So is the faceless supposed to be invincible/unhittable until you trigger it's transformation? Because when you miss 6 consecutive 93% shots in a row, that's absurd

I just did EndBattle XcomWins 1

This took an hour. I got 12 civilians out. I got my soldiers out.

And it just didn't end because there was one civilian left under my control and I had to wait another 30 minutes for chryssalid turns to resolve in running her across the map. She extracted while there were npcs left alive and the map continued into enemy turns.

I know its two years since last update by now but can a check be put in place for when everything is done?

This is a one hell of a buggy mod. Not recommended. At all. It just overstays it welcome to the point it became a chore. Unnecessarily brutal, just for sake of being brutal. But I still like it... I don't know why lol

Would be helpful to have a video clip either on steam or on YouTube to see what kind of mission this is. There's nothing more annoying then to lose a campaign, because of this mission.

All XCOM operative have returned to ship and all the other objectives are completed, but mission doesn't end....what should I do? It's keep looping between Enemy Turn and Resistance Turn.

I had to use EndBattle XcomWins 1...very immersion breaking.

@Ashen--Nightfall I was one of those people who got this as their first retaliation, and it was literally impossible to save everyone because my soldiers were too weak to attack the pods, they would die in one hit unless the attacks missed, and the resistance assistance kept attacking the pods instead of the enemies. causing the stage to be flooding with enemies.

I'm assuming this mission is a lot more manageable when more is unlocked, but oh lord.

I do like how the enemies follow The Lost rule though where if you kill something you refund your action.

So, this is definitely brutal if you get it as your first retaliation. Doable on a modded campaign (thankfully I got a soldier with fire damage before this), but still pretty rough.

Is there a way to reduce the regeneration on the Plague Nodes? I looked in the .ini files and couldn't find anything relating to it, though maybe I missed it.

Also, unsure if this is a bug or intentional, but the Culprit does not respect Shadow concealment on Reapers. Damn near almost lost my Reaper just by running past the Culprit, but I know for a fact that I didn't enter the shown detection radius.

And lastly, I'll also mention what a couple of others have: the resistance soldiers only seem to target the plague nodes. They will fire on those things even as the Chrysalids are litterally in their faces ripping them up.

good mod,my soldiers must use their swords to kill all monsters they see in the mission!but one question why there is a message "all xcom soldiers are dead or missing"when mission completes

Amazing mod.

Great variety and a lot of fun! Nice to have different missions that feel quite different!

I got this as my first retaliation mission.

I did not survive.

Sorry about the late reply, I thought I clicked "subscribe to thread" but apparently I didn't.

It is not just a visual bug. I had some other mod that messed with civilians (or rookies) which was messing with the regular terror missions, so I yanked them all. I know it's one of these but I don't know which: Civilians revamped, don't pull that trigger, only haven assaults, raiders and resistance strategic spawning, rw realistic civilian rescue, versatile rookies, a better militia, improved advent resistance soldiers for chosen retaliation, no rookie & soldier prizes, rookie eager to impress GTS perk, rookies get free shield vests, silence the witnesses, war crimes, xcom civilian defense wotc. I know that's a long list but if I figure out which is the problem, I'll report back.

@LightenedDark
Are they unrescuable or just without the circles round them? I seem to remember reading about the circles disappearing for some people (maybe in one of the Long War mods), but that was just a visual bug.

My civilians aren't rescuable, just like that other person. Does anyone know what causes this?

I thankfully didn't get one of these until month 3, and it was hard as hell. IMO the damage resistance and health of the nodules is way too high even with plenty of fire damage sources. The friendly AI only targeted nodules even with chryssalids breathing down their neck, so they were completely useless, and the spawn rate of the civilians was far too slow to avoid getting overwhelmed.

To anyone reading this, don't install this until you're late in the campaign. This mission is basically a guaranteed loss if you get it early or God forbid as your first terror/retaliation mission.

A good idea for a mission but fumbles hard on the execution. Chryssalids honestly suck to fight against in general but when it's the FIRST Terror mission in the campaign it's just plain unfair and infuriating due to Chryssalids overwhelming your squad before ripping them apart while you can do nothing but grumble in anger because you know you'd win the mission if the civilians could move more then five feet.

Overall Score: 3.5

Yes AI soldiers only target the nodules for some reasons.

Playing with the Hive and Feral Hive on top may crash the game and cause the save file reopened also crashes. It often happens during the "reflex turn". Only geoscape save file before mission start works again.

Tested with EU Shiv mod, will causes crash the next turn after the chrysallids attack a shiv unit.

Playing on Covert Infil, 2nd retaliation without any fire weapon

After testing this a bit, the AI controlled Resistance soldiers seem to only ever target the nodes, and ignore the chryssalids.

