That’s partly my fault I believe. BB Nest/Lair assaults were a bit of a cakewalk - you rocked up to the location and did what I do in Citadel assaults: sat back in a defensive position and picked off all the Crabbie/Tritons till they stopped coming. Then you simply strolled through an empty warren to the Spawnery and offed it. No challenge, no interest, and no sense that you were invading an angry hive teeming with bugs. So I suggested infinite spawning to force you to keep moving forward.
Which is fine, as long as it’s balanced properly. The problem as it stands is the sheer number of Nasties that keep coming at you thick and fast is so great, you don’t have time to move forward.
In this current Lair, a third Siren has just turned up (I took the first 2 down with no probs). My Peeps are currently facing something like 5 Crabbies with MGs & Shields or GLs & Pincers, and 2 or 3 Tritons armed with ARs & SRs - and we’ve already taken down a similar number.
I’m contemplating a strategic withdrawal at this point, or at least a regroup behind my Snipers until I can figure out the best route to take.
Like I say, it’s a fun challenge, but it feels like a Boss mission, not a mid-tier everyday assault.
That’s really strange. With your experience with this game I don’t understand why it can be so difficult. Do you have a video of your walkthrough?
I’ve just finished a Lair with a squad of 5 people. A couple of Priests (Frenzy + WP regen), Heavy/Assault, Assault/Berserker, Assault/Sniper. No repeated dashes or Clearence cheesing. Used Fireworms a lot to block passages with fire. Had one of my Priests mind controlled once, got several hits. No casualties, no reloads. Heroic difficulty.
I am really curious to know what makes these missions so hard for other players?
Nah, I don’t do videos. Nobody wants to watch me fumble my way through a game
I don’t claim to be good at this game, either . I just enjoy trying to surmount the challenges it throws at me. But when I read about the way people stack damage and Skill combos, I’m like: “Really?” I consider it a good turn if I can get most of my guys to fire twice in a round…
The thing is, with the adaptive difficulty and getting stronger over time, it’s hard to say if it’s you doing something wrong, or the game being unreasonable. I do find that the lairs require a very different approach, as you have to try to maneveur around enemies, but it’s entirely possible that I’m not facing the same kind of odds.
Exactly! The enemies find a direct passage to you and try to storm it. Only you have already made a new passage with Hel canon and blocked the old one with fire, so they are late for a turn or two and have to chase you getting in ambushes and all kinds of nasty things while the spearhead of your team secures the respawn point and runs to the Spawnery =)
I have to agree, Lairs are a thousand times harder than Citadels.
Just spent 2 hours failing to deal with a Lair, ended up sitting in spawn and cheesing my way through by Mind Controlling a MG Arthron to destroy the Spawnery.
Infinite Spawn, Narrow Spaces in which you can get nuke’d by Grenade Launchers, Irregular Elevation which Tritons and Arthron can simply jump over, Bombard Chiron are Overpowered as all hell, Terror Sentinel and Sirens to difficult rush tactics and provide Frenzy 24/7 to everyone and did I mention Bombard Chiron which are OVERPOWERED as every single hell?
Scylla is not aggresive enough if it spawns with cannon arms and the Mist Ball thingy, it’s a walking meat sack that only shoots Mist 24/7.
I have seen it shoot the cannon arms 2 times in my life.
The fact that if you kill the thing it’s GG and you are out, is super lame, because if it also spawns with the “On Death Spawn Mindfraggers” tail it’s a full time support player, it doesn’t matter how bad the situation is, you don’t care if you are surrounded by enemies and about to get rekt, you can just focus the thing down and get to the Victory screen.
Could be that, but I believe that past first month, there’s more balance through fails/successes and difficulty, you do a bad series and difficulty is tune down, you do a great series and difficulty scales up.
There’s other difficulty influences:
In fog or not but lairs are always in fog, I wonder if fog repulsing destroy lairs lol.
Global corruption level, but it seems minor, still here.
Difficulty level on some aspects, and without considering the static start bonus.
