Nailed a super reinforcement UFO

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Kamikaze Samurai
Posts: 50
Joined: Tue Oct 24, 2017 10:31 pm

Nailed a super reinforcement UFO

Post by Kamikaze Samurai »

Those little bastards bring down 4 legions at once, and I finally got one last night.

It showed up a VIP jailbreak, but I'm tuned into the details enough that I immediately knew what it really was.

The tip off was light to moderate baseline activity in a region where all the other missions were light or very light, and less than 3 days infiltration where I was typically getting around 6.

I boosted in a squad of 4 Master Seargents for a tense run around the board edge with drones everywhere and the blasted cryssalid dark event in effect.

Fortunately the evac was a only a 2 turn dash from the jail.

Sure enough it was a UFO, and I know it's the super one because the normal reinforcement UFOs have a discovery mission reward that's only intel.

Can't wait to get home tonight and destroy it.
Swiftless
Posts: 59
Joined: Wed Apr 26, 2017 4:31 pm

Re: Nailed a super reinforcement UFO

Post by Swiftless »

Pretty interested in how this goes for you. I've only ever had a single UFO mission.
Kamikaze Samurai
Posts: 50
Joined: Tue Oct 24, 2017 10:31 pm

Re: Nailed a super reinforcement UFO

Post by Kamikaze Samurai »

Hi Swiftless.

My guess is that you only ever saw one UFO because the low infiltration times convinced you to skip the discovery mission.

There are 3 critical bits of information that you need to become a UFO hunter.

The most important is the characteristics of the mission where you find the UFO. The normal one looks exactly like Liberation 1 but with +1 Advent strength (recover or hack data, intel only reward). The super one can look like a lot of different missions or rewards but is the only mission that has +2 Advent strength. Either one will have a lower than usual infiltration time.

That brings us to the second important factor in finding UFOs, which is maximum intel.

The third and trickiest factor is knowing where to look for them, and I'm giving a big high-five to faket15 for posting the mechanics.

They are weighted towards areas that you are attacking or the aliens want to defend. Calculating the probability directly is impractical because of imperfect information, but you can observe their behavior and look for patterns.

I have a simple paper map to track the changes in strength distribution over time in the areas I have contacted, and it is showing a disproportionate amount of troop strength coming down in and around India. Of course that makes it a brutal place to go hunting.

I'm going for global liberation but starting to think I made a fatal strategic error. It's late September, I've destroyed 10 legions on the ground and another 10 in the air, but they have 50 on the board which is unchanged since the beginning of July. I'm getting hit by elite troops, cryssalids, andromedons, and the wounded are filling up the hallway outside the AWC.

The mistake was leaving too many HQs on the board for too long. I was trying to farm scientists and haven personnel in low vigilence regions, so I held off on liberating a bunch of areas to slow the rise in vigilence of those places, since liberating an area causes vigilence to rise everywhere else.

The problem is that the areas that I held off on liberating all had local vigilence of 16+, which adds up to a continuously severe global resistance threat and equally continuous stream of these super reinforcement UFOs. It's also getting hard to put a squad together that can take down all these HQs after my A team got trashed by running into the Archon king and a devastating army of mechs during a facility raid. I could probably still win if I focused on actually fulfilling the victory conditions, but instead I will take what I have learned and start again with the goal of global liberation.
gimrah
Long War 2 Crew
Posts: 422
Joined: Fri Jul 15, 2016 12:25 pm

Re: Nailed a super reinforcement UFO

Post by gimrah »

Good luck. Sock it to 'em.

I've only ever seen the discovery missions with stupid low timers. Even with a full haven on full intel. And I've only ever managed those missions by cheesing it with a suicide squaddie assault. And even then I usually have to savescum those for concealment loss. So this campaign I decided I wouldn't do that.
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SonnyWiFiHr
Posts: 416
Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2017 1:57 pm

Re: Nailed a super reinforcement UFO

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

Shinobi + grenade or shaped charge for distraction.
Right now I m using stealth overhaul but that I used in normal LW 2. My 18 movement Shinobi leveled can do them - sometimes.
The Preacher
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