Is this a Bug or a Bad Joke?

[Psieye]

fact that some players think it's a bug shows that in practice it doesn't work for everyone

It's a reflection of the general view of XCOM 2: there are bugs in the game. Some indicator that "yes you are supposed to get all these reinforcements would be good but not sure what a mod author can do.

[Zyrrashijn]

Suggestion: There's a line Bradford says during the Avenger Defense: "The situation just got worse, more of em coming in and they got battleships in toe..." It's been a while, so i don't remember correctly. This one has a trigger and is already existing. Wouldn't that make a suitable addition?

[mr.Manul]

It should not be like that, because it is "difficulty through obscurity" coz you initially do not know this rule, and after figuring this out, you, as a commander, can assign someone from avenger staff to compare mission difficulty and region strength for you automatically, and be warned in those cases. Otherwise you are forced to check manually every mission, which is not fun and does not even require strategic thinking, just a boring math check every time. And even being detected, these missions can actually be attractive to run, if it is a dark event stopper or a good reward.

[Tuhalu]

The worst part of a snare mission, the first time you get it, is that you can't even play around it except by luck. If you go into one with a 4 turn evac timer, you can just lose a few guys before the evac is ready with all those enemies dropping in. In 1.3, you'll have to be exceptionally lucky to get a short evac timer due to all the evac nerfs.

Once you do figure out a workaround, it's not so bad. The initial shock is pretty rude though.

[Psieye]

So there's 2 separate discussions going on at once here:

1) "Players feel there's a bug when discovering in-mission that it's a snare". That's a valid concern - some signal should be sent that 'this is working as intended'.

2) "Players want perfect information - false intel is heretical". That I don't side with. If anything, the snare missions need to be hidden better than currently so you can't 'work around' them by comparing data. The only solution should be to remove faceless aggressively.

[Antifringe]

So there's 2 separate discussions going on at once here:

1) "Players feel there's a bug when discovering in-mission that it's a snare". That's a valid concern - some signal should be sent that 'this is working as intended'.

2) "Players want perfect information - false intel is heretical". That I don't side with. If anything, the snare missions need to be hidden better than currently so you can't 'work around' them by comparing data. The only solution should be to remove faceless aggressively.

Agree with this and the comments made by mr.Manul.

My first snare mission, I almost reported it as a bug. I mean, it sure looks like a bug.

I'm not sure how to deal with this. Repurposing a VO won't really solve it. The supporting characters are always, constantly, telling you that whatever you're doing right now is super dangerous. Non-specific warnings are just background noise, and the player is actually trained to ignore them by the game. Remember how Vahlen said you need to treat Seekers with "extreme caution?" Do you also remember how your team of rookies one shotted the whole pod with their sawed offs? Yeah. So when I get a VO saying "OMG, enemy reinforcements!!111!!" I don't think "I should drop what I'm doing and evac right now." What I think is "Shut up, Bradford."

I am okay with snares existing, in the same way that I am okay with retaliations existing. 90% of the time, the strategy layer is about the player making moves against an essentially passive ADVENT "player." I am okay with the other player occasionally being allowed to make a move. Snares are one of the few ADVENT activities that can actually hurt XCOM in a way that really matters. But they're only dangerous if they're convincingly mixed in with the other missions. As it stands, they're very easy to identify if you know the hidden rules. But a strategy game shouldn't be based on the players just not knowing the rules (do not confuse this with the player not having access to all the information, which is a very different thing). The mechanics should still be interesting and challenging even when the player understands them.

The worst part of a snare mission, the first time you get it, is that you can't even play around it except by luck. If you go into one with a 4 turn evac timer, you can just lose a few guys before the evac is ready with all those enemies dropping in. In 1.3, you'll have to be exceptionally lucky to get a short evac timer due to all the evac nerfs.

