Your biggest gripes about LW2?

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chaosxxxxx
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Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2016 7:13 pm

Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by chaosxxxxx »

First of all,if a similar thread exists,accept my humble apology.
Second of all,if you think this is a 'whine thread',please feel free to move along. The internet is just waiting there with full of things to amaze you,no need to bore yourself with a bunch of texts...

I am sure almost all of the active users on the forum have went though multiple campaigns,on various difficulty setting,many on legend ironman.
As for me,i am on my 4th commander campaign with which includes 18 classes(previous were veteran,commander,commander).None of them were on ironman;because,yes u guesses it,i am simply not that skilled.On occasional cases like wasting 2 full turns on a freaking m1 drone,i am forced to reload;but in general i avoid save scumming. Xcom 2 is the first tactical turn based game i ever played,so 20 months later,i am still learning.
Anyway,For those of u have been down the LW road countless times,what are some of the things that you think are downright unfair/unbalanced/makes no sense?Yes,the mod has been through a lot of balances,but for me some issues still persists. I am not talking about class or skills,simply game mechanics.

For instance(again,only my opinion)
1.Reaction Shots:
Do not get me wrong,i like the concept,and it makes sense that enemies will indeed enter alert mode upon detecting sound/corpses and therefore take shots upon visual contact. What does not make sense is that their aim do not suffer from any penalties whatsoever.
So,let me get this straight.When enemies run into me,my team takes some ridiculously low chance shots(unless overwatch spec) throughout the game,but enemies not only get to reposition,but take full aim shots(flank in many cases)? and when they do enter combat,and actually spend action points to go into overwatch mode, take shots with aim penalty? I can not count how many times a commando with 95 aim ran into me,and hit me through full cover for full damage with a 50% chance to hit.
How this makes sense is beyond me.
Possible solution: simple, just give them the aim penalty they would suffer from overwatch shots.
P.S. If you are going to say,'why do not you simply hunker down?' that is what i am trying to do right now,but with most missions being time restricted i need every bit of damage i can get. Also, that is just side-tracking the problem,instead of addressing it.
2.Late game retaliation:
Let me show you one example.
It was november i think,FL20. On an intel retaliation,my team spawned at least 3 dashes away from the relay,with 2 pods in-between. So,unless i have a squad of nightcrawlers,i simply can not reach the relay before 4 turns.
And would not you know it,on the start of very second turn,a gigantic pod consisting of an m3 muton,m3 gunner,rocketeer and officer spots my relay.
All of my rebels have less than 5 health,therefore even graze shots will one shot them and the adviser is not going to be much help alone.
So,i did what i thought would be sensible and flash banged all of them,to keep my rebels alive.
Would not you know it,the pod simply ignored all my rebels,and tore the relay to pieces.
Huge plot twist: Since my rebels grenades were on cool down,the next turn all but one of them died,shot through full cover.
For you info,the region had a strength of 4.
My question:Why give me utterly unwinnable missions?Why can not there be a simple message saying "congratulation! All of your rebels have been killed by advent,and they now have control of region X."
Solution: along with their weapon,upgrade some of their armor as well?
3. Facility lead:
The other two can only get your soldiers killed,but this issues can actually botch your campaigns.
Doom counter is a very alarming issue in lw2,despite more pips,and there are very few ways you can counter it. There is the liberation chain,which takes huge amount of time;plus you need to get lucky with the infiltration times.
There is the story missions,Which gives you limited amount of reduction.
And there are the facility leads, which can only be rewarded from mission poi,and some hack rewards. Both of which has,you know,have ridiculously low chance to spawn.
For example,in my last two campaigns, i got absolutely zero facility leads;and i was forced to finish the game before mid january,with only hours left on the counter.
In other words,u have to get lucky to save/extend your campaign.
Mind telling why this is necessary? or why sheer luck needs to be an actual feature?
Solution: May be try making them available on the black market sometimes?
4.Spark:
I did not play xcom EW,therefore did not have the pleasure of getting acquainted with MECs, which most veterans claim were far superior than the sparks. I have to agree they were extremely underwhelming at first. Fortunately,WOTC has fixed most of their shortcomings like aim progression,and the ability to add attachments;and most importantly,immunity to exhaustion,which made them a monumetal asset. However,in lw2,they are still,well....in lack of better terms,utter garbage.Why?
(i)Horrendous aim(will very often miss point blank shots)
(ii)Horrendous mobility(fixed at 12,like vanilla soldier mobility.can not be improved by legit means.)
(iii)Highest infiltration time(more than technicals and grenadiers)
(iv)expensive as hell(In vanilla,supplies stop becoming an issue pretty early,not in lw)
(v)Skills that are straight up bad,like intimidate,strike,bulwark and arguably adaptive aim(holotargeting being far more superior)
Solution: as a temporary patch up,i use metal over flesh and moddable dlc weapon mods.However, MOF makes them slightly OP. A more balanced ground would be much more appreciated.

