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 (Electroflares) 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.

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.

Alien Nightvision

In full daylight, every unit in the game can see up to 20* tiles away. Unless there's an obstruction or smoke in the way, all aliens will be able to see 20 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 20 tiles at night if there's sufficient illumination. (*actual viewing distance for dawn/dusk and night to be evaluated at a later time.)

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 multiplied by the degree of illumination to get the dimmer colours.