What determines when Faceless appear on a regular mission?

[Alketi]

I was doing the 3rd mission in the Liberation chain, without the Faceless Dark Event active, and I had a civilian turn into a Faceless. He actually killed a soldier when he blew up the car he was hiding behind.

This was the first time I've ever had a civilian turn into a Faceless on a regular mission.

Can someone explain the "regular mission" Faceless mechanic?

- Is there a chance that any civilian could be a Faceless on any mission?
- Does it require Faceless to be in your Haven?
- Is it only on Liberation missions?

[trihero]

1) there is a dark event which specifically places faceless on regular missions

2) even if that dark event is not up, I have noticed on the liberation missions, when advent strength or force level is high enough I don't know for sure which one it is, then you should expect faceless in city-type missions. I'm sorry I don't know the exact specifics of which month or what force/alert it is, but at some point in the game it becomes a regular thing, and early in the game it never happens.

It has nothing to do with faceless in your haven, I've gone entire months free of faceless in havens and still see them in the cities.

[Devon_v]

It's just something that can happen on Lib 3. The Faceless is/are an "undercover" bodyguard for the VIP.

[cerebrawl]

I think you need to have made your first haven spy mission for them to show up too, though there may be a timer as well. You can avoid faceless for quite some time by not putting soldiers as haven advisors.

[Sir_Dr_D]

The first time I ever saw a faceless in the game was in a capture dark VIP mission.

[KevlinTallfellow]

I've gone on a mission before, in a city center, that I'm pretty sure was some kind of faceless "trap". I think it was 9 or 10 civilians turned into goop monsters while I was trying to work my way to the objective, and I'm pretty sure this was *before* I got the dark event that puts faceless on every mission.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's the equivalent to the zombie apocalypse terror mission from LW1.

The bottom line is, if you see *anyone* that isn't in your squad, be fully prepared for them to break your concealment and/or blow up the vehicle that half your guys are hiding behind, because sooner or later, that's going to happen, and it will probably be pretty spectacular.

[trihero]

I kinda wish I knew the details on how many tiles away you have to be for a faceless to activate. I know it generally has something to do with being within a blue move + attack range of them.

I get very spooked when doing lib3 in the middle to late game when I see a bunch of civs everywhere

It's also an excellent reason to bring overwatch specced rangers to city missions.

[Jacke]

I kinda wish I knew the details on how many tiles away you have to be for a faceless to activate. I know it generally has something to do with being within a blue move + attack range of them.

I imagine if you have a non-Ironman game with autosave and you "stumble" across a civvy turning into a Faceless, it might be worth loading the earliest autosave, making a permanent save, and do some testing.

Here I was feeling back about a VIP vehicle extract in which a civvy got blasted by my pod-cracking grenade. Considering they were hanging out right beside aliens bad enough to count as nightmare fuel, I'd now say at best there were dirty collaborators and at worst they were damn Faceless. Can't target them. Makes me want to have more grenades, rockets, and flamethrower shots.

[Alketi]

I kinda wish I knew the details on how many tiles away you have to be for a faceless to activate. I know it generally has something to do with being within a blue move + attack range of them.

Yes, triggering can happen somewhere within their BLUE attack range.

In my case, the civilian was across the street, and I only had one soldier on overwatch, as I had no idea about the connection between Faceless and Liberation 3.

Apparently all environmental damage was nerfed except for Faceless damage. Mine blew up a car. I watched a YouTube LW2 video where, with each swipe, a Faceless destroyed the roof of a building, killing both soldiers who fell.

It would be nice to have the Faceless/Liberation 3 mechanic explained in a pre-mission pop-up. The beta testers all know the mechanic, and it's passed around as tribal knowledge on the message boards, why not explain to the player when there's a possibility that civilians are Faceless?

[trihero]

Apparently all environmental damage was nerfed except for Faceless damage. Mine blew up a car.

That's a really good point, I hadn't thought about it but it is obvious in retrospect. I don't think it needs to be changed or anything but yeah you totally need to play around faceless blowing up cars on you, I've learned that the hard way and sometimes I still forget : /

It would be nice to have the Faceless/Liberation 3 mechanic explained in a pre-mission pop-up. The beta testers all know the mechanic, and it's passed around as tribal knowledge on the message boards, why not explain to the player when there's a possibility that civilians are Faceless?

I'm a little bit on the fence about this one. I totally hate a lot of the hidden mechanics in the game (like the hidden thresholds for retaliations, doom counters, etc), but I'm actually ok with being "surprised" by meeting new tactical situations that are avoidable and can be learned intuitively within a couple tries. I think it's super fun for the first time to get owned by an enemy, like the feels you get when you first skulljacked that officer, or realized mutons have plasma grenades, or got rekt by the gatekeeper's mass rez, etc.

[you_would_not_believe]

Ever since vanilla, I have found them to be a bit of an "unfair" and counter-intuitive unit considering how the Firaxis' XCOM has been about allowing you to react to any situation and have a chance to prevent taking damage. With time considerations, either through explicit timers or civilian defence, positioning yourself to engage current pods while simultaneously trying not to trigger others, and now throwing in the alert reactions LW2 brings, space is at a premium and positioning is key. The possibility that you can move just within range of something innocuous that won't present itself until you can't do anything about it is a bit rich, especially in missions like these where you have no reason to believe they will be there. I thought the goal was to promote a more aggressive push forward, not even more laboured overwatch trap moves.