For Haven defense the source, Lairs or Citadels.
Some RNG deciding a difficulty level for a mission, the mission text mention it, but auto scaling can make it insignificant or increase it even more.
Moreover I think that procedural generation can change a lot the difficulty of Lairs. That’s why leave and come back is a good idea, but most often it will make the Lair become a Citadel.
I don’t have that much trouble with lairs, you can tell fairly easily where the spawnery is and then you send a heavy jumping towards it while the rest of the team keeps pandas entertained.
Firstly a positive note, I finally found the best scout to check where the target is, a Siren, they won’t be attacked and they can’t be controlled, the perfect scout, even more with frenzy.
And then a complain, bombard Chiron, I played multiple missions with them and had a lot of fun, but Lairs, it’s crap, top covers are weird, often too limited, boredom.
So, I got bored. I was waiting for the endgame to trigger. So I decided I’d try assaulting a Lair again.
One rage quit after a near TPW later, Moby emptied her Deceptor into the Maguffin and I beat it.
On the plus side, it was fun - for a given value of ‘fun’. It is just as tough and challenging as I’ve always been crying out for. Despite the fact that people hate it, it also reconfirmed to me the correctness of infinite spawns. There was a point where I was completely bogged down, and the temptation to simply hunker down in a defensive position and let them come to me until I’d wiped them all out was only countereed by the knowledge that they would never stop coming, and if I didn’t break out of my comfort zone and figure out how to punch through, I was screwed.
As it is, 6 of my 8 peeps limped out injured, and every single one of them was down to their last mag of ammo - and most of my peeps carry 3 guns as standard procedure.
All this is a long-winded way of saying that this has also confirmed to me that Lairs & Citadels are totally the wrong way round. From a strategic viewpoint, I am never assaulting a Lair again - unless it’s attacking one of my key Bases or I get bored. It’s far more cost-effective to hoover up the loot from the Haven Defences it triggers, wait for it to turn into a Citadel, then make like Garrus in the Great Scylla Turkey Shoot that follows.
Lairs are a really interesting challenge, but they’re Boss Dungeons, not mid-level Nasty dens.
What makes Nests broken is simple -> Visibility is buggy and broken. Fix it. I cannot see things down the next corridor because it is pitch black sometimes. And stop infinite, or seemingly infinite, spawning. Have enemies appear in triggered situations, maybe. People agitate some alien structure, and aliens hop down from the ceiling, maybe. Just an idea. But having them spawn behind you because the spawn point you just passed is under the fog of war… that’s annoying more than anything else.
What makes Lairs broken is simple -> Infinite spawning of enemies, especially Sirens, makes it very difficult to advance in a timely manner because you risk a Siren popping out of nowhere, mind controlling 2 squaddies, and disappearing, all in one go. Or they do a psychic scream from the other side of a rock formation and send half you squad into a panic. It forces you to sit back in the spawn area, wait for the initial waves of enemies to run into your guns, before you can finally start to push your way to the hatchery. This can take insanely long time, and you may run out of ammo before you get there. And some configurations of the Lair’s layout exacerbate this.
What makes Citadels broken is simple -> Why ever do anything but sit in spawn, and let enemies appear one by one as you gun them down? This way, the entire enemy force does not become alerted and engage you all at once. And you can easily kill the Scylla as she runs into wide-open gunning range. She is like a mobile hatchery that comes to you instead of making you fight your way to it. It’s so much easier.
While knowing what the problem is is simple. Finding a solution isn’t. I don’t know if I have the answers to make it a better experience. Spitballing, but maybe the Scylla only appears once you destroy two hatcheries in the back of the Citadel. Maybe there is a threat that makes quickly engaging enemies a desirable move - such as a mist rolling into the caverns from some region in the back. It threatens to make your squaddies lose Will more quickly if you do not engage the Scylla and her allies as fast as possible.
