like, hey, I don't really lose much in the early game anymore. Or, hey, I remember the first time I got to the Black Site on L/I and what an accomplishment that felt like, but now I'm Black Site'ing mostly every game. After awhile of this and many more losses, I figured out a few more things and then I won. Pretty cool, to say the least.
So, now, topics and thoughts.
​

• Don't Tell Me The Early Game Is Hardest

Most everyone says the early game is the hardest. I get it. Gatecrasher seems to involve lots of RNG and early failures seem that they will inevitably crush all hope. I'll say this - in my L/I win, I didn't get the first engineer from the first guerilla mission. I've read many people say they restart if this happens. Sure am glad I didn't bail.
Ok, so how did that go down, then? Ok - like this...
First, though, say you get a 2nd engineer the first month - take that excellent case. Well, if you got a top corner-empty start for building in the avenger, then the first engineer will be digging out the top middle room. Your second engineer cannot expand to the other corner until the first engineer finishes cleaning the room. You can only use the second engineer, until that time, to rush your first building, and you don't need it yet. So, the great 2nd engineer start doesn't overly help with expansion unless you got a middle room empty start. By probability, 2/3 of starts won't be a middle room empty start. So, maybe 2nd engineer is not that important. So, additionally just maybe the first isn't critical. Something to consider. Also, the top rows are cheap to clear, buying an engineer is often available in a few more weeks, and rushing construction via the HQ bonus is viable in the early game, before map expansion pressures become overwhelming.
I was glad that I continued - I found that a couple of missed high-probability enemy shots on the first council mission were great luck and compensated for the failure to get the first engineer. As noted in many places, you're gonna fail missions - this is XCOM, after all. In my case, the failure cause was very difficult placement of a to-be-hacked computer combined with a reinforcement pod in turn 5 or 6 (very inconvenient) of lancers (!). It wasn't much trouble to hurt my crew, but the mission objective was just screwed. Oh, well, that's XCOM baby! Just to finish with a final thought on this - I ended my run with 8 engineers and 4 gremlins - I guess it stands to reason that missing one engineer, even at game start, need not always be fatal.
If the early game isn't the hardest, then what is the hardest? Ok, I'll say this - the early game is hard. HOWEVER, the first 2 months are, I find, the time that you can still win missions with rookies and squaddies. So, you're down you're best ranger in the first month? Not the end of the world. I've won the first retaliation on L/I with just rookies, unharmed. It does wonders for your squad depth, actually. Not stacking kills on your prime seargent-candidate, the second month is dawning and you're worried about the first supply raid? Happened to me - I took my B option grenadier and he killed everything in the second month first guerrilla op, made seargent and I had my 5-team available for that supply mission.
To get to the point, I found the midgame just as hard as the early game, and maybe more frustrating. It was due to some misconceptions - I had to adjust, but I had to struggle to figure out how. I had painful-by-comparison memories of Commander where the power curve lightens rather rapidly in midgame, you're OP and cruising. It took me lots of time to figure out how to climb the ladder and get past the midgame. Much of the rest of this write-up will address aspects of that.
Overall, though, I found the midgame hard because of the demands for expansion and the massive costs associated with it. For awhile, I had this "hermit kingdom" strategy going. Because I would lose regions from retaliations with early expansion, I said "screw it, I'm not expanding - I'll sit here in this one region, accrue intel and technologies and then I'll blast outward when the timer forces it, and only then". For me, this manifestly did NOT work. It took while to realize it, but I eventually had it battered into my head that, while intel is precious and elerium too, that in the midgame this also is true - your supply will be stressed and it can decimate your hopes if not addressed.
I now think of it like this - beyond intel and elerium pressure, there is also supply pressure, it just takes awhile for scarcity to dawn. The early income from contacted regions that saves you from selling lots of alien bodies to the Black Market - that is critical income. It can only be replaced via mechanisms that rob you of faster tech expansion, and more supplies later (with better Black Market prices, due to continent bonuses and/or sale pricing). Without making supply accumulation a priority in the early game, I found I just couldn't afford tier 3 armor in the late midgame/early endgame. A plasma rifle costs 500 supplies, 50 alloys and 60 elerium crystals on Legendary - a massive cost. bluescreen rounds cost 125 supplies and a core, plasma grenades cost 100/10/10 and a core, etc.. You're building out radio towers with increasing costs to reach far-away alien facilities, trying to build rooms like Shadow Project and Psi Lab, and upgrading power supplies, etc. - everything costs supplies. Here's the key thing - having little/nothing coming in each month from the resistance and having robbed Peter to pay Paul in the early months to afford Gauss and Plated, you'll find yourself poor and hopeless in the midgame. Even if you scrounged together a psi-op or something, by neglecting supplies, you'll find you've been outflanked ON THE MAP. This is just as bad, in the end, as them taking a flank during a mission. Worse, maybe, for the discouragement.
I had to realize that the power curve and "lifetime supply requirement" was so steep that I couldn't wait to expand. That meant I had to take and keep regions, getting maybe 125-200 supplies each month for a few months, and much more later. So, retaliations be damned - gotta expand early. Ok, how to do that?