Not really, I think? Snares have a detection chance of 85%, and a rebel income threshold of flat zero. You will almost always detect them on the very first day that they spawn, and usually within the very first six hours. They should always be able to infiltrate them to whatever level you want. Since you can control your squad size and infiltration level, there's no luck element involved with the evac timer on this specific type of mission.

[Tuhalu]

The worst part of a snare mission, the first time you get it, is that you can't even play around it except by luck. If you go into one with a 4 turn evac timer, you can just lose a few guys before the evac is ready with all those enemies dropping in. In 1.3, you'll have to be exceptionally lucky to get a short evac timer due to all the evac nerfs.

Not really, I think? Snares have a detection chance of 85%, and a rebel income threshold of flat zero. You will almost always detect them on the very first day that they spawn, and usually within the very first six hours. They should always be able to infiltrate them to whatever level you want. Since you can control your squad size and infiltration level, there's no luck element involved with the evac timer on this specific type of mission.

Emphasis included. The first time you get one, you don't know you need to infiltrate to 200% and stealth like a ninja to beat it. There is every chance you'll think going in with a 6 man combat team and shooting everything is going to be a cake walk, so you don't need to try and 200% infiltrate.

Further, in 1.3 they are removing the evac delay reduction for small squads (size 1-3) and increasing all evac times by 1 turn on Legend. So on normal difficulties, 2 turn evacs for 200% infiltration is absolute best and on legend it's 3 turns (until you have Air Controller officer perk on an officer). So the pain is going to be even worse for future new players.

[LordYanaek]

It all comes down to documentation. If new players don't know such a mission can exist they are good for a squadwipe without having made a strategic or tactical mistake. Being squadwiped due to your mistakes is part of the game but being squadwiped for apparently no good reason can certainly be frustrating.

Is there any hint in the in-game help that such a mission can exist or is it totally obscured? I don't think players should necessarily have access to every in-game variable to turn the strategic layer into a big spreadsheet a la joinrbs but some clues of what's going on is needed.

[Saph7]

Honestly, the biggest impression I'm getting from a lot of these posts is that 1.2 is really not doing a good enough job of driving home the lesson that doing missions in high strength regions is dangerous. The whole point of LW2 is that it's supposed to simulate a guerrilla war. You are NOT supposed to fight Advent where they're strong; you're supposed to fight them where they're weak.

I suspect a lot of the problem is the prevalence of stealth in 1.2, which has allowed players to largely ignore Advent Strength since most of their missions are stealth ops (where you don't care about fighting) and the rest are no-timer sweeps (where you're bringing home the corpses so a large number of enemies is just fine). So possibly Snare missions are going to be less of an issue in 1.3, since a few attempts at doing timed missions at Strength 6 will probably make players realise that they really don't want to do them at Strength 7+.

[jfoevv820ueb]

I think it would a good indicator if "Evac all XCOM soldiers" was added to the mission objectives right when concealment is broken, along with one of the unused soldier voice lines that indicates a trap (they exist, I've heard them in game before for some reason, they're just never used). I feel like that would be a pretty good indicator of the fact that you should probably leave.

Honestly, the biggest impression I'm getting from a lot of these posts is that 1.2 is really not doing a good enough job of driving home the lesson that doing missions in high strength regions is dangerous. The whole point of LW2 is that it's supposed to simulate a guerrilla war. You are NOT supposed to fight Advent where they're strong; you're supposed to fight them where they're weak.

Really agree with this. High strength regions never really felt like something I should avoid, just something that I should wait for longer missions in and were a pain to keep a hold of.

[hairlessOrphan]

Honestly, the biggest impression I'm getting from a lot of these posts is that 1.2 is really not doing a good enough job of driving home the lesson that doing missions in high strength regions is dangerous. The whole point of LW2 is that it's supposed to simulate a guerrilla war. You are NOT supposed to fight Advent where they're strong; you're supposed to fight them where they're weak.

