What happens if 2 of the 3 abduction missions take place on the same continent?

Question

So I have 2 abduction missions in Europe, both in zero-panic France and England, and a 3rd in Africa with panic level of 1. However, in Europe I also have 3 panic in Russia, and 2 panic in Germany where my home base is, and I want to lose neither.

Which countries/continents will increase in panic and by how much if I take either the Africa site, or one of the European sites?

Answer 1

Having two of the abduction missions be on the same continent is quite helpful, actually, greatly reducing the amount of panic worldwide that results from alien abductions.

The reason for that is simple: continent-wide panic only happens if there is no response to any alien abductions on that continent, and continent-wide panic is not made worse by more than one simultaneous abduction.

In this case, if you take one of the two missions in Europe (and the mission is successful), the continent will not panic, meaning no change in most countries. The country that you don't respond to will get +1 panic (+2 on impossible), but not the usual +2 (+3 on impossible) because one point of that results from the continent-wide panic.

As usual, you'll get -3 panic in the country you respond to, and Africa will see +2 panic (+3 on impossible) in the country that the abductions occurred in, and +1 in all other countries.

If you instead respond in Africa, you'll see +2 panic in both European countries that you didn't respond to, and +1 panic in other European countries, while the African country that you respond to gets -3 panic.

The reason it's so great to get abductions arranged like this is that the second abduction on the same continent only produces one unit of panic (or two on impossible difficulty).

Compare that with the third abduction mission being in Asia instead of Europe, where you'd get 5 total panic (6 on impossible) from it: two (three on impossible) in the country that the abduction mission happened in, plus one in each of the other three countries. Even an abduction in South America produces 3 total panic.

I haven't seen it yet, but if it's possible for all three abduction missions to be on the same continent, that would be ideal. If one of the three countries is at four or five panic, it would actually be possible to get a net reduction in global panic from the abduction missions, on any difficulty other than impossible: the result would be +1 panic in each of the countries not responded to, and -3 in the country you did respond to, for a net of -1 panic globally.

Answer 2

I chose the UK, and it turned out a little better than expected. Africa got its regular panic increase, but the only thing that happened in Europe was that France, site of the other, ignored mission, only got +1 panic. The rest of Europe had no change in panic level.

Answer 3

Assuming you are playing on Easy, Normal or Classic, the values are:

• Panic increase for ignored Abduction mission: 2 in a country, 1 across continent.
• Panic decrease for completed Abduction mission: -3 in a country.

For Impossible this is 3 in an ignored country.

So you have to take one of Europe missions - that way you'll have +1 across Europe and Africa and Russia will to go up to only four.

P.S.: Here are the values from DefaultGameCore.ini to look all clever and scientific :)

PANIC_ABDUCTION_COUNTRY_EASY=1
PANIC_ABDUCTION_COUNTRY_NORMAL=1
PANIC_ABDUCTION_COUNTRY_HARD=1
PANIC_ABDUCTION_COUNTRY_CLASSIC=2
PANIC_ABDUCTION_CONTINENT_EASY=1
PANIC_ABDUCTION_CONTINENT_NORMAL=1
PANIC_ABDUCTION_CONTINENT_HARD=1
PANIC_ABDUCTION_CONTINENT_CLASSIC=1
PANIC_ABDUCTION_THWARTED_CONTINENT=0
PANIC_ABDUCTION_THWARTED_COUNTRY=-3

Note that difficulty levels are called differently here. And yes, you can mod these with a special tool.