Veteran Ironman Campaign thoughts

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raydeft
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Jan 19, 2016 1:30 pm

Veteran Ironman Campaign thoughts

Post by raydeft »

Last night after 1500 hours of Long War 1 and 1400 hours of Long War 2 I finally got my first "Long War" victory. I am super stoked (I'm probably also a slow learner but hey ...). I thought I'd take some time to write up my thoughts, and chose to do so here rather than on Reddit.

Firstly to the devs / team / modders - JL, Amineri, JoInRbs, XWynns, CapnBubs, RoboJumper, TrackTwo etc thank you so much for the time and effort you have put into this. Long war takes a game and multiplies it by a factor of 15 at least in terms of value for money and time in game. I really appreciate the work that you have put into this.

I played the game with a lot of cosmetic mods, the only gameplay mod was using Commander's Choice. I like being able to select the early game classes and found this stopped me from restarting after gatecrasher if I wasn't happy with the initial team. It becomes academic after GTS but I found it was cool as a starting mod. The only critical mod I would recommend is unlimited icons because I had a squad wipe after not being able to find revival protocol on my specialist.

I played Ironman, and did over 200 missions in the campaign. There were no serious bugs. A few LOS, and a couple of burning units that took an action (I think this is related to setting panicking units on fire), also the odd panicked enemy still taking an overwatch shot (not sure if this is deliberate). And the icons bug referred too above. Certainly not the multitude of game ending bugs I keep reading about as justification not to take Ironman.

I played every mission I could infiltrate to XL / VL up until around November. Essentially taking every mission with over 4 days of infiltration. I liked playing like this a lot. I'd been more selective in previous campaigns, but this definitely rounded out my roster, and helped me recover from setbacks.

Suggestions:
1) ELIMINATE SPY: Eliminating spy's becomes a bit tedious. Is it possible to make the map smaller? The firefight is okay but it seems like every mission has the same 4/5 turn run across the map to the combat area. If the maps were smaller this would alleviate some of the tedium.
2) ELIMINATE SPY/ LOW RANK SQUADS: In the mid to late game it is virtually assured death to send a low ranking squad on a mission. I'd like to keep playing with lower ranked guys later into the campaign. Given the tedium of the spy missions I would love it if these missions could be run by low ranking squads later in the campaign which would allow for ranking up, and allow for more enemies on the map. Maybe after date x (say August) Eliminate spy missions can be run by a 6 man team with nobody above sergeant? Add some low level advent pods to the map for balance.
3) ELIMINATE SPY: How about some variety. Instead of the faceless in the haven, why not the occasional eliminate VIP mission to remove the spy? Its thematic and would give some variety to these missions.
4) LOW RANK SQUADS: Smash and Grab is a great addition. I'd love to see it used later in the game for low ranking squads. How about reducing the rewards later in the game and making this a mission that runs with enemies at half the force level? It would still be worth doing, but would give an option to use lower ranked squads. You could have a Smash and Grab with 2 advent resource containers but 1/2 the force level - call it Training Raid or something.
5) AWC: I feel like the training times should be dropped by a day, (3/6/9 instead of 4/8/12) across the board. Even built as first facility, and with two tubes this takes most of the game to get a few guys trained. I feel its just that little bit too long.

Things I liked:
1) Perk trees - I know everyone has their pet hate, but I feel that there are multiple viable options per tree, and there are some pretty significant and difficult choices. If there was any class that I feel needs a little bit of a bump up it's gunners, but I feel the hail of bullets / demolition combo along with area suppression makes them worthwhile anyway. I wish traverse fire was a bit lower. I'm also happy with the new shinobi tree.
2) Smash and grab is fantastic.
3) Network tower as a reward is a nice addition.

General comments:
1) I see a lot of hate on the difficulty of getting archon / muton elite / gatekeeper corpses. I found that by the end of the game I had fusion blades on my top 3 shinobis, alien psi amps on 5 of my psi-ops, carapace armor on the A-Team etc. I'm happy that you need to go on liberations / supply raids etc if you want these corpses. The items are special, the rarity should reflect that.
2) I struggled to get any facility leads. I would really have liked this as I wanted to keep playing in Feb 2036 but had too run the final mission to avoid the doom counter. I think making these more accessible (maybe via skullmining) would be a good decision. Ultimately you still need to run the missions, but losing to the doom counter or being forced to close the campaign early felt like it was against the spirit of a "long war"
3) I did not play with Alien Rulers DLC. Personally I dislike frost bomb enough to remove the whole DLC.
4) I'd support incendiary grenades being dropped in damage but still keeping the 100% burn. I used these (like stasis) to remove an enemy for a turn. Damage is not important. I also wondered if it was not viable to make different grenades have different effects on melee / shooting. E.g. burning units cannot shoot but can melee, poisoned (or acid) units cannot melee but can still shoot. Acid came late and felt useless at that point in the campaign because I had shredder ammo on most soldiers.

Once again thanks for the efforts.
Psieye
Posts: 829
Joined: Thu Apr 06, 2017 12:27 am

Re: Veteran Ironman Campaign thoughts

Post by Psieye »

raydeft wrote: I struggled to get any facility leads. I would really have liked this as I wanted to keep playing in Feb 2036 but had too run the final mission to avoid the doom counter. I think making these more accessible (maybe via skullmining) would be a good decision. Ultimately you still need to run the missions, but losing to the doom counter or being forced to close the campaign early felt like it was against the spirit of a "long war"
I consider them extremely accessible but I do an unorthodox 8-man GOp doctrine for the mid-game (so late May onwards). Facility leads only ever show up with very little time to infiltrate - usually well below 4 days. Supposedly this gets mitigated when you've liberated regions with facilities in them but I never cared - 1 day is enough to infiltrate any GOp (and come out with minimal wounds) given the right preparations.
My three 8-man GOp squad Commander campaigns:
1st
2nd
3rd
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