Kudos

[deducter]

I actually never played that much vanilla XCOM 2, but lately I've been playing a pretty ridiculous amount of LW2 on Veteran. Great game. My thoughts:

1. When you hear every streamer cursing drones, you know this is Long War.

2. It may be a good idea to call out explicitly (say via a pop-up upon loading the geoscape) that early on, it's wise to put most of your haven members on intel. It was not until I saw some videos by folks like xwynns that I realized there was a significant influence on infiltration times, which makes the early missions much easier. This may be frustrating for some new players.

3. New loading screens. They were so well-done that I didn't even know they were LW-specific until someone else mentioned it.

4. I initially dreaded stealth missions, but they weren't that bad once you got used to it. Ghostwalk is amazing.

5. First Haven retaliation... let's just say I was not prepared. Great mission type. My only comment is that I feel like the UI could use the green civilian icon to represent the civilians you activated. It was really hard to keep track of exactly how many civilians I actually reached and how many were still left without manaully counting over and over.

6. There's nothing quite like unleashing a torrent of flames at half a dozen advent soldiers. Or rocketing a pod of sectoids. You can never pass up the opportunity to rocket sectoids.

7. Final mission of liberating the starting zone was insane. I was expecting some sort of boss, but this was somehow worse than the boss outsider in LW1. I imagine this will only get even more insane in future regions.

8. I like the new graze mechanic, although I think the UI for it is not too great. I think many players fail to realize that this can actually convert some misses to hits. If I understand it correctly, on the vanilla settings if you have 90% chance to hit then you are guaranteed to do at least some damage. Yes, sometimes you need to hit for full damage with that 99% shot and you fail, but I think it's counterbalanced by the times you need to do 2 damage but would miss that 98% shot. Also, I feel like the player is generally much better at controlling how to deal chip damage vs the AI. I think the graze mechanic is, on the whole, a buff for XCOM.

If there's any way to incorporate the new graze mechanic directly into the targeting UI I think it'll really help players understand it. It can display something like 50% chance to hit for full (green), 20% chance to hit for partial (yellow), 30% chance to miss (red).

9. Anyway to incorporate soldier class reroll? I know the GTS is meant to allow you to selectively train soldiers after the first 14 days, but it could be interesting to allow one reroll per rookie. Don't like your 60 aim ranger? Reroll and hope you don't get a sharpshooter. After the first reroll that's it.

[bilfdoffle]

I still recommend using perfect information. It upgrades the display to show dodge chance, and the graze band is incorporated into this. I'm hoping it gets updated to remove the graze band from the normal hit section, as inl currently have to do it myself.

[GavinRuneblade]

6. There's nothing quite like unleashing a torrent of flames at half a dozen advent soldiers. Or rocketing a pod of sectoids. You can never pass up the opportunity to rocket sectoids.

I think rockets actually hitting anything is an urban legend, everyone knows someone who knows someone who claims to have seen it. But really, all rocket targeting systems were coded by faceless infiltrators.