In XComGameData_SoldierSkills.ini there is the variable CIVILIAN_MORPH_RANGE_METERS, which by default is 3.75. I'm not sure how this translates to tiles, but I'm pretty sure it only dictates the range at which they will reveal on your turn, similar to how their immediate reveal range when concealed is 1 (or 2?) tiles.

[Devon_v]

I've gone on a mission before, in a city center, that I'm pretty sure was some kind of faceless "trap". I think it was 9 or 10 civilians turned into goop monsters while I was trying to work my way to the objective, and I'm pretty sure this was *before* I got the dark event that puts faceless on every mission.

It was, in fact, a trap. The game data calls them Snare missions. There's the one where everybody's Faceless, and there's the one where ADVENT drops troops on you every turn once they spot you. From what I recall the rewards for the missions aren't quite normal, and they have really attractive timers to lure you in to them.

[trihero]

I've gone on a mission before, in a city center, that I'm pretty sure was some kind of faceless "trap". I think it was 9 or 10 civilians turned into goop monsters while I was trying to work my way to the objective, and I'm pretty sure this was *before* I got the dark event that puts faceless on every mission.

It was, in fact, a trap. The game data calls them Snare missions. There's the one where everybody's Faceless, and there's the one where ADVENT drops troops on you every turn once they spot you. From what I recall the rewards for the missions aren't quite normal, and they have really attractive timers to lure you in to them.

I'm not so sure, I thought the Snare mission was a hack mission specifically. I've seen the mass faceless thing in lib3 dark VIP without the "snare's" mass reinforcements."

[KevlinTallfellow]

Also, if they're quickly becoming your new Favored Enemy, you can always take some battle scanners for your scout to toss into crowds of civilians. If there are any faceless in there, they'll be revealed, and if they don't have line of sight on any of your guys, they'll just stand there next to their friend after transforming.

And the friend doesn't seem to care at all.

So don't feel bad about blowing up normal civilians. They're kinda asking for it.

[Devon_v]

I've gone on a mission before, in a city center, that I'm pretty sure was some kind of faceless "trap". I think it was 9 or 10 civilians turned into goop monsters while I was trying to work my way to the objective, and I'm pretty sure this was *before* I got the dark event that puts faceless on every mission.

It was, in fact, a trap. The game data calls them Snare missions. There's the one where everybody's Faceless, and there's the one where ADVENT drops troops on you every turn once they spot you. From what I recall the rewards for the missions aren't quite normal, and they have really attractive timers to lure you in to them.

I'm not so sure, I thought the Snare mission was a hack mission specifically. I've seen the mass faceless thing in lib3 dark VIP without the "snare's" mass reinforcements."

There should be two Snares, I thought the other was mass Faceless. It's definitely a possible setup for Lib3.



Honestly even in vanilla I thought there should be some sort of penalty on civilian kills. Like ADVENT lampposts capture footage of it and use it in their propaganda films which does some sort of damage to the resistance' s effort, or the soldier who took the shot is automatically Shaken after the mission.

[trihero]

Honestly even in vanilla I thought there should be some sort of penalty on civilian kills. Like ADVENT lampposts capture footage of it and use it in their propaganda films which does some sort of damage to the resistance' s effort, or the soldier who took the shot is automatically Shaken after the mission.

Collateral damage? T_T

I can imagine Bradford with counter-propaganda saying with that silky smooth voice: "those civilians leaped into the radius of our rocket launchers, not the other way around. They knew what was coming."

[AegixDrakan]

I've gone on a mission before, in a city center, that I'm pretty sure was some kind of faceless "trap". I think it was 9 or 10 civilians turned into goop monsters while I was trying to work my way to the objective, and I'm pretty sure this was *before* I got the dark event that puts faceless on every mission.

It was, in fact, a trap. The game data calls them Snare missions. There's the one where everybody's Faceless, and there's the one where ADVENT drops troops on you every turn once they spot you. From what I recall the rewards for the missions aren't quite normal, and they have really attractive timers to lure you in to them.

REALLY?! There are trap missions?!

Holy moly this mod keeps getting better and better.

[nightwyrm]

I've gone on a mission before, in a city center, that I'm pretty sure was some kind of faceless "trap". I think it was 9 or 10 civilians turned into goop monsters while I was trying to work my way to the objective, and I'm pretty sure this was *before* I got the dark event that puts faceless on every mission.

It was, in fact, a trap. The game data calls them Snare missions. There's the one where everybody's Faceless, and there's the one where ADVENT drops troops on you every turn once they spot you. From what I recall the rewards for the missions aren't quite normal, and they have really attractive timers to lure you in to them.

REALLY?! There are trap missions?!

Holy moly this mod keeps getting better and better.

There are actual trap missions where the game tempts you with better than usual rewards, but those are limited to hacking missions. Lib3 (maybe other dark VIP missions as well) just naturally have a bunch of facelesses running around.