Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

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Ronar
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Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by Ronar »

A few 0% supply raids were conducted during this campaign. Every other one that wasn't infiltratable was skipped. For the most part, avatar progress was slowed the most at around 25%, and we let it drop back down to 10% after ceasing the supply raids. This shouldn't have affected the victory very much, because we won with a good number of pips still on the clock with all buffer days untouched.

Almost Ironman
So to begin, this victory was an "almost" Ironman victory with 2 bronzeman restarts on 2 specific storyline missions. The first was the Forge when I didn't realize there was a doom timer. The second was the final network tower which I didn't realize I didn't have to kill everything on the map. Both missions had vital information which wasn't presented to me. On the subsequesnt playthrough of each mission, we crushed it without any deaths after knowing these things.

The doom reinforcements on forge dropped every turn with 8 big enemies each wave which the team just could not escape from. Eventually we ended up with a map of 40 dead enemies and 60 alive enemies which was slightly ridiculous, not because of how impossible it was (Doom reinforcements are supposed to be impossible), but because of how it took 5 minutes to restart level with console (First restart level crashed the game). Doom Reinforcements are a mechanic that exist on any mission that doesn't require the player to kill everything, so it was something I should I have realized would happen on the forge, but since the mission was a swarming storyline mission, I really didn't expect to have to rush a little bit harder than usual. My only complaint was the lack of information presented to the player. The amount of time allotted to the player before doom was ample for them to complete the mission with minimal casualties. However, as a mechanic to encourage less overwatch camping, it kind of failed by not letting the player know that it exists. It's like not telling your dog that pooping in the house is against the rules, then punishing it for pooping on the carpet.

The final restart happened on the final network tower where the goal was simply to walk up and hack the objective. There was no objective indicator on the screen which I had complaints about since the start of the mission. Then I played the mission like a standard network tower except I had to kill swarming level of enemies with 8 people while assuming drop ins would happen. All the game literally had to do was tell me that I only needed to hack the console, and I could have done this without any deaths or a restart.

Now onto the actual analysis of LW 2!

Early Game
It all begins with a standard gatecrasher where we kill all enemies with bullets and rush for all the loot. It shouldn't be too hard to bag all the corpses and loot with a bit of rushing and luck. You can reliably do this 2/3 gatecrashers by just taking risky flanks, never using grenades to kill, and taking shots from disoriented targets while in half cover.

The early game is the tamest part of the strategic layer. All the goals are laid out for the player... Provided the player knows to go for 'Find a Lead' missions without the Intel Package. A lot of players needed this condition clarified on reddit. I highly recommend not labeling Intel Package missions 'Find a Lead' because they have nothing to do with objectives. Another case of lack of information provided to the player. If information doesn't need to be withheld, don't do it... I understand they wanted to add in uncertainty for lore reasons, but XCOM is a turn based strategy game; Non-tactical lack of information is unnecessary.

Back to what we were discussing, early game is the tamest part of the strategic layer. The player has anywhere between 1-3 regions, and they are all relatively low Advent strength. I highly recommend taking 2 regions early and preparing 1 for liberation, while preparing the other for intel gathering after liberating the first. The next most important thing is getting your first Scientist and Engineer. It is very important to complete the first scientist and engineer mission as quickly as possible. The first Sci and Eng personnel lock away a lot of key tech and resources from the player. Most importantly, laser weapons and free resources from digging.