Do not get me wrong,i do not dislike LW2. If i did, why would i spend hundreds of hours on it? But that does not necessarily mean it's not perfect. However,i simply do not see why it needs to be needlessly frustrating either.

I will update the thread as i revisit more issues.
Last edited by chaosxxxxx on Mon Nov 20, 2017 11:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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SonnyWiFiHr
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

Use Additional mission type

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/fil ... =846087073

You can upgrade rebels. Un-tick hide research & No tech required. Instant upgrades should be unticked by default
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Psieye
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by Psieye »

Your gripes get processed into my one gripe: "explain the rules better".

Orange-alert shots boil down to "how far can a pod on orange-alert travel in a turn?" - it's a lot less than the ground your units can cover in a turn. To my awareness, they can't do anything serious (like explosives) off an orange-alert. If you're at lategame and you want to not get shot by M3 dudes without alpha striking them first, then you'll need to stack Def buffs. You can reach 100 Def at midgame (high cover, dense smoke, T2 Gremlin) and there's some more obscure Def buffs beyond that. No, what orange-alerts come down to is "a pod MIGHT walk into me, I need to take countermeasures". If that means running away in the lategame because you've run out of ways to safely scout ahead, I call that fair. If you must rely on an OW creep (not viable in many missions) then at least min/max so your shots are 80%+ (then get hosed by enemy Lightning Reflexes/Shadowstep).

Late-game mini-intel retal: I see nothing wrong with being unable to save the relay in lategame. There can only be one intel mini-retal at a time (I may need to be corrected) and if you've expanded a lot you'll make do with the other regions while the targetted one can't do intel. The mission is still meaningful because you're saving rebels. If you don't want to do that, just skip the mini-retal and automatically get your conclusion with some dead rebels/advisor.

Facility Leads: this catches people off as they don't know how to find the missions which might be Facility Leads instead of PoI. They look unappealing ("low timer, just a PoI") so they get skipped. I'm sure it's theoretically possible to do some calculations and go "there's no way a PoI mission has this low a timer given my circumstances, that has to be a Facility Lead" but I've never needed it - I just do every PoI no matter what the timer is and I get my Facility Leads like clockwork around June onwards.


It's the nature of LW(2) that you can waste weeks of playtime because you didn't understand something on the strategy layer. My current campaign looks bleak because I picked the wrong direction to expand twice and the wrong 2nd region to liberate. All my previous campaigns where I thought I was making a mistake, I was actually making a good decision.
My three 8-man GOp squad Commander campaigns:
1st
2nd
3rd
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SonnyWiFiHr
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

I restarted early rush campaign and concluded same I wasted to much play time and never finished above April.

I learn this :
Rushing will give you chance to rise Vigilance in far away region faster vs two more early missions in first region and you can skip missions in second region. Intel price is huge .
Playing 3 missions per week (vigilance drop) - you can still rush to region far far away with more resources. So slowmotion wins but experience gain is a bit slower.
Manipulating advent strength and dumping advent strength in few regions gives huge barracks big chance to collect everything.
NCE does not operate on 478 point base. I had 470 rookie.
Game will kill rookie intentionally .
1 HP (wounded) advent lose 30 aim at max.

Guide = read scripts
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chaosxxxxx
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by chaosxxxxx »

Psieye wrote:Your gripes get processed into my one gripe: "explain the rules better".

