Search found 167 matches

by Saph7
Mon Sep 18, 2017 4:00 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: So Johnny and the devs ...
Replies: 30
Views: 56899

Re: So Johnny and the devs ...

Cryptc and Psieye's takes are fairly accurate. Speaking personally: as part of my day job, one of the interview questions I'll occasionally get is something along the lines of 'where do you get your ideas'. And it's awkward to answer, because the assumption behind it is that the idea/inspiration/con...
by Saph7
Tue Aug 15, 2017 6:35 am
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: Assault class - how to effectively used them?
Replies: 50
Views: 84534

Re: Assault class - how to effectively used them?

If you use assaults well, they can practically win you the game before psi soldiers ever get running. Assaults and Shinobis are the only early-game classes that can double move and attack, and their attacks hit hard enough to kill nearly anything in March/April. Yes, you'll sometimes trigger additio...
by Saph7
Tue Aug 08, 2017 7:37 am
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: New balance changes
Replies: 9
Views: 18248

Re: New balance changes

Not sure the needle/stiletto thing fixes anything with ammo. Just means I'll be using Needle rounds for 95% of the game. This may even be a buff to XCOM, not really sure, probably about the same or very close in any case. There tend to be more advent, but aliens tend to have more HP. Either way, +1...
by Saph7
Mon Aug 07, 2017 11:27 am
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: Legend difficulty vigilance generation mechanics
Replies: 13
Views: 23978

Re: Legend difficulty vigilance generation mechanics

I got plasma rifles in time for the last missions, though it meant I didn't have time for Warden, so I had to do Waterworld with my team in Predator. I had 4ish combat teams, of which 3 would be infiltrating at any one time. Did an average of 11-12ish GOPs per supply month throughout midgame. Blacks...
by Saph7
Mon Aug 07, 2017 6:07 am
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: Technicals and Grenadiers with SMG's
Replies: 14
Views: 25061

Re: Technicals and Grenadiers with SMG's

The best way to think of it is that there are four primary weapon classes, and four secondary weapon classes. The primary weapon classes are Ranger, Sharpshooter, Gunner, and Assault. For the most part they'll be spending their turns shooting. The secondary weapon classes are Specialist, Shinobi, Gr...
by Saph7
Mon Aug 07, 2017 5:58 am
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: Legend difficulty vigilance generation mechanics
Replies: 13
Views: 23978

Re: Legend difficulty vigilance generation mechanics

Great info Saph. Can you share some details. When did you manage to finish the campaign? When did you do blacksite? Did you do any advent facilities to slow down the AVATAR and how imporatant was that in your overall strategy? Ran Blacksite on August 14th, finished the campaign on September 26th. T...
by Saph7
Sun Aug 06, 2017 10:28 am
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: Legend difficulty vigilance generation mechanics
Replies: 13
Views: 23978

Re: Legend difficulty vigilance generation mechanics

Just finished a Legend campaign a couple of days ago, and to confirm what's already been said, I don't think focusing on increasing vigilance is necessary or even particularly useful. Just try to expand as fast as possible and generate as many resources as possible. Think of an XCOM 2 campaign as a ...
by Saph7
Mon Jul 24, 2017 1:49 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: Covering Fire not proccing
Replies: 6
Views: 12405

Re: Covering Fire not proccing

Covering Fire has various issues, of which the most annoying is that it won't proc on anything your soldier didn't have LOS of at the beginning of the turn. This is deliberate, not a bug – if you go into the base game code, there are comments specifically pointing this out as intended behaviour. I h...
by Saph7
Mon Jul 24, 2017 1:42 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: To what degree can dark events break a campaign
Replies: 8
Views: 16314

Re: To what degree can dark events break a campaign

I have always been quite lucky with DEs before, but my newest campaign (Commander) started off with the one giving 15 defense and armour to OWers and Center Mass. That got me thinking. Combat Awareness (the Sentry one) only affects 50% of Sentries and only when they're on overwatch. Just grenade th...
by Saph7
Sun Jul 23, 2017 10:14 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: Aren't advent rocketeers not supposed to shoot a rocket after moving?
Replies: 4
Views: 9234

Re: Aren't advent rocketeers not supposed to shoot a rocket after moving?

Advent Rocketeers used to have various AI restrictions that made it quite hard for them to use their rocket. With time, higher level players learned to manipulate this so that they could reliably avoid rockets all campaign. One of the changes in 1.3 was to alter the AI trees to make Rocketeers/Grena...
by Saph7
Wed Jul 19, 2017 2:25 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: A Tale of two players
Replies: 38
Views: 55634

Re: A Tale of two players

Yes. We know what JL wants to do. That's in the upcoming changes thread and that wasn't the question. The question I asked specifically was: Why was the "It's now only OP 75% of the time" approach chosen over other approaches that leave the player in control? And of course: What is the re...
by Saph7
Wed Jul 19, 2017 12:36 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: A Tale of two players
Replies: 38
Views: 55634

Re: A Tale of two players

I'd rather see the 75% at 100% with either the cost massively increased (grenade is a consumable like combat drugs) OR the 75% at 100% with no explosion damage (basically a pause button) OR a dark event spawning 25% of biological enemies with hazmat, that I can scan for before launching the grenade...
by Saph7
Wed Jul 19, 2017 9:33 am
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: A Tale of two players
Replies: 38
Views: 55634