This is where one of my issues with the early game resides. It is too easy to get screwed over early game if you don't get any good missions for personnel. I've had too big an issue with having to restart early game campaigns just because of terrible starts. Unless I've been really unlucky, about 1/3 of my first 2 months end up getting restarted due to getting only 2-4 days for early Eng and Sci missions. This isn't even uncommon. I had one campaign where I didn't get a scientist until 3 supply drops. Perhaps this is due to faceless spawning in the starting region? If that is a thing, I believe removing faceless from the starting region would be a good way of starting a fix to this issue. The first scientist and engineer are so vital to a healthy early strategic layer that having bad detection times for the first scientist/engineer is terrible for the game. Just because you can buy personnel or do basic research does not address this issue. It means that in campaigns where the player does not receive a scientist/engineer early, they are either going to be down ~150 supplies or behind 26 days on research (on top of the research time lost from not having personnel). I understand the need for RNG and variance to create different experiences on every playthrough for replayability, but this is just playing at a plain disadvantage. Good variance would be something like: "In my previous run I had an extra scientist early on, but I had less engineers so I had an interesting campaign where we were ahead on research but behind on resources to build the tech. In this run, I had extra engineers and intel packages that gave me more resources, but we lacked scientists so we were able to capitalize on the tech that we researched, but we progressed slowly." Currently, the replayability experience for the player would go like this: "Last campaign I had zero scientists and engineers because the first 3 missions for personnel were on 2 day timers despite having 6 people on intel. Then I had no personnel missions until the end of April. By then, I decided to restart the campaign. This time, I had 2 Scientists and 2 Engineers at the end of April, and I'm getting ready for HQ raid with a full set of lasers and plated armor. Last campaign was literally a few hours of my life wasted." There needs to be a tradeoff rather than just a complete disadvantage to the player. This seems to be a huge theme for a lot of complaints about LW2. One example is the graze mechanic which is *technically* fair to both XCOM and Advent, yet tactically is just unfair to XCOM who needs to win a LOT more engagements than Advent with timed restrictions. There's a lot to talk about with the pros and cons of the graze mechanic which I'll do separately in the future.

Stealth
Stealth, like the graze mechanic, is also a pretty big topic that can't just be covered in a post about LW2 in general. However, on the topic of early game, stealth should be addressed. I would agree that stealth should be removed after playing dozens of hours. Many players like stealth when starting out LW2 because it's new and exciting. But after hours of doing stealth, any player will start to see the pattern. It's very linear gameplay with uncontrollable factors such as stealth civs, bad pod placement/patrol, and magical teleport drones. Because of the very foundations which XCOM is built with pod and LOS mechanics, stealth can never really be done in a healthy manner without changing the core game. About 10-30% of stealth missions will end in failure depending on when in game the missions are conducted. After understanding stealth missions to its core, a good comparison for stealth missions would be like throwing 1-2 troops into a mystery machine and having an 80% chance of getting back the troops you threw in along with a reward. The other 20% of the time, the troops are dead or injured, and a reward may or may not accompany them. I would like average mission sizes to be about 4-6 people. That feels like the healthiest number for an average number of troops. There was an analysis done that showed that a large portion of missions from successful campaigns seems to be done with 1-2 troops, but the playtime for those 1-2 man missions is a lot less. This raises the question of how much stealth should be in the game in terms of IRL playtime, and in game time. IRL playtime is a very big portion of the consideration, but in game time is also a huge part of this consideration. After all, when half a game's missions are unfun, but that half only accounts for 10% of playtime, that's like 50% of the game's potential thrown down the drain. On that note, the mod is called Long War 2, yet Long War 2 felt relatively short compared to the first Long War. Early game is when stealth is done the most because even after getting caught, the drones/troopers probably miss all their flank shots anyways. Stealth is highly rewarding because of how low advent strength is. Most missions are probably going to be extremely light with very low turn count for skyranger arrival. Later on when enemies are deadly accurate with super high mobility such as lancers and MECs, getting caught at any point during stealth usually results in dead operatives. In general, I'd like 1-2 man missions to be removed as long as changes are made to allow a reasonable amount of missions to be done with 4-6 man teams. Just flat out removing stealth without any tradeoff would be a plain unfair disadvantage to the player.