Orange-alert shots boil down to "how far can a pod on orange-alert travel in a turn?" - it's a lot less than the ground your units can cover in a turn. To my awareness, they can't do anything serious (like explosives) off an orange-alert. If you're at lategame and you want to not get shot by M3 dudes without alpha striking them first, then you'll need to stack Def buffs. You can reach 100 Def at midgame (high cover, dense smoke, T2 Gremlin) and there's some more obscure Def buffs beyond that. No, what orange-alerts come down to is "a pod MIGHT walk into me, I need to take countermeasures". If that means running away in the lategame because you've run out of ways to safely scout ahead, I call that fair. If you must rely on an OW creep (not viable in many missions) then at least min/max so your shots are 80%+ (then get hosed by enemy Lightning Reflexes/Shadowstep).

Late-game mini-intel retal: I see nothing wrong with being unable to save the relay in lategame. There can only be one intel mini-retal at a time (I may need to be corrected) and if you've expanded a lot you'll make do with the other regions while the targetted one can't do intel. The mission is still meaningful because you're saving rebels. If you don't want to do that, just skip the mini-retal and automatically get your conclusion with some dead rebels/advisor.

Facility Leads: this catches people off as they don't know how to find the missions which might be Facility Leads instead of PoI. They look unappealing ("low timer, just a PoI") so they get skipped. I'm sure it's theoretically possible to do some calculations and go "there's no way a PoI mission has this low a timer given my circumstances, that has to be a Facility Lead" but I've never needed it - I just do every PoI no matter what the timer is and I get my Facility Leads like clockwork around June onwards.


It's the nature of LW(2) that you can waste weeks of playtime because you didn't understand something on the strategy layer. My current campaign looks bleak because I picked the wrong direction to expand twice and the wrong 2nd region to liberate. All my previous campaigns where I thought I was making a mistake, I was actually making a good decision.
Apologies,but i think i may have failed to make my point clearly here.
I did not ask for ways to counter the problems,and yes;apart from number 3,none of them are campaign breaking. It's not particularly hard to counter number 1,instead of wasting resources like gremlins and smokes,i now simply just hunker down.My point is:Why this mechanics exist in the first place,and what purpose does it serve?(again,making it clear,i am not questioning the existence of alert mode reaction fire,merely lack of their aim penalty,which logically speaking,should exceed or at least be equal to the penalty they receive while entering overwatch.)
One more thing;m1,m2,m3 gunners and mutons can one shot your soldiers on reaction shots(even on non crits),and they do not always suppress on reaction fire,if my memory serves me correctly. I would call that 'serious'.
As for mini retal,yes,losing the relay barely did anything to me in term of progress. Again,my point is,why does a mission need to be trivial early game,and straight up impossible late game? why cant my rebels just have a shimmer of survivability? Cause,it sorts of gives the notion that advent can kick our ass anytime they want,and all our efforts are pointless.Also,in this particular scenario(in fact most scenarios),if i fell back anymore with my rebels,i would have been sandwiched between two pods;and it's back to square one.
Your response to problem 3,with all due respect,did not make much sense to me, for several reasons.(i)The devs made it clear that we are not supposed to do every mission(ii)I am pretty sure,the facility reward from intel package is completely random,and has nothing to do with low infiltration time whatsoever(iii) Even if it does,it sort of turns xcom into a grindfest like diablo 3,if you run this dungeon a ridiculous number of times,may be u will lucky,and get that shiny new gear u r looking for,or may be not. Except in this case, it's even worse,cause it's not a shiny new gear,but a pretty crucial element of the campaign. Honestly it reminds of those f2p mmos,where even quest items drops are based on rng. Not sure why xcom needs to take such direction.
Psieye
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by Psieye »

chaosxxxxx wrote: Why this mechanics exist in the first place,and what purpose does it serve?
To force the player to think of future pods before they meet them. Players aren't going to take orange-shots seriously if they're not serious.
chaosxxxxx wrote: why does a mission need to be trivial early game,and straight up impossible late game? why cant my rebels just have a shimmer of survivability? Cause,it sorts of gives the notion that advent can kick our ass anytime they want,and all our efforts are pointless.
Pretty accurate notion, design working as intended. "Advent got serious, you can't win anymore" has become the story of LW2. Vanilla XCOM 2 never really drove that point home despite Firaxis saying "XCOM is not a power fantasy" - the intent is that you're the underdog and you STAY the underdog. If you wanted a story where you start as a tiny resistance and end up leading a giant liberation army to end the aliens' rule, the win condition should have been "liberate everything". As it stands, if you somehow end up doing that, Advent invades every region simultaneously. The point of the campaign is to out-race Advent - their force level as well as the doom bar.