Alpha Striking, and How

Much has been made of the need to alpha strike. I heard, learned, and always mostly agreed. Not to the extent that I needed to.
To re-hash well-known community wisdom, alpha striking gives many benefits. It keeps your troops healthy, because they aren't being shot at. It makes large map council missions Not.A.Squad.Wipe. It allows guerrilla ops to be more consistently won. This, in turn, allows alien bodies to keep collecting, enabling proving grounds projects to be undertaken, and tech achievements to be instant'd.
So here's what I learned - what worked for me. After the second month, after mag weapons, alpha striking is, AFAICT, entirely about the Rangers and the Shard Gun. I used to live in absolute fear of the Neutralize Target Council Mission. That thing popped, I always needed the intel and so I'd take it, but I was always losing troops on that mission, often not getting to the exit with some valuable soldiers. My problem? Not alpha striking enough*.*
In the second month, I think you need to absolutely build up rangers with the GTS. I had 4. I kept them all through end of game. Is there a more OP weapon for the cost in the game than Shard? 200 supplies for mag rifles vs 75 for shard gun? OMG, the difference. Only have a squaddie ranger? Who cares, he carrries Shard and is, thereby, awesome. Muton bothering you? Shard Gun to the face. Lancer with armor? Again, Shard Gun to.the.face. Snake issue? Crazy flanking robot with bombardment habits and a tendency to vanish mysteriously into unseen cover on maps? Shard Gun is the cure. I took 4 rangers on a Neutralize the VIP Council Mission in the 3rd month and I finished it with 4 turns to spare (!!!), with the supply and intel rewards accruing to my inexhaustible need for such resources.
I had read a few comments online about rangers and alpha-striking. You know, the articles about class weaknesses and strengths - some guy commented and said, basically, it's all about rangers. I understood, but I really didn't. The thing about rangers in the early midgame on Legend is that I feel that they aren't an option - they're THE OPTION. From my perspective, I look at it like this - you can't alpha strike with grenadiers during this time because they are blowing up cover and have to wait for their mag cannons a bit longer. They also don't have the key close range crit bonuses. You can't alpha strike with support because they're support - yeah, mag rifles are nice, but they don't crit like shotguns. Snipers? Too limited on timed missions, and constrained by topology. I like them fine, but they're map and mission-bound in ways that I didn't fully appreciate for too long - it's all about the timer. Gunslingers? Nah - underpowered for most of the game. For me, it is rangers in the earlys month, especially post-Shard - I find that's your speed and your safety.

