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Increased Detection Radius...

As soon as I read it, I felt like "Well, I guess Im screwed now."

Then I thought, "Pff, Im overreacting to this. Play on, play smart."

Next mission there were the two red down marks denoting a negative status effect... "Oh, great, now I have that to look forward to on every mission to degrade my moral." Then while playing the mission there was so much red everywhere I though someone slaughtered a pig and rubbed its blood on my screen.

Here is my problem with the permanent dark events. You get a really terrible one that sucks really hard like Grazing Fire, or increased detection radius from a region you havent been able to contact yet... feels bad man. Thats what happened to me, got Increased Detection Radius from... somewhere.

That is a incredibly harsh event to be permanent. I understand that the tactical dark events are permanent, but honestly Increased Detection Radius needs to at best be temporary. Too much of the way the game is meant to be played is tied up in stealth. In vanilla IDR simple meant you would have your opening ambush be further away, or you may get detected around a blind corner further away for a while. In LW2 its just a giant FU massive difficulty spike in every mission, and there is no reasonable counter to it.

It doesnt seem to work like the other dark events where "some" enemies, or "random number" of enemies have the benefits. Increased Detection Radius appears to work as a status debuff on your soldiers. This means EVERY ENEMY has it. Its like how you have a larger detectable radius when you carry an assault rifle as opposed to a smg, except you have an invisible bell or buzzer attached to you making you an easier target for detection.

I dont mind challenging games (I beat Dark Souls... on PC, with a mouse and keyboard), and I like a lot of the challenges of LW2, but along with protect the data tap I now add this permanent Increased Detection Radius dark event as just plain unfair mechanics that are part of this mod. I sought out these forums and made an account just to type how displeased I am with this gross allowance of this extreme enemy enhancement... excuse me, permanent debuff to my soldiers.

TL;DR: Increased Detection Radius dark event feels bad man, feels unfair with the huge overall focus on stealth, every enemy gets it unlike most dark event buffs, needs to be taken out of dark event list or made temporary.

Jeeez, i actually got lucky and got to counter this one. But there is so much stuff that is annoying as hell. I wish we had some knowledge in which regions in the future these projects will be developed...

It's not permanent. Vigilance is an Ops dark event. I had it come around twice.

Skeazix wrote:It's not permanent. Vigilance is an Ops dark event. I had it come around twice.

Really?

I hope so. Most of those that are temporary say "for a month," and this one doesnt, and since it affects the tactical layre I was fairly certain this was just like every other tactical enhancment.

Your words give me hope though, and make me glad I didnt rage delete the save and start another campaign.

I guess I will wait and see, and update this topic when/if it goes away. I sure hope so. Enemies seeing my smg toting specialist 8-12 tiles away on a 200% infiltration mission seems crazy, but acceptable if it goes away at some point.

Vigilance does go away eventually. But it is a pain until it does. I hated it in vanilla, too, and it was usually my top priority to counter. It's even worse in LW2. Advent Guardians/Sentinels when you have Vigilance are a nightmare... they can damn near see through concealment out to full visual range. It's always a blast when you move two tiles out of your spawn location while carrying a SMG, and a Guardian or Sentinel spots you from halfway across the map because they were just barely out of visual range of the spawn point.

Oh, great. Just had Vigilance show up in my campaign, now about the end of April.

I've only had a realistic opportunity to counter ONE Dark Event. At this point I just consider them all permanent and basically ignore them.

The only ones I even notice and change my play style for are the Faceless infiltration and Rapid Response.

There are a lot of annoying Dark Events out there, but Vigilance really does seem to be the winner for making your missions thoroughly miserable while it's active.

Saph7 wrote:There are a lot of annoying Dark Events out there, but Vigilance really does seem to be the winner for making your missions thoroughly miserable while it's active.

Infestation and infiltrators are also good contenders, the only reason they don't take the top spot is because battlescanners exist.

Yeah, vigiliance popped 2 months in for me and it was pretty annoying. It didn't actually stop me at all from running tons of stealth operations for the month or so it was active, though, since 9 aliens per mission is still pretty easy to avoid if you hug the side of the map. It does make the detection radius for surveillance bots hilariously large (and these were definitely the biggest riskbringers), but sightlines are generally manageable and you can get away with a lot with ghostwalker and suppressors.

Yeah Vigilance is definitely one of the worst to get, as it makes stealth missions significantly harder. Perhaps once the balance of stealth vs combat is addressed, this Dark Event won't be so brutal.

Vigilance is not permanent, thread lost its meaning.

It's still quite playable as long you infiltrate to 200% and have smg shinobis with covert/ghostwalker.

It is in fact temporary.