It does sound like there's appetite for a "second wave" option to let you keep playing when the campaign should be winding down (read: huddling in fear of serious-Advent while getting GP missions and Avenger Defence missions done).
chaosxxxxx wrote: (i)The devs made it clear that we are not supposed to do every mission
(ii)I am pretty sure,the facility reward from intel package is completely random,and has nothing to do with low infiltration time whatsoever
(iii) Even if it does,it sort of turns xcom into a grindfest like diablo 3,if you run this dungeon a ridiculous number of times,may be u will lucky,and get that shiny new gear u r looking for,or may be not. Except in this case, it's even worse,cause it's not a shiny new gear,but a pretty crucial element of the campaign. Honestly it reminds of those f2p mmos,where even quest items drops are based on rng. Not sure why xcom needs to take such direction.
1) the LW2 devs also made clear they believe in deliberate obfuscation - this is why Lib 1 isn't labelled "Liberation". There was once a noob post saying "I got to September and died to the doom bar - I didn't even know it existed as I never did any liberation mission. Why would I do a 'find a lead' mission with no intel package?" A player who doesn't know that a UFO pre-cursor mission looks exactly like Lib 1 will similarly never do a UFO mission.

2) Incorrect. The missions that give you a PoI (point of interest) from the intel package are fundamentally different to those that give you a Facility Lead from the intel package. They LOOK the same on the surface - see (1).

3) a lot of players are averse to RNG determining the strategic direction of their campaign. It clashes with the LW2 devs' view that "completely deterministic outcomes aren't what XCOM is about - learn to risk mitigate". On its own, that'd be fine if it weren't also for (1) which leaves many players unable to make appropriate steps to mitigate.
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SonnyWiFiHr
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

Hey what about my complain ?
Guide = read scripts
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Kamikaze Samurai
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by Kamikaze Samurai »

My only real complaint is that the game is preventing me from doing useful things with my free time.

Nobody should have any gripe about anything because the mod is fully modable.

If you don't like something then change it.

I'm a wimpy flesh man so I gave myself back the reinforcement flare on commander.

I also brought .ini doom down upon the haven faceless after doing 50 of those missions in 1 weekend when the dark event coincided with a global recruitment drive. (I didn't know they would still be gone if you skipped the mission).

You can kill orange alert or anything else if you don't like it and are willing to accept that you are not a Legendary Iron Man.
Root
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by Root »

My biggest gripe is the UI, which isn't just about LW2. I use a lot of mods to see information more clearly (hours remaining, infiltration details, squad character portraits, soldier perks, etc) but there are still too many instances of clicking 12 times to do one simple thing. Managing the base in particular is pretty tedious - while no particular action is awful, everything feels like it takes a few extra clicks and its rare to see the information you need all on one screen.
JohnnyPureMoney
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by JohnnyPureMoney »

My biggest gripe is that my game seems to be bugged. I am not sure why the game refuses to generate a winnable liberation chain mission. I had a few generate early but they infiltration times less than 3 days and weren't winnable. When I refused to do them they stopped generating.

What hasn't stopped generating is dark events. I currently have 17 dark events occur and 95% of them were not counter-able even though I have "A Better Way" mod. Now even the lowliest advent is a super soldier with a gazillion hit points, damage and defense. Missions are not worth trying since you can't chew through all that armor and hit points when you are on a timer. Frustrating to spend all this time building the squad and getting rebels set up on half the map just to lose on the mission plane shenanigans and not on the battlefield.
Dong101
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by Dong101 »

JohnnyPureMoney wrote:My biggest gripe is that my game seems to be bugged. I am not sure why the game refuses to generate a winnable liberation chain mission. I had a few generate early but they infiltration times less than 3 days and weren't winnable. When I refused to do them they stopped generating.

