We just finished mission 12 of the campaign. It was fun to play, although the missions were sometimes hard to get right because of all the mission specific rules. But it is exactly these special rules that make every mission a unique experience! The three last missions in particular, were very easy and did not feel like a suicide mission. I think it is because of the following two points: Turrets are never an issue if Jazz has her "Owned" hacking program active. Together with Billy's repeater + someone else has bought the repeater, every turret that might be a threat to a party member, is covered by Jazz hacking range. This already happened in the missions before, but at this point, probably every Jazz build now has a repeater + billy repeater + hacking device plus Suggestion: The hacking program should only work for a single turret, otherwise the party never has to worry about turrets. The rules for the upgraded program are fine, since we invested enough points to not worry about turrets anymore. The instant consequences the Speculo killers inflict are nasty stuff, or would be, if we would not be able to heal consequences between missions. By that time, the party probably also invested points in getting an extra and is able to re-roll one dice, resulting in basically three rolls to remove one consequence. So even if we never collected any additional Minotaur engines, and thus would receive a massive amount of consequences, we are well of by simply healing consequences in the med bay. Suggestion: Because we are not on the Defiance for mission 10 - 12 story-wise, it would make sense to not allow players to heal consequences between these missions. Suggestion: Require Med kits between mission 10 - 12 to heal a consequence. At this point, because it as quite easy, everyone had at least one extra med kit at their disposal and because we never really needed any of them to finish the missions, we never bothered with detours to get additional items, making the missions even easier. We still have the Megalodron mission to go, I will post our experience about that one later. Anyway, Defiance has been super fun for us!
Pretty sure the intention is you should perform none of the post-mission steps between missions 9 and 12 (as they're all "episodes" of the same operation, with no time to return to the ship). That's why there's no more specialities unlocked, and no more Intel awarded. But it looks like they didn't bother to write it down anywhere.
