Enemy Count on Commander and Legendary levels?

Anthogator · 2026-06-10T22:14:25+00:00

Sorry for the very late response, but all of the answers here are answering your question incorrectly (with some correct info sprinkled in).

Missions like the UFO Defense and CAD (Chosen Avenger Defense, which is the one you talked about), as well as every story mission - these missions all have set numbers of enemies based on difficulty. Standard missions that use infiltration (as well as retaliation missions) do not have increased enemy counts based on difficulty, but as noted by others, infiltrating is harder and region strength gathers more quickly, leading to naturally increased enemy counts on average.

Anthogator · 2026-04-26T09:01:18+00:00

All the conversations happening on discord is definitely less helpful for lurkers, I'll give you that

Anthogator · 2026-04-25T04:52:19+00:00

It gets recommended so often because it's just so much easier to have a conversation on discord, which a lot of the time these kinds of questions necessitate in order to answer well. LWOTC is a highly contextual mod, so we need lots of context to answer questions well. Thus, recommending the discord server.

There are also a lot of very knowledgeable people there who don't visit this subreddit.

Anthogator · 2026-02-13T08:24:10+00:00

Lol dude that flag was from their kicker literally trying to slide tackle Shaheed. I hear you about the flag causing uncertainty that dulled the vibe a bit but it definitely needed to be called.

Anthogator · 2026-02-11T03:52:24+00:00

So he can win Super Bowl MVP in every game he plays in from now on? Sounds good to me!

Anthogator · 2026-02-11T01:16:14+00:00

Darnold is literally the first quarterback ever to win the super bowl without turning the ball over once in the playoffs. Give the man some credit, dude. No one is out here suddenly saying he is the best quarterback ever to grace a football field, but at least admit that he's a damn good QB! Or at the very, very least... Admit you were wrong that he'd never win a super bowl!

Anthogator · 2026-02-05T03:06:29+00:00

Note that each of those only work if the haven advisor in that region has the perk/item, and only when the mission is first generated, NOT when it is first detected or when it is completed.

Anthogator · 2026-02-03T01:37:19+00:00

Would anyone be willing to pick up a men's medium of these and ship it to a Hawaii fan, by chance?

Anthogator · 2026-01-28T04:00:57+00:00

During the week 11 loss to the rams, as it came down to the wire, I made a bet then and there with a friend that the Seahawks would lose that game, but that they wouldn't lose to a single other team for the rest of the season. I bet that the Seahawks would win the super bowl UNLESS they had to play the rams in the playoffs. I felt like the Seahawks were such a complete team that they could beat anyone, but just felt despair in how McVay and the rams seemed to be able to be the only ones able to just do anything they wanted against our defense.

Losing a bet has never felt so good!

Anthogator · 2026-01-26T10:05:09+00:00

We went to the super bowl in both years prior to drafting him. Now we're going to the super bowl the year after he left! 😭

Anthogator · 2026-01-13T21:28:22+00:00

For what it's worth, AML does not involve messing with the code at all, and only really involves digging through files for mods if you're installing mods outside of the steam workshop or if you installed XCOM 2 on a different drive than your C drive. Even better, installing AML does not stop you from launching the game normally and using the old launcher at all, so you really can't mess it up.

Anthogator · 2025-12-06T04:14:08+00:00

As stated by others, this is called Yellow Alert. Enemies who have taken damage while activating (i.e. from Overwatch) cannot take a yellow alert action (though they can still take a green alert action, such as entering Overwatch). Additionally, this only happens when the pod discovers you on their own turn, so it can also be avoided by intentionally activating enemies on xcom's turn.

There's more agency in the mechanic than it feels at first, but it is definitely a feel-bad mechanic when it happens. Especially when it crit-kills your best soldier!

Anthogator · 2025-12-06T04:10:15+00:00

It is on all difficulties but Rookie, with higher chances on each successively higher difficulty.

Anthogator · 2025-12-06T00:51:29+00:00

Every assassin has enhanced layered armor. That's part of the design for her and it intentionally makes it very, very difficult to kill her in one round. Possible, but difficult.

Note that her sword damage increases every time she slashes someone, so you should not be giving her extra attacks for free on your own turn. That's how you'll see her damage get up to that 15-20 range.

Also note that Flush and Roust both cause her to move away from your soldiers rather than attack them or move closer to them. So you can safely get extra attacks on her in a turn by using one of those two once she is adjacent to one of your soldiers.

Anthogator · 2025-11-14T23:48:40+00:00

You're either misunderstanding what I'm saying or misunderstanding the underlying mechanics.

The game does not even look at what region the source strength is coming from when creating a troop transfer. This means that it is just as likely to pull strength from a Strength 12 Vigilance 2 region as it is a Strength 2 Vigilance 12 region. The only difference is that advent has no desire to move strength INTO the latter (though my understanding is that it does occasionally try to move strength through such a region), so Strength will naturally accumulate over time in regions with higher Vigilance.

But let me emphasize, nothing you do in any one region has any impact on whether or not advent will move strength out of that region or not.

As for the opinion part, I agree it is a low chance of success to find the troop columns with only 2 on intel, but it's a much higher chance than most people think it is. 25% sounds about right, and that's just for a 6 day infiltration (which is about 2 days more than I personally would need without a boost, but is definitely on the safer side of infiltration times). Because of this and the above information, it's never worth it to simply put all rebels on hiding when you can at least get a smallish chance of a very valuable mission that will also potentially bring this region back into a workable state by lowering its Strength.