I suspect a lot of the problem is the prevalence of stealth in 1.2, which has allowed players to largely ignore Advent Strength since most of their missions are stealth ops (where you don't care about fighting) and the rest are no-timer sweeps (where you're bringing home the corpses so a large number of enemies is just fine). So possibly Snare missions are going to be less of an issue in 1.3, since a few attempts at doing timed missions at Strength 6 will probably make players realise that they really don't want to do them at Strength 7+.

Totally agree with the first half. If the changes in 1.3 do what you're hoping they do, then the snare mission should be cut. There's no need for a gimmick to make high-strength regions dangerous, and it's better if the system *naturally* makes a region too dangerous instead of just dumping a snare mission on you in an artificial attempt to push you out of a region you're handling just fine. If your team can handle S7 regions, you should be allowed to do them. You should, as a player, be allowed to play as high as you can.

[Monochrome]

This problem, like others in LW2, is in the UI not reporting known information to the player as best it could. This could be very simply solved by having a warning section in the mission preview panel, by/under the expected difficulty rating (Very Light, etc.), saying something like "Enemy activity seems to be much lighter than we'd expect for a region with this strength. This is a bit suspicious...". Or an icon with a tooltip, or something else. There are plenty of possibilities.

Another simple, but not as good, solution would be to have a popup box come up after the mission has finished, saying something like "Clearly ADVENT had laid a trap - in the future we should be on guard for other easy-looking missions in high-strength regions."

Very experienced players will already know to check the region strength; the current situation only punishes newer players.

There's no damage to immersion with presenting this information, either. After all, the resistance operatives & soldiers would already know the general strength in the region and what to normally expect, so if they found it to be much lighter than expected they'd naturally get suspicious.

Personally, I think trap-missions add a nice bit of flavour, even if I'm now always super-paranoid about mass-faceless Liberation missions...

[LordYanaek]

Not arguing for or against snare but if it's there to stay making it more obvious that something is wrong (or unusual) is probably a good idea.

I spent some time listening to various audio cues from Central and i'm pretty sure with some editing it would be possible to create a nice "it's a trap" audio file but doing this for every language would be a big task for what's ultimately a very limited issue.

However i found a cue from Shen in the tutorial that sounds nicely like something is definitely wrong (including her tone). Throwing this line after Central announces RNFs and then having him suggest an evac would certainly inform the player that something is wrong but not due to a bug.

Menace 1-5, be advised, we've picked up hostile reinforcements inbound on your position.

The entire ADVENT security grid just lit up! Firebrand is holding nearby for EVAC, but it's now or never Central!

Commander, we're losing control of the area of operations rapidly. We should consider pulling out the squad and regrouping.

This would involve using those 3 files in a raw. Hopefully it wouldn't require a lot of coding. No experience here so maybe it's another dumb idea but then, maybe not so i'm throwing it.

Code: Select all

SoundSpeechTacticalCentral/CEN_Sabotage_RNFIncoming
SoundSpeechTacticalShen/T_Setup_Phase_Combat_Tutorial_Shen_71
SoundSpeechTacticalCentral/CEN_Gen_SecureRetreat_03

[Sootytx]

Not arguing for or against snare but if it's there to stay making it more obvious that something is wrong (or unusual) is probably a good idea.

I spent some time listening to various audio cues from Central and i'm pretty sure with some editing it would be possible to create a nice "it's a trap" audio file but doing this for every language would be a big task for what's ultimately a very limited issue.

However i found a cue from Shen in the tutorial that sounds nicely like something is definitely wrong (including her tone). Throwing this line after Central announces RNFs and then having him suggest an evac would certainly inform the player that something is wrong but not due to a bug.

Menace 1-5, be advised, we've picked up hostile reinforcements inbound on your position.

The entire ADVENT security grid just lit up! Firebrand is holding nearby for EVAC, but it's now or never Central!

Commander, we're losing control of the area of operations rapidly. We should consider pulling out the squad and regrouping.