Alpha Striking, Midgame Enemies

Early snake? Snakes eat grenades and 100%-chance shotgun blasts. Their dodge is such a PITA, not to mention venom, and early XCOM soldiers have such poor aim that anything else is often problematic. They will pull you into vision of another pod. Can you bear that on a timed council mission with an absolute need to reach the evac - no, you can't - so throw grenades. Use all of them if you have to. Alpha striking snakes means snakes.eat.grenades and then, sometimes, shard.
Early muton? The appearance of the first muton on the battlefield is an emergency situation. Terminate it prior to all other troops including lancers and captains, in the first turn. Grenades and shotgun blasts are the way - no hesitation possible, or you lose troops.
Robot? Don't be flanked. Their mobility is nuts, as is their propensity to run away into cover where they aren't visible, hoping to run out and flank you next turn. Get high cover, spread your troops, blow their cover and shoot your shotguns. Not too worrisome, overall, basic mechs, as opposed to their big brothers, later - with Shard and aggressive tactics, early mechs are the easiest bosses to deal with, IMHO.

Other Topics

Intentional Concealment Breaking

For me, concealment, unlike cover, is overrated. It is well-discussed already, in the community, how pods will start to "magically" locate your crew on timed missions as the turn counter proceeds. Also much talked about are the cost/benefit calculation that scout concealment brings into play. That is, scout concealment is pro-alpha-strike via optimal OW positioning, but counter-alpha-strike by removing a shooter (an OP shooter - the ranger).
I haven't seen much discussion of intentional cover breaking. Maybe I've missed some (sorry?). In my experience, though, intentional cover-breaking is super-useful on supply missions and on protect the device missions and I haven't seen it much covered. For example, my favorite moment from my recent campaign was the second supply mission. I sent a concealed troop to a building recently vacated by a vipelancelancer pod - a lot of power at this point in time (as an aside, the first pod on the supply missions are, in my experience, always the toughest - a useful fact). My troop jumped into the building and out on one blue move. He was spotted, the enemy pod all went into the building. He grenaded the propane tank on his yellow move and hit 2 enemies with the grenade as well - dead snake, dead lancer, lancer with 3 hp left!!! Difficult supply raid more than 1/3 done (b/c first pod is toughest) with only one grenade spent and no wounded troops - it was simply awesome.
I believe that overwatch is the equivalent of 2-3 grenades. Therefore, starting in concealment on untimed supply missions, protect the device missions AND on gatecrasher is, in my view, actually detrimental and to be fought.
Example? Try this. On gatecrasher, get three of your rooks on high half or full cover, with the 3 trooper pod spotted. Place your 4th trooper, the clumsy guy, near a window also close to the main XCOM group. Then, when the first 3-trooper pod walks out of sight of ALL troops, break that window or spook a civvie and go into OW with ALL troops. If you can, you can then bring your "clumsy" rook back to the others and have a 4 rook OW setup for that 3 troop pod that will come back to you. With this setup, instead of those funny videos where, in gatecrasher, an ambushing squad misses 4 shots and then the enemies shoot the floor out from under one rook, who falls and dies, the others panic and fire grenades at each other, or whatever, you'll have had, usually, 2/3 of the enemies killed by your OW. Only THEN will your troops get to miss their chosen shots, but one will probably hit or you'll use a grenade - and you'll be done with 1/3 of the mission, usually with all grenades remaining, ready to feed to the captain pod. So.much.better.
On supply missions, my first thought is, no longer, "where's the height?" - it is "where is that pane of glass that I can break in that abandoned cabin?" That is much better than trying to set it up so that advent walks into your concealed OW - they will have a chance to shoot at your unflanked troop with that latter ploy. When I blew concealment in that vipelancelancer cabin, the propane tank bomb was a bonus to my tactic, not its primary thrust, which was to simply get that harmful concealment broken.
I also break cover on Protect The Device missions, when I can. These are the missions where advent pods are running around in and out of your vision and you start in concealment. You usually have time to wait for the return of a pod to your vision - those devices-to-be-saved are, in fact, fairly sturdy and an OW barrage will help you greatly in this mission. What is the value of concealment here, after all? One good shot? You're gonna have to kill everything on the map and OW is gonna be great help for that. With this tactic, I beat a difficult Protect The Device mission or two. I like those missions, now - they're easy.

