Blacksite Strangeness

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Swiftless
Posts: 59
Joined: Wed Apr 26, 2017 4:31 pm

Blacksite Strangeness

Post by Swiftless »

Did the Blacksite mission over the weekend on my first campaign since not playing shortly after 1.0's release. I did it later in the campaign and think I paid the price for it, wiped my A squad. So now I get to start a new campaign but there was enough strangeness that I wanted to post up because I'm not experienced enough to pass judgement on anything.

So to start off with I contacted the region with the Blacksite and when I did it had a force level of 5 right off the bat. I decided to hide all the rebels there and then go about doing other stuff before I came back to reduce the FL before I went in. In 3-4 months of waiting the FL never ticked down, it was always at 5 even though I was working missions at least 2 zones away. When I finally decided to infiltrate the mission I decided to boost it to cut down time of infiltration since I wasn't hyped about doing it in the first place and I was cutting it a little close on the doom pips. So I boosted it and then waited till it hit 100% on the infiltration. Unfortunately I didn't see the starting activity list but at 100% infiltration the activity was listed as Heavy-Moderate. I went to the full 200% infiltration, the activity never ticked down and I had to go in still with Heavy-Moderate. The force level of the region also went up to 6 from 5 during the infiltration, even though as stated previously I wasn't running missions anywhere near it and had all my rebels to set to hide.

Once I was in, the Evac Point was literally right on top of the LZ; which meant that I had to cross the map in its entirety and then recross it all over again once I had the vial. I knew then that I should have probably aborted but figured I might be able to cheese the map by wall hugging and then hug all the way back again. That didn't go as planned since once I dealt with the Sectopod and two Advent pods sitting on top of the vial the entire map was on alert. On my way back with the vial I encountered the Chryssalid Soldier and pack of Chryssalids. Working on the idea that I couldn't possibly trigger anything else if I made a half move up to the soldier with my trench gun Assault, lo and behold I activate a second Sectopod which may or may not have also been part of a 5 mech+1 snake pod. It went quickly downhill from there since a Muton Centurion+3 advent pod and the Viper King+3 snake pod (my own fault for having the DLC installed) also happened upon me while I was trying to extricate myself from the s***storm I had managed to find myself in.

So I guess my points or questions are as follows:
1. Why did the FL in the region never go down?
2. Why did the activity level never tick down?
3. Boosting seemed ineffective and I felt like I wasted intel.
4. Having the evac point also be the LZ point was some incredibly bad RNG, regardless of the enemy content.
5. Two 60 hit point sectopods on the Blacksite map is a little ridiculous.
nmkaplan
Posts: 207
Joined: Thu Jan 26, 2017 5:14 pm

Re: Blacksite Strangeness

Post by nmkaplan »

To answer your questions:

1. It sounds like you actually worked directly against your goal without realizing. There is a hidden variable in each region called "Vigilance", that represents how concerned Advent is about your threat to it in the region. There is a mod that will reveal it to the player, but the design intent of LW2 was to keep it hidden. Every time you run a mission in a region, the vigilance goes up by 1. Doing a "get advent attention" mission makes it go up more. When Vigilance is higher than Strength, Advent will tend to reinforce the region by moving strength from an **adjacent** region in which Vigilance is less than Strength. Basically, they will pull strength out of adjacent "cold" regions to reinforce "hot" regions.

Vigilance decays over time, and hiding your rebels in a region makes it decay faster, but Advent will only move strength out of the region if there is an adjacent region that needs reinforcing. So, by running missions **two** regions away, you actually ensured that Advent would never pull Str from the region you wanted them to.

2. I believe that there is a minimum level of activity that can exist for the story missions, like the Blacksite, Forge, and PsiGate. It makes sense if you think about it -- these missions are supposed to be hard and allowing you to scan down to Extremely Light seems a bit silly.

3. Boosting with intel won't tick down the activity level, but it WILL allow you to reach 100% faster. Given that you've got 6-8 of your best soldiers tied up infiltrating these missions while you wait, getting to 100% or 200% faster allows you to run the mission sooner, and have your soldiers back sooner. Infiltrating to 200% gives a host of other benefits as well, beyond reducing strength: decreased detection radius and decreased chance of aliens getting yellow alert actions to name a couple. You should still get these benefits even though you don't reduce the activity level.

4. Having the LZ right next to the Evac is actually intended behavior. Having the evac near the objective allows you to stealth the mission with 1 or 2 guys, which is not what the devs wanted. This is one of a host of changes that were made in 1.3/1.4 to disincentivize pure stealthing.
Dwarfling
Posts: 524
Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2017 12:16 pm

Re: Blacksite Strangeness

Post by Dwarfling »

1. Facilities and Golden Path Missions increase the vigilance of the region they're placed in until you clear them. You probably contacted some high strenght regions as you went for the Blacksite region? They probably have a Facility in them.
2. Same reason, because vigilance is increased from base value cuz of the facility.
3. The mission has so many enemies (+38) that taking out some by overinfiltration didn't change the designation.
4. That's no RNG, they fixed the evac zone to the spawn in 1.3 so you could no longer stealth cheese them.
5. Depends on the month you launch the mission. At most I found Muton Elites on my last campaign but I pushed hard towards the region.

The mission is designed to be done conventionally: bring a big team, find first pod, kill it, push towards objective killing everything, then run back before RNF overwhelm you. Same for The Forge and Facilities. Taking the vial triggers the RNF I think, so be prepared to run back.
nmkaplan
Posts: 207
Joined: Thu Jan 26, 2017 5:14 pm

Re: Blacksite Strangeness

Post by nmkaplan »

Dwarfling wrote:2. Same reason, because vigilance is increased from base value cuz of the facility.
3. The mission has so many enemies (+38) that taking out some by overinfiltration didn't change the designation.
Pretty sure these two are wrong. You're saying that the activity level didn't tick down because vigilance was high? I'm pretty sure vigilance has exactly 0 effect on activity level.

And you also appear to be saying that "Very Heavy" shouldn't tick down between 100% and 200% infil because there are two many enemies? That makes no sense. "Very Heavy" specifically means a range of number of enemies. Even "Swarming" now adds plus signs ("Swarming+, Swarming ++, Swarming+++, etc.) for very high numbers of enemies. If the enemy count were ticking down, you'd see it easily.

It's more likely what I said, that there is a cap on how much you can reduce the # of enemies on the story missions.
Swiftless
Posts: 59
Joined: Wed Apr 26, 2017 4:31 pm

Re: Blacksite Strangeness

Post by Swiftless »

@nmkaplan. Got it. It makes sense now that you put it in that context. I'm still working out exactly how the strategy layer works after having come back to the game after a long break. I'm aware of vigilance but I'm still trying to puzzle out how it interacts and all of its implications. Based on your feedback in #1 I realize that I should have worked missions in the region next door.

3. I'm assuming that's on story missions only? On normal missions you control the enemy count by infiltration percentage. On normal missions boosting increases the amount you infiltrate which reduces overall time spent but also increases infiltration level which reduces enemy count. Which is probably what confused me, the Blacksite isn't a normal mission and doesn't behave the same way.

4. That's sort of lame. I know that stealth cheesing should be prevented but I really don't want to have to fight my way across every pod on that particular map. The cut scenes are particularly annoying and I've seen them so many times already. In this particular case I'm feeling apathetic in that I was doomed from the start if I've already set alert on the first pod I attack with the given the level of enemy activity on the map. I'm not sure how I would not get mobbed unless I equipped everyone with suppressor? The evac zone on that mission alone almost makes me not want to play again. I really dislike the Blacksite to begin with, it always felt like a chore after the first time.
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