This would involve using those 3 files in a raw. Hopefully it wouldn't require a lot of coding. No experience here so maybe it's another dumb idea but then, maybe not so i'm throwing it.

Code: Select all

SoundSpeechTacticalCentral/CEN_Sabotage_RNFIncoming
SoundSpeechTacticalShen/T_Setup_Phase_Combat_Tutorial_Shen_71
SoundSpeechTacticalCentral/CEN_Gen_SecureRetreat_03

Pretty much agree with all you've said on this thread. it's not the fact of the mission that's the issue, it's that, like so much else in LW2, it's more "difficulty through obscurity" than actual difficulty. Far too many hidden mechanics and things like this that require either extensive note taking through multiple playthroughs to work out or an evening or three studying the UFOpeadia and these forums just to get a basic idea of how the game actually works. Both those options are pretty much BS for the average player and certainly not fun for the vast majority.

It doesn't even need to be an audio file though, although there are certainly a couple from the avenger defense that could easily be pulled to indicate something very different is going on. At the end of the mission a pop-up after the mission rewards screen could be very easily added that gives a debrief from Central that the mission was a trap and some context about Advent strength in the area and the apparent ease of the initial mission being a red flag we should watch out for in the future. Give the player a chance to learn IN THE GAME without having to have an eidetic memory or 15 notebooks full of reference material.

I think a huge part of the problem is that very influential playtesters (people like XWYNN) are too close to the project, know the inner workings to well and are totally oblivious to the fact that most players neither know nor really care about having a deep understanding of all the hidden mechanics, and nor should they - this is supposed to be for fun, not another job.

[Psieye]

doing missions in high strength regions is dangerous. The whole point of LW2 is that it's supposed to simulate a guerrilla war. You are NOT supposed to fight Advent where they're strong; you're supposed to fight them where they're weak.

The problem: what number counts as 'high'? On my very first campaign, I thought 4 strength was prohibitively bad and never attempted a mission from such regions.

It's like retals - there's a magic threshold that acts as a binary switch to turn on certain features. I say it's better for snares to work like the proposed 1.3 retal mechanic: no threshold, gradual (increasing until triggered) chance that any guerilla mission gets designated a snare if you have faceless. Extra rule that the evac flare can re-aimed if it turns out to be a snare mission, even for supposed fixed-evac ones.

[Antifringe]

I think a huge part of the problem is that very influential playtesters (people like XWYNN) are too close to the project, know the inner workings to well and are totally oblivious to the fact that most players neither know nor really care about having a deep understanding of all the hidden mechanics, and nor should they - this is supposed to be for fun, not another job.

That's unfounded and completely unfair. LW2 has a testing team of some 20 odd people, if I remember correctly. XWynns and Joinrbs are merely the two most publicly-facing members of the team. They don't have a special channel to the devs that the rest of the team lacks. They've even said a few times that their suggestions are merely added to the pile. They're the Legendary testers, the devs know that, and they know that Legendary is the extreme setting.

The testers are doing this work for free. It's completely unfair to arbitrarily blame them for faults in the game, real or perceived, when they are not even the developers and are not in charge of any of the decision making. This has not been the first time people have tried to blame them for stuff that is expressly not their fault, and it probably won't be the last, but I can at least register a note of compliant about it.

Seriously, it's borderline crazy to think that snares, their specific implementation, or the amount of documentation regarding them is somehow XWynn's fault, especially since he has specially stated that the lack of in game information is a problem.

[Saph7]

The problem: what number counts as 'high'? On my very first campaign, I thought 4 strength was prohibitively bad and never attempted a mission from such regions.

1-2 is low, 3 is low-moderate, 4 is moderate, 5 is moderate-high, 6 is high, 7+ is very high. At least those are my own mental labels. There's room to argue over where you draw the line, but if you're able to consistently do timed missions in strength 7+ regions, it's probably a sign that either you're on a very low difficulty relative to your skill level or the game needs rebalancing.