Are You Ever OP in Legendary? For Real?

I lost so much in L/I it was the.most.surprising.thing when I finally got to the late game and started dominating. Many flawless supply missions. Flawless guerilla ops. Flawless retaliations. All stacked one after another. Unreal.
In my view, this is what it takes - all mag weapon kinds built, predator armor, bluescreen protocol, plasma grenades, holo targeting, lieutenants, mimic beacons and advanced explosives. I was OP before plasma weapons - I was greatly surprised. The beacons are necessary for dealing with archons and andromedons, both of which are extremely likely to survive a turn even with the other power components in your arsenal now being present. It was shocking to be winning so much - 24/24 killed, perfect alien facility. 18/18 perfect supply mission, etc, - I used to sweat these a lot, I recall thinking. Anyways, those are the components of OP, in my view. Notice that only 2 of those are from the proving grounds...

On The Proving Grounds

Another reason that I lost campaigns was building the proving grounds second, as I experimented with strategies. I find the proving grounds to be a build-it-fourth kind of building. It can build some important things, but maybe there are only 3-5 such things - bluescreen protocol, plasma grenades, skulljack, battlefield medicine, maybe something else I'm forgetting. So, no need to rush this building - you need to kill a muton and a mech before you can begin the really important research.
Here's something - none of the vanilla experimental grenades destroy cover. So, each can be considered a major DOWNGRADE from basic grenades. Destroying cover is just so important to being fast. Setting enemies on fire, burning them with acid, gassing them - all of these have nice aspects, but by not enabling your MAIN WEAPONS to fire at uncovered enemies, these grenades will SLOW YOU DOWN, a mortal sin. This is additionally so when you cannot get into the space now occupied by acid/flame/gas after combat - you've built yourself an un-crossable desert sometimes. That's 2-3 turns of obstruction for a mission timed for 8 or 12 turns - can you afford it? I found I often really cannot, comfortably at least. Nevermind the problem of a snake popping up and you now being at risk of being pulled through that acid/flame/gas. Generally, I found that experimental grenades are nice, as noted elsewhere in strategy guides, to give early troops a guaranteed kill - some alpha strike accrues from that, sure. On supply missions, poison can be somewhat great - these missions are (even in the case of "timed" UFO missions) untimed and the debuff to opponent aim is sweet. Still, though, those poisoned troops are now gonna be in cover for you to shoot at. Your grenadier that was carrying the poison grenade - now he can only blow their cover with the solitary additional grenade he is carrying. Is he gonna exhaust his grenade load on the first pod? That's OK, but maybe still isn't the most efficient alpha striking.
EXO Suits? I never built one in my winning campaign. Losing a slot that often, for grenadiers, can hold a tracer round or a bluescreen round or a mimic beacon, is just too costly, in my current opinion. The rocket weapon is awesome and can be used to destroy the object-of-the-mission relays in some layouts at distance, and to annihilate armor, too, but they cost 10 alloys and 10 rare crystals and only provide one armor (though some 5 health, too). I just find them not cost/benefit worthy. Again, you need beacons, tracers and bluescreen ammo in those grenadier slots. On a ranger, where you don't lose a slot by taking EXO, its a decent option. But I found that spending crystals prior to researching elerium can be dangerous, and I simply didn't ever need the extra health.
Skulljacking/mining? It is awesome to get intel/leads and insta-kill an officer or shieldbearer - don't get me wrong, skulljacks can be great in situations. However, at the time when you want to build them you have a ton of other costly things to buy - shadow project, psi lab, radio towers, tier 3 weaponry and armor, plasma grenades, battlefield medicine, enhanced explosives, etc. You're also likely to pop another pod charging into melee, as with a sword. So, in my view, it is better to be expanding on the map to find facilities than trying to rely on getting alien facility leads. Better to expand with ranger crews then to send, say, a multi-specialist skullmining crew into a guerilla op mission looking to crack into those skulls. The great capacity of intel available from alien data caches also helps remove any need to skullmine. Also, do you really want codexes running around for much of the game? They slow you down, massively.
So, in the end, the proving ground can be delayed. I feel it should be. Needs to be 3rd or 4th, but clear the second row before building it or the comms.