Re: A Tale of two players

While I can see your point about them still being powerful statistically, I don't see why the CC part was targeted in such an inconsistent manner when clearly the damage part would have been easier to manage. Inconsistent? Seriously? It's not enough for the things to do more damage than a point-bla...
by Saph7
Tue Jul 18, 2017 6:40 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: A Tale of two players
Replies: 38
Views: 55634

Re: A Tale of two players

But there is a way to control the percentages for incendiaries, just fire two incendiaries, and the chance becomes 94%. Or three for 98.5%. Or combine it with any number of other random things in the game that may kill or control your target. Pretty much. Incendiaries do a ridiculous amount of dama...
by Saph7
Mon Jul 17, 2017 5:18 pm
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: How do you deal with yellow alert flanking shots?
Replies: 25
Views: 40794

Re: How do you deal with yellow alert flanking shots?

I see some theorycraft responses like this that might work on rookie difficulty or w/e - I guess what I'm wondering is if anyone has any playthroughs where they effectively manage yellow alert pods rolling in and getting flank shots or if they just eat it as RNG and move on. I'm one of the Legend p...
by Saph7
Mon Jul 17, 2017 3:09 pm
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: How do you deal with yellow alert flanking shots?
Replies: 25
Views: 40794

Re: How do you deal with yellow alert flanking shots?

It's not luck at all. It's very controllable. First thing to understand is that with a few exceptions (Intel Raids and such) pods don't start on yellow alert. They start on green, which is much less dangerous. The most common things that put a pod into yellow alert are: 1) hearing weapons fire/explo...
by Saph7
Sun Jul 16, 2017 11:22 am
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: Alien strength, how to control it? Global.
Replies: 9
Views: 15652

Re: Alien strength, how to control it? Global.

Controlling strength is very RNG-dependent. If you get lucky with UFOs, it's possible to keep it low for a while, but it's unlikely, especially on Legend. A more realistic goal is to avoid strength rather than destroy it. Unless you're actually doing missions in a region, its strength rating is comp...
by Saph7
Tue Jul 11, 2017 9:36 am
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: Reinforcement Nightmare
Replies: 9
Views: 16062

Re: Reinforcement Nightmare

General rule with reinforcements: with a very few exceptions (mostly retaliations/raids), they don't slow down, they only speed up. If it takes 4 turns for the first wave to show up, then you can expect a 2-3 turn counter on the second wave, a 1-2 turn counter on the third wave, etc. So if you're ge...
by Saph7
Mon Jul 10, 2017 7:50 am
Forum: Long War 2: Strategy
Topic: How soon do you liberate your first region?
Replies: 4
Views: 10432

Re: How soon do you liberate your first region?

On Legendary I usually do my first one in July. If you're playing on Commander or below, you can get it done by June. Earlier is better, since they only get harder as time passes and the sooner you liberate, the more supplies you can farm from the region.
by Saph7
Fri Jul 07, 2017 10:28 am
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: 1.5?
Replies: 33
Views: 55575

Re: 1.5?

It's not only to dodge grief IMO. When the patch comes out is highly dependent on how testing goes. If testers find issues, then another round of working and testing is needed, which can take weeks. This is especially bad on balancing changes as fixing the issue is very non-trivial. So the potentia...
by Saph7
Thu Jul 06, 2017 9:33 am
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: Please rethink this!
Replies: 141
Views: 690086

Re: Please rethink this!

Psieye wrote:This is the most interesting post in this thread. For 1.5 if it proves successful? Or 1.6+?
Nothing that dramatic I'm afraid! I'm playing with the LW2 Shadow Ops mod to vary things up a bit.
by Saph7
Thu Jul 06, 2017 8:34 am
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: Please rethink this!
Replies: 141
Views: 690086

Re: Please rethink this!

I don't think anyone argues that incendiary is the most powerful grenade. What people are argue and complaining is that this nerf will simply remove the item from the game. I'm playing with the nerfed version of incendiaries in my current campaign right now. They're fine. Point of interest: none of...
by Saph7
Fri Jun 30, 2017 5:07 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: Please rethink this!
Replies: 141
Views: 690086

Re: Please rethink this!

The difference between absolute-and-fixed vs tactically-scaling is player psychology. Agreed, you're not going to put gun-to-face before shooting every time, or even half the time. The perception that "if I do work to engineer ideal circumstances, I can mitigate (though maybe not eliminate) th...
by Saph7
Fri Jun 30, 2017 4:31 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: Please rethink this!
Replies: 141
Views: 690086

Re: Please rethink this!

Randomised damage rolls. Randomised scatter in the case of rockets. Randomised burn chance in the case of flamethowers. The only one of those which is truly 100% non-random is Stasis. Which is arguably OP as well, since it makes fights against single lategame enemies like Gatekeepers/Sectopods prett...
by Saph7
Fri Jun 30, 2017 4:04 pm
Forum: Long War 2
Topic: Please rethink this!
Replies: 141
Views: 690086

Re: Please rethink this!

I believe the acceptable middle ground in principle would be a random number roll that the player can influence via tactical cleverness. Without code-level familiarity, I'd offer a solution like "more burn chance in enclosed spaces" where 'enclosed spaces' is measured by how much cover th...