Advent strength will have a much greater impact on mission difficulty in 1.3, so it's possible this issue will become moot with the new patch.

[Sir_Dr_D]

The fact that Long War tries to support so many languages probably hurts them at times. it makes it hard to add or change content, and give proper in game feedback.

But there really needs to be some in game help about advent strength. And I don't mean in UFOpedia, as most people probably don't read that. The fact is that most people don't expect the aliens to react with any sort of smartness, as the way the game is designed, it doesn't look like they do.

For the most part, except for Faceless, there is no logic as to way aliens are there. Their is no in game explanation for why a certain of troop, such as Mutons, when they appear suddenly appear everywhere regardless of mission type or regional strength. I would expect their to be Mutons in war zones where high conflict is expected. But Mutons would be bored in doing guard duty ,and shouldn't be in 1 strength regions. And beserkers especially should only seen on missions where the aliens are doing aggressive actions against XCOM. They would be to hard for the aliens to control other wise.

And the aliens patrols make little sense either. it is just random. It is not as if we can understand their purpose and patrol zones, so we can use logic to avoid them.

So wWe cannot use logic to determine what sorts of aliens will be in an area, or what they will do. It is really just very gamey. The aliens are just obviously there so that there is an ever increasing difficultly for the player. Only Faceless seem to be in any location for a strategic reason on the aliens part. Then to have some things we can actually use logic for, just seems out of place, and needs obvious documentation for. Things like the trap missions just seem to pop up out of nowhere, as for the most part their seems to be no rhyme or reason for anything the aliens do.

[Psieye]

The problem: what number counts as 'high'? On my very first campaign, I thought 4 strength was prohibitively bad and never attempted a mission from such regions.

1-2 is low, 3 is low-moderate, 4 is moderate, 5 is moderate-high, 6 is high, 7+ is very high. At least those are my own mental labels. There's room to argue over where you draw the line, but if you're able to consistently do timed missions in strength 7+ regions, it's probably a sign that either you're on a very low difficulty relative to your skill level or the game needs rebalancing.

Advent strength will have a much greater impact on mission difficulty in 1.3, so it's possible this issue will become moot with the new patch.

Probing the higher strength missions requires spending time on intel. LW2 is already pushing newbies hard to min/max as much as they can, how many would 'risk' setting rebels on intel in a region they feel is 'too high', even if that threshold is as low as 3 or 4? Without knowing how far this 'strength' number can go up, how should they know if this is "1 to 5" or "1 to 20"?

[sarge945]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA

[Sootytx]

I think a huge part of the problem is that very influential playtesters (people like XWYNN) are too close to the project, know the inner workings to well and are totally oblivious to the fact that most players neither know nor really care about having a deep understanding of all the hidden mechanics, and nor should they - this is supposed to be for fun, not another job.

That's unfounded and completely unfair. LW2 has a testing team of some 20 odd people, if I remember correctly. XWynns and Joinrbs are merely the two most publicly-facing members of the team. They don't have a special channel to the devs that the rest of the team lacks. They've even said a few times that their suggestions are merely added to the pile. They're the Legendary testers, the devs know that, and they know that Legendary is the extreme setting.

The testers are doing this work for free. It's completely unfair to arbitrarily blame them for faults in the game, real or perceived, when they are not even the developers and are not in charge of any of the decision making. This has not been the first time people have tried to blame them for stuff that is expressly not their fault, and it probably won't be the last, but I can at least register a note of compliant about it.

Seriously, it's borderline crazy to think that snares, their specific implementation, or the amount of documentation regarding them is somehow XWynn's fault, especially since he has specially stated that the lack of in game information is a problem.