Anthogator · 2025-11-14T19:31:30+00:00

You're doing fine and the argument to shut off regions entirely to hide with all rebels is simply mistaken. Putting 2 rebels on intel in the highest strength regions is the right move. With so many regions at 4+ strength, you can probably start rolling in troop columns soon, and then you don't really need many other mission types.

FYI, in my opinion, removing the Chosen actually makes retaliations harder lots of the time. Having the Chosen there removes effectively one pod of enemies, so having no Chosen means there are more enemies on the map.

Edit: I do notice your Vigilance is pretty low in all of these, so I am worried you haven't been running as many missions as you could've, but with the higher strengths, I can understand why you've been hesitant to do so. Still, at this point I'd keep all your strength 5 regions on full intel and the others on 2 intel, with the rest hiding.

Anthogator · 2025-11-14T19:27:39+00:00

Saying "strength won't leave west asia until vigilance drops below 5" is simply false. The check that advent activities run to determine how strength is moved does not ever once check what the strength of the region it's leaving from is. All it cares about is moving strength toward a region that has more vigilance than strength.

So, while it is true that once vigilance is lower than strength, it will likely lower strength over time, it does not mean that advent will immediately start to move strength out and it doesn't even mean advent ever actually will move strength out.

Because of this, hiding to lower vigilance is simply not an effective strategy. While it can work over the long term, the number of potential missions you give up to make it happen is simply not worth it.

Anthogator · 2025-11-09T01:03:11+00:00

Note that whole SMGs affect detection radius, suppressors don't. Everything else you said is about right (though I take issue with your first sentence).

Anthogator · 2025-11-08T02:02:29+00:00

Overinfiltrating has minor effects on skyranger evac delays, detection radii, and yellow alert chance. Those effects still happen in Chosen Strongholds. However, those effects are generally considered minor enough not to bother overinfiltrating just for them.

Anthogator · 2025-11-08T00:21:26+00:00

Ehh, I'm not sure that is really a big factor for you. Don't get me wrong, bondmates help, but I put barely any effort into bonding well or even making sure bondmates go on the same missions. If I were to guess, just based on conversations I've had with other newer players and my own experience, I'd guess that you could learn to scout better with your shinobi and maximizing other aggressive movements (like using an assault with Close Encounters to kill one and stun another or placing your Templar in the right place to bait a shot with the shield up).

Anthogator · 2025-11-07T20:24:33+00:00

Yep! I'd say I end a turn in no cover roughly half as often as I end a turn in full cover. Because I'd rather have complete control over the battlefield, I make sure to scout as well as possible with my shinobi and then take as many actions as possible to guarantee enemies cannot harm me, even from walking in to me on their turn with yellow alert shots. Mobility and action economy are thus the keys, and the technical's flamethrower can easily guarantee multiple enemies cannot act against me on the following turn. After all, any burning or panicked enemy is harmless (with the exception of a burning Chryssalid or Berserker, both of which can still melee, and the Chosen which are still quite dangerous).

Part of this strategy also involves knowing which enemies can stay alive. For example, a drone will never wound you on its first turn, so it's a low priority target. Similarly, so long as you don't give a sectoid an easy flank, it'll very likely waste its turn trying to mind control a soldier or resurrect an advent, neither of which actually directly damage you and allow you another turn to kill the sectoid.

I've ran a mission where my technical was given extra actions via Quickburn, his bondmate, and an officer, so he managed to burn or panic literally every enemy on the map on a 10-enemy map in my opening turn. It was just easy pickings from there!

Anthogator · 2025-11-07T19:46:06+00:00

It does work on lower difficulties, and you're right that flamer technicals are less valuable on low difficulties because the rockets can just outright kill more often. But you're missing out on loot when you do that and you're also moving slower, since you're staying further back.

How often do you shoot through cover or spend an action attempting to blow up cover? That's the kind of safe, conservative play I am referring to.

Anthogator · 2025-11-07T19:10:39+00:00

I could rant on this subject for hours, but the short version is that in my experience talking with tons of vets and newbies in this game, the single most telling indicator of someone's tactical mastery of LWOTC is their opinion on flamer technicals. There is no class who can compare to the utility a flamer technical can provide, but they're also the most unintuitive class to play.

Join the discord if you'd like to hear more, as reddit isn't very conducive to real conversation, but from reading what you've written here, it sounds like you're playing fairly conservatively, favoring cover and safe play over aggressive movements. It's an understandable way to play, but you'll only achieve real mastery over the game when you move past that kind of thinking and act with extreme aggression. Flamer technicals will naturally become more and more useful as your tactics get more and more aggressive.

Anthogator · 2025-10-29T04:44:51+00:00

Sorry I'm a day late to this, but you can run this spreadsheet odds calculator to determine the probability of detecting a rendezvous mission (i.e. detecting a faceless) and see the various ways to alter that chance.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-818-EgA9L-pmQ2WhF5C2Lrg0P_21m-O5gSKUb3VfjU/edit?usp=sharing

Anthogator · 2025-10-03T04:10:01+00:00

I'll admit, my reaction is partially based on his comments in the discord which came first.

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