[Spoiler ?] Calendar & scripted missions

[Cat Lord]

Hi,

has anyone put up a calendar of when do the aliens type appear overtime ?

I made a first run in Veteran difficulty, and thought the first Black Site scripted mission to be quite easy.

Now I was playing Commander / Ironman, and I left it a bit until I did it. I have just been wiped out: Too many Sectoids/ Vipers/Combat Robots/Heavy Turrets/Mutons and at least 5 pods on the way to EVAC. This was way too much for my soldiers.

So I was wondering, do the scripted missions get harder and harder if you let too much time pass before doing them ?

Cat

[Spartan]

Originally posted by Astranon:

I was of the impression that once a new type of enemy appears and is researched that this increases the difficulty, not the passage of time (although the two go hand-in-hand). New enemies that have not yet been researched seem to appear in response to technological advances made by XCom.

This is based on observation alone, so I could be wrong. But this explanation seems to fit the experience I have had perfectly.

I'm not sure about this, I usually do not research most of the autopsies, because I don't need several items, but the game still progresses.

[orion winterfire]

Originally posted by Cat Lord:

Hi,

has anyone put up a calendar of when do the aliens type appear overtime ?

I made a first run in Veteran difficulty, and thought the first Black Site scripted mission to be quite easy.

Now I was playing Commander / Ironman, and I left it a bit until I did it. I have just been wiped out: Too many Sectoids/ Vipers/Combat Robots/Heavy Turrets/Mutons and at least 5 pods on the way to EVAC. This was way too much for my soldiers.

So I was wondering, do the scripted missions get harder and harder if you let too much time pass before doing them ?

Cat

Based on my own observations, the appearance of new aliens seems tied to story events and tech advances, but I can't be sure.

[Cat Lord]

I have made several attempts, and it seems that delaying this mission is a bad idea. The aliens become more and more powerful, and there are a lot of pods in this one. So lots of easy pods is OK. Lots of difficult pods get you in trouble.

Anyone else experiencing this ?

[Reciprocity]

Reasonably sure the enemies advance in a time-determined fashion. I put off the blacksite mission until August or September in my Commander/Ironman run and faced Archons and heavy MECs (don't recall a sectopod yet). Still have not finished the game, but so far feel that putting off the blacksite mission is a benefit as it gives you a guaranteed way to stop the Avatar countdown while you are still branching out to find more facilities, as you get a hard reset each time you stop the countdown after max boxes. Similar for the first skulljack of an officer/Codex
.

[Azrael]

Afaik the different alien types appear after a certain date, though I don't know by heart, after which dates which aliens appear.
But I also saw, that delaying the story missions doesn't make them easier, since you encounter all the aliens there, that you alrdy know.
The imho only exception from this is the mission, where you have to skulljack a Codex and you encounter your first avatar.
You want to have guys with high aim and good weapons to kill this thing.
In my first encounter, he raped my half squad. I managed to bring him down after several rounds, because I had to weak weapons at that point of time, but I lost 2 soldiers to him and the remaining 4 had to evac since there still was a sectopod patrol left, which I saw with the scan protocol and I knew, they couldn't survive this encounter.

[jouertue]

I have the impression they are tied to both story progression and research, story wise , i never had a codex before skull jacking, never seen a mec before blacksite, never seen a crysalid before 4th retaliation, tech wise, never seen a gatekeeper before plasma or andromedons and archons before having mag weapons and predator suits.
I tend to do black site with half mag weapons and almost complete predator suit research, regular mecs and mutons are the hardest enemies I found.