Air Combat (Long War)

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Overview

UFOs are tougher, faster, and much deadlier in Long War. Along with that, your crafts and armaments are significantly less potent, at least at first. You will need to cycle your craft regularly like your soldiers. UFO kills will grant experience to your pilots and provide a bonus to accuracy. Your pilots will learn UFO flight patterns and movements and therefore will become much better at shooting down alien craft. Interceptor experience provides +3% to hit per kill (up to + 30%) and +1% damage per kill (with no top limit). Also, you will find that both your craft and UFOs may sometimes get 'critical hits', with UFOs being downed in a few hits, or your undamaged Interceptor immediately going into near-full red damage indicator.

At the start of the game your fresh pilots are equipped with Avalanche Missiles, which now have an abysmal 40% accuracy. While it is still possible to down the first Scout with one Interceptor, this is an incredibly unlikely event. It's more probable that it would take two, or even three interceptions to bring down even the most basic alien craft. It is also a good idea to switch some of your aircraft armaments to Stingray missiles at the game start, details on that below.

Players should exert caution and pick and choose their air battles carefully. You will not be able to bring down every single enemy UFO. Sometimes attempting high risk interceptions against tough targets would be detrimental to your campaign due to the highly unpredictable nature of the engagements at the start of the game. Your early game goal should be to get experience for some of your pilots and advance your air-warfare technology in order to keep aliens at bay on the battleground for the Earth's skies. In case you overreach too early, you might quickly find yourself crippled with long repair times and unable to stop alien operations.

There are Research and Engineering projects that will assist in aerial sorties. There are multiple foundry projects to improve your interceptors. There are also three consumables that remain from Vanilla.

As you progress, each type of UFO's statistics also increase, from general 'health' to firing rates, as to keep you on your toes; so don't expect to ever truly dominate the skies. Plus with the added variables to air-interception, there is no clear-cut "UFO X can be brought down by Interceptor Y" table. As such, the Long War's UFO page will be your general guide for how--- or if-- to attempt to engage these potent UFOs.

Damaging UFOs

It is not necessary to shoot down enemy UFOs in order to prevent them from completing their mission. Doing damage to them is sometimes enough to spoil their plans or reduce their effectiveness. The damage that UFO sustains is stored between interceptions, therefore multiple interception attempts is a good idea to limit the damage to your own Air Force. When a player does more than 50% damage to a UFO, you will start seeing explosion effects around it.

Some UFOs will wander about a country's airspace before zooming off. For these, it is sufficient to get the yellow effect described above. Those effects signify that UFO sustained enough damage to prevent it from completing its mission, such as an Anti-Satellite hunt. Note however that you still have a chance to prevent the UFO's mission while doing less than 50% damage, which is simply linear (i.e., the UFO abort mission chance is 0% at full health, 100% at 50% health, and in 2x% general at (100-x)% health). Otherwise, when they leave detectable airspace (whether you have a satellite over the target country or not), there will be a notification of the damage they did in the minor notices that play alongside the Hologlobe during in-game time progression.

Other UFOs will have a set flight path, and a narrow window of opportunity to intercept: to disrupt these missions entirely, these need to be shot out of the sky. Cases like this include Terror ships and Abductors.

Long War mod brings back a mechanic from previous generations of XCOM: UFOs can now have full DOA crashes (with minimal Alloy recovery, and no corpses or other artifacts), so in some cases you may want to pull your punches. To compensate, the Council will give cash rewards for UFOs obliterated in flight. The harder hitting weapons have a greater chance of reducing UFOs to a pile of smelted alloys.

Interceptor Weapons and Stances

Air-to-air weapons now have three main damage statistics - Damage, Rate of Fire, and Armor Penetration. UFOs have different armor levels, which reduces the damage done by a weapon if its armor penetration isn't high enough. For example, you start with a choice between Avalanche missiles (medium damage, low armor penetration) and Stingray missiles (low damage, medium armor penetration). Avalanches will be better against unarmored and very lightly armored UFOs, while Stingrays will be better against more armored UFOs.