Woah, calm down - who said anything about blaming the testers? If you read what I actually wrote, I place the fault squalrely at the doorstep of the devs thensleves. All I'm saying is that the testers are too close to the issue to see a problem, because they know the inner workings too well. That's a problem with small test groups throughout the industry and why so so many projects enter more extended testing and are found to have major flaws. The inner circle, THROUGH NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN, are simply too close to the project to see issues that may be glaringly obvious to less invested players.

And, to be fair, XWynn himself is a lot closer than you try to portray, as he mentioned in a recent video that it he directly wrote at least one set of combat modifiers (I forget which). But again, not blaming him, just pointing out that its a poor testing process that will inevitably lead to numerous issues for many players. Maybe next time read the whole post and stop to think before jumping to conclusions about one insignificant aspect that you've misinterpreted.

[DaviBones]

Woah, calm down - who said anything about blaming the testers? If you read what I actually wrote, I place the fault squalrely at the doorstep of the devs thensleves. All I'm saying is that the testers are too close to the issue to see a problem, because they know the inner workings too well. That's a problem with small test groups throughout the industry and why so so many projects enter more extended testing and are found to have major flaws. The inner circle, THROUGH NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN, are simply too close to the project to see issues that may be glaringly obvious to less invested players.

And, to be fair, XWynn himself is a lot closer than you try to portray, as he mentioned in a recent video that it he directly wrote at least one set of combat modifiers (I forget which). But again, not blaming him, just pointing out that its a poor testing process that will inevitably lead to numerous issues for many players. Maybe next time read the whole post and stop to think before jumping to conclusions about one insignificant aspect that you've misinterpreted.

You may be right -- testers may not actually "test" snares because they simply skip them, being able to easily recognize them. However, xwynns and JoINrbs are poor examples because they are specifically testing Legendary difficulty, which is designed to be beatable only with near-perfect play, including being able to recognize and skip snare missions. If it were revealed that ALL of the play-testers never did snare missions because they recognized them, I would absolutely agree with you. However, we just don't know, so we can't really make a definitive judgement here.

... if you're able to consistently do timed missions in strength 7+ regions, it's probably a sign that either you're on a very low difficulty relative to your skill level or the game needs rebalancing.

Absolutely agree with this. Advent strength of 7 should be terrifying, and should be putting you on the edge of your seat during the mission, even if for some unholy reason you decide the rewards are actually worth the risk.

Another simple, but not as good, solution would be to have a popup box come up after the mission has finished, saying something like "Clearly ADVENT had laid a trap - in the future we should be on guard for other easy-looking missions in high-strength regions."

This is the best suggestion I have seen so far. Doesn't require voice-over shenanigans, ensures the player that the experience was in fact intentional, not a bug, and helps teach new players to take note of the regional strength before doing missions.

[LordYanaek]

Another simple, but not as good, solution would be to have a popup box come up after the mission has finished, saying something like "Clearly ADVENT had laid a trap - in the future we should be on guard for other easy-looking missions in high-strength regions."

This is the best suggestion I have seen so far. Doesn't require voice-over shenanigans, ensures the player that the experience was in fact intentional, not a bug, and helps teach new players to take note of the regional strength before doing missions.

I may be wrong but i think "voice-over shenanigans" would actually be easier to code than a special post-mission pop-up (provided they use existing lines). Also if the only information comes after the mission you'll see as many complains because it comes "too late", "the developers are taunting them" or something similar.
A warning coming with the first RNF would help new players realize something is wrong with that mission so they could decide whether they want to take risks completing the objective or try to "run for their lives". It wouldn't trivialize the mission as even if they call evac immediately they'll have to wait for Firebrand but at lest it would give them a chance.

A lot of complains i read about LW2 have to do with lack of information and while some of them are not even remotely justified, some are. Too much information can be bad for a game but too little is usually worse. In this case, giving one fair warning when it might still be possible to change the plan is probably not too much. Without a warning new players will always realize that something is wrong too late and they'll feel like they had no control on the situation. No control is not fun even when this lack of control comes from a strategic mistake (but one that probably occurred due to lack of knowledge in the first place).

