Prison Jail Break - Confused by Strategy and reinforcement timers

[johnmaidenfootball]

hello, i am trying to get into this mod over this last weekend and have been confused about the timers and strategy layer. I can not find the 24 turn mission timer in the wiki which results in reinforcements coming before concealment breaks. I'm not sure what to do with this mission because I have 18 movespeed but after going max distance of every soldier, plus +1 more turn to have the others catch up and group on top of the building, reinforcements are dropping next turn. The reinforcements sprint/run(not patrol) to the xcom soldiers wherever, and while the soldiers are concealed, and since they charge at the soldiers while they are concealed the reinforcements break the concealment and xcom gets attacked. There is a green mec stuck patrolling around the second prison cell beside the one im trying to rescue.

What could I do to hide from the reinforcements? How do I know which reinforcements can see me while concealed and which cannot?
How do I know which prison break mission has the 24 turn timer that start to drop reinforcements after 6 turns or the 12 turn ones that don't send reinforcements until conceal is broken(not the one where you start revealed to rescue the vip)?

here is a screen of the map
http://imgur.com/WQ8IikT

here is the green mec that patrols only in front of the cell, are these missions setups or something? where that prisoner is just a faceless anyways?
http://imgur.com/AZvPPKB

this is a great mod and im having a lot of fun, just hard to understand some strategic things, thanks!

::this is on commander with normal .ini's and hidden potential turned on, in a level 2-3 region, it changed to 3? just after i lost this mission i think?::

[DonCrabio]

Some horrendously big maps was added in last patch. I had mission with objective 10 full dashes away from me and another 10 to evac zone. I don't think it even possible to do, since I had 4 turns left for actual fighting and hacking jail cells. I decided to just reload mission to get more reliable map since I'm dirty savescummer. If I was hard enough to play Iron-Man I see only one option on such mission - just go strait to evac and consider prisoners as inevitable losses.

[Gethseme]

Just going to add to this issue. I'm not sure I want to even play the mod anymore. I was playing around with it the past few days doing decently well on Veteran, then I send 3 of my best soldiers on what should've been a relatively easy Jail break. Got one of the huge maps that took a solid 7 turns of full running to just get to the jail, and when I get positioned after a couple more turns (14 turns left till forced retreat), I get the alert that enemy reinforcements are about to be dropped.

I'm like "WTF? I'm still concealed? Who calls in reinforcements when there's nothing happening. There's no pods active, no shooting/glass breaking/doors opening. It's quiet." And lo and behold, they drop about 15 tiles behind me, then immediately RUN (not slowly patrol) directly towards me, like an active pod that is trying to join a firefight. So I move my squad away at a full run, and the reinforcements run at me again like they know exactly where I am. Then the reinforcements alert goes yellow. So I'm like "screw this, going for the EVAC, so I move towards the evac, sitting in cover every move's end with myself facing the reinforcements. About 2 runs away from the EVAC (which is half the map away from the jail) ANOTHER Reinforcements drops, this time behind me cutting me off from the EVAC point, in the same turn that the first pod of reinforcements runs into range of me, keeping me from running without breaking concealment. I lost one of my best soldiers to trying to get to evac, and the other 2 were heavily wounded.

If this is a feature of Long War, I'm not only not impressed, but totally against it, not on principle of a timer/reinforcement spam (I actually liked that part on missions where I'm fighting and retreating to the Evac point fighting constant waves of reinforcements and trying to fight my way out), but on the fact that you can get reinforcements when the enemy has no f***ing clue XCOM is even there to jail break. And on top of this, apparently a member of your squad is a faceless or has a homing beacon that only reinforcements can home in on, because the reinforcements that shouldn't be there because you're concealed are making a beeline to your squad.

It's completely stupid, unrealistic, and un-fun. I know that this was probably to stop people from doing too many full-stealth missions or to help combat "True Concealment" (which I don't use, but I completely understand why some people do. To me the timers for hacking and such make sense. You found an unprotected data access point for hacking, but Advent [without knowing you're coming] has found it as well, and is trying to secure it. That's why they're defending the access point. ), but it doesn't make a lick of sense. Reinforcements during concealment is dumb, at least in the sense of them rushing to you. Now if it was like them rotating some troops in and adding a few inactive patrolling pods (like a real prison, sometimes you get more guards one day or what not before others go on break/home), then yeah, that'd be fine I guess, as long as they don't swamp you every other turn. But the homing ones made me uninstall the mod. I'll go play Legendary vanilla before subjecting myself to the stress that losing a squad from something that makes no intelligent and tactical sense has caused.

[Antifringe]

In vanilla, the narrative was that ADVENT could detect Firebrand and knew that something was up. It doesn't strike me as at all implausible that ADVENT would both notice and be concerned about an unmarked dropship hovering over one of their zones and would start mobilizing the local forces.

I used to feel the same way that you do, but after trying True Concealment, it got very, very tedious. Unlimited stealth time is fun for about one day, and then the novelty wears off and you have this unfun tension between playing optimally (e.g. spend one real life hour carefully sneaking around looking for the perfect engagement) and playing something fun.

Are you using map packs? Because I have never seen a map that takes 7 full dashes to cross. Like, ever. And I've played a lot of LW2.

[Gethseme]

Nope, only addons I have are Overwatch All, Evac All, Long War 2 and Update Carried Units. And those 3 that aren't Long War are obviously just QoL addons so I don't have to spend minutes telling all my soldiers to Overwatch in place, Evac one at a time, or lose a soldier because of shitty UI not letting me see where my allied dead body (especially when it ragdolls 4+ spaces from its death spot and misleads where you have to go pick it up to carry out).

And I think you have misread my comment. I DON'T use True Concealment. As I said, even if Advent does detect the Skyranger, and they send reinforcements, that's fine IF they don't start going on a full witch hunt directly at my concealed/hidden party. If my Shinobis can Ghostwalker within 4 tiles of enemies, why does a newly dropped reinforcement squad who hasn't seen me yet know exactly what spaces my Shinobi is (other than alien space magic reasons, in which case, we've lost already and might as well give up if they can find us everywhere no matter what....)

[Antifringe]

No, no I understood that you don't use True Concealment. I was saying that I have tried playing the game without the always on reinforcement timer, and the result wasn't very fun. The game is that way because it kind of has to be that way.

I don't think I've ever had RNFs land while I was still in squad concealment, so I can't comment on that.