XCOM 2 SG - It Continues?

[Dreylin]

Haven't looked at it yet (going to finish my own Commander run first), but I pulled these dev comments from an article:

"The original Long War's DNA was that of a hardcore mod," said Lumpkin. "And while we made plenty of effort to open it up for a wider playerbase once its popularity grew, it kept its reputation as being very challenging. This go-round, we've tried to broaden our appeal by keeping the lower difficulty levels of Long War 2 more accessible to casual players who would still like to take part in an extended campaign experience.

"Those difficulties probably still harder than the unmodded game in the sense that we've added a bunch of mechanics for the player to figure out and master, but the gameplay is set up to be more forgiving to players as they learn the ropes. And make no mistake, the higher difficulties are still things even experienced players should very much lose.

Sounds like we should go in on Commander for our run.

[Jowy]

Oh, I didn't think Long War 2 was going to be out this soon! I'm definitely going to try it (no way I could handle 2 long war SGs at once, sadly, much as I'd like to join you guys). Does the new LW require all the DLC for XCOM 2?

Yea it dropped out of nowhere. They announced it only two weeks ago and now it has already been released.

It works with or without the DLC.

[Jowy]

Haven't looked at it yet (going to finish my own Commander run first), but I pulled these dev comments from an article:

"The original Long War's DNA was that of a hardcore mod," said Lumpkin. "And while we made plenty of effort to open it up for a wider playerbase once its popularity grew, it kept its reputation as being very challenging. This go-round, we've tried to broaden our appeal by keeping the lower difficulty levels of Long War 2 more accessible to casual players who would still like to take part in an extended campaign experience.

"Those difficulties probably still harder than the unmodded game in the sense that we've added a bunch of mechanics for the player to figure out and master, but the gameplay is set up to be more forgiving to players as they learn the ropes. And make no mistake, the higher difficulties are still things even experienced players should very much lose.

Sounds like we should go in on Commander for our run.

Agreed. Legendary would be too much, I haven't even gotten through it unmodded yet (on ironman ofc).

[Whosit]

I started a LW2 campaign but I have to abandon it as a loss after just a couple missions. Mainly came down to me misunderstanding new mechanics for guerrilla ops. I hacked a workstation, and I'm used to just having to mop up remaining enemies, but turns out you're supposed to just call down the skyranger and extract. By the time I figured that out, I hit a point in the mission where Advent drops in 6-8 units every single turn and also the Skyranger takes 3 turns to show up.

So. I kinda lost all my guys.

Also, I'm still not 100% clear on how the infiltration portions work. Smaller squad sizes are better, but I thought hitting 100% infiltration made Advent vulnerable on that mission. Apparently you have to hit well over 100% to get that.

[AdrienIer]

I ran into problems myself (I wrote about them in the discord chat).
I think that as long as you're above 80% infiltration you'll be fine, but if you want the mission to be easy you need to be well above 100%. 100% just means it'll be as difficult as the initial mission description said. I tried a mission with 52% infiltration and it made the mission from "very low enemy presence" to "enormous enemy presence" where I faced two 6-man squads on my first encounter.

[Dreylin]

I went into a 4% mission just for grins ... the pod of 6 would have been manageable from concealment, even the nearby pod of 4 could probably have been dealt with, but then I moved to get a flank and triggered another pod of approximately 12!?

The multi-squad deployment / infiltration aspect is going to make it complicated to divide into neat SG "turns".

[Jowy]

Been pretty busy with RL stuff and haven't had time to try LW2 How has it been?

[El Grillo]

It's been a lot of fun, once you dive into the mechanics and figure out how infiltration and havens work. It is less cleanly divisible for SG purposes, because missions are split between planned infiltration and immediate response. I guess you could go at it from the perspective of passing the save upon completing any mission, but you'd have a lot of situations come up where you wouldn't get to play the missions you'd expect. This gets more noticeable as the game goes on, because the main-quest missions and flashy new missions (network towers and HQ assaults) all take forever to infiltrate, whereas the number of immediate response missions (retaliation-type missions, mostly) scale with the number of regions you've contacted. Some are fairly straightforward and can be played in 15-20 minutes, others, well, not so much :D

I would strongly recommend starting a LW2 SG on Rookie difficulty. There's something crazy going on with Dark Events right now where they happen almost once a week, and are permanent. I have more than 2 pages of them active right now :D

[Dreylin]

Haven't advanced nearly as far as El Grillo, but the Haven/Infiltration squad juggling is a solid addition. Haven't got a good feel for the new troop types or build options yet, and barely got my AWC active to start looking at the extra options.

TBH I think squad make-up / deployment logistics are going to be very difficult to translate into an SG; one solution would be to divide the turns into longer period - maybe 1-2 weeks - which would likely translate into playing the previous set of missions, deploying for the next round, and maybe playing some of those and deploying again. Would be taxing on reporting though.

[Bobchillingworth]

Overall I'm impressed with the mod, but it does have some serious issues I've brought up in the Discord chat.

* The Haven management system would have been better as a Civ IV-esque slider abstraction imo, rather than having to constantly micromanage the assignments of individual Resistance members. The system itself is poorly documented, and it's not at all clear what a sensible division of labor looks like (are four members out recruiting significantly better than three? By how much? Who knows?).

* The enemy readiness system is sometimes a horrible liar and will pit you against enormous forces even when your infiltration level is at 100% and the enemy level is "Extremely Light". Other times it swings too far in the other direction and there will hardly be any enemies on the map.

* Level architecture is sometimes bugged; stairs often don't work (units refuse to walk down them), and tonight I had a VIP spawn in the middle of a table (had to abort the mission, no way to move him- couldn't even destroy the table with explosives).

* Transferring weapon mods between different gun tiers is an enormous pain.

* There's a significant utility / power discrepancy between the nine available classes, with Gunslingers inexplicably being essentially removed from the game.

* The amount of micromanagement in general has been increased several-fold

* The campaign progression system is completely opaque- you are simply told to "find a lead"; said lead comes in the form of a string of missions initially almost indistinguishable from any of the other randomly generated raids you'll have to pick and choose between. It's easy to spend months wasting time while inadvertently ignoring the story (while the Avatar Project ticks by invisibly in the background). This is the most egregious issue imo, and has more-or-less killed my interest in the mod for the time being, as it has likely doomed my current attempt. I only realized something had gone terribly wrong after I read a guide.