What hasn't stopped generating is dark events. I currently have 17 dark events occur and 95% of them were not counter-able even though I have "A Better Way" mod. Now even the lowliest advent is a super soldier with a gazillion hit points, damage and defense. Missions are not worth trying since you can't chew through all that armor and hit points when you are on a timer. Frustrating to spend all this time building the squad and getting rebels set up on half the map just to lose on the mission plane shenanigans and not on the battlefield.
Did you try put everyone on intel and put a scientist with avenger scanning on the region you want to librerate?
chaosxxxxx
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by chaosxxxxx »

My biggest gripe is that my game seems to be bugged. I am not sure why the game refuses to generate a winnable liberation chain mission. I had a few generate early but they infiltration times less than 3 days and weren't winnable. When I refused to do them they stopped generating.
I feel you buddy.On my last run i somehow got lucky and had my first liberation on may.
On this one,i had to wait until july to get my first and only doable lib2,and i have 5 regions contacted.I am now approaching august with 2 days-3 days lib 3 missions. And as u can guess,i am starving bad for supplies. Smash and grabs are nice and all,but they can hardly make up the huge equipment demand for my troops.
It seems this campaign is doomed,but according to the veterans(and devs i think,not sure) that is part of of the LW2 experience.Sometimes u r gonna loose campaigns,no matter what,simple as that.
As for appointing scientists as heaven advisor, i've tried that. The intel boost is almost unnoticable...
If you are on normal mode,i'd suggest just intel boosting a 3-3.5 day mission,while loading up on suppressors...
chaosxxxxx
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by chaosxxxxx »

My biggest gripe is the UI, which isn't just about LW2. I use a lot of mods to see information more clearly (hours remaining, infiltration details, squad character portraits, soldier perks, etc) but there are still too many instances of clicking 12 times to do one simple thing. Managing the base in particular is pretty tedious - while no particular action is awful, everything feels like it takes a few extra clicks and its rare to see the information you need all on one screen.
Hours remaining is not exactly an lw2 thing,it should have been incorporated in the base game.
Yes,i also use those clarification mods myself. Especially the vigilance indicator is a lifesaver.
Would have been nice to see how each equipment is contributing to the total infiltration.
Psieye
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by Psieye »

JohnnyPureMoney wrote:infiltration times less than 3 days and weren't winnable.
That's winnable. You'll (most likely, but not necessarily) take casualties, but you can get the VIP out on a Lib 2 or assassinate the VIP on a Lib 3 to win the mission after accounting for all the pods. Lib missions having low timers is a feature. Depending on how you structure your earlygame and how you've been manipulating Str on the strategy layer, low infil Lib missions can be won without casualties or wounds (while killing everything on the map).
My three 8-man GOp squad Commander campaigns:
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johnmaidenfootball
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by johnmaidenfootball »

I have a few opinions I have been meaning to mention.

Lack of information about changes from base game, lack of information about methods of progress, lack of information about very important strategic/tactical layer changes. Stealth is not fun, even with battle scanners avoiding patrolling drones sucks, why bother, just run straight for the objective and suicide it rookie tank. Setting squads and changing armor/weapons in long war 2 is terrible suffering compared to long war 1. I have slightly over 1200 hours in long war 1. Almost 400 in long war 2.

On commander, missions, get that RNG for your 20 missions a week global ui spam, or maps with many turns for objective, so very far away, Those long 'run run run run run' missions are not fun, rookie tank method again? Next, delivery of 20 missions into the ui bar, why? Few of which I am able to do, or give a fuck about. Why do I need these to think about? It ends up being 'run run run, with zero shots fired by xcom' just keep up smoke and up flashbangs and run run run for the evac. Little reward for struggling xcom RNG to recover a campaign. I want to kill aliens, I want to kill advent, Killing stuff is fun, moving men around in circles across the map hiding from bullets or stealth is not fun.

