How to crank Incursion Red River's enemy count and fight an entire army solo

What happens if you take a PvE extraction shooter that already respects your time and tell it to throw everything it has at you, alone, with no mates to revive you? I wanted to find out. So I dragged the difficulty sliders as far as they would go and walked into the worst day of my operator’s life. Here is what I learned, with the receipts in the videos.

What the settings actually do. Incursion lets you fine-tune the AI at any point, which is rarer than it sounds. In my runs I treat the enemy count and the enemy quality as two separate dials, and that distinction matters. Crank the count and you get more bodies. Crank the AI, which got a proper rework in the 1.3 update, and the bodies start using cover, flanking, and punishing the moment you peek the same angle twice. I treated them as two different experiments on purpose, because conflating them is how people end up frustrated rather than challenged.

Maxing the count first. I started with raw numbers, and the result is exactly the glorious mess you would expect. Patrols stack on top of patrols, every gunshot pulls a fresh crowd, and the map stops feeling like a place you scavenge and starts feeling like a place you escape. I show the whole descent in I Maxed the Enemy Count… Here’s What Happened. The honest takeaway: more enemies is not harder in a clever way, it is harder in an exhausting way. Your ammo economy collapses long before your nerve does.

Then maxing the AI. This is the one that actually changed how I play. With the AI pushed to the ceiling, the army does not just appear, it thinks. They suppress, they push when you reload, and they do not stand in doorways waiting to be shot. I took that fight on solo in I Maxed the AI and Fought an Entire Army Solo, and it is a different game. The count tests your stamina. The AI tests your decision making.

How to actually survive it. A few things kept me alive. Never hold an angle, because smart AI ranges you in fast, so shoot and relocate every single time. Treat sound as the enemy, since one loud fight summons the whole map, and a suppressor is worth more than a scope here. Carry far more ammo and far less loot greed than you think you need. And pick your fights at the edges of the map, never the middle, so you always have a quiet line back to extraction.

Is it worth doing? Honestly, yes, but not as your daily driver. Maxed lobbies are a brilliant stress test for your fundamentals and a humbling reminder that this game has more depth than the chilled PvE label suggests. They are not where I would learn the game, though. If you are newer, build up first with the Incursion Red River beginner’s guide, then come back and turn the world against yourself when your habits are sharp.

I take the game seriously, not myself, and these runs were me poking the bear to see what it could do. The full campaign is over at WillyB’s Incursion Red River. Go build your operator there first, then crank the sliders and find out what you are actually made of.

Incursion Red River solo PvE extraction shooter AI difficulty challenge run tips