Night Missions

Night missions are very challenging as the visibility is about a third of day missions. It is possible to avoid most night missions by delaying your landing until daytime. Night Terror Missions will disappear before daytime unless you can keep the site continually targeted with different Skyrangers. If you only have one Skyranger you may find yourself landing at night.

The most important additional operation in night missions is to manage your illumination. These come in four varieties - flares, fires, artificial lighting, and personal lighting.

Flares

Always keep about five or six light flares (Electro-flares) on the 'Ranger and an equal number of replacements on base.

Light flares are best thrown where you expect aliens to be, but remember if you follow that up with a grenade you will also blow up the flare. Bullets or beam weapons are suggested instead.

It is also useful to throw the flare as far as you can. If you throw past an alien they will sometimes be silouhetted by the flare.

Don't forget who has the light flares; start with some soldiers holding them perhaps. The first soldiers shown on the combat load-out screen are the ones who will be first out the door.

Flares can be picked up and re-thrown. Try to leapfrog flares as you progress. Have someone cover a soldier picking up a flare as the aliens will be able to see that soldier more easily until the flare is picked up.

Incendiaries

Incendiary ammo is as good as a flare, plus it can travel further and do some damage if it hits the enemy.

Load up the Auto Cannon with Incendiary before starting the mission. Use on snap-shot to light up the depths of the map, further than flares can be thrown. Give the soldier a back-up pistol.

Incendiary ammo is also available for Heavy Cannon and Rocket Launcher, but the Auto Cannon's fast shot makes it best for the mission - the soldier can still use his pistol the same turn.

Artificial Lighting

This just refers to cityscapes and UFO's being illuminated by streetlamps or internal lighting. A big bonus to night terror city missions. Explosives can knock out this lighting.

Personal lighting

Each soldier is surrounded by a ring of light; this mostly reflects the ability to make out shapes in the darkness when you are close enough to them. This lighting cannot be seen by the aliens.

If you have mind controlled an alien, you will not get its personal lighting until someone on 'your' team moves (including your new pet alien, or any other MC'd aliens). For these purposes, 'turning in place' does not cause personal lighting to come on - only actual movement (from one part of board to another) does. Since movement of your new pet can trigger reaction fire, move one of your 'back field' boys if you want to light up the pet's area while playing it safe re: your new pet drawing reaction fire. FWIW, I have yet to see turning itself cause reaction fire, but maybe it might (with a very low chance).

More specifically, aliens do not check for personal lighting status change, until someone on 'your' team uses energy. On a more abstruse note, this means that going up and down on an elevator by your backfield team will not cause newly-MC'd aliens to light up. On a more practical note, though, this also means that aliens that you MC'd last turn, will stay lit this turn, until you move one of your guys (so that one of them uses energy). This might be useful on night missions or in those dark, windy alien base 'gardens' - at the start of a turn, aliens you MC'd last turn stay lit until one of your soldiers moves. Then again, while all of this is true, you will still get the glowing 'alien seen' number, even if you do move - and it's the most important thing of all, by far. Anyway, perhaps these insights will help, some cold dark night.

Alien Nightvision

In full daylight, every unit in the game can see up to 21* tiles away. Unless there's an obstruction or smoke in the way, all aliens will be able to see 21 tiles away under all lighting conditions. Your soldiers on the other hand have this reduced somewhat at dusk and quite a lot at night. You can still see the full 21 tiles at night if there's sufficient illumination. (*actual viewing distance for dawn/dusk and night to be evaluated at a later time.)

- Night vision for X-COM units (without any sort of surrounding light source) is 9 squares. Notice that this is to detect alien units: you can see the darkened outline of the terrain at longer distances but you won't be able to see the alien until you get closer. Dusk or dawn for X-COM units counts as daylight: visibility is 21 squares. (Also see line of sight.)

Behind the scenes

For those techies who like to look Under The Hood, the XCOM engine handles varying levels of illumination quite cleverly. The palette is arranged so that the base colours of a tile can be added to the degree of illumination to get the dimmer colours.