There seems far less tactical setups and much more strategy of trying to think "okay, how do I balance havens, black sites, pips, soldiers, infiltrations, vigilance, strength, farm resource missions, farm intel, troop movements, supply convoys, keep engi scientists missions up,what do I do if the mission I need comes up 4 hours from now, soldier infil time/fatigue, and even more", without any information. Instead of "how do I arm my guys with guns to kill aliens, how do I shoot down alien ufo's with my little fighters". If you do not suffer through the correct # of the 20 possible stealth missions you will not have the RNG resources to do anything, and since there is little information unless you constantly fail weeks of playthrough campaigns, good luck figuring it out on your own to restart.

In long war 1 I felt like I made progress or could change outcomes with weapon/armor assignments/intelligent gameplay. I received immediate feedback from mistakes or could decipher them easily, despite everyone calling it overwatch fiesta, I like that better than cowering out line-of-sight fiesta dance. LW2 feels like it doesn't matter unless I want to have fun with excel charts and reading code! Long War 2 feels so RNG penalty heavy that I do not want to lose 20 campaigns until I figure out the RNG. With Commander if you do not get happy RNG engineer/scientists early first month, just restart, there is zero chance to recover RNG without getting that bump. Lose a region in some part of the game, fine that happens, but now you can't get to that 4 pip blacksite on the other side of the world because you didn't spend enough time RNG for intel in the first 3 months, time to restart.

There is no information about when another supply event might happen, should I sell this corpse to buy equipment or will I NEVER see a similar corpse again for 3 months and now I have lost the campaign because I can not find ONE CORPSE and have no way to get ONE CORPSE over a period of 3 months. There must be information about troop movement time estimates, supply estimates, reinforcement timers, convoy movements, how vigilance affects regions around you. Need more information displays, we should not be required to have excel open, not fun to randomly get fucked by things the game does not explain.

Biggest gripes are lack of information, lack of strategic layer information, lack of tactical capabilities, lack of fun with stealth, and overwhelmed with 2 full rows of missions in the global view layer makes long war 2 much less fun than long war 1 imo.
chaosxxxxx
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Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by chaosxxxxx »

I have a few opinions I have been meaning to mention.

Lack of information about changes from base game, lack of information about methods of progress, lack of information about very important strategic/tactical layer changes. Stealth is not fun, even with battle scanners avoiding patrolling drones sucks, why bother, just run straight for the objective and suicide it rookie tank. Setting squads and changing armor/weapons in long war 2 is terrible suffering compared to long war 1. I have slightly over 1200 hours in long war 1. Almost 400 in long war 2.

On commander, missions, get that RNG for your 20 missions a week global ui spam, or maps with many turns for objective, so very far away, Those long 'run run run run run' missions are not fun, rookie tank method again? Next, delivery of 20 missions into the ui bar, why? Few of which I am able to do, or give a fuck about. Why do I need these to think about? It ends up being 'run run run, with zero shots fired by xcom' just keep up smoke and up flashbangs and run run run for the evac. Little reward for struggling xcom RNG to recover a campaign. I want to kill aliens, I want to kill advent, Killing stuff is fun, moving men around in circles across the map hiding from bullets or stealth is not fun.

There seems far less tactical setups and much more strategy of trying to think "okay, how do I balance havens, black sites, pips, soldiers, infiltrations, vigilance, strength, farm resource missions, farm intel, troop movements, supply convoys, keep engi scientists missions up,what do I do if the mission I need comes up 4 hours from now, soldier infil time/fatigue, and even more", without any information. Instead of "how do I arm my guys with guns to kill aliens, how do I shoot down alien ufo's with my little fighters". If you do not suffer through the correct # of the 20 possible stealth missions you will not have the RNG resources to do anything, and since there is little information unless you constantly fail weeks of playthrough campaigns, good luck figuring it out on your own to restart.

In long war 1 I felt like I made progress or could change outcomes with weapon/armor assignments/intelligent gameplay. I received immediate feedback from mistakes or could decipher them easily, despite everyone calling it overwatch fiesta, I like that better than cowering out line-of-sight fiesta dance. LW2 feels like it doesn't matter unless I want to have fun with excel charts and reading code! Long War 2 feels so RNG penalty heavy that I do not want to lose 20 campaigns until I figure out the RNG. With Commander if you do not get happy RNG engineer/scientists early first month, just restart, there is zero chance to recover RNG without getting that bump. Lose a region in some part of the game, fine that happens, but now you can't get to that 4 pip blacksite on the other side of the world because you didn't spend enough time RNG for intel in the first 3 months, time to restart.

