ISS vs Guided Missiles & Bears. Help!

Active turn GML is very order intensive, so it may just be a matter of weathering it and playing the mission with the survivors. Of course, don't leave troops bunched up where a single missile can hit multiple troopers.

Reactive spotlighting depends on forward repeaters. Kuang shi ought to work against those.

 

Major Lunah is good for any time but especially good against bears and wolves. There’s also some Breaker with the Zhanying, and plenty of Nanopulsars.

For GML, there’s a lot of troops with Stealth. Only good in your own turn but still good to remember. They can’t hack what they can’t see.

 

There is no real protection vs a guided list. Try to get a tinbot in or an EVO. Last one is an autoinclude for me, because my ISS not leave without Aleph support (= is good for you citizen). Dogs (and maybe bears too - I had encounterd only two or three so far, one made me problems because Bixie failed her Dodge....) die best to multiple impacts - so burst is still king. Though Lunah is a very good sniper, I struggle for the points to get her in. Ninja KHD is never wrong and best way to kill the enemy hacker. Tao is good for some nice hiding tricks - if your opponent is HI/TAG heavy try to sneak him near and lay down that templates. He also save you 1 order, if you go first.

 

GML is a backup strategy: if an opponent is attempting to use it against you as a primary tactic, you're already ahead.

Tips against Guided: Having a KHD Cybermasked next to your most juicy targets (Su Jian, Hsien, etc.) will make them un-targettable (can't drop a template on a friendly model. That's only useful after your first turn of course.

As others have said, Tinbot is helpful, and the Tinbot MMR Hsien is awesome. As a nice bonus he'll be handy against bears too with his MSV2 and 24" weapon if you can get him a decent sightline at just 24" (leaving a sightline for him over 24" will tend to get him erased by heavy weapons).

Use a Garuda. A GML launcher is often in a poorly-defended rear position, or placed on long-edge defense at rear table edge. Do whatever you have to to kill whatever is watching the Garuda's best entry point. Then drop the Garuda and kill the ML.

Lastly, don't group your troops up.

 

Against bears, I've found that major lunah and a swarm of kuang shi is often more than enough to handle it. I've had more than one bear simply die to chain rifle saturation (event took one out with the explosion once, that was neat), but the good ol' major really scare the shit out of them (and pretty much anything else ariadnese tbh, DMG16 viral is nasty when you have no BTS).

Against guided, we're pretty much screwed. ISS tends to rely a lot on super heavy pieces like the su-jian or a hsien, and if one of them gets sniped too easily it can be quite hard to come back.

Getting our lieutenant sniped is also a possibility, but in that regard we're actually quite ok with Sun tzu. With WIP 17 and total immunity he can be ridiculously resilient to guided tactics. I prefer the MI version who can't simply get oblivionned out of relevance.

 

Great advice above.

holomask* is a perfect answer to guided in my book. As mentioned above, it’s already so order intensive that as soon as you make it a 50/50 coinflip for your opponent it almost makes it not worth it?

For example. You have a Hsien Lt. Brining a holomask trooper pretending to be Hsien with same profile(taowu, kenran, sforza) and deploying them on the opposite side. You opponent has to guess which side to throw their pitchers

edit: holomask not cybermask, thanks ikon

 

you mean holomask?
Cybermask is the impersonation program for killer hackers.

 

There's also the Zhanying Breaker Combi. Most Dogs and Bears have BTS0.