Base Weaponry

Second to my revelation about shard guns, and related to the lack of need to rush the Proving Ground, I learned this - the BASE weapons and armor are the most important things to buy in the game, besides the GTS squad size upgrades and Wet Work. You can win much of the game, it turns out, without anything from the proving ground. I think that newer players can easily get lost with all the cool things that can be bought. For me, vanilla L/I is about what you must buy. You must buy the base weapons and armor, preferably in that order, sacrificing mostly everything else to do so as quickly as possible. Before plasma guns, though, it is important to get beacons, plasma grenades, bluescreen ammo and EMP bombs. As noted before, the insane cost of tier 3 weapons mandates careful expansion throughout the entire course of the game. I ended up selling most of my elerium cores when the black market wants them.

Flashbangs

About flashbangs. Yes, they are awesome, but I'll say this - they slow you down - I wish I didn't need to carry one.
By their nature, you're using flashbangs when combat will extend to the next turn and you want to try to stop that as much as possible. Or you're using them to suppress codexes, but you can delay their arrival for much of the campaign by simply expanding on the map instead of skulljacking the officer. Or you're using flashbangs to stop lancers from rushing, but I swear I've lost more troops to lancers that are shooting at me than I've lost to melee - their aim is so high.
Yeah, even flashbanged, lancers and officers are still deadly in that first supply mission, in my experience. IMHO, it is better to blow their cover and blast them from height or from proximity or handle the lancers partly thru OW, where you don't have a good shot during the main combat turn. Also, the flashbang isn't gonna help you with the boss if it is a mech. That flashbang also costs supplies in the early game when you need them just oh.so.much for other things (wet work, anyone?). For most early troops, it is the only utility item they can carry, occupying that cover-destroying spot for up to 25% of your fledgling crew!
In my view, while you do need a flashbang on a specialist or sharpshooter in the early to mid game, it is only in recognition of the need to handle nightmarish mind controls. It is for dealing with sectoid mind-control which, more than anything else, is gonna afflict your early game rangers. A mind controlled ranger is an emergency on any mission. On Council Missions, it is a squad wipe harbinger. Definitely carry one flashbang, just one, and absolutely do NOT put it on a ranger!

Scopes

In my view, scopes aren't for Sharpshooters. Scopes are for grenadiers and, to a lesser degree, for rangers. Grenadier weapon damage is high from the beginning - a hit kills a base trooper. When holo targeting comes around, grenadiers make sharpshooters out of everyone else in the squad, but they should hit, too, to shred and to do that high base cannon damage. Put scopes on those grenadiers, people, and if you need to shoot first, sometimes, with a ranger.

