Avenger Defense

[frdnwsm]

OK, what the heck is going on in this scenario? The UFO shoots down the Avenger, as usual, but I can only deploy one squad (maximum of 12 men) for the defense? I had 20 more troopers inside the ship, who never got called up to defend. What, they were all asleep?

This game seems to have been doomed from the start, BTW. Dark events kept occurring every few days until the Alien tech outstripped my own. The attacking forces outnumbered XCOM by about 2 or 3 to 1 numerically, and included an Andromedon, an Archon, 3 Vipers, a Berserker, 4 Mutons, 4 mechs, and a slew of troopers, officers and stun troopers. But far worse was the fact that they all had great health, weaponry and armor, much better than my own.

Some of my guys were using ballistic assault rifles, for heaven's sake. (It didn't help that the UFO didn't appear until my 5 best troopers ... with my best weaponry and armor ... were tied up infiltrating the Advent tower!).

I did manage to inflict a decent number of casualties, but the whole thing was impossible without the troopers who were inside the ship, apparently cowering under their bunks. So WHY were these guys not available for the defense?

[Sarger]

AFAIK it is possible to choose and ger up ones who will defend Avenger. Also if time allows it is very reasonable to recall most potent soldiers from their missions.
More here:
https://xcom.fandom.com/wiki/Avenger_Defense

[frdnwsm]

Yes, I was able to choose what troops to use in defense, but unlike the vanilla game, the rest of the troops inside the Avenger are never mobilized. Trying to defend against the overwhelming odds that were present in this particular game was a hopeless task. 12 guys just wasn't going to cut it. I tried leaving 6 men to defend the ramp, and taking the other 6 to try and hit the spike, but they never even got halfway to it, while the ramp troops got slaughtered by acid grenades and the like from the mechs and the Andromedan.

[frankie60]

The Avenger defense is a tough mission. As far as I know, you do get the reserves even if they are wounded. But for some reason, you can't take them out of training, which I don't get.

I had to do that mission twice in the last campaign. The second time I only had 7 soldiers total on the whole ship. 3 were MSGTs and the rest were Squaddies and LCPLs. Luckily, I had a Specialist and a Sharpshooter in the bunch. My Squaddie Assault pretty much held the line by constantly stunning the high HP enemies. We cleared the right side of the ridge and valley and advanced that way until we could get some sight on the spike for the SS. Then in the last ditch effort, the specialist, controlled a drone and sent it into the enemy group which distracted them long enough for us to run.

But yeah, that mission does kinda suck...

[frdnwsm]

Well, I am going to try it again. But as I said, I never got any reserves sent out from the ship, and I had something like 20 troops on board. Mind you, they were mostly squaddies and lance corporals, wearing kevlar and carrying assault rifles, but in a mission like this, extra warm bodies with some grenades would have been a huge help.

I tried disbanding all the squads, just to see what would happen, but the game refused to go on further until I created a squad with at least one member for ship defense.

This game took a way different turn than the last one I played. In that one, the UFO never even showed up, but I left the Tower Assault go too long; the game ended abruptly when the aliens suddenly completed the Avatar Project, with zero warning. I suspect that this UFO attack was in fact triggered by my infiltration of the Tower.

As I mentioned, there were a lot more Dark Events early on in this game; I don't know if this is a random thing, or what, but all of them were related to making alien troops more powerful in combat. As a result, not only did they have a numbers advantage on me, but their troop quality was better as well.

[Mrvecz]

UFO can be triggered either by dark event or by knocking out the Blacksite facility.
Also since you dont see the avatar timer till you raid Advent's HQ you can lose without any prior warning.. the timer is there, you just dont see it.

[frankie60]

Oh you got the easy Dark Events. Wait until you get Vigilance where the enemy detection radius is about twice as big as normal, or Rapid Response where the RNFs drop like acorns in the Fall. Or Infestation, where buried Chrissilids (sp) ambush your squad without warning... OR... well, you get the picture. ;-)

I'd say 1) you need to have two liberation's done by Mid August (then stop liberating). 2) Research faster. Still using ballistics by the time the time the Avatar Project finished is way too slow. You should have had access to Magnetics by mid May. Early June at the latest. 3) Don't burn your intel boosting missions.

