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Originally Posted by bhlloy
Does anyone really understand or has had success with the Long War?
I've done a bit of research online, and understand that I'm supposed to follow the Find A Lead missions, and then complete the chain to liberate a region, but in practice that seems completely impossible, as when I get the next mission (or the one after that) the time for the mission is usually a couple of days or even a few hours, which basically makes it impossible. Do I just not have enough people doing intel to give me a chance to win these missions, or am I doing something else wrong?
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I think I understand it, but it has not really turned into any kind of significant success.
I can offer you this bit of advice:
There are quite a few missions with very low infiltration times - 2 to 3 days or less. Sending a full team in will never work, because the alien activity will go from "very light" or "light" to "moderate" or "heavy" and that's a death wish. Trying to complete a mission with "light to moderate" alien activity has been a challenge.
So, the trick for those missions is to send one shinobi. A single soldier. Outfit him with a sub-machine gun with as good a suppressor as you can (since you can add/remove gun mods at will), maybe a smoke or flash grenade and that's about it. You want the soldier to have as low an infiltration time and as high a movement as possible. The "shadow walk" ability (the one that reduces enemies' detective range) is key here, too.
The goal is to get the alien activity down to "extremely light" and the EVAC to one to two turns max.
You send your shinobi in solo and go pure stealth. Avoid contact. Kill no aliens. Get in and get out ASAP.
You can do this on some missions, not all of them. Any mission you need to hack a terminal, crack a safe, rescue people, or even assassinate (bring a much better gun if you have to assassinate someone) you can pull this off. Some are harder than others, but I've run a lot of successful solo stealth missions on all of these.
The hardest part, until you get the re-stealth ability, is surviving once you reach the objective. Calling for the Sky Ranger blows your stealth as does hacking a terminal, opening a prison door, cracking a safe, or assassinating a target. Once you do that, you just need to survive until you reach the EVAC zone. In some cases, it's easy because you're behind a wall and no alien pod can see you even when you break stealth. In some cases, it's really hard, because there are multiple pods around the objective and you just have to pray you find cover and they miss.
Since calling the Sky Ranger doesn't take an action, you do that first. Then you hack the objective, and then you have one move to try to hide/run or whatever. It's tricky, but it can be done.
I've managed to liberate one region so far. Once you get enough leads and intel (it helps having a lot of the resistance people on intel) you find a communication tower. You hack that and that gives you the regional alien base. Once you clear that out, you liberate the region.
I'm currently in a mission to go after my second communication tower. I cannot beat this mission. It's limited to 5 soldiers and it's impossible. There are a lot of pretty powerful aliens all over the map and there are constant reinforcements coming in. I could probably pull it off with if there were no reinforcements, but with them there's no chance. Advent Commandos are a fucking bitch.
So, to sum up: Solo shinobi stealth missions for very low infiltration time missions are key. Best to have ghost walk and the "does not trigger overwatch" skills to help survive. Get the alien activity down to "extremely light" if possible and a 1 to 2 turn EVAC time.