Midgame
Mid game was by far the most enjoyable part of the game. I would have actually liked early game more, but the amount of time I spent on restarting campaigns after not getting personel, just took the enjoyment out of that half of the game for me. Once we made contact with more regions, and areas started hitting strength 4 and 5, that's when things got a bit more interesting. I decided that we would try and maintain the regions around our liberated region as much as we could. We fought every single troop column to reduce all the strength we could. This is also when we did most of the 0% supply raids. After realizing advent vigilance was getting tampered with too much (Avatar progress slowed by ~25% at peak), I backed off of the supply raids. Suddenly strength hit 7 before I knew it, and they were capable of raiding our region. While I do agree that being able to halt advent's advance into a region is a bit too strong, I also feel like when a player invests 13 people on intel with a scientist advisor and the avenger scan, advent troop movement should be slowable. It felt like advent troop movement either shouldn't be a mission (Just have the strength increase), or supply raids should be occasionally infiltratable when the player really proves he wants to slow advent movement. Regardless, after advent strength in the nearby region rose to 8, I chose to set everyone in the liberated region to intel and put in a sci advisor. SURPRISE! ADVENT DIDN'T ACTUALLY WANT TO RAID THE REGION. IT WAS JUST A PRANK ALL ALONG! SEE? THERE'S THE CAMERA. YOU'RE ON TWITCH.TV! No joke, for the entirety of the campaign advent never raided the region once. If this was because advent realized I was hunting for their supply convoy, they are absolute geniuses. By doing this I never got to farm supplies from my liberated region for fear of the assault. Not that the assault is hard (I've done it before), but replacing personnel was just such a pain, that I chose to set everyone to intel to catch the first assault so I could farm supply in peace for a little longer. Interestingly enough, supply was one of the resources that I ran lowest on late game (Hmmm, I wonder why). However, most of a player's income comes from the blackmarket anyways so it didn't matter too much. In fact, it helped deal with my historic tendencies to run out of intel late game. All my previous campaigns that came close to winning were lost due to intel debt.

Overall, I'd say the best experience I had with LW2 strategic layer was struggling over strength in a region against advent while maintaining a goal in mind. If any bigger changes were to happen with the strategic layer, I'd say this is what I'd like Pavonis to look at the most. Decision making here was the most exciting the strategic layer was for me.

Endgame
Decision making for the strategic layer was the most exciting during the midgame. Then everything drops into hell. Literally and figuratively. I understand that a feeling of utter chaos as the avatar project nearly completes makes sense. The world falls into chaos as XCOM expands it's influence while Advent struggles to complete the project. But it was a bit messily executed. Late game is when stealth missions become riskiest to play. It is also when missions spawn like no tomorrow, because the player is suddenly forced to contact a bunch of regions around the world in an almost unreasonable amount of time to beat the game. Furthermore, your A team will usually be infiltrating for around 35 days at some blacksite while your B team tries to fight elite troopers with B tier weapons. After you do a retaliation mission at this phase, you realize doing any missions is a huge risk to your fighting force and you just stop doing missions. 3 missions will pop up a day, and you'll skip it while saying, "This is fine." with everything outside the Avenger window on fire. After I realized what I had to do, (Wait through the massive infiltration times for late game missions without doing anything stupid) the game became a very stale skip every mission type of stage. I understand lategame is the hardest part of a game to test because of how much can be different between different campaigns, but the late game really feels like a mess on the strategic layer. Fighting elite troopers with anything other than coilguns is basically a losing battle, yet unless you are rich from consistent 0% supply raiding, you'll be waiting with your B team mag weapons watching all the missions you can't reasonably do. Especially with how awkwardly paced the avatar project is. Overall, I think this part of the game could use the most changes. If this phase of the game is really deemed to be fine as it is, can we at least get a "Scan while ignoring all the missions" button?

Bugs
Losing to a game can be one of the best feelings ever. When I lose to a game and say, "Wow. The game beat me. I wanna try that again." it says a lot about how well the difficulty was introduced into the game. Then there's losing to BS, "Wow I just lost a mission because 2 pods ran beside us on yellow alert WHILE I HAD MY BACK AT THE END OF THE MAP" which doesn't feel good at all because the player can do literally nothing about it besides waltz into 8 enemies in a terrible position followed by 16 more enemies walking in from behind. (You can tell how fondly I feel about yellow alert) THEN there's losing because your best soldier was crit by an 86% through a wall that he shouldn't have been seen through (Referencing cover not being there bug). Then a chain reaction of not having enough firepower on the team to deal with the enemies coupled with slowly losing more people happens, and the entire mission slowly goes down the drain. This is the worst way to lose because the player shouldn't have even lost. The player feels cheated out of a good campaign AND their time. Hours of gameplay on an Ironman lost because the player didn't alt f4 fast enough. Even if he did restart level, the victory would feel incomplete because he didn't break out of the scenario he was previously in. This time things went better, and there was a flawless victory.

