Consequences of poor performance early in the campaign

Question

In vanilla DoW2's campaign, does wasting time before the Tyranids show up have any consequences?

A friend and I have been playing vanilla DoW 2's coop campaign mode. However, we screwed up in pretty much the biggest way possible - not only did we fail to snag any bonus deployments, we also failed one of the missions by misunderstanding the objective. All of this wasted us a few campaign days; we could've accomplished what we did much faster.

Both of us rushed through the campaign back when the game first came out; I remember that wasting time like this was punished by an ever-increasing amount of Tyranid infestation (not that I remember what the consequences of THAT were). Problem is, we haven't encountered the Tyranids yet; we are wondering, do lost and/or failed deployments even matter, when the infestation sliders aren't even in play yet? Assuming we had failed one and the same mission a hundred times in a row, what would be different to a campaign where everything has been done perfectly (aside from the fact that the team failing a hundred times would have a ton of experience on their squads from whatever kills they racked up), assuming those failures happened before the Tyranids show up?

Answer 1

Failing missions before the Tyranids show up does not increase the infestation level. Further, there aren't any achievements that are indirectly made impossible or harder by failing missions at this point. The obvious question - "Will my score be hurt?" also gets a favorable answer - no. The easiest and most likely way to obtain a high score (and the related achievement) is to keep repeating the endless optional and defense missions once all squads are at level 20 and the final mission is available - early failures will not be a detriment to this approach.

Further, Tyranid infestation doesn't actually do much, so failing after the 'nids show up isn't too bad either - even if all three planets were to become maximally infested, the only thing that would change is some of the ending text, and arguably the amount of Tyranid buildings encountered while deploying on the infested planets.