Stealing aircraft on legend?

[Heau]

Hi,

I'm just looking for conditions to evaluate whether I have a crew capable of it or not. I'm trying legend ironman but deviating from ironman with some caveats like since I never did any aircraft steal before and the game isn't very good at telling me how hard I'll get my ass handed to me when I queue up a mission, I'm allowing myself to deviate for such learning attempts.

Anyway, I tried a NJ steal pretty early on. My fancy big tech is grenade launchers and anu shotguns with units around lvl 3-5. I can deal with the human ennemies pretty well. Technicals with rockets were painful but others I'm fine with. But I just don't understand how I'm supposed to deal with a flamethrower armadillo this early on.

So again pretending I had info to play this ironman style, how would I be able to evaluate that I have the power, if played well, to hijack a plane on legend diff? Is it just spawn rng where sometimes there's an armadillo and sometimes there isn't? Am I expected to bring my own vehicle to just stall/block it? Or am I missing some weird 1-man strat where I just jet in to activate, jet back to the top of the building for the 5 turns and jet back in to escape? Or is the tech that one of the other faction is a lot easier to take early?

[HBD]

I try to kill them with overwatch fire so I can kill umbra on my next round. or how mentioned before try to disable them instead of killing.

[Heau]

my problem with umbra is they often reveal their purple clock as I kill the last guy alive after I've spent most of my turn AP already, leaving me very little for an overwatch kill. And they are often within range to move +melee 2-3 times on the AI turn. If they swing twice I usually survive but if they swing 3x it's usually a death.

*Edit*, also the first model of umbra in my current game started off with 500 hp. It's not that easy a paralyze target.

*edit* Is it normal that the athron umbra I paralyzed did not show up in my containment?

*edit* after reading the wiki page about them I think I know how to deal with them now. I did not know it was tied to killing another Arthron with a special buff to begin with.

[Muton]

You cannot capture umbras as far as I know. Here's a trick about umbras: The enemy with tar shadow should be the last guy you kill (you can disable him). If he is the last enemy to die, the mission will end immediately and the umbra it spawns will be meaningless.

Radar buildings: Do not dismantle them. Keep one in every base. You need them to monitor pandoran attacks and discover pandoran bases.

Neural torso: Yes, all of your technicians should get Neural torso as soon as you can afford it, according to your priorities and needs.
Techs carry a lot of equipment, and neural torso makes his carrying capacity so high it is no longer a problem.

[Heau]

Tar shadows is what I ended up picking from the wiki that I didn't know and which helped me understand the other responses better. It's still sometimes a little tedious with the guys that have return fire but I've managed a lot better.

Ty for radar and neural torso info. About the Torso, I have one side question. Even though I bailed on ironman, I still play heavily to avoid ever restarting missions. As such, I found myself investing in a lot more stats, particularly strength, than I would in previous playthroughs especially given the base stat penalty on legend (14/6/14 feels so awful).

Do you have any like strength benchmarks. e.g. I want at least X1 for frontline, x2 for backline until Y enemy comes up on the report then its x3, x4 etc.

[Muton]

You need more strength for heavies than snipers/assaults etc. At least 25 since they carry more heavy equipment, armor and are frontline soldiers that need to be able to take a beating.
Your other soldiers should have enough strength to carry what you want them to carry.. If necessary you can put them in lighter armor.
However all your soldiers should have bare minimum of 21 strength, as stomping and other things often affect soldiers with 200 or less HP.
Strength is least important in snipers.
If you go over capacity it merely slows their movement so it is not too big of a deal.

[Muton]

Disable umbra carriers.. Then kill the carrier on your own terms.. Ideally you want it to bleed out and die on it's own turn so the umbra will not have its turn to come and kill you. Keep your distance from them. Use Warcry on the tar puddle. Kill the umbra with shotguns or overwatch shotgun. Explosives, fire, acid etc does little damage as the umbra body has only a single body part.

[bomansi]

Mind control the tar shadow dude, throw a fire granade at it, move the dude around in the flames until it dies.

[Muton]

you can.. too much effort, more than 2 shotgun blasts. Assumes you have a priest nearby and an umbra already was allowed to have its turn and survived that long

[Heau]

Did I interpret correctly that warcry while the tar is still as a puddle will actually remove 2AP from the umbra on his spawn turn? The tar didn't light up when I thought about trying it so I never tested. That'd certainly make them significantly more manageable.

[Muton]

Yes...Warcry on the puddle will take 2 AP away from the umbra it births... So at most, if it survives your overwatches, it will be able to move with 1 AP and attack once with 1 AP

[Rocket Mule]

Originally posted by Heau:

What are typical counterplays to Athron Umbras? Can they be popped up with spiders scouting? Or will they systematically go for holo targets or closest target or something?

Ways to prevent Umbra from spawning (for the newcomers it spawns fromenemies with tar shadow ability on death):
1. Force the enemy to retreat by crippling all weapons on it. They will often retreat off the map, if they can no longer attack.
2. Paralyse enemies.
3. Make sure Tar shadow enemies die under tiles set on fire. Tar shadow does not trigger when the enemy dies under a tile set on fire. (My go to strategy, admittedly resource intensive)
4. Make sure the Tar Shadow corpse lands in invalid areas like bottomless pits. (Very niche, but sometimes handy).

Ways to protect yourself from Tar Shadows.
1. War cry the spawing tar shadow puddle. (The puddle is considered the same unit as the tar shadow itself. Using war cry removes 2 ap from it for a turn, effectively reducing the amount of melee attacks it can realisticly deal from 3, i.e. certain death to 1 i.e. badly injured.)
2. Use infiltrator holograms as a meat shield. (Warning the ai doesn't always go for the closest enemy).
3. Use spider mines as a meat shield. (Same as point 2)
4. Using vehicles as a meat shield.

How to kill Tar Shadows:
Tar shadows are werid as they are effectively a single large health pool with no limbs and no armor. So high raw dps weapons work the best like shotguns, machine guns and PDWs. Since they spawn on the enemy turn you'll probably need at least a few soliders overwatching the spawn point.