When I start a game, the very first thing I research is the Basic Research item. It feels like a waste but it essentially gives you one scientist which helps in the long run. If you can rescue a Scientist, ALWAYS do that. You just can't have too many Scientists. You may have to buy one in the early game, and if you don't have 2 or 3 by mid April, definitely buy one. Engineers are important too, but they are not as critical to your game as Scientists. Advancing your Tech is paramount.

I think I mentioned it to you before, but you need to be VERY aware of where you are in the game months. If you haven't liberated a region by September, you may as well just start over.

Just speculating, from you game descriptions, I think you were running a lot of the wrong missions. You also expanded too fast and probably didn't hit fewer regions hard enough to drive up the Global Vigilance. Having high Global Vigilance slows the Avatar down. You need a full haven to get good missions with long timers. I will always stick a scientist in my full havens to improve the intel. For me, it's worth it to lose a few days on research if I can get a Troop Column with a 15 day timer...

[PinkDaddySasquatch]

This won't always work for obvious reasons but I came up with an easy way to deal with the UFO event. It requires the ruler armor with the jet pack and a sniper with squadsight. You just jet pack over to the spire thing because it gives you a small area of sight around it and just take the spire down with the sniper or snipers.

[frdnwsm]

Well, I did the defense mission 5 times and there is just no way I can win. My snipers, even with concealment, get spotted simply because of the density of the opposition. I sent my stealth shinobi ahead to try and spot for the snipers, but they didn't have a clear line of sight to the spike; and even the shinobi eventually got spotted.

The aliens with acid bombs have to be stopped first because they can destroy my guys cover, but picking them off before they can launch takes all my firepower (remember, 3 guys are trying to head for the spike), which lets the other troopers and mechs take up positions where they can get flanking shots on some of my soldiers. 2 or 3 of my 12 guys are usually dead after 2 rounds of combat and it rapidly goes downhill from there, since part of the ramp cover is destroyed..

What the heck is Global Vigilance? I have never even heard the term before.

[frankie60]

Well that blows. Ahh well, just start a new campaign. You will have a better handle on it. Global Vigilance (GV) is just the total vigilance of all the regions, whether or not you have contacted them. If you click the resistance management tab, it's shown as low, guarded, alerted, etc, but there's a mod I gave you a link to that gives it to you in number form. It's a measure of how interested Advent is in your activity.

The more successful missions you run in various regions, the higher vigilance gets. High vigilance keeps the avatar project from running wild. At high difficulty levels, it's hard to slow the avatar project down, but at veteran and below, it's pretty easy to manage.

Anyhow, don't give up. LW2 is definitely tough to figure out, but I think it's one of the few games in existence that's worth my time.

[frdnwsm]

Hang on; so it's the Aliens who go on High Vigilance, and because they are spending effort on that, they can't allocate as much effort to the Avatar Project? Odd, if XCOM is annoying them that much, you would think they would ignore their raids, which are basically pinpricks, and accelerate the project instead, since that would solve the problem permanently.

And how do I know when they go into that condition? It sounds like it's the same as the Advent Presence number I see in each region ... 1-6 are the values I have seen so far. I don't recall downloading any such mod, but I see numbers anyway. Could they have updated the LW2 mod itself to have incorporated that feature automatically?

[frankie60]

I dunno. If you're gonna play LW with any level of effectiveness, you need the information mods

[frankie60]

Also, there is a point in the game where they do accelerate the project to solve the problem permanently, as you so eloquently put it.

[frdnwsm]

Anyway, I started a new game. I am trying your suggestion of researching improving Basic Research first; are you sure that actually gives you a scientist? I have done this before when there was nothing else I could research, and never noticed that. Or is it just that the drop in research time is equal to having another scientist on staff?