Movement - Cover Deserts

Troop movement has been mostly covered, by the community. I'll write just a little.
In my mind, I have this concept called a "Cover Desert" - any area without much, if any, cover. This happens with roads, in actual deserts and where XCOM has destroyed lots of cover with grenades during prior turns' combat, which should be often. On the final mission, the alien churches often end up just annihilated of cover by the commander's avatar's area psionic attack - an extreme example of this.
The way to cross cover deserts is via one big scary blue+yellow move by a single troop and then everyone follows in the "cone of safety" left in their wake. In the cover desert, everyone overwatches with their yellow move. This is seen in the beaglerush vids, on gatecrasher while crossing the roads, and elsewhere, but I think it is lost on some early players and I think it is just so important.
This tactic makes a highly unsafe situation extremely, almost perfectly, safe. It is special because, in this situation, you follow the opposite rule that it is preached that you must follow typically in combat. In the cover desert DO NOT SPREAD OUT. Rather, cower together, in minimal area, in this safety of a tiny "shadow" of known-good squares The safe area is the area traveled by the leading troop and some triangle behind extending out from that troop - be conservative in not going too wide.
The naive early learner will cross the road with everyone running to half safety or no safety, spread-out. This is likely to trigger (a, sometimes multiple) pod(s) and force disaster mitigation yellow moves to cover. This is a recipe for disaster. If all troops follow that first troop, they're all safe, though not in any cover at all, even though it doesn't feel safe to the new player. Better than safe though, actually - they're in OW and will pummel enemies that spot them on the next turn with, then, the chance to move out of the desert to safety.
So, spread your troops out - as the literature says. You don't want to get grenaded when engaged in combat - completely true and so important. But in cover deserts do the exact opposite, or die, really.
Doing a run-and-gun across a cover desert to simply then setup an OW from that ranger or to shoot as needed is also great. Run-and-gun is great, once you have it.

On Data Caches

When you play at levels less than Legendary, intel is aplenty. Like so many other aspects of the game (radio towers, build order, even flanking), the importance of intel can be lost on the player before Legendary is attempted. I sold alien data caches, I think, in my Commander runs (!!!).
In Legendary, the best thing to see is that you got an alien data cache in the loot you collected. Listen - these things give > 100 intel, often > 150 intel, for a cost of research time spent. I was so surprised at the magnitude of intel they hold when I first researched one. There is maybe no better payout in the game. Skullmining cannot compare. Hacking rewards - no chance - maybe 20-40 intel? 100-150 (?) intel per alien data cache is THE way that you can skip council missions in the mid to late game, when you may not have the likelihood to 100% finish that evac in 12 turns and especially before shadow chamber can show you the exact number and type of enemies you'll be facing. I skipped 2-3 council missions because I fear them when I know that there are 4 pods with possibility of more with reinforcements and I don't yet have a psiop with domination to flip combat on its head. Council missions are the SQUAD WIPE missions, after all, so thank god for alien data caches.

On The Hospital (AWC)

In a number of my failed runs, I tried a lot to accelerate my power curve by temporarily skipping the hospital - building it 3rd or 4th, not 1st or 2nd. It feels like this can be alpha striking - screw defense, go with attack! Nope.
The reason to build the hospital second or first, in my view, is NOT for the healing in the 2nd or even 3rd month. As noted, you can win missions with rookies at that time. No, the reason to build the hospital second is this - during the latter 3rd month and later, you WILL have injured troops AND you CANNOT sit in HQ and get the healing bonus AND you MUST be crawling towards Captaincy with as many troops as possible. No, without a hospital, if you are away from HQ, you heal at the base rate, with NO OPTION and it is simply not fast enough.
You don't want to build too fast inside the avenger. You want to clear rooms as fast as possible, but building too many things in the early months will steal supply needed for wet work, squad size, mag and predator. For me, it was best to clear the second row before building any buildings beyond the first 2. And I needed the hospital before then.
The cross-training is simply amazing as well. Holo-targeting on a ranger? Allows a grenadier to blow a muton's cover, then a shotgun gives a 15% bonus to all other troop's chance to hit that muton if still needed? Game-changing. I've heard of others like DFA on rangers. You need time for these to accumulate on your promoted troops. Get the hospital quickly so you don't suffer the lack of healing and cross-training when you're expanding and doing supply, council, facility, retaliation and guerilla missions back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back in the midgame.