You can understand my confusion on that as the alert doesnt say "for a month" like a few others, and its affect is in the tactical layer where every other DE is permanent.

Its passed in my campaign (glad its gone). Thank you for those who informed me of its temporary nature.

You can understand my confusion on that as the alert doesnt say "for a month" like a few others, and its affect is in the tactical layer where every other DE is permanent.

I definitely understand your confusion. There are some events which I suspect are permanent (like alien conditioning) but aren't listed as tactical (which are supposed to be permanent). The labels in game are inconsistent to begin with, which combined with the mystery of how many enemies do they actually effect makes the dark event system a hot soup of discontent and confusion.

trihero wrote:

You can understand my confusion on that as the alert doesnt say "for a month" like a few others, and its affect is in the tactical layer where every other DE is permanent.

I definitely understand your confusion. There are some events which I suspect are permanent (like alien conditioning) but aren't listed as tactical (which are supposed to be permanent). The labels in game are inconsistent to begin with, which combined with the mystery of how many enemies do they actually effect makes the dark event system a hot soup of discontent and confusion.

Which Dark Event is Alient Conditioning? I know there are 3 +1 HP Tactical DEs but I don't think you're talking about them.

I think it does the same thing, it's literally called Alien Conditioning and doesn't say tactical upgrade on it. It says something like aliens field tougher units, which I take to mean additional hp.

trihero wrote:I think it does the same thing, it's literally called Alien Conditioning and doesn't say tactical upgrade on it. It says something like aliens field tougher units, which I take to mean additional hp.

Hrm... *checks more files*
Okay, checking the localization files turns out it is exactly what I was thinking. Alien Conditioning is the first of the three +1 HP tactical DEs. The other two are Alien Adaptations and Alien Survivability.
Config files refer to them as Conditioning 1, 2 and 3

Oh, they don't say "tactical upgrade" when you look at the dark events list. It just says "alien conditioning."

I've also wondered what other dark events are actually permanent. I suspect firewalls is permanent but I can't be sure, it doesn't say tactical when you look at your dark events list.

Not sure about viper rounds either, it feels like they've been around in my campaign for 5 months or more but it's not listed as a tactical upgrade.

trihero wrote:Oh, they don't say "tactical upgrade" when you look at the dark events list. It just says "alien conditioning."

I've also wondered what other dark events are actually permanent. I suspect firewalls is permanent but I can't be sure, it doesn't say tactical when you look at your dark events list.

Not sure about viper rounds either, it feels like they've been around in my campaign for 5 months or more but it's not listed as a tactical upgrade.

Hrm... And... Aha, here it is. An amazing spreadsheet made by sectoidfodder, it's in the 201 subforum as well I believe. It's for a few things, but also has a list of tactical DEs taken right off the configuration files - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

As it is, none of the vanilla Dark Events are Tactical, such as Viper Rounds. You'll notice his sheet lacks information for it, even, because it's nowhere to be seen in the LW2 files, meaning it haven't been changed.

Viper Rounds have definitely been up for a loooong time in my campaign

We definitely need something in the description to tell how long a given DE lasts.

I had a feeling firewalls was also tactical, even though it's not listed as such in game.

Yeah, how long do viper rounds last?

Strategic DEs are supposed to last just a month.
On the other hand they can chain like crazy, and the volume of missions in LW2 really skews what 'one month' feels like.

JulianSkies wrote:Strategic DEs are supposed to last just a month.
On the other hand they can chain like crazy, and the volume of missions in LW2 really skews what 'one month' feels like.

No, it's not just a feeling, for instance someone in another thread dug in the code and found out the strategic haven infiltrators lasts for 45-60 days. Viper rounds has definitely been around for longer than that in my game, since haven infiltrators for me came after that AND disappeared while viper rounds is still up. There is something more than "skewing" going on.

trihero wrote:

JulianSkies wrote:Strategic DEs are supposed to last just a month.
On the other hand they can chain like crazy, and the volume of missions in LW2 really skews what 'one month' feels like.

No, it's not just a feeling, for instance someone in another thread dug in the code and found out the strategic haven infiltrators lasts for 45-60 days. Viper rounds has definitely been around for longer than that in my game, since haven infiltrators for me came after that AND disappeared while viper rounds is still up. There is something more than "skewing" going on.

Aha, I see. I never really counted how long strategic dark events last, I never cared to.

I'm pretty sure Viper Rounds is permanent. In my current campaign, it was one of the earliest DEs that popped up, even before the first +1 HP DE, MECs and Mutons were just showing up as the newest, biggest, baddest enemies on missions, and I hadn't liberated my first region. It is now late game, I've got Gatekeepers, three liberated regions, and a DE list as long as my arm... and Viper Rounds are still there.