I understand many of the bugs in this game were a result of firaxis not fixing half their bugs in a poorly made game, and it wouldn't be fair to put it all on pavonis to fix everything. However, the bugs really do ruin the gameplay experience. Pavonis puts a lot of emphasis on IRL gameplay time over in game time. The amount of time it takes to alt f4, and fix all the bugs (if they even are fixable) should also be considered then. Someone needs to fix these bugs or the game will remain flawed no matter how good actual gameplay is.

Conclusion
Overall, there's a lot to talk about that couldn't be talked about here. I didn't talk about any of the tactical stuff, because there's a whole lot of conversation to be had there that couldn't be reasonably addressed in a post like this. While this post may be very critical of the mod itself, I actually don't think LW2 was poorly made at all. I just prefer to be more critical when it comes to criticism so actual problems are addressed. There's a lot that was very well done that fixes many of the issues of vanilla, while maintaining the amazing gameplay and difficulty of the first Long War without being an exact clone. If I made a post praising LW2, it would probably be even longer than this one. There will understandably be many parts that could use improvement especially since there have only been 2 patches so far. Also keep in mind that I'm not a beta tester. I can't provide the type of info that players like Joinrb gives, but I do give information about how a regular player would feel about the game. As a player, my goal isn't to make the game, but to play the game. To figure out every inch of the game. This is my feedback to be taken into consideration. I certainly don't expect every word to be taken. However, hopefully this gives Pavonis a different perspective to look at when it comes to developing Long War 2.


The entire victory (Minus the first month which I did offscreen because everyone was probably tired of seeing me play March stealthfest) was streamed on my twitch channel at twitch.tv/ronar1

Come for the stream and stay for the memes,

Thanks for reading!
mmCion
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by mmCion »

Very detailed Commander Ronar.

I've watched countless hours of Ronar playing LW2 Ironman, and I saw most of what he mentioned on this post. He did as close as it comes to ironman, even pushing and taking a beating through many bugs. I especially agree with the late game button request (scan and avoid missions).
stefan3iii
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by stefan3iii »

I'm curious what determines avatar progress? Is there some randomness to it? How many Alien Research Facilities did you do?

In my own campaign the avatar timer was just a complete non factor. I did 3 alien research facilities in like July/August, so does it mean that you just need to focus on doing those, or is there more to it?
fowlJ
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by fowlJ »

stefan3iii wrote:I'm curious what determines avatar progress? Is there some randomness to it? How many Alien Research Facilities did you do?

In my own campaign the avatar timer was just a complete non factor. I did 3 alien research facilities in like July/August, so does it mean that you just need to focus on doing those, or is there more to it?
I'm not sure how much randomness is involved, but a major factor is that if you generate an excess of ADVENT Vigilance (by running a whole bunch of missions, particularly high impact missions like Supply Raids and 'Get ADVENT's Attention' missions), Avatar progress is slowed until ADVENT Strength catches up - quite significantly if you accrue enough of it.
Drogmyre
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by Drogmyre »

I really enjoyed watching your campaign, Ronar!

Thanks for making this post, I agree with a lot of your points, though I would say you didn't rant about Viper tongue grab enough XD
dstar3k
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by dstar3k »

Ronar wrote:Hours of gameplay on an Ironman
"Well, there's ya problem."

The game is known to be buggy. I have no idea why anyone would even consider playing Ironman given that fact.
Izzy
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by Izzy »

The Bugs are the most serious problem I have with the game at this moment and actually stopped me from playing it altogether. I have a very good running Ironman Commander campaign alive but after losing 2 Missions back to back to abysmal LoS bugs (good old Micro Missiles through solid wall and out of LoS of any alien soldier and a Rocketeer Rocket fired through 3 (!) separate solid walls and so perfectly placed it actually killed 2 guys in the center of it, also out of LoS ofc) I took a break and went over all my injuries and lost soldiers that campaign and came to the conclusion that most of them happened due to bugs, so I never went back to the game.
Commander and Legendary are too challenging to play around and with so severe bugs. I would go this far and say, take everything away or nerf it down a lot which can break the game this hard and start with rockets, micro missiles and viper poison until it is fixed (if ever, considering we are speaking of X-Com 2's engine here).
Ronar
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by Ronar »

Drogmyre wrote:I really enjoyed watching your campaign, Ronar!