There is no information about when another supply event might happen, should I sell this corpse to buy equipment or will I NEVER see a similar corpse again for 3 months and now I have lost the campaign because I can not find ONE CORPSE and have no way to get ONE CORPSE over a period of 3 months. There must be information about troop movement time estimates, supply estimates, reinforcement timers, convoy movements, how vigilance affects regions around you. Need more information displays, we should not be required to have excel open, not fun to randomly get fucked by things the game does not explain.

Biggest gripes are lack of information, lack of strategic layer information, lack of tactical capabilities, lack of fun with stealth, and overwhelmed with 2 full rows of missions in the global view layer makes long war 2 much less fun than long war 1 imo.
It's true that lw2 requires extensive research on your first time,the only reliable source of information being ufopedia and this very forum; and the info is not very well categorized. I myself i think watched an entire lw2 campaign by xwynns to familiarize myself with the mechanics first. Otherwise i am pretty sure i would have given up 10-20 hours into the campaign.

There was an amazing 51 page pdf guide composed by several forum members that does a splendid job of explaining almost every mechanic of the mod. Sadly since the post is not pinned,one has to actually browse the forum to find it. I currently have it on my desktop,if someone would like it,i would be more than happy to forward it.

As for your other complaints,forgive me,but i simply do not see where you are coming from m8. After 1.3,missions give you a lot of breathing rooms in terms of turns. The only missions that are extremely tight are those hack objectives missions,that only gives you 8 turns to hack,where you really do not have much of a choice other than running. Other than that you can always afford to tactically engage enemies in my experience,provided u r not operating in a strength 5+ region. And i honestly can not remember the last time i did a mission without firing 'a single shot by xcom' ,since almost 90% time i complete objective everything on the map is pretty much dead.
And i watch a lot of lw2 campaigns on youtube(it's a addiction :p),and not once i saw someone doing a mission where he/she just spammed smokes and flashbangs on his way to objective/evac. True,that at first i found the timed missions extremely annoying,but than i saw some xcom ew gameplays,where overwatch camping is pretty much the best/safest way to win,which i found extremely boring. If limited turns give u incentive to always move,so be it. Games much more exciting this way.
I did not play LW1,so it would not be wise for me a draw a comparison between the two.

Yes,corpse management is an extremely dire issue. If i did not have the corpse extraction mod(lets ur soldiers physically carry corpses from missions,there is even a fulton system),i would have been pretty much fucked this campaign already,since in 4 months,i only got 1 extremely light and 1 very light troop columns;that's a grand total of 21 corpses in 4 months. I now consider it one of the an essential mod in any campaign.There is also a mod that lets you view the vigilance and force level in regions,so that you can sort of take precautions.
Psieye
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Joined: Thu Apr 06, 2017 12:27 am

Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by Psieye »

There are good gripes being collected together in this thread. It does make me wonder if I should make time to help out with the community LWotC effort - specifically the strategy layer. I just need to commit to contribute.
My three 8-man GOp squad Commander campaigns:
1st
2nd
3rd
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SonnyWiFiHr
Posts: 416
Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2017 1:57 pm

Re: Your biggest gripes about LW2?

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

I m forced to restart game because 8 man GOPs rocks vs standard and because I selected Basic research to early .

Summary

Rush first region and fish in 3 bordering regions.
Legendary players should also do that but they can't get Lib2 for more scientist in first month - they will get them but not that fast
In those 3 regions keep vigilance under or at and 5 pick up every scientist + intel package (first and probably second month).
To keep that low vigilance don't do every mission, only one per week until you can expand more or you finished Liberation chain and get spike in vigilance.
Always wait for vigilance drop to launch mission (fastest way) because finishing mission will reset clock.
Why scientists - they boost mission detection and speed up research. Find a Lead is must do mission -period (timer 1h - do it )

I m not Dev but why every guide stars with Global vigilance (who cares?) and not with how to get something with regional Vigilance no more than 5.

My campaign count 200+
Most for save scumming gameplay mehanic. I m rewriting my guide for fishing almost every single day
The Preacher
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