When launching you can set a combat stance for your interceptors as they launch on a mission:

• Aggressive gives +15% to hit for both you and the UFO. You may not use the dodge consumable when aggressive.
• Balanced plays out like normal.
• Defensive gives -15% to hit for both you and the UFO. You may not use the auto-hit consumable when defensive.

Mathematically and not accounting for interception time, this means that Aggressive is the most efficient stance when your Interceptor aim is lower than UFO aim, while Defensive is strongest when your Interceptor aim is higher than UFO aim. These effects are stronger the bigger the difference. However, Interception time is an issue as UFOs will just leave after some time. Obviously, Aggressive is the most time-effective stance.

UFO Flight Patterns

UFOs can fly at three altitudes: "High", "Low" and "NOE" ("Nap of the Earth,"). The altitude is a clue of what mission the UFO is going on - UFOs flying at NOE altitude are most likely to land, are performing bombing runs, or will generate an Abduction or Terror mission immediately upon arriving at their destination. UFOs at high altitude are most likely to be hunting satellites. Unless playing in Ironman, you may want to see if a UFO will land before shooting it down (and reload if it does not): while a landed UFO is always more dangerous, an intact UFO and it's material components is a valuable prize, given how fragile Power Sources and Flight Computers are from being shot down in Long War.

Once you successfully raid a UFO type, either landed or crash landed, you can research that craft for a damage bonus against it in future.

Strategic Plan

• You start with the Avalanche and Stingray missiles. These will work for small and medium craft for a while until Aliens research better upgrades for their craft.
• After some time sticking with conventional weapons will leave you totally outgunned. Next you'll want to upgrade to Laser and Phoenix cannons. Laser Cannons are built for accuracy, so a pilot can still reliably hit UFOs on Balanced or Defensive stance. The Coilgun is built for armor penetration and higher rate of fire. You would likely need multiple interceptions with frequent use of boost modules to reliably bring down larger UFOs.
• The Plasma Cannons need to be built from Alien Rifles. Once the Mutons start fielding them, you would want to build up a cache of those items to convert to plasma cannons for your Interceptors. The EMP Cannon is built from 1 Sectopod wreck each. It has a higher rate of fire and lower damage than Plasma which increases the chance of UFOs not being destroyed outright. It also increases the chance for more resources to remain intact for UFO crash-site missions.
• Last, but certainly not least, the Fusion Lance is the most powerful air to air weapon that can only be used by Firestorms. They're built from Fusion Cores, and the only way to get Fusion Cores is to take down Battleships and Assault Carriers... or save the cores from Slingshot mission. Though once you do get them set up, you would have a good chance to disrupt even the Terror missions.

Interception Strategy

• Choose an appropriate stance based on your equipped weapon, researched upgrades, and UFO type.
• Always be prepared to cancel an interception if the engagement is not going well for you. Losing an aircraft with an expensive weapons can be devastating to your resources.
• Consider aborting interception if your first shot hits while UFO misses. You can refuel within an hour and try again or send another bird out with the same hit and run tactics.
• Consider aborting when a satellite hunter displays explosion effects. You have prevented the destruction of the satellite, so you might not want to risk additional damage.
• Use modules in tough situations when you need an extra boost to get the job done.
• Have an idea of how many interceptions are possible before UFO completes its mission or attempts to escape. For example Scouts usually can only be engaged twice with Ravens.
• If/once you get enough EMP Cannons to be distributed throughout each continent's squadron, remember that higher damage weapons have a greater chance to outright destroy enemy craft. Plan your engagements around that fact and consider which ground tactical missions you would rather go on.
  • Consider saving craft equipped with more damaging weapons to go against larger UFOs, while EMPing the smaller craft may be a better risk/reward scenario, given that their full compliment of aliens won't be much larger than if shot down with other weapons.
• Late-game, you may find that the aliens favor sending more and the larger UFOs to one continent in particular (such as the continent that got the first Alien Base, or the one with XCOM HQ), meaning that you'll remained burdened by repair times: simply cycle out damaged fighters with fresh fighters from other continents.
  • Transit time puts repair times on pause, but transfer time will almost always be far less than the days it'll take to repair a single fighter.
  • This will also help you by evening out experience between your pilots, and spreading them out between each continent, so you don't get blindsided by, say, a Battleship appearing in a continent with an inexperienced squadron.
• The modules are much more worthwhile-- nearly essential-- in Long War. As said, Dodge cannot be used in an aggressive stance and Aim cannot be used in a defensive stance. And as they do take time to build, it pays to maintain a stock of them.
  • The Aim module is fairly cheap, and is useful throughout a campaign. Keep a large stock of Floater corpses to make these. While an aggressive stance means that all shots have more accuracy, using an Aim module early in a normal stance dogfight means drawing first blood while being a little harder to be hit yourself.
  • The Boost module can be used in any stance, and only extends time (as all air-to-air weapons now are counted as 'long range', approach reduction time no longer is affected). More useful in early game, when you need more time to do enough damage with the weaker weapons and less experienced pilots.
  • The Dodge module is exceedingly useful, and still hard to make, due to the necessity of Cyberdisc wrecks needed to construct them.

