Talk:Missions (LWOTC)
Enemy Activity
The Enemy Activity Level section & table currently imply that during infiltration, the number of enemy units goes down in Enemy Activity Level steps; e.g. from 13-15 at 100% to 10-12 at 125% to 7-9 at 150%. This is a misapprehension.
The quantity of enemy units is derived from the Alert Level and mission schedule, which are not exposed to the player directly. The Alert Level is reduced/increased as expected at breakpoints of 125% etc. Crucially, when the game then calculates the quantity of enemy units from the Alert Level, this calculation depends on the particular mission schedule — not on the Enemy Activity Level table. The mission schedules can be found in XComSchedules.ini.
Let's look at a revealed guerilla ops mission of baseline Alert Level 4 as an example. If a player infiltrates this mission from 100% to 125% and expects to go down one Enemy Activity Level, he will be disappointed! From Alert Level 4 to Alert Level 3 we have reduced the actual number of enemy units from 12 to 10-11. The displayed Enemy Activity Level remains unchanged at 10-12 — Very Light.
| Infiltration | Alert Level | Enemy Units |
|---|---|---|
| 100% | 4 | 12 |
| 125% | 3 | 10-11 |
| 150% | 2 | 9 |
Another issue is that some missions never go down to Extremely Light (7-9) at any level of infiltration; e.g. Secure UFO missions have a minimum of 14 enemy units at Alert Level 1.
The key here is that Enemy Activity Level is simply a way of giving the player a rough estimate of the number of enemy units before a Shadow Chamber is built; it is not a set of potential mission states. Those mission states are found in the schedules. The number of enemy units does not go up or down in Enemy Activity Level steps. I know, it's confusing.
I have edited the section to reflect this, and removed the table of Enemy Activity Level steps. The table helps to imply that these are the steps actually used, and it is not needed anyway because the numerical value is always displayed to the player whenever the Enemy Activity Level is on-screen.--Turtledactyl (talk) 01:13, 26 October 2023 (CEST)