Pavonis Interactive Forums

Commander difficulty level, running a level 3 liberation mission (capture VIP), alert level 4 region, infiltrated to extremely light, there are 6 civilians who transformed into Faceless. Is this working as intended?

If so, I need to go down a difficulty level

I'm using exactly the same mod list as xwynns has in his 1.3 campaign. I have the save file.

This is normal. It happens exclusively on that specific mission type (lib3 dark vip), so you aren't going to be running into it too often.

I'm not sure that's normal actually.

For a Dark VIP mission reporting as "Extremely Light", you shouldn't be getting 6 Faceless. About the only way it's likely to have happened is if he also had the Alien Infiltrators Dark Event active, which would add 4 more Faceless than normal.

To get 6 Faceless appearing on a Dark VIP Lib3 mission without Alien Infiltrators you would need the strength 6 schedule, with 14 advent and 4 drones.

I just checked and it was a strength 4 region and there are currently no dark events active.

Unfortunately I was playing ironman and in fiddling with the save files to be able to save/reload the game it has overwritten my save of the map, so I don't have a save file of the issue anymore.

Lib3 has a +3 alert modificator. Bet that counts.

Zyrrashijn wrote:Lib3 has a +3 alert modificator. Bet that counts.

Sounds like it is most likely working as intended but it seems possibly that it could do with some balancing though. I was finding the campaign relatively easy up to that point but there is absolutely no way I can complete that mission!

Stay clear of civilians, is my advice. I only triggered faceless on lib3 once so far and never again.

Zyrrashijn wrote:Lib3 has a +3 alert modificator. Bet that counts.

It's only +2 in 1.3 Also, he said he got it to "Extremely Light", which would mean some misreporting of difficulty by the UI beyond the normal not counting faceless (hidden as civilians) and turrets. Str 6 (4+2) should report as being a Light mission, not Extremely Light.

Tuhalu, you're most likely deeper in the code than I am. I can only make guesses. Didn't even know that the number of Faceless depends on the alert level. Maybe this counts towards baseline activity? So if baseline alert would have been 4+2 and he reduced it by overinfiltrating... dunno if that makes any sense.

Every alert level has a schedule of enemies which can appear. Some alert levels even have multiple schedules and which one is picked is randomized. Under and over infiltrating changes the alert level of that individual mission, thus changing which schedules can be picked.

As far as I can tell, there is no schedule which includes 9 or fewer visible enemies and 6 Faceless.

I also looked at the source code (available with the mod) that reports current activity on a mission in the launch window on the global map. This code reads the mission info to get every NPC that will turn up on the map. For each enemy that is not a civilian, it adds 1 to its count. Faceless count as civilians as long as they are hidden at the start of a mission. I'm not sure why Turrets don't count. Then it does some math to relate the number to a text string and spits the text string out. "Extremely Light" is 9 or fewer enemies.

So the only things that spring out at me is either Phenotype is misremembering that it was Extremely Light (if it was Light it would be fine) or somehow the mission info being reported to the bit of code that reports the activity level is wrong (which seems unlikely).

It could very possibly be a miss remember by me.

I've started a new, non ironman campaign and am going to try this mission at different infiltration levels to work out what happened.