Players should probably always have a small chance to avoid total disaster (at least below Legend) if they can take it and in the case of the Snare it requires being able to understand that something is wrong before you get hit by too many RNF waves. For new players it means some warning during the mission, a post mission debriefing is good for learning what happened but you still have no chance to save any one of your guys.

[Zyxpsilon]

Arrrgghhh.. this is all turning into a "Find a much better alternative trick to please everyone EXCEPT my simple initial suggestion of the SKIP/IGNORE mission button beforehand" contest.

Yup.. anyone has a right for opinions. But still, the logic is quite clear; IF we don't know then.. we're just jumping into a much bigger risk than normally expectable. On every playthrough there are certain tactical dynamics (tough & easy, etc) that we must deal with & eventually understand as rational gameplay twists that were designed by Long-War & define it.

That "SNARE" event feels like *the* exception to the global rules set forth. It's awkward at best.. and frankly, what sort of ingame problems would be created if we just had a rational button to dismiss it? Please.. forget the fancy warnings --visual or otherwise-- that would replace a single obvious HUD click for a moment of your attention to such details. I don't want to be *only* warned in yet another mysterious step.. i want facts -- directly when they matter.

Seen it once.. got hooked.. bad combat situations occured.. the whole intended suspense is now gone --- unless, another Snare-type call happens.. which we wont know about until too late for proper TACTICAL decisions. Sooooo.. you all know the phrase; "Stop wasting my time!"

[DaviBones]

I may be wrong but i think "voice-over shenanigans" would actually be easier to code than a special post-mission pop-up (provided they use existing lines). Also if the only information comes after the mission you'll see as many complains because it comes "too late", "the developers are taunting them" or something similar.
A warning coming with the first RNF would help new players realize something is wrong with that mission so they could decide whether they want to take risks completing the objective or try to "run for their lives". It wouldn't trivialize the mission as even if they call evac immediately they'll have to wait for Firebrand but at lest it would give them a chance.

A lot of complains i read about LW2 have to do with lack of information and while some of them are not even remotely justified, some are. Too much information can be bad for a game but too little is usually worse. In this case, giving one fair warning when it might still be possible to change the plan is probably not too much. Without a warning new players will always realize that something is wrong too late and they'll feel like they had no control on the situation. No control is not fun even when this lack of control comes from a strategic mistake (but one that probably occurred due to lack of knowledge in the first place).

Players should probably always have a small chance to avoid total disaster (at least below Legend) if they can take it and in the case of the Snare it requires being able to understand that something is wrong before you get hit by too many RNF waves. For new players it means some warning during the mission, a post mission debriefing is good for learning what happened but you still have no chance to save any one of your guys.

I agree that the warning would be best received the moment the first wave of RNFs drop. However, I disagree that a voice-over is a good solution. As was mentioned earlier...

... So when I get a VO saying "OMG, enemy reinforcements!!111!!" I don't think "I should drop what I'm doing and evac right now." What I think is "Shut up, Bradford."

You specifically might actually care what Bradford drones on about (and good on you for it, you're certainly a more patient man than I), however, I would be willing to bet money that the vast majority of players don't. A text box might also dismissed, but at least then when they came and complained on the forums, we would have a lot more solid ground to stand on when we answered, "well, you ignored the in-game prompts."

Perhaps Pavonis could instead modify the "mission briefing" popup that appears at the very beginning of the mission. It could be made more attention grabbing by setting it to be red, and it could say something along the lines of "**WARNING** -- We are starting to see an incredibly unusual amount of radio chatter; this mission is almost certainly a trap laid by ADVENT in order to wipe out an XCOM squad!" Having a warning this early on would allow players to abort and throw evac immediately. Additionally, it would probably be the one of the easiest to code out of all the suggestions so far, since I assume they already have an coding infrastructure for inserting/altering mission briefing popups.