Welcome to a jumpstart guide on running night ops!
Night missions are a completely different ballgame than what you've previously seen under bright sunlight.
For starters, here are tl;dr points:
1) Enemies in general are much tougher in night ops.
2) Armored enemies will absorb your bullets down to 1 damage hits without the help of armor piercing rounds. Thankfully armored enemies usually have zero dodge.
3) Pitch black darkness incurs a global 90% accuracy penalty on all of your units unless equipped with PEQ laser sights.
4) There is fog of war and your squads cannot see what is standing on a node next to them without a handgun in their squad.
5) Most of night missions will ask you to kill everyone on the field and offers equipment as drops rather than dolls.
6) Most of night missions have a turn limit of completing the objective. In other words, you are short on time.
Continue reading on for detailed talk on those points.
1) Have squads ready for total of three roles.
Ideally you need squads that are built for three different roles: [A] armor killers, [B] unarmored killers, and [C] boss killers.
Group A absolutely needs RFs or MGs equipped with armor piercing rounds.
Group B needs ARs equipped with PEQ laser sights.
Group C will have tailored setups against a specific boss that you are just about to fight.
Mixing A and B is usually a bad idea as the enemies you encounter are much better prepared to kill you than other places.
It is highly recommended to have 2 teams each for groups A and B as you will quickly run into a situation where only one squad is going to be nowhere enough to complete the objective.
Night ops have tight time limits too! There is no time to play peek-a-boo and as such you need to clear the stage as fast as possible.
More about Group As and Bs below.
2) Armor Piercing rounds
You will encounter tan colored enemy units that have been armed with armor plates.
Grey damage indicators with shield means your hits got absorbed by their armor while yellow damage indicators with broken shield means you've penetrated their armor for full damage.
Only RFs and MGs (with the exception of 6P62, Thompson Contender, and C-MS) can equip armor piercing rounds in this game and without the help of AP rounds you will have to painfully brute force your way through armor.
While all dolls have a hidden default armor piercing value of 10, it is nowhere enough to really kill stuff without AP rounds.
Make sure you bring units with armor piercing rounds!
The upside is that barring very few types, most of armored units have zero dodge so you don't need to worry about accuracy.
A small workaround is to use explosives as they completely go through armor but usually you won't ever have enough to kill them fast enough before they wipe your squad out.
Squad setup examples:
3RF 1HG 1SMG. Handy when you are confident with your solo SMG tanking well.
2RF 1HG 2SMG. Use when you are having trouble with your squad surviving multiple encounters.
3) PEQ laser sights
The pitch black darkness on night ops translates into uniform 90% accuracy penalty to all of your own units, with actual formula below:
Night Accuracy = (Original Accuracy * 0.1) + (0.9 * (PEQ's %))
To circumvent this penalty, you need to equip your dolls with PEQ laser aiming modules.
Sometimes mistakenly called as night vision goggles, these are gadgets that you attach on your gun so that you can see the laser beam point at where you're aiming your gun.
You will primarily be using ARs equipped with PEQs to kill unarmored enemies on night ops.
Squad setup examples:
2AR 1HG 2SMG, with 1 SMG that throws grenade to quickly deal damage.
Note that explosives completely ignore the 90% accuracy penalty and will hit regardless.
4) Squad sight with HG
Do you remember the formation screen screaming at you to have a handgun in your squad?
What the tooltip didn't say was that it meant to prepare you for night ops.
Ever heard of fog of war?
Any squad in night ops without a handgun as squad member will have *zero* visibility of what's ahead of them.
White circle in the above screenshot shows how a squad with handgun can see what's ahead while black circle shows you how a squad without one has no idea what it's about to get into.
While it is entirely possible to clear the field with your squads running blind, it is really bad for your mental health.
Even a level 1 handgun is totally okay! Just make sure you have handguns ready to give you sight range.
That's it for today. Stay tuned for more soon!
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