I'm running this with The Hive, though, so it may be conflicting.

Probably not intended, but you can change the evac zone location, making this mission easier to handle since you can move the evac zone closer to where civilians tend to spawn.

@The Hive It continues until you evac your squad.

We have to ask, is it possible to "Win" this mission? Cause we've erradicated everything on the map, and we really don't want to know that 2+ hours of effort was essentially wasted.

The first 3 words describe this perfectly. It was my first retaliation mission and is getting taken out of the load order immediately.

Enemy turns end up taking forever, the civilians spend their time running towards the chryssalids, the spawning of civilian pods makes it frustrating as they'll appear seemingly out of nowhere. Not to mention by the time I got to my first pod of civilians I already had 3 dead ones off screen and if you do have a gestation bubble odds are you'll spend a turn or two killing it, when it ends up being more worthwhile to ignore it since it has overinflated health/armour even if you do have a fire weapon.

this mission takes too long

Also, the mods used for those sitreps are:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1961980059

and

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2068573223

Possible bug report:

Mission wouldn't clear despite getting all 12 civilians out. So what happened was that I played the mission, beat it, extracted my units... but it still went on with the resistance forces and aliens fighting each other.

My guess is that it's a conflict with a sitrep. The sitreps I had going at the time were:
- One that limits the squad to three units
- Resistance contacts on the field, effectively creating civilians on the field that a character would go up to and they'd give xcom an item (usually supplies)
- Resistance forces on the field <-NPC resistance members fighting alongside xcom

My guess is that it was the 2nd one that caused the issue because, normal behavior would despawn those NPCs, but in the plague mission, they stayed on the field and counted as civilian targets.

There is a workaround though:
I just used the console command
endbattle xcomwins
To force the mission to end.

Has anyone been brave enough to try it with LWOTC?

@Reshikillim Thanks for the information. I do run Covert Infiltration now in every campaign.

Thank you for letting us know about the config. I found fire weapons did a bit of extra damage but the regen usually heals up the damage you do to it before you can destroy it completely.
At least for T1 weapons. T2 I expect will be a bit better.

@Silverleaf1 If you're running Covert Infiltration, it uses one of that mod's hooks to prevent it from spawning as the first retaliation. To actually push back the possible timeframe beyond that would require me to overhaul a significant portion of the missions system and make it outright incompatible with a lot of mods.

Plague Nodules are already extra weak to fire, and a burning Nodule is unable to spawn Chryssalids. Acid also does extra damage to Nodules, both Fire and Acid Weapons have a 300% Damage Bonus against Nodules.

Plague Nodule HP is incredibly easy to configure if you wish to change it. Simply open the mod's XComGameData_CharacterStats in the Alternate Mod Launcher, and set the AHWPlagueHive 's RandomizedBaseStats to whatever numbers you wish.

Otherwise, the mission is working as intended.

@Killerkitty641 I have to agree with you about push back. Every time I used this mod this was the first retaliation. Points 2 and 3 are in my opinion very good suggestions.

I really want to like it. It could be so good. But at the minute, it's just not all there.
Here's my feedback for what I'd change:

1 - Push back the possible start time for this mission. It should not be triggering early game, IDC what others say. It's just not possible to complete early-game, not without a huge amount of luck.
2 - Change some stuff about the plague nodes. Reduce their HP, make them extra weak to fire, or prevent a carrier spawning with EVERY WAVE (seriously, maybe it's random and I just got unlucky, but I had a node carrier spawning with every new civvy group, so it got out of hand too quickly)
3 - The civilians are moving to slow, and often in the wrong directions before you control them, making the situation much slower than it needs to be. If possible, maybe have them move slowly towards Xcom or the general direction of the extraction zone (maybe just blue movement range, then hunker) or even just away from the plague nodes.

Hi, this has the potential to be a fun mission but at the minute it's just a tedious and frustrating time-waster. It should never be set to trigger so early in the game, because with 4 mid-rank soldiers and basic starting equipment it's an impossible task and major setback for month 3 (when I had it trigger), even though I had a very large number of local forces AND a Skirmisher battlemaster party it'd collapsed pretty quickly.

These missions feel like they take way too long to actually complete due to how slow the civilians move, and how if a mission is done correctly it turns into just waiting around and killing the occasional crysalid.

On the flipside if you get bad luck with being able to clear the plague nodes early you will get overran and is effectively a guaranteed fail.

Personally i think the civilian count needed to be escorted should be halved.

Not for me, its a lot of work, very tedious and the crysalids one shot your guys if you mess up. This should never be the first mission.

Had a chance to try the updated mission and found the experience vastly improved from the first few times. The Hidden Condition was a fun find, though it would be nice if it had a bigger impact on the rest of the mission (also would be nice if letting it escape had some sort of consequence after the mission), and I also liked the spawn-on-damage effect for the hives.

