I’m having zero luck with lairs. Have not completed one yet, and have many hours playing the game. Can do the regular missions no sweat but alien nests/lairs/citadels just intimidate & frustrate me. Perhaps I’m going in too early, with troops at low level? I see people posting about going in with teams of 6’s & 7’s but that must mean that they’ve left the alien bases alone before they got troops to that level…or am I wrong? I read of cheesy ways to do these missions but I’m not a cheesy kind of guy. Admittedly, at 71 I’m pretty conventional and perhaps unimaginative, but I’ve played PC games for, what, 30 years now so I should be able to manage this.
Nests are my favorite missions. Scouting is essential. Use your assaults with dash to scout ahead, as they can dash back if they encounter trouble. Then set up a kill zone. For the really narrow passages, lead with the heavy or a shotgunner; they’ll reliably take down or stun anything that jumps in their face. Research the purity grenade as soon as you get the chance — they’re great at blocking passages to enemy movement.
You’ll hear a lot of exploit advice on lairs, but I still prefer fire and movement. Your deployment area will usually only be under the fire of one Chiron. If you can, get snipers in position to fire on it; pillars are ideal, because they’re hard for the Chirons to hit. High ground will also show you where the Sirens are. Let the first few sirens come to you before trying to advance. I’ve beaten lairs repeatedly without top-level soldiers.
The mortar Chiron can be rendered much less effective if you disable one of the rear legs. Their stability stance shots are lethal, but disabling the rear leg disables it, and cuts their standard accuracy as well.
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Gunnergoz, I’d be interested to know what you’ve tried so far? There are several ways of achieving it.
You shouldn’t need super high level soldiers. Just one assault/shotgun (berserker even) or a heavy with machine gun (etc) will kill the spawnery. I had a heavy/berserker bash it 3 times with the machine gun, that was enough too.
A trick is to try not to kill too many of the aliens (just wound them if you can). Any you kill just get respawned, usually quite close to the spawner and that makes it super difficult. I try to lure the aliens to one side of the map, engage them there, allowing me to pass the other side a little easier.
Most of the cheesy tricks (or my strike-team) are just to make the missions more reliable. They’re certainly doable without (I’d completed a few early game, until I decided I wanted a dedicated team), but it’s in no way an easy mission.
Funnily enough, Citadels are WAY easier lol (just have to kill a Scylla, peazy)
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I’m pretty conventional. The few times I’ve tried to take them on in lairs, I got pasted by goo or explosives from a distance and nailed by ambushes. I think it folly now to attempt lairs with level 2 or 3 soldiers. That may be a big part of the problem. Have not tried with level 4-6 and due to re-starts, have yet to grow anyone to level 7 in any game. I keep at it, though. 
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Lairs have the potential to be the best/deeper missions of the game. But currently I have huge doubt the game has much control on the repsawning, this could generate playability problems. I also doubt the map generation is that great, there’s something weird to do a blind search thought a whole area, obviously it can generate huge differences between missions, too huge in my opinion of the game admit have zero control on difficulty.
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I played through a lair just today and whoa, it was fun. To anyone entering lairs, bring a lot of ammo and two grenade launchers.
I had the same experience like the OP, but to me that was fun. I do agree that if a lair mission would crop up frequently enough, it would make the game unplayable. It takes too much time, unless you somehow slither towards the spawnery without too much exposure.
For me, after cleaning up the massive hostile presence in a fortified (and gooed up position), it took slowly moving that formation towards where the spawnery is, giving cover to my two launcher/cannon handlers.
I would vote against preventing respawns. I mean, come on, you come to “their” territory and attack an important base. I mean, only prewent respawns if you come up with a good story trick to explain away how the probably massive seafood army suddenly stopped reinforcing their strategic points.
Also, keep the goo chiron, that was loads of fun!
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Man, lairs specifically are an insanity…
It took me days to finish even one, with dozens of restarts, weird bugs, ragequits etc…
I almost gave up on the whole campaign because of it - if lairs are so hard, I could not imagine where the game was heading.
But today while a friend came over I decided to show him the game and launched an assault on a citadel - thought I’d just show him how I lose horribly and it’ll be fun. But instead I finished the mission in two turns - it was super easy! And then I went and steamrolled three more citadels, even used them to level up my B-squad.
So I guess, lairs are in dire need of rebalancing, such discrepancy in difficulty is definitely not helping the game’s appeal
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Lairs are special missions, they require adapted tactics and strategy. The current probable problem is the procedural management of those missions including the respawn along mission is too approximate for the tactical design point of view.
I think a problem is they spawn too much, also I would suggest add at least an aircraft call taking the team at a team defined position, it could need wait two turns, but the point is to make a bit lighter a failed attempt.
Lairs are completely unfun, so much so I don’t see me playing again and losing hours and hours just to have this leave me not liking the game again. I will try again, but as feedback to a developer I would leave you have to listen to your fanbase and make changes. If people are straight up not playing the game due to unfun areas, changes should be made or at least commented on.