On Andromedons

This is already well-covered by other posts. I don't care.
As with mutons, the first Andromedon is a first-class emergency. Do not underestimate this foe. It does not matter what else is in the field - how many pods, etc. The first time you spot an andromedon, make a calculation - can both its forms be killed in the first turn? If not, will the 2nd form be in melee range? Do you have a beacon? If the first form cannot be killed (worst) or second form is in melee range and cannot be killed or hacked (not great) or beaconed, then you seriously might consider an evac, even if all your troops are in full health at mission start.
Say je hits your predator-wearing troops with an acid bomb (you were spead-out, but not like you need to be spread-out for the acid bomb). They really might all die; at very least, they'll be evac'ing. That acid bomb hits for 5-7 in the first turn, BUT you get NO CHANCE to heal before your next turn and so additional damage accrues then, without fail, so the actual "initial" damage is 2-3 points worse. You can't lose 2-3 troops like this. Sorry it was a supply mission - next time, make sure you can kill the andromedon on the very first turn. More realistically, make mimic beacons a priority immediately after building predator armor and start carrying them. You probably can't kill that andromedon in both forms on the first turn, after all.

Suppression - OP

In my experience, suppression is OP. It is like stasis, actually, without all the waiting for the psiop. Suppressed enemies - look, they aren't gonna hit your properly covered troops. This is wonderful, magical. It works for shieldbearers and mutons best, in my experience. I've survived retaliations against 3 muton packs with 2nd tier armor with multiple faceless in the mix, on the final pod (no more grenades), by suppressing 2 mutons and then dealing with the rest of the foes. It has no cooldown!!! It removes enemy OW!!! It applies holo-targetting!!! A-maz-ing.
Look, I could see demolition being used for being fast, for alpha-striking - I get that, a little - it destroys cover, it can blow-up explosive cover. But, look - you don't EVER want to use demo until you've used both grenades, anyway, so it is limited automatically to the 2nd or 3rd pod. So, reduce that hypothetical buff to speed. Also, that 3rd pod is where you'll be flanking, using swords, skulljacks, whatevers - and demo is less useful for these reasons, too. Demo also has a cooldown AND a probability of missing(!?!) - insult to injury, compared to suppression. So, for me, choosing demo is just a big mistake, always. It is not useless, just it pales (so much) by comparison with suppression. I found this out late in my playing, and felt very, very chagrined.

Longwatch is a Giant Trap

Far too many times, on Black Site mostly, but also elsewhere, longwatch triggers when the concealed ranger is the only XCOM that spots the enemy. So, if at a distance, that enemy is now NOT subject to my main OW and this can also active MULTIPLE PODS - a dis.as.ter. So, giving longwatch to a sniper can DECIMATE A SQUAD, actually - it is a HUGE MISTAKE, IMHO, like taking demo on a grenadier.
Look, in my view, it should NEVER have been allowed that having a concealed scout and using it with a sniper should be able to have such a deleterious effect. I NEVER, EVER WANT MY SNIPER TO FIRE WITH LONGWATCH WHEN ONLY THE CONCEALED RANGER SPOTS THE ENEMY POD. This should have been obvious from the beginning or else fixed by a patch to the main game by now (launch was 2016!). Seriously, I'm engaged via long distance sniper on Black Site with one pod that is far away. I'm waiting for the enemy pod to approach - they're wandering around looking for how to get close. I accidentally put my sniper on OW and a muton pod wanders into sight only of the concealed ranger (as intended - the safe multi-pod troop "watcher") and my LONGWATCH sniper shoots at it, triggering multi-pod engagement! Sorry, this is unacceptable FIRAXIS. You take the scout/sniper pairing with drawbacks already - to alpha-striking, to guaranteed sword hits and bonus damage. This BUG that can make accidentally selecting OW on the sniper FATAL precisely when the scout and sniper are engaged in their primary use-case is just awful and a CLEAR DESIGN BUG. Take blademaster, people - at least it won't kill you and make you rage quit.
Again, you ALMOST NEVER want your sniper to shoot at a (potentially second) pod that only the concealed ranger can see, and this is what LONGWATCH easily can accidentally do. Even if I want to engage them, if that ever is true, I 99.999999999% want to shoot without the OW penalty, on my main turn.