Yes to visibility fix, absolutely no to “pods”. You’re on their turf, enemies coming at you from the rear should be expected and planned for. Get in, cover your rear and flanks, and neutralize the objective asap. Except for the broken fog Nests are the best of the three as is.
Magically spawning in a spot that my team was literally just at isn’t, in my opinion, within the realm of “enemies coming at you from the rear should be expected and planned for”.
That’s my point. I don’t have a problem with enemy spawning creating a flanking situation, but that above scenario is annoying to me, not strategically interesting. Again, just my opinion.
An easy tip - enemies stop appearing at a spawn point after a soldier reaches it, or the tiles next to it (or its vicinity, I’m not sure about the range from the spawn point that you have to be). There is no visual cue, they just don’t appear from there any more.
IMO, infinite spawns in nests and lairs is an absolute must.
There’s nothing magical about it. “Spawn points” are just access points from other locations such as side tunnels or other chambers. I’d prefer a way to disable them instead. A small explosive charge to “collapse” that entrance.
The problem is not the spawning - it’s the way it’s depicted. If the spawn points were tunnels, like they were in the Base Defence of BB5, the player would go: “Something can come down that…” and cover it. As it is, they feel like arbitrary teleport points, which is annoying.
That doesn’t make Lairs broken, though. Imho, Lairs aren’t broken - they’re actually the most interesting and challenging mission I’ve encountered in the game so far - but as a mid-level mission there are just too many of them, and they’re in the wrong place! It is strategically not sensible to send your squad into something that feels like the final mission in any XCOM I could mention for virtually no reward when, as you (and I and many others) have said, you can simply let it mature into a Citadel, then sit back and make like Garrus in Mass Effect.
Now if Lairs were Citadels, that would make them worth doing - and it would also make Citadels as Lairs more important as well. Now I’m rushing to do the Great Lair Turkey Shoot and take it down before it turns into a mazelike Citadel infested with Sirens and infinite waves of Crabbies that I have to fight my way through to take the Panda Den down. Suddenly, the difficulty spike of the current Lair setup doesn’t feel so arbitrary, because it’s now the Boss Dungeon of Panda Dens and it’s your own stupid fault for letting it grow that big. It’d also be quite interesting if instead of the Spawnery, the Squad encountered a legless Scylla in the Nest Pod at the end - so the Maguffin would fight back. Tough - VERY tough! But that’s the point.
That said, I do agree (and keep on saying) that the Citadel mission as it currently stands needs to be fixed. Its big problem is that the Maguffin (the Scylla) is a massive, unmissable target that actually comes to you. I think your solution - that you have to kill a couple of Spawneries/Hatching Sentinels before the Scylla appears - is a good one, especially if the Maguffins are hidden behind the big conch shell structure, so you can’t shoot them from the other side of the map and have to go to them.
Like the idea that players could close (blow up) of enemy spawn point wther tunnel or hole, or some abandoned turret that would need to be activate for secure the spawn point. It’s true that Lairs are more challenging than Citadel. At certain point especially extreme threat level, common issue I found with Lair mission is not enough ammo to carry sometime, now in case having huge map this could be more troublesome…adding some crates around the maps that may come handy but I felt that is kind a bit off, yet most of crates are filled with random stuff meaning another issue? I don’t know it might be works for late game where the squad are full of steroids heavy lifter.
Anyways, imho playthrough of dealing with “big boss” it doesn’t meant to be hard to beat.
I think that with some clear mechanics on disabling spawn points (which is something that can and is done right now, but it’s not clear whether that is game design or an AI bug), a rework of the Citadel missions to make it harder and general balance changes, lairs might generally be easier than Citadels.
One important thing to consider is that the difficulty of lairs varies dramatically from one lair to another, depending both on RNG and on how “evolved” the Pandas are.
getting stronger over time, it’s hard to say if it’s you doing something wrong, or the game being unreasonable. I do find that the lairs require a very different approach, as you have to try to maneveur around enemies, but it’s entirely possible that I’m not facing the same kind of odds.
where the squad are full of steroids heavy lifter.