Damage Calculations

• Armor Mitigation = 0.05 * (Target Armor - Armor Penetration)
  • 0 is the minimum Armor Mitigation and 0.95 is the maximum
• Base Damage = Weapon Damage * (1 - Armor Mitigation)
• Crit Chance = (Armor Penetration - Target Armor) / 2
  • 5% is the minimum Crit Chance and 25% is the maximum
• A successful Crit multiplies damage by 2
• total damage is then randomized to between 50% and 150% of its current value.
• For XCOM Aircraft:
  • If the appropriate UFO analysis has been researched, total damage is multiplied by 1.1
  • total damage is also multiplied by (Pilot Kills / 100) + 1

Examples:

• Avalanche Missiles (340 damage, 0 armor penetration) vs Fighter (armor 12): no armor is penetrated, so 12×5=60% of damage is blocked, and the avalanche has an effective damage of 136.
• Laser Cannon (290 damage, 5 armor penetration) vs Fighter (armor 12): armor mitigation value of 12-5=8. Consequently, 8×5=40% of the damage is blocked, and the cannon has an effective damage of 174.
• Stingray Missiles (200 damage, 10 armor penetration) vs Fighter (armor 12): armor mitigation value of 12-10=2. Only 10% of damage is blocked, the stingray has an effective damage of 180.

Note that in the above example while the Laser Cannon and Stingray Missiles are about equal on a per-hit basis, the Laser Cannon is more effective in combat due to its higher rate of fire and higher accuracy.

Tables

Aircraft

Name	Health	Armor	Penetration	Speed	Prerequisites		Cost						Maintenance
											Other
Skyranger	Can't be damaged or destroyed				XCOM starts with one, unable to produce more								20
Satellite	Increases funding and provides unique bonuses					10	200 (300)			0 (7)		25 days (12.5 days)
Interceptor	2500	5		10			200					3 days	40
Firestorm	4000	25	5	15	Alien Propulsion	75	750 (1125)	180 (270)	120 (180)	10 (30)	8 UFO Flight Computers 4 UFO Power Sources	28 days (14.0 days)	50

Interceptor Weapons

Name	Hit chance	Damage	Penetration	Firing cooldown	Prerequisites		Cost
											Other
Avalanche Missiles	25% / 40% / 55%	340 (170 per second)		2.0 second	XCOM starts with an unlimited supply
Stingray Missiles	25% / 40% / 55%	200 (133 per second)	10	1.5 second	XCOM starts with an unlimited supply
Phoenix Cannon	25% / 40% / 55%	140 (183 per second)	5	0.75 second	Alien Materials	15	120 (180)	12 (18)		0 (5)		10 days (5.0 days)
Laser Cannon	25% / 40% / 55%	290 (290 per second)	5	1.0 second	Advanced Beam Lasers	25	160 (240)	30 (45)		0 (6)		10 days (5.0 days)
Plasma Cannon	25% / 40% / 55%	650 (650 per second)	22	1.0 second	Vehicular Plasma Weapons	95	500 (750)	50 (75)	60 (90)	5 (19)	1 Alien Rifle	14 days (7.0 days)
EMP Cannon	15% / 30% / 45%	310 (563 per second)	30	0.55 second	Electromagnetic Pulse Weapons	100	575 (862)	60 (90)	160 (240)	0 (16)	1 Sectopod Wreck	20 days (10.0 days)
Fusion Lance	15% / 30% / 45%	1200 (960 per second)	26	1.25 second	Fusion Weapons	120	800 (1200)	70 (105)	120 (180)	40 (62)	1 Fusion Core	25 days (12.5 days)

