YOUR tactic on invasion missions?

[machinehater]

Hey!
I have to say, i am in the endgame, have heavy armour on every of my master sergiant and plasma up the ass, in other words, the missions these days are pretty easy.
Until now, my first invasion mission.
In other missions, where you have to destroy a relay or similar, i always approached with a shinobi until it is in his line of sight and then blew it up with a sniper.
But this invasion mission almost turned into a nightmare, since the reniforcements happened right on my starting point, causing big trouble for my sniper in the rear, and the troops placed between my soldiers and the relay was numerous and there was no sneaking by.

I hate to split up my team, but here i had to camp with some dudes around the reinforcement-point and the others had to approach to the other site of the map, to provide squadsight for my sniper-boy.

What is your approach for this kind of missions? Maybe rush with all soldiers to the relay and let the reniforcements come and handle them later?
This is very risky, you get sandwitched.

Armin

[Dwarfling]

Assaults and SPARKs to take the brunt of the shots and kill whatever is up close and Sapper Grenadiers with mostly Incendiaries to AoE and control as many things as possible. I bring as many of those as I can, preferably Grenadiers, add a single Sharpshooter and a Shinobi. Then fill the rest of the slots with the best soldiers I can get, say Crit Rangers and Cooldown Gunners for the MECs, Archons, Berserkers and Chryssalids.

I've gotten a spike inside a building without LoS before so I stopped relying on Sharpshooters to destroy it and just try to duke it out every turn with AoE skills and consumables on my way to the spike before RNF get too annoying.

[LordYanaek]

Invasions are 1/2 destroy the relay and half retaliation. I haven't played one in my 1.4 campaign but in 1.2 i played them like i would play a retaliation on steroid : go heavy and go loud with as much firepower as i can field, including shredder/shredstorm, sparks, and all the rockets/grenades i can equip.
I made a beeline to the relay, trying to dispose of whatever was standing in my way as fast and explosively as possible. Destroying the relay should stop RNFs so the earlier the better. When the relay is out you can clean the rest of the map.



I have a friend with the same name who also plays XCOM but i don't think he ever played LW(1 or 2). You're not living in Belgium are you?

[machinehater]

That's cool, everyone deploys a different strategy, this is why i love long war (the long warS).

I have no more grendiers, lol, i stimply stopped using them, once i got better rifles i relyed much more on rangers (my favoritr class). And every time there is a technican that provides the mandatory explosions.

No, i live in north italy, but it's a german name.

[WanWhiteWolf]

I didn't see any invasion in my campaign but from what I've read on forums, people keep a rocket for the relay. As it is sometimes / always (?) on some sort of roof and blowing that with a Javelin Rocket seems the way to go.

Shinoby + Sniper may work as well but you need the full stealth shinoby skills to avoid detection and move across the map. However, as you've seen, it has it's drawbacks / risky so it's not necessarily the best choice.

Edit: I just had one invasion. I could snipe the relay across the map without a shinoby close to the relay. I don't know if it's a bug or that's how it is designed. After taking the relay down it's basically a standard retaliation.

[stringsthings]

Just finished an invasion and this is what worked for me:

Took 4 overwatch soldiers ( 2 rangers + 2 specs ), all with ever vigilant to help with reinforcements. Took 1 shinobi and 2 techs. Luckily, I had a tech advisor and a resistance MEC in the region. Made a beeline for the relay, using full moves for everyone. The overwatch guys were really the essential guys as they could get off 2 overwatch shots each. The shinobi was super useful for slashing dudes. ( might take another next time ). Took out the relay as quickly as possible, leaving several enemies active. The relay wasn't on a roof, so it took several shots to kill it.

Until the relay was down, I almost always used overwatch for the rangers and specs to maximize their shots. They all had expanded mags, the reaction fire upgrade, and auto-reloads.

One of my main goals was to go for the relay as quickly as possible, ignoring most of the enemies along the way. If you use "normal" tactics against the enemies, the reinforcements will eat you up.