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I agree with the general sentiment but I will attempt some anti-frustration analysis. The main problem with nest/lairs whatever is combination of 3 factors which intended to produce difficulty/interesting tactical problem, but in fact amount to pure undiluted frustration. 1) Fog of war, which obscure objectives. You cannot know where you should go, even in the lairs it left OR right, and you cannot guess which. It isn’t even “realistic”, no one ever sent or will send a detachment without resonance and you can actually know general placement of your target with technology from real world previous decade. But in and on itself it is just a little bit strange and not interesting, but not enough for frustration. And then comes 2): constant spam of grenade-wielding crab-men. Even sirens are less frustrating. But the crab-men… In the nests etc. you cannot scout them reliably, so if you are not lucky enough they will see you without being immediately crippled. And then you eat magic never-missing, never-misfiring into the wall/ceiling grenade (for the record: your grenades do prone to hit the wall or whatever and explode on you). You cannot even protect your squad by increasing distance because 3) convoluted layout which you cannot scout. IMHO these 3 things produce much frustration and luck-based gameplay to be enjoyable. Along with some extreme absurd, like nest being more difficult then some lairs (because crabs+no second-floor lever worse then sirens). And worst of all - you have to do them, because it is a part of progression and the only way to slow a doom-clock (as far as I know). For the record: I’m aware that there are some ways to cheese them but 1) I play games for pleasure, not for record-breaking and cheesing by sticking to algorithms is equally boring and frustrating to losing to RNG-placements 2) I like to experiment in games, and to cheese nests you have to go very specific builds. Which is boring. So I agree, lairs/nests/whats-their-name have to be change drastically, to become enjoyable element of the game. Sorry
And some more thoughts: the changes to lairs/nests/your-know-what-I mean can be done as options in starting new game, so people which like current system can keep playing it… And people frustrated by current system can enjoy the game too. Non-zero-sum solutions are good.
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First point I think most players will agree they need more tuning on some aspects. The core difference is some players don’t want them removed but improved, when other don’t want them.
An option but replace them with what? They are a core element of the global gameplay.
I never said “replace” them, I’m not sure it is even possible, because of their interaction with other mechanics (like progression, doom-clock etc.) But, for example only, it is possible to reveal general target (but not enemies) from the start, restrict spawning mechanics, change weights for determination which enemies spawns and their quantity… And these are just “quick” options. Surely professional game designer in his work-hours can do better then me after full-day work?
Lairs need limited respawn in my opinion. Way too hard and tough right now.
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The lairs, and to a lesser extent the nests, have me just about ready to give up the game. It’s not the combat or the difficulty, it’s the layout. Having to constantly rotate the map to improve your view is annoying to the extreme. Would have much preferred having the aliens in a swamp, desert, or some other terrain.
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Five hours of restarts on the same darn lair and I still haven’t even found the spawnary. My jumpers keep getting mind controlled by one of three sirens. My ground teams are either lost in black smoke, or can’t get far as all the routes are covered with large things which I am out of explosives to get past.
Five hours isn’t fun, it is what kills games.
There needs to be tech to tell you where to head. May be time to quit.
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I am not very happy with lair missions and I think I am very good at them. I’ve used every combination of cheese and none are anywhere close to 100% reliable. You can always get through them without loss by using a few tried and true techniques. Getting enemies to “the other side of the map” from the spawnery is always helpful. No, there are two annoying problems. 1. The missions take so long because of the pathing and respawn. You learn not to kill enemies often, but it is eventually inevitable. 2. Maps with no path. I have seen maps that you can’t “blast through” (no well placed white squares) and can’t get across without a jet pack. That means that you are always at risk of jet packing right into an unseen siren. Game over if you don’t have multiple jet packers. Yes, made the mistake of only taking one before encountering this type of map. To make matters worse, they nerfed dash (I know it was needed) and vanish. These reduce the exploits you can use to shorten these missions. I hate the changes because of this mission type. The result will be hours more game time in an annoying map with little reward. Yes, especially early game getting those points to improve faction relations are important, but late game this matters much less. The missions eat time leading to nothing but frustration.
Other thoughts on the patch changes. All fine in general except it makes a hard game even harder / longer. If you are going to nerf the perks, maybe enemies without 40 armor all around or missions where every Arthron has spitter / machine gun / launcher / 300 + points and 30 plus armor everywhere would help. Fewer exploits are fine, but please reduce the difficulty as well. Not every gamer has 100+ hours to finish a game. There has to be a middle ground.
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90% of the time it’s in the same exact spot, upper left hand corned, if not it is in the upper right hand corner. You can often tell by looking at the map at the beginning, a rectangular hole with a ladder in the upper corner, they always look the same, and there are few spots that it can be. You can tell by the size and shape of the hole.
The easiest way to do it is mind control a Archron and walk him over, and let him kill it, the enemy NEVER attacks mind control units unless it is a return fire.
Yes Archon, poison, next, quite basic.
In last patch they boost the Spawnery HP but it will change nothing.
Lair’s do need something. They are tense and that is good and fun but…I don’t know I’ve never been a fan of Endless waves of enemies much. If the number was Finite (And perhaps it might be but it seems not) or they could call in reinforcements a finite number of times that would be best.