SOLVED – XCOM Can you delay doing Slingshot Council Missions? Friends in Low Places, Confounding Light, Gangplank

If you are using the XCOM: Enemy Within DLC Slingshot Mission Pack, your campaign’s early Council missions will be replaced by the 3 specialized “Slingshot” missions. In playing my Ironman campaign, I wanted to know if you could delay doing these missions as my soldiers were not prepared for any rough missions at the time.

The XCOM Enemy Unknown / Enemy Within wiki is a very helpful resource to check before making any big decisions in an ironman campaign. From reading there and other forum posts, I had thought that I was able to delay doing these missions. Some users stated that the mission would disappear after 1-2 days of in game time, but come back after about 2 weeks.

If you ignore the Slingshot Council Missions, they will disappear forever!

Unfortunately for these special Slingshot missions, you CANNOT delay doing them. To clarify, they are optional, but if you want to do the missions in your campaign, you can’t delay them in hopes they will return. They won’t.

The mission availability lasts for for about 24 hours of in game time, then will disappear forever. (So if you have some research almost completed, you could delay the mission for a very short amount of time.)

When I first encountered these missions, I had managed to get through all of the missions except the final mission, Operation Gangplank. However my soldiers were wounded and I was behind on research so I didn’t think I would survive the mission.  I had read that I could delay Council Missions and they would return, so I tried doing that. Unfortunately Operation Gangplank never returns. (Which makes sense since according to the story it was very time sensitive.)

Slingshot and Operation Gangplank Mission Rewards

If you do manage to complete all of the missions, the final Gangplank mission will give you a huge amount of recovered resources and artifacts: 304 Elerium, 508 Alien Alloys, 6 UFO Flight Computers, 5 UFO Power Sources, and 2 Fusion Cores. This is equal to something like 1500 credits if you were to sell all of it (though that’s not recommended). That is a huge amount of credits or resources, especially that early in the game.

What kind of technology research should you have for completing the Slingshot Mission Packs Confounding Light and Gangplank?

If playing on Classic or Impossible difficulty, I would recommend at least Carapace armor and Laser Rifles, plus a max squad size of 6. Based on the time of the mission, this may be hard to pull off depending on how things go at the beginning of your campaign.

Friends In Low Places mission strategy

The first Slingshot mission Friends in Low Places can be done with much lower resources – just move all soldiers and the VIP slowly along one edge of the map and use Overwatch constantly. Enemies will drop in depending on how far the VIP moves, so move him up slowly, behind the squad, and use Full Cover and Hunker Down on him every turn.

Confounding Light Council Mission Strategy

Every time I tried this mission I found it extremely hard. I have lost several ironman campaigns due to failure on this mission. You may want to consider skipping it and the followup mission due to their difficulty.

However here are some tips. Because this is a time sensitive mission, you have to be constantly moving forward. There is no time at all for a slow overwatch advance. If you waste more than 1 or 2 turns you will not complete the mission in time. The first turn you are okay to do a full dash forward with all troops on the right or middle side. The first enemies you will encounter are on the left side of the train, around the 2nd train car. Generally the enemies on this level are groups of 2 thin men, then Mutons will teleport in at set points. Note that when you activate the 2nd transponder, this will trigger muton(s) teleporting in, so be prepared for that.

For the 3rd and 4th transponder, I would recommend NOT triggering them right away. Have one soldier at each transponder, and also a soldier in the final train car at the controls. Then all on one turn activate the 3rd and 4th transponder and the mission will end instantly. This allows you to avoid fights with several Mutons and Thin Men which are scripted to trigger when the transponders are activated. You could even leave a sniper with squadsight way back at the second transponder and wait to trigger that until the very end as well.

When I played this mission with a more typical strategy on Classic difficulty, I was always 1-3 turns too late to complete the mission.