How to Beat Them
Here are some tips to make them easier:
- Equip your whole squad with shotguns and as many grenades as possible. If you like them, maybe bring a grenadier to demo walls (I personally don’t bother).
- Flashbang/Stun Grenade the *** out of anything close enough to shoot back as soon as you land, then finish them off with shotgun-to-face.
- When LZ is clear, send out scouts to every building to find VIP. Pretend you didn’t already know what building that was. Yes I wish it was random. Skip this step if you already know.
- Rush shotgun squad to all the walls surrounding the building, but keep them behind full walls. DO NOT peek into windows right away if you don’t have TUs to move back to safety, you risk mind attacks.
- Use demo grenades if you have to, but otherwise use doors/windows to move your men in from every direction. Use lowest TU guys first, and try to use up all their TUs spotting all enemies so your other guys can get close and shoot. Once VIP is located flashbang/stun grenade the *** out of everything and kill defenders. Beat down VIP with stun batons/grenades then hustle back to the ship.
Clearing the LZ should only take 1-2 turns. Getting to the correct build takes 1-2 turns unless you are unlucky with scouting out the VIP because you don’t know his loc. Clearing the VIP build should only take 1 turn. At this point, reinforcements will start to spawn.
Unless they are right next to you, just ignore them and sprint to ship. If you feel the need, pop smoke grenades or flashbang them to stop reaction shots, but otherwise run your ass away.
I will agree that the cleaner cell missions are the hardest in the game, and coming relatively early in the storyline like that is what in the old days would have been called a “rental stopper” mission for console games. I feel like it either needs to be made easier, as even on the lowest difficulty I had a super hard time beating them without savescumming, or re-worked into a later event.
I wait until I have mostly full warden armor and accelerated weapons on my soldiers before diving into the VIP missions– The first one I take is the one with cleaners that use improved armor, since it barely matters against accelerated snipers (they almost always die in one shot) and sometimes accelerated rifles will kill a cleaner in a single blow too.
I place two snipers on top of the cargo containers after the second/third round, they do overwatch and help kill reinforcements for a few turns to buy my soldiers extra time– They are extremely helpful and important. The rest of my forces are riflemen with a single MARS set up for rockets and smoke or tank cannon and accuracy booster, and they split into two or three teams and clear the map as quickly as possible. By the time the first wave of reinforcements arrive, most of the cleaners are dead, so I mop up as many reinforcements that are as easily in reach, and then rush the VIP, kill him, and start retreating before the second wave of reinforcements engages me too much.
Using this strategy I have cleared the VIP missions multiple times on commander difficulty ironman because I keep starting new campaigns, about half the time I have one casualty and the other half there are none, but my troops are usually pretty beaten up afterwards.
This wouldn’t work as well blind, but I am playing on commander so I don’t mind it being a bit brutal anyway.
Make sure not to try those missions at night…