Modules

Name	Special properties	Prerequisites		Cost
								Other
UFO Tracking (Boost)	Increases the duration of this air combat	Alien Materials Aircraft Boosters	12	15 (22)		1 (1)	1 (3)	2 Drone Wrecks	5 days (2.5 days)
Defense Matrix (Dodge)	Dodges the next two incoming attacks	Cyberdisc Autopsy Aircraft Boosters	50	25 (37)		2 (3)	1 (3)	2 Cyberdisc Wrecks	5 days (2.5 days)
Uplink Targeting (Aim)	Automatically hits the next two attacks	Floater Autopsy Aircraft Boosters	35	20 (30)	1 (1)	1 (1)	1 (3)	3 Floater Corpses	5 days (2.5 days)

Permanent Upgrades (Foundry Projects)

(Version Long War Beta 15d2)

Name	Effects	Prerequisites		Cost
										Other
Advanced Repair	Increases interceptor, SHIV, and item repair speed.	45	Heavy Floater Autopsy	§500	100	0	0	80	21	4x Heavy Floater Corpse
Aircraft Boosters	Allows production of one-time 'boosters' for interception.	10	Alien Materials	§50	0	10	0	10	7	-
Armored Fighters	Increases all interceptor HP by 1000.	30	Advanced Aerospace Concepts	§400	200	0	60	70	14	30x Floater Corpse
Elerium Afterburners	Increases interceptor combat time by 5 seconds.	45	Alien Propulsion	§200	30	0	30	0	14	2x UFO Power Source
Improved Avionics	Increases interceptor aim by 10.	40	Advanced Aerospace Concepts	§400	10	50	0	0	14	3x UFO Flight Computer
Penetrator Weapons	Increases armor penetration of air weapons by 5.	35	Advanced Aerospace Concepts	§300	80	45	0	0	14	3x Cyberdisc Wreck, 3x UFO Flight Computer
Phoenix Coilguns	Increases the phoenix cannon's damage by 90 and armor penetration by 13.	50	Advanced Aerospace Concepts	§300	120	100	60	40	14	2x UFO Power Source
Stealth Satellites	Decreases chance of satellites being detected by alien patrols (30% on first pass, 60% on second).	115	Stealth Systems	§1200	200	0	200	0	28	10x UFO Flight Computer
Supercapacitors	Upgrades laser cannon damage by 10, armor penetration by 6, and increases rate of fire to 0.75.	70	Advanced Pulse Lasers	§800	200	100	200	100	21	6x UFO Power Source
Super Skyranger	Adds 2 more spaces to the roster on Alien Base and EXALT HQ raids, and 4 more on the Temple Ship Assault.	35	Advanced Aerospace Concepts	§200	60	0	0	0	14	-
UFO Countermeasures	Increases interceptor dodge chance by +15%.	50	Seeker Autopsy	§350	10	40	60	0	14	4x Seeker Wrecks, 4x UFO Flight Computer
UFO Scanners	Add UFO HP display to the interception screen for UFO classes that have their analyses complete.	40	Advanced Aerospace Concepts	§200	10	0	10	0	14	4x UFO Flight Computer
UFO Tracking	Increases the chance of interceptors detecting UFOs without satellites present (mimicking patrol behavior) and always when UFOs are on satellite-hunting missions.	40	Alien Power Systems	§300	20	0	40	0	28	2x UFO Flight Computer
Wingtip Sparrowhawks	Grants interceptors secondary armor-piercing missiles (1/2 Stingray Missiles damage) in addition to their primary weapons.	50	Advanced Aerospace Concepts	§400	80	40	20	40	21	-

See Also

• Hangar
• UFOs