Can the Avatar Project be delayed forever?

[inTense RioTz]

The game makes a point of 'The Avatar Project can not be stopped, only delayed for a while. You are in a race against time.' My question is can you keep destroying the blacksite and facilities forever? Or will you eventually be overtaken by the project's progress bar?

[Jesterofgames7712]

Originally posted by inTense RioTz:

The game makes a point of 'The Avatar Project can not be stopped, only delayed for a while. You are in a race against time.' My question is can you keep destroying the blacksite and facilities forever? Or will you eventually be overtaken by the project's progress bar?

You will eventually be overtaken
But you can quite litterally stall the avatar progress for Month's possibly an ingame year
By then you will have nothing to do but get random rolls to optomize you troops as you have all research done

[inTense RioTz]

So, you cannot stall it forever?

[Jesterofgames7712]

Originally posted by inTense RioTz:

So, you cannot stall it forever?

No you can't stall it forever
however you can stall it so much You've basically run out of content and there is no point in stalling any longer

[inTense RioTz]

Ok, thank you. The thing I didn't like XCOM:enemy unknown/within was that you eventually had to lose the game and start over

[Brian (The Schmaltzy Cynic)]

I can safely say that so long as you have one ADVENT project mission within a few days' reach, then you should never have an issue. I beat my first game (Normal) thinking I had screwed up as I got to the last three bars of the Project. I then played the next 15 hours doing side-ops to get resources and occassionally doing the story missions to keep it from finishing.

It's a much more forgiving system than the first game.

[LeftPaw]

I don't know if it's within the vanilla game you wish to stall the avatar project or not, but you can easily mod it so it's delayed or prevented from completing.

[Rord64]

Originally posted by inTense RioTz:

Ok, thank you. The thing I didn't like XCOM:enemy unknown/within was that you eventually had to lose the game and start over

Wait what?

[Cactuskiller]

In theory,yes but you would need to have nearly infinite amount of facility leads, which guarantee you a facility mission. Otherwise you will be outrun, cause the game spawns less facilites over time on its own, while the default "1 block per month" still continues to grow.

So practically, no

[AlexMBrennan]

In theory,yes but you would need to have nearly infinite amount of facility leads

This reverses the avatar project points contributed by the facility, but not general avatar project progress (over time or from dark events). As such, you can stall for a finite amount of time (campaign progress gives you -11 points) but will eventually lose due to general avatar progress.
Edit: Rephrased after checking source http://xcom.wikia.com/wiki/Avatar_Project

[SundownKid]

If a Facility Lead gives you a facility from nowhere then it does seem possible to stall it by save-scumming until you get a Facility Lead via Skulljack for every mission.

[Black Sheep Wall]

No, you cannot.

Lots of misleading information on the exact mechanics.

Basically the progress bar will complete at a set base rate, regardless of anything the player can do. The thing is, this base rate is VERY slow.

In addition to the base rate, the bar will progress based on how many ADVENT facilities are currently active. Keep in mind that active does not mean that it isn't hidden. The game will start with a set number of facilities, and you will get leads on these facilities during your playthrough. By default, you WILL NOT get leads to ALL of them.

However, you CAN gain these leads through hacking/skulljacking bonuses and loot drops.
The interesting bit is that SOMETIMES you have a lead you CANNOT research.
This is because you have already neutralized the facility in the regeion it is tied to.

Surprisingly, if it builds a facility in a previously deactivated region, a lead associated with that region may become active again, so even though it's been sitting in your inventory all game doing nothing, all the sudden it can be used.

Ultimately this leads to a tug of war over facilities if you want to prolong your game, which is pretty easy to do. You gather leads at every opportunity and shut down facilities at every opportunity, and when it builds a new facility, you immediately destroy it.

However, the base gain on the AVATAR project will eventually complete it, and with no story missions or facilities available to set it back, you either have to let it count down and lose, or commit to the final mission.

[JaegerBane]

Originally posted by Ronnie Law:

The interesting bit is that SOMETIMES you have a lead you CANNOT research.
This is because you have already neutralized the facility in the regeion it is tied to.

IIRC you can research them, it's just a lead in this kind of situation just doesn't do anything once research is complete. Happened to me a few times in my last playthrough.

Tbh I never bother with leads anymore. I don't think I've ever come across a facility that could only be discovered via leads - they always seem to appear normally, eventually.

[inTense RioTz]

But in the wiki, it says' If all 12 points are acquired, the project enters its final stages. The player has a fixed duration (20 days on Veteran, 15 days on Commander) to reduce the Avatar project progress by any means, or else the aliens complete the project and XCOM is destroyed'

By this logic, if they get up to 12 squares, you can destroy a research facility, get the bar down to 11 squares, and then when they get the 12th square back, the time limit resets to 20 days. So, surely continually allowing them to fill the bar then taking a square off gives you a theoretically infinite time limit, assuming you can find enough avatar research facilities to keep this technique going.

[SunDrippedDevil]

Originally posted by inTense RioTz:

But in the wiki, it says' If all 12 points are acquired, the project enters its final stages. The player has a fixed duration (20 days on Veteran, 15 days on Commander) to reduce the Avatar project progress by any means, or else the aliens complete the project and XCOM is destroyed'

By this logic, if they get up to 12 squares, you can destroy a research facility, get the bar down to 11 squares, and then when they get the 12th square back, the time limit resets to 20 days. So, surely continually allowing them to fill the bar then taking a square off gives you a theoretically infinite time limit, assuming you can find enough avatar research facilities to keep this technique going.

The timer no longer resets, and persists from the last time that the progress meter filled up. This was changed by the devs to prevent the exact thing that you just mentioned.

[Nebhead]

You can certainly delay it for a considerable amount of time with some clever preparation:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=829225723

The results of me allowing a single Avatar facility to accrue numerous Breakthrough Dark Events and allowing it to gain pips as facilities sometimes do.

As you can see in this artwork of mine, this single facility was worth an enormous 9 blocks of progress towards the Avatar project, and the end result was that the avatar progress was reduced to only 2 blocks.

Even though I had completed all the main objectives (except the ADVENT Network Tower of course), there's no way that the Avatar Project's source was only at 2 blocks.
I think if you get a facility to be worth that many blocks of progress it actually deducts progress from the Avatar Project's source too.
I could of tested this theory at the time as another Major Breakthrough was being prepared as a Dark Event, which means that the Avatar Project's source could of actually been reduced to zero if it worked like that.
I no longer have the save unfortunately.