[frdnwsm]

Also, I have to ask if it's possible to actually win this game. Has anyone beaten it, even if only on rookie level? It's possible that the devs put bit too much emphasis on the "long" part. I played EW:Long War for something like 9 months real time before shelving it. I was making progress, but there were SO many setbacks. I survived the first base attack, but lost some good troopers that took a while to replace. More men lost on the assault on Exalt HQ, then still more during the second base assault. Also, cash was getting tight as Nations would drop out every now and then.

I didn't so much lose outright, as become annoyed at having to keep running missions to level up new troops to replace the old ones. Also the money was just as tight as in this game; I guess the designers just had a thing against wealth. I hate games that put extreme emphasis on budgeting. Here I have to choose between producing two more laser rifles and making a suit of predator armor.

Here I haven't gotten nearly as far as I did in EW, but from what I have read, it seems that Advent can do stuff like try and regain a liberated region ... sounds a lot like the EW assaults on XCom's base. Combine this with some of the Dark Events, and it sounds worse than EW:Long War.

It's not that the tactical combat side of the game is terribly hard, but the strategic planning needed is obscure to me, at least at present.

I am no stranger to long games ... it took me close to a year to finish Xenonauts (which plays very much like the XCOM games but has, IMO, far superior game mechanics ... poorer graphics, though). Also no stranger to tough games; try to win the Necromancer campaign in Age of Wonders III. The opposition there makes Advent look like amateurs. And no, I didn't win that one.

[frankie60]

I've beat it every time I played it. My last campaign I stopped because it felt won. But I understand the game mechanics. It's very obscure. Almost none of it is explained within the game, which is why you have to study it and get info from other sources like here and the Pavonis forum. In the Pavonis forum, every single aspect of the game has been discussed already. Every possible question has been asked. The answers are all there. But it will take some digging. Unfortunately, it takes a certain level of commitment.

Long War is a misnomer. It's not that long. The game can easily be won by December or January of the next game year. There are just a lot of missions. And strategically, you have to take a long view of what you MIGHT need to do, versus what you CAN do, right now.

Concerning "Basic Research", it doesn't get you a scientist that you can SEE. It reduces research time which is the same thing. But because the effectiveness of scientists drops off as you gain more scientists, the Basic Research is good only if you do it early. It will definitely help, but that's just one tiny aspect of the game. it's not a silver bullet to winning. You can play it just fine without doing it.

The game is hard, but it's not that hard. Honestly, the real problem is that you don't understand it. You don't understand any of the mechanics involved. It doesn't matter what games you played before. It doesn't matter that you played XCOM before. This is its own thing. It's not hard because the enemies are hard to kill, like most games. It's hard because you have to think. It's not gonna hold your hand. It's not gonna toss you some easy "gimmie" missions to feed your ego. It will beat you and it doesn't care. That's why I like it.

You can do this, but I can tell that you're not actually trying to learn it. You seem to just wanna build the best stuff, kill a bunch of enemies and win. That's just typical game mentality. Long War doesn't work that way. At all. Winning it is on you and your ability to command and fight hard fights with possibly minimal equipment. In a fight, you might have to use EVERY tool that's available to you. AND you have to use your imagination. There are ways of winning in the game that are buried in the game... If, as a commander, you don't know what your soldiers are capable of, you can't win it. It's not obvious. Standard military tactics always work. As I said before, I beat the Avenger Defense with 7 soldiers, and 4 of them were either Squaddies or LCPLs. One Squaddie got wounded.

Now having said all that, I've only beat it on Veteran and Commander. I'm doing a Legendary campaign and it's mind bendingly difficult. When Xwynns played it the first time, he lost half his forces to win and he's one of the best LW2 players on the planet. So don't feel bad. When I found this game I didn't even start a campaign until I understood nearly every aspect of the game mechanics. And I'm still learning stuff. You kinda just jumped in. I knew it was hard. So I wasn't gonna waste my time just trying to play it. You have to do your homework. Maybe it's just not for you. Either way, I've got some Aliens to fry...