It's not a bug but a feature. The internal mission name of this type of mission is called Snare. It's a mission that can only show up in regions with high vigilance and high advent strength and it has only one purpose: to .... well, snare you. It's basically a trap. It's one of the few ways how Advent can try to counter your actions by lureing you in an easy mission to then catch you off guard to eliminate your squad.

Just like you noticed, it's a mission where once you break concealment hell breaks loose as they quickly send lots of reinforcements in order to destroy you. The mission is usually extremely easy to detect, since they want you to find it, and it has a higher than usual force level, meaning stronger enemies show up, while also having less enemies than usual, which lets you think that it's an easier misison due to you seeing that it has less enemies before infiltrating.

My only suggestion would be to always be wary of hack missions you find in regions with lots of vigilance and lots of advent strength and be especially wary if the time reimaining for the misison is suspiciously high. On top of maybe trying to throw down a flare on the turn when you break concealment to be able to run away if needed.

Don't forget, one of the most important decisions you have to make through th egame is deciding if doing a mission is worth it or not. And doing a mission which was designed to trap your soldiers might not be quite worth it. Though guess it would be rather cheap to just reload an older save to cancel the infiltration, you should still at least try to run away and accept that Advent actually managed to trick you with its Snare mission. After all, once you broke concealment it's obvious that it was a trap due to the immediate reinforcements.

If thats the case i wish the game did a better job of communicating that to you. It doesnt help that the objective is almost identical to the ones where you need to get to an item before its box explodes, and the objective description for said missions are almost identical.

Hell, i only actually found out about Vigilance and...the other one just yesterday. Its not mentioned anywhere in the archives or LW tutorial.

If such a mechanic will remain in the mod, it really needs to be more apparent. At no point do those missions appear to be a "trap" because if you win, you do get away with something. Its not like false data or something. Perhaps that could be added to make it a bit more obvious, so you're more choosy with your missions in the future.

Either that, or this "bug" needs to be fixed because without your explination, thats all it is. A bug. Its extremely player unfriendly.

Originally posted by Ven:

If thats the case i wish the game did a better job of communicating that to you. It doesnt help that the objective is almost identical to the ones where you need to get to an item before its box explodes, and the objective description for said missions are almost identical.

Hell, i only actually found out about Vigilance and...the other one just yesterday. Its not mentioned anywhere in the archives or LW tutorial.

If such a mechanic will remain in the mod, it really needs to be more apparent. At no point do those missions appear to be a "trap" because if you win, you do get away with something. Its not like false data or something. Perhaps that could be added to make it a bit more obvious, so you're more choosy with your missions in the future.

Either that, or this "bug" needs to be fixed because without your explination, thats all it is. A bug. Its extremely player unfriendly.

Well, it would be a pretty bad trap if it would be possible to see it that easily. You simply know that it's a trap once you notice that they throw down reinforcements on you every turn once you broke concealment, since it's an obvious indicator for that they were very much expecting you, seeing that they had so many reinforcements prepared for you. It's supposed to be player unfriendly, as it is a trap for the players. And by then you should have gained enough player skill to know when to complete a mission and when to abandon a mission. Also, if the mission reward would be fake it would make he decision trivial, so the real reward is required.

And I mean, it is the enemy strategy we're talking about. It would be kind of weird if the game would give you a manual for what the aliens do in detail when they feel threatened. A trap only works if the opponent doesn't expect it and if the lure you use is actually worth something. And if you really want to know it then you can always check the rather detailed wiki. Though I guess it doesn't give you too big details about the Snare's reinforcements, other than that it's different from usual.

Also, I thought that the achives told us about stuff like how global vigilance slows down the Avatar progress. But it's not really like it tells us details about which of the enemy missions can spawn or not spawn anymor depending on the vigilance and advent strength, since those are after all again top secret alien information.

Not really?

Its not an obvious indicator that they're expecting me. To me, its an obvious indicator of a bug or unintended feature, or a buggy implementation. It is a Mod, after all.

And what i meany by it being fake data - It should be real up until the point you get it, but when you go to grab it, you get a popup textbox telling you that it was fake, revealing that its a trap. Because without that, this is just a bug to me.

Hell, it could even be made so that when you get said popup, 5 pods instantly spawn over the end turn, rather than it being a single pod each turn. Retaliation missions do it, so why not the "obvious trap"? To me, that would be more of a trap, and much more obviously one.

And nope. All the Archive explains is about how you need to do missions to liberate regions, how infiltration works, and how havens work. That's ALL the archive says. Nothing else is explained.
A lot of things i had to look up and even then i only looked them up because i was curious, not because it was anything that i explicitly realised i needed to learn about. For example "What are the V and F in the regions" is one of my recent google searches. That is never explained, and even still most of what i found online is anecdotal and vague explinations from players, and/or assumptions as to what they are. Again, none of this is explained.

The base game isnt anything like that. The enemy doesn't set "traps" for you and considering the tactical AI is just as dumb as it is vanilla, i assumed after playing it that LW was just a rework of how missions are given, and structured + infiltration + haven management + more difficult strategic layer with no schematics.
If the AI isnt any smarter, why would i immediately assume "Oh they must be setting a trap for me!"
Why would i think that?
My first thought would be "This is clearly a bug. Its literally only this one mission type, so clearly someone crossed some wires while working on this mission type".

If it really was a trap, i would expect that kind of thing to happen on any and all mission types with subtle hints to tell you about it, but still fairly obvious if you know what to look for.
Instead of it being a mission type, it should be an OBJECTIVE TYPE. This way, you wont lose out on something you very obviously need to do just because its a trap, and its a obvious indicator if you know what to look for, and you've experienced it before.
For example, it could be "Plant Malware in Psi Tower" Objective or something like that. Kinda like the vague "Find a lead" objectives already in the game.
As it stands, now i just know "Okay im not doing that one specific mission type now". So now its like....i cant do a mission type? Deliberately reduce the variance in gameplay?
That is what i mean by Player unfriendly, not just because its not told to you.

There is a difference between "Player Unfriendly" (Read: Annoying on purpose for the sake of being annoying) and "Challenging but rewarding" (Read: Very obviously a trap, but still doable, and very explicitly told to you that you've been duped rather than assuming its a bug until someone on the forum tells you otherwise)
This isn't the only example of Player unfriendlyness in the mod as well.
I recently researched Coil weapons and i started a mission, i realised my Grenidier needed a cannon upgrade as she was still using the basic earlygame one. I went in to build items, i built one...only to realise that i had built the SPARK cannon instead.
Their descriptions are so vague, it doesnt say which is which until you try to go and equip it and even then all it says is "CANNOT EQUIP" not "Not Equipable by current class" like it says in vanilla. This mod really does go out of its way to be unfriendly to the player for no reason.

I've got to agree with Ven on this one. There are definite bugs in these mods. Mostly minor stuff, but this kind of 'feature' comes across very poorly.

Even basic stuff in the missions are often miscommunication, like the speech overlay saying to 'kill all remaining hostiles', but you have to extract not clear the level.

If there's an interactive strategy layer like this it needs to be 1 - communicated better, and 2 - the mission itself should change once the trap is detected. It should just become about extraction at that point, with some kind of fair reward that makes it worth completing the mission rather than loading you game from before it and aborting the infiltration.