General > Tactics

Cannon fodder

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Strzelec:
Hello everyone,

I have read many times in this forum that most of players use cannon fodder and I would like to know why, because I never use tactics connected with rushing using cannon fodder. Here are the reasons:
- in this game you don't lead great army, but single soldiers and they all have their names, skills and before battle I pay a lot of attention to equip them so I don't want to lead them for certain death
- I usually lose 0-2 men per battle so most of my soldiers survive and gain experience and even if a valuable soldier dies I still can have at least 4-6 very good soldiers in battle while from what I've read players who use cannon fodder usually haven't got more than half of a squad well trained because they are so afraid of losing valuable soldiers

So I am simply curious why so many people use cannon fodder while for me not using it at all is more effective.

hwoarangmy:
In hard modes (hard and very hard), aliens almost always one shot a soldier even with armour. And killing them require more than 1 shot with most weapons.
For my part, I tend to have 2 teams of 5 soldiers + 3 cannon fodders per base (with 6 bases). That means that in late game, I only need 6 * 5 * 2 = 60 good soldiers.
For this reason, I can use the best available soldiers for what I want them to do. And I don't need the other soldiers (strenght < 35 or not skilled enough). Using them as cannon fodders is not a problem.

Now, we come to the benefits of using cannon fodders. A good soldier requires a lot of missions to be good and there is a huge difference between a rookie and a veteran ingame. Thus, loosing a good soldier is something that should be avoided as much as possible. And using cannon fodders allows to expose a target and avoid attacks on non expendable soldiers.

Last but not least, on hard levels, you need to save as many civilians as you can. Letting some soldiers out of cover/smoke makes them preferable targets than civies and allows you to save some of them. In the first game I played on very hard,  I used much smoke and did not use cannon fodders as decoy out of smoke. I won every battle with only a few soldiers losses but all civilians were killed on almost every mission. Even through I played all available missions, I lost the game pretty early. Not saving civilians is not allowed and will result in nation happiness dropping.

anonymissimus:
I have maybe 3 cannon fodder and 5 valuable soldiers in an average team of 8 in total, but it depends on the mission also. Some missions are without any civilians, then I may have only 2 or even a single cannon fodder. Other missions are pretty hasty, such as subway or city high rise, then I have maybe 5 cannon fodder and only 3 valuable.

The goal of cannon fodder is to minimize the losses of valuable soldiers. I lose maybe only 3 or 5 of them in a whole ingame year with maybe 100 missions. It is probably different on lower difficulties, but on very hard in 2.6 a single attack does absolutely sufficient damage to kill anything, no matter how experienced or armored the soldier is. The only important point is whether the shot(s) hit, and I don't know whether they will, so I cannot risk putting someone valuable onto that position. It's better a cannon fodder soldier dies with -1000 hitpoints than a valuable soldier dies with -100 hitpoints then, so to say. This absorbs quite a lot of the alien TUs, as they love to use expensive shot modes (full auto) albeit snap shot would suffice. And I do not need to spend TUs to heal the bleeding, if a (valuable) soldiers survives.
The good thing is that not wearing armor grants you the great TUs bonus, and even cannon fodder can easily kill a powerful enemy when on close range. It's always difficult to decide whether to give the kill to a unit it's wasted on, but the cannon fodder may well be dead the next turn and that enemy is still not even wounded.

While cannon fodder is not very valuable from a campaign point of view, it is from the point of view of the current battle, because once all cannon fodder is dead, I can no longer take risks; such missions are awkward then. So I put even cannon fodder only into danger if there's a chance the soldier survives, or if there's something to gain, such as pulling shots away from civilians or luring aliens out of cover.

Strzelec:
Maybe that would make sense because I never tried harder level than normal. Anyway, thanks for your feedback. I am also quite surprised, because today I played subway mission and before battle I thought "Oh no, this is the map which seems to be disliked by players", but it turned out to be quite interesting and nice close combat, I lost 2 civilians and 0 soldiers (actually all my soldiers could be considered as cannon fodder because that was the first mission for my new squad in a new base, but I was leading them with respect to their lives).

Strzelec:
 

--- Quote from: anonymissimus on March 21, 2016, 12:11:33 am ---The good thing is that not wearing armor grants you the great TUs bonus

--- End quote ---
I've read a lot about it but for me the armor is more important than TUs, because I approach slowly and more slowly, so I don't need TUs that much - I'd rather had my soldiers protected. 

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