Narcos: Cartel Wars & Strategy: How to Use Raid Firebombs

In Narcos: Cartel Wars & Strategy raid events, deploy Firebombs onto tightly packed defensive clusters seconds before landing ground forces. Firebombs deliver initial impact damage followed by lingering damage over time across a wide footprint. Dropping them on overlapping splash-damage turrets softens or destroys high-threat targets before your troops take fire, while building destruction refunds the tactical energy required to maintain your offensive momentum.

Selecting Target Drop Zones

To maximize damage efficiency, drop Firebombs where multiple defensive structures sit within the burn radius. Raid layouts often feature automated designs with overlapping defensive pockets.

Prioritize targets in this order:

1. Clustered Artillery: Overlapping Mortars, Rocket Launchers, and Sniper Towers pose the greatest wipe threat to infantry squads through heavy direct or splash damage.
2. Defenses Anchored to Utility Buildings: Clusters containing turrets mixed with resource storage or utility structures allow the area-of-effect burn to level secondary targets, accelerating structural destruction.
3. Low-Priority Centerpieces: Avoid targeting standalone high-durability structures, such as Cartel Mansions or isolated vaults. High hit-point pools absorb burn damage without breaking, leaving nearby threats active and yielding no immediate tactical openings.

Managing Tactical Energy and Destruction Refunds

Tactical support abilities launched from your cartel gunship carry escalating command energy costs with repeated use. Expending energy on strikes that fail to demolish targets leaves your forces without support options later in the raid.

Every base building destroyed returns a fixed amount of energy to your tactical pool. Use this economy to sustain your attack:

• Target Multiple Adjacent Targets: Catching three or four structures in a single burn ensures cumulative damage destroys them, creating an immediate energy refund that offsets the cast cost.
• Capitalize on Low-Health Support Buildings: Collateral fire damage ticking down adjacent utility structures helps fund follow-up support abilities.
• Halt Premature Recasts: Do not spend escalating energy on a second or third Firebomb unless the strike guarantees immediate kills, clears an ingress path, or refunds enough energy to justify the higher cost.

Timing Strikes Before Troop Deployment

Deploy Firebombs during the initial scouting phase before ordering landing craft forward. Because Firebombs rely on damage over time to reach their full damage value, dropping them late forces your infantry to take avoidable counterfire.

Identify the primary entry corridor and drop the Firebomb onto the forward defensive cluster. Allow the burn duration to run its course as your Sicarios and assault squads disembark. By the time ground troops advance into range, the defenses will either be destroyed or reduced to low health thresholds that single rifle volleys can quickly finish off. If a defense survives with substantial health, delay troop advancement until the final burn tick completes.

Combining Firebombs with Secondary Abilities

On higher raid stages, defensive structures feature higher health pools that may survive a single Firebomb strike. Combining Firebombs with crowd-control abilities neutralizes incoming damage while the burn ticks down.

Freeze and Burn

Against dense pockets of Rocket Launchers and Cannons, cast Freeze immediately after launching a Firebomb. Freezing the cluster locks defensive weapons in place, stopping them from firing on advancing troops while the incendiary damage continuously burns down their health pools.

Smokescreen Corridor

When breaching deep base layouts, deploy a Smokescreen along the troop path while dropping a Firebomb behind the enemy frontline. The Smokescreen shields advancing infantry from direct-fire perimeter Machine Guns, while the Firebomb burns down rear-line Mortars capable of lobbing indirect artillery fire through smoke concealment.