So I watched like every video there is on Colorado, learning tips and tricks from everyone's SA runs and escalation runs.
But after another run of Colorado, even getting SA, I still hate it. My SA string quartet run took me like an hour and probably 20-30 save/reloads. Even though I knew what I was doing and was following a 9 min SA run exactly. But either because patches since a year ago broke stuff or something else, things wouldn't work and I'd have to spend 20 mins save/reloading the same 20 seconds over and over with minor variations to get it to work because there are eyes everywhere.
A good example of this is by the car lift, one of the main strategies in SA vids is turning off the generator near there and pulling the guy away from the van, knocking him out, waiting for the guy looking out the window to reset his cycle so he's looking away, then dump the body over the fence and drag it to the container and hide it.
But, if you do that half the time a guy on the roof starts walking in your direction and sees you. If you try to do it when one of the targets walks by the van, not only does the guy on the roof see you half the time, but a pair of guys walking along the outside perimeter are timed to see you through a window exactly during that time frame where the target would be lured over.
So I ended up having to throw a coin to stall the target until the two guys in the perimeter walked by, then turn off the generator and the target walks over, then because the guy on the roof is looking, I let the target turn the generator back on and start to walk away, THEN I turn it back off again and this time the roof guy has his back turned and so I take the target out, then I still have to wait by the fence for the guy in the room to reset his cycle so he doesn't turn right when I dump the body over the fence, then I can do that and drag it into a container and hide it.
So much friggen effort and trial and error minor timing changes just to get one target.
Another target I tried using a strategy from the videos for Sean Rose by waiting until he was near the fire extinguisher at the bomb test site and shoot the extinguisher once to blow him up in an accident kill. Yet now post-patches, instead of it just being an accident kill and walking away, every time it starts LOCKDOWN and makes everything a pain and I have to wait for that to end for people to cycle back to their routines.
I feel like the only quick & easy simple kill is the haystack drop for one target. Everything else is a pain. I know 2-4 ways to kill every target, and can get through the level fine and get the various disguises, but my problem with the level is it always takes a while to do all that. I just don't feel comfortable being able to jump into to the Colorado mission and do a quick and easy 10-15 min run without any save/reloads even if I don't care about SA or how the kills are done and that keeps it from being fun. The other 5 maps I can do that, if I want to just take out one target quick and easy and mess around with the other and escape I can, but doing Colorado feels like work every time. Bleh.
Last chance the map has with me is this new Patient Zero campaign which has one mission on Colorado. Final chance to make the map fun for me.