Honestly, I think it's hard on players when you'd get like, four Voxes spawning simultaneously with AA blocking eagles, and defensive strats getting blown up immediately. We burned through tons of tickets that way, trying to raise flags.

It's a very lethal combo. And with all the buildings, my orbitals wouldn't fire for ~10 seconds sometimes giving voxes plenty of time to roll out of the AoE for orbital railguns.

I think it's hard to extrapolate, but my guess is that the Voxes stopped lots of missions in their tracks, and a failed mission meant no progress towards the end goal. I believe you had to have three successful, consecutive missions for progress to count at the end of the operation.

I mean it was the GM that decided to enact the whole “save the 77th”