Pavonis Interactive Forums

I am new to Long War 2. I have a mission to secure a network tower. It is the first red colored mission so it must be important. But I can only load 5 soldiers for the mission from my 10 man squad. Is this a bug? Or a feature of this mission?

Normally I can load up to 8 soldiers but it will raise infiltration, thus bringing more enemies or higher alert status. But the choice is mine. This mission seems to allow 5 soldiers max? Is that correct?

Any help appreciated.

Redjac

Intended. The Network Tower is a fairly small/compact map type and is balanced around smaller enemy counts and squads as a result.

I have to respectfully disagree (again!) with you Arcalane.

1) The compact principles of that very specific map is exactly why i manually altered the MaxSoldiers value to 6 after having tried 7 or 8.

2) It enforces me to NOT rely on Stealth tactics too much & (now more than ever) just face the "backstabbing" drops that could only add superfluous turns to an otherwise simple objective -- Hack & Leave under such variable battle conditions.

3) WE must defeat anything left-over.

4) It's a pivotal Liberation Chain step that is extremely hard to detect (early to mid months) & that we shouldn't need to skip when called for out of the already precluded balance cycles. Their decisions, but not my personal evaluation of the whole dynamics necessary to truly compete -- AT THAT PARTICULAR TIME.

For those interested by this extremely small change.
It is on line #13340
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MaxSoldiers=5 \\
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From the XComMissions.INI file and its script section;
+arrMissions=(MissionName="AssaultNetworkTower_LW"....

Yeah right.. i'm a cheater. But gosh is it fun.

The mission was hardcoded to have a lower max number of soldiers in original XCOM 2 (3 there). Since the regular limit was upgraded to 8 in Long War 2, the current limit for the Network Tower mission is 5.

From what I understand Pavonis just used the original mission as a template and added their Long War 2 pods and reinforcements.

It makes it a bit more interesting, since you have to think what you would like to do during that mission.

Yet the context (by coincidence) of an important battle occurs at a time when we basicly have access to Lasers & maybe some Predator armors.. my dear 8wayz!! (How's the new Wiki comin' along?)

Yup -- sure anyone can delay *THESE* missions.. yet, instinctively we just don't want to stall progress towards getting to the other key aspect -- get the Doom-Tracker status up & running while we still should have the satisfaction of Liberating something, anything the "wise" way.

I find the Network Tower missions currently the most difficult ones, because of those 2 specific factors :
map layout is not in your favor
limited squad makes your soldier class pick critical

Note, I'm not complaining, on the contrary. I find those missions really challenging, and I haven't devised yet a good, reliable tactic despite having liberated 4 regions.

Map layout provides overall fewer high covers and those are defined mainly by buildings walls ; map is narrow which forces you to move forward and break concealment relatively early, first reinforcement comes 2 turns (maybe DE) after reveal and there is a high risk of being flanked ; it's not possible to remotely hack the objective ; u have to eliminate all hostiles...

You cannot leave a sniper on the first building you find because he may be directly spotted by reinforcement. Stealth shinobi movement is heavy impaired by layout. Same layout almost nullifies flamethrower usefulness... With a 5-man squad, I haven't found the right combination of classes to bring. Most successful squad composition yet was sting grenadier, gunner, ranger, assault, specialist, still progression is slow and 2nd reinforcement triggers before I even reach the hack station building.

So i'm fine with the current setting, it offers me currently great challenge in mid-game.

Oh so thats why ...

I assumed i was only allowed to bring 5 ppl because my region had 4-5 strength (low strength). Thought that the higher the strength the higher the number of ppl i can bring.

Currently these are very hard and you can't evac. In 1.2 you will be able to evac, but not sure if you can still win the mission if you do.

It is an important mission and worth taking risks for. You should do it sooner rather than later because advent will be reinforcing the area, with the effect of putting more enemies on this mission and the one that follows. You can infiltrate to 200% and remove a few enemies: probably worth doing (you can boost to speed it up).

There is one key feature which is when you hit the objective it stuns all the enemies for 2 turns and blocks any further reinforcements that aren't already inbound. There is no timer but you have to kill everything (currently).

I've only done one but I followed advice that worked well for me. If you can stealth the objective as far as possible, you don't get reinforcements. Also the enemies will be stunned in the open and easy to kill. Take your time, watch the patrol patterns, try to sneak by them. A squad probably won't be able to stealth all the way to the objective. So get as close as you can, preferably into a good fighting position and in vision of a couple of pods, and then try and go the rest of the way with a ghostwalker shinobi. When he hits the objective your squad starts slaughtering stunned enemies and your shinobi books it back to the squad. After two turns of everything stunned hopefully you've killed a fair few enemies safely and then you can tackle the rest with your small squad, taking as much time as you need. So other than the shinobi, you want killy classes like trenchgun assaults (xwynns did some beautiful work with these) and rifle rangers. A gunner with Hail of Bullets is really good too: area suppression for crowd control and he can also take out those hard-to-reach ayys. A technical would ne nice in theory, I just suck at using them effectively and mine was a clear LVP.

I don't like technicals or grenadiers in these because of limited ammo plus smaller pods. Rangers and gunners are magnificent here.

My most successful team so far was sniper (with clutch shot and QuickDraw), gunner, ranger (officer with face off and QuickDraw), assault, and shinobi. This is now my go to group for these.

I was able to get a bit past halfway before breaking cover, then kept the shinobi back with my team in stealth as I killed him an open path. He hit ghost walk and ran to the target. Then cleanup. Had three reinforcements but it went smooth.

I tried sending the shinobi ahead on several attempts but too many patrols and too much visibility. I find it is easier to let the team cut the opening, the exception was one time when we pulled everyone onto it me bridge and the shinobi went down the other unopposed.