If you end up doing a follow up or a "part 2", I would love to see something along the lines of a swarm of Chrysalids that behave like The Lost, low health high body count sort of thing.

Again, I went in knowing what to expect and I was able to mitigate a lot of the problems. I don't want to take away counterplay, but the counterplay might be too easy outside of vanilla setups (which have to be super rare these days).

So, in closing, not trying to be a downer and hate on the mod. I love this mod. So I'm hoping this comes across as constructive rather than just being hateful. Open to being corrected or discussing further.

So I came across the Plaguebearer in this most recent instance of doing this mission. It was a cool surprise and a great idea for an enemy. I made it way worse with one of the mods I add that buffs the default version.

But after killing him, the mission carried on as normal. So can I ask what the point of the Plaguebearer is? On one hand, I know it would make the mission SUPER boring if you killed the Plaguebearer and the rest of the mission stopped. It would just turn into an instance of find the bad guy and kill him, almost like the Advent General mission. On the other hand, it almost felt unsatisfying to kill him and the plague continued to be an issue. I obviously have very little mod knowledge, and this mission is definitely fun (if for no other reason, the deviation from the norm), but I feel like there's something more here to be uncovered.

Quite possibly the issue, Rusty, the assets in the unreal editor aren't quite clearly marked as which DLC they're from, so it's likely a missing assets issue given a missing DLC.. Adding them as requirements

Possibly uses textures from the DLC's ?

Does this mod add a New Texture? Because i got it as first retaliation Mission and i have weird blue White squares on many many textures in this Level ^^"

@Blanjipan Is the reinforcement waves spawning properly? If not, rescue units will not spawn. Ideally, I'd try reinstalling the mod and restarting the mission to see if it fixes it

In the absolute worst case scenario, where some other mod is preventing the spawning, you can try spawning the Rescues using the Console Command to spawn it onto the XCOM Team: Dropunit FriendlyVIPCivilian 0 1

Hi, I'm playing the mission now for the first time and I'm pretty sure I've run into a bug; while infected civilians seem to spawn correctly, I have not had a single healthy civilian spawn. I am nearly ten turns into the mission, and have not had a single rescuable civilian spawn. I believe this is unintentional, and has made this mission genuinely unwinnable. Any way for me to fix this, or should I just restart the mission?

@Skarsatai I'm assuming you're running no minimum damage and it's only doing like 1-2 damage baseline? Otherwise, they'd eventually chew through all the HP. But fundamentally, that's not an issue caused by this mod, and not really something I would attempt to address in this mod.

I've never personally used IronLordByron's ROO, and I'm not sure where I would begin trying to fix that issue, but most likely something isn't working quite right in that mod, as shooting a pistol should consume action points, unless for some reason it's set up as a free action

several. in my list active : [WOTC] IronLordByron's Resistance Order Overhaul

@Skarsatai 2.0
Which mod is giving the vip's pistols from? o.o

and a third point I just found out: the vip fires as long there is lost/ node/ kokon, mocx, sitrep raiders, chrysalid in fire range. He stops shooting until ALL is dead. Funny they do the job...

I found a Loop problem. If you have vips equipped with pistols like from sitrep or else and this vip enters the side of the resistance move and stand near a plaque node then the following two things happen: first: the vips shoots as long the node have health points after reaching 1 health point ( 49 times shots !!!) and goes to the next resistance OR second : the vip shoots infinite rounds into the node and the game stays in this modus. The vip fires uncounted rounds into the node and stays in resistance move... forever

@Zigg Price Yeah, there's been a lot of balance updates. A lot less gnarly to have as a first retaliation, but the mission can still be a challenge later into the game

Just had it as my first retaliation, again. The last time I played it, it was around release. It was pretty overbalanced, but it was insanely fun.

This time around, I admit I had less fun, but I took A LOT of fire. And I have mods in place that give me access to early fire, like the Alchemist class, Burner class, and Savage Items has early fire rounds that just reduce damage of the shot. With the few chryssalids that did spawn having around <4 hp, I walked over the mission. That said, I get that I overprepared because I was expecting insanity again. So the unbalanced is in XCOMs favor, but it's entirely my fault. I noticed that the nodules have a chance to spawn on being shot, which is a good change.

Well tried out the new re-balanced mission and it's a step in the right direction

And while I did trumped it with my spark Pioneer on the first retaliation mission (on Veteran) I kinda liked it ^^;;

it did get boring burning the plaque nodes at the same place it was alright especially when the Faceless showed up

I would say from my experience to add some more advent/ hidden faceless or re-add the chosen but that was because I destroyed the mission with the Pioneer so I'm not sure ^^;;