Random Thoughts

Some final random thoughts.

• The surprise of grenades becoming not so important in the very late game - so huge, every time.
• So, you wanna build the workshop? You want to spend TIME and SUPPLY and a rare ROOM and 1 POWER to build exactly ONE additional engineer THAT IS ALSO MOVEMENT CONSTRAINED? If engineers are rare in your early- and/or midgame, it does suck, but building the workshop will spend the supplies that might be used to later INSTANTLY increase your engineer count by one who might also be used to build an IMPORTANT ROOM in the place that you, instead, used to put that workshop. Don't.build.the.workshop. I used to, but that was stupid. Realize people, what you're building isn't cool - it is rather, a wasted room in rare space, one space-constrained engineer easily instantly obtained elsewhere/soon, a power problem and heartache.
• The "quiet" of the story missions. IDK if the noise mechanics are different, but you seem not to get the "radio wave" notices on the supply missions, for enemy pods, except mostly for turrets and towards the end of the missions. Spooky, unsettling. I like it, as a difference, but it took me awhile to realize the difference. Pretty sure it is real and not just frozen pods. I'd like to think it is real, anyways.
• Besides the Forge, long distancing sniping doesn't work for me. Too often, they can move closer and get off shots without OW triggering to hit them, so what was the point, again, of getting off one-shot. Yes, you can avoid multi-pod engagements at the early Black Site this way, but you should balance the cost. No, for me, scouting is best used as the name implies - for scouting nearby, to setup OW - kill them with your scouted OW, not with your long-distance-scouted sniper.
• The "large single building setup" at the start of a council mission is an emergency/death trap. If you spawn on a large long building, or facing one, and this is a council mission, it is an emergency - become aware and take steps to try to mitigate it. The enemy pods are very likely to bunch up beyond the building in multi-pod-triggering scenario that is nearly unavoidable. They will eventually auto-pilot towards you should you try to avoid them, so that's untenable. If not an evac-the-VIP mission, then you will also be suffering the "concealment penalty", preventing OW from helping you trying to deal with a multi-pod single turn activation. You might consider breaking conceal if you have a scout - the scout remains concealed and you might be able to setup an OW against one pod near the end of the building. You're screwed, though, basically, and I really don't like how this can happen - it verges on unfair beyond even the XCOM-sanctioned level of unfair, IMHO. Do what you can to engage a single pod as soon as possible and take my condolences with you.
• Advanced mechs. To hell with these guys. In retrospect, I like how they're different from basic mechs, but they will ALMOST ALWAYS DESTROY YOUR COVER as the first attacker in the pod (!!!) - it won't matter that you saw them and carefully spread out to full cover and/or hunkered in half-cover, as would work with basic mechs. I think this surprises everyone who thinks they'll act like their little bros. Nope - they do to XCOM what XCOM does to advent - they blow cover and attack with followingtroops, your layout be-damned! So, your troops WILL die if these guys are allowed to survive a turn, cover-less and without a prayer - at least without a beacon deployed, or the rest of the pod all killed, or similar. Don't be surprised - don't let it happen. Their presence on the battlefield is one of the many reasons you must prioritize mech breakdown and then bluescreen protocol at the proving ground as a first matter after predator armor (or close second to plasma grenades - I'm not sure).
• UFO Timers. They, like the cake, are a lie. Please be aware that ALL UFO mission timers can and should be ignored - you can get all the supplies and COMPLETELY win the level and you will simply need to deal with an additional pod when the reinforcements drop in. You won't EVER need to be running around in the interior of a UFO dealing with multiple pods and trying to stop a timer in 6 turns. I somehow found this out very late, to my great chagrin. Rather, you should OW and wait for the enemies to come out of that dangerous UFO into your ambush - kill everything and avoid injuries, get the supplies, elerium and alloys, collect all the bodies - get richer than astronauts and laugh at the false premise of there being some "timer" in effect - that is, essentially, a damn lie.