Thanks for making this post, I agree with a lot of your points, though I would say you didn't rant about Viper tongue grab enough XD
I was gonna do a post about tactical turn offs, but I felt like a post mainly about strategic stuff matched a discussion of the campaign overall more.

But Viper tongue grab with unnecessary accuracy makes them into a very high priority target in every engagement that has enough units to kill a grabbed troop.
SouthpawHare
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by SouthpawHare »

Ronar wrote:...the player is suddenly forced to contact a bunch of regions around the world in an almost unreasonable amount of time to beat the game.
This is kind of the main intention of the hardest difficulty mode, yes?
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johnnylump
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by johnnylump »

Thanks for the post, Ronar.
seananigans
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by seananigans »

Good post, enjoyable read. I do have to chime in though, and say that there are several pieces of it that seem like more of the same "I'm not really sure how LW2 works, so I feel this is unfair/buggy/whatever." This is mostly a fault of the mod not giving you enough information of what's happening, what to do, etc. But I'm pretty sure they're working on that.

It's also entirely possible I'm misunderstanding what you're saying in parts, but after reading so much of this forum (and so many similar posts with misunderstandings), I don't think I am.
Ronar
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by Ronar »

seananigans wrote:Good post, enjoyable read. I do have to chime in though, and say that there are several pieces of it that seem like more of the same "I'm not really sure how LW2 works, so I feel this is unfair/buggy/whatever." This is mostly a fault of the mod not giving you enough information of what's happening, what to do, etc. But I'm pretty sure they're working on that.

It's also entirely possible I'm misunderstanding what you're saying in parts, but after reading so much of this forum (and so many similar posts with misunderstandings), I don't think I am.
Which parts are you referring to? Maybe I could address them.
Navil
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by Navil »

Hi, i agree with most of the things you say Ronar.
This is my first encounter with Long war mod, i didn't played LW1, i started now with LW2 and i can tell the mod is great compared to vanilla for which i payed and now i don't pay and get hell of a great game. I beated the vanilla game on Ironman Legend, but to beat LW2 on Ironman Legend i need like 2 months of my life to just play and learn mechanics, stop working my job, and prepare to try beat the game on Ironman Legend. But who's gonna pay the bills that 2 months?
I think LW2 is designed great, just the simple players like me dont have the time to invest to learn all mechanics to beat the game on Ironman Legend. Also this is FREE mod. If we want all bugs to be fixed i think this mod should be payed. I think the design team just dont have the manpower to fix everything. They have the great design but actually some one need to do the job after all.
I am now preparing myself on LW2 1.2 save scumming while i wait for the 1.3, but time is a rare commodity. I will try to beat LW2 at Ironman Legend at 1.3.
That was my point of view.
Greetings
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johnnylump
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by johnnylump »

Ronar,

Thanks the for the post.

We're able to fix some vanilla bugs, but things like shooting through a wall is not the sort of thing we would be able to address -- that's deep engine level stuff that to the best of our knowledge is out of reach for modders. And I agree it sucks, especially with Legend where the margin for error is so small.
Drogmyre
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by Drogmyre »

johnnylump wrote:Ronar,

Thanks the for the post.

We're able to fix some vanilla bugs, but things like shooting through a wall is not the sort of thing we would be able to address -- that's deep engine level stuff that to the best of our knowledge is out of reach for modders. And I agree it sucks, especially with Legend where the margin for error is so small.
Does make for hilarious moments where your soldier throws a flashbang through a lamppost and destroys it, though.

Happened to me twice in a row on gatecrasher, I was like 'this squad is too stupid to live' had a good laugh.

Keep up the good work JL!
Ronar
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Re: Long War 2 Legendary Almost Ironman Victory ~ Detailed Analysis

Post by Ronar »

johnnylump wrote:Ronar,

Thanks the for the post.

We're able to fix some vanilla bugs, but things like shooting through a wall is not the sort of thing we would be able to address -- that's deep engine level stuff that to the best of our knowledge is out of reach for modders. And I agree it sucks, especially with Legend where the margin for error is so small.
I understand that completely. These are bugs that seem to be deeply rooted in the game that would be very difficult to fix. Thanks for all the effort thus far though!
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