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Lament for LWOTC

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2018 1:38 pm
by unkin24@gmail.com
I can't express how sad I am to hear the community development of LWOTC is most likely dead.

I love Long War 2 for the feeling of how epic every mission feel because of the short timeline of things that I have to overcome, building up forces I can help control, manipulating advent to reinforce certain regions and striking at the heart of others.

The infiltration mechanic is incredible, it ensures i'm at least considering changing equipment to shave of a few hours of my time and maybe get a an extra soldier in a mission, should I run this mission under 100%, should I spend this intel, Should I run this in a strength 5 region, it's really the sweet spot of a management sim to me.

I love the objective focus of missions, not having to kill every enemy, how can I use the map to my advantage, always looking out for more reinforcements, I get the sense of how risky the mission we are performing is(their always more advent).

It makes liberating a region all the more satisfying, I can imagine x-com and people have time to breathe and not have to hide all the time any more. Advent begone!

and yet more could be done.

WOTC added some great mechanics to the base game and created a nice excuse to improve others.

WOTC will/fatigue system is wonderful. It helps you rotate out characters pretty constantly and give the soldiers you would roll with high will stat a value to the game. I dare say their is even more untapped potential in that system, maybe with more psi related abilities.

WOTC covert ops is quite good as well and could be expanded as well so it's more of a relationship to manage similar to XCOM 1.

WOTC ability point system/Intelligence system is probably my favorite addition. I think the class system has been building up to try and make every character feel unique but a noticeably similar role for example: Training roulette and AWC. In my opinion they are ok but never really hit that spot i felt "wow, I can build this character different than other characters, and it still be balanced" the WOTC ability point system was an important step in that direction. Because it gave rise to mods like MINT and more recently A Better Barracks. The class roulette system for my money is what the class system should be.

So after all my rambling I have two questions: What are your thoughts? and Can't piece meal mod WOTC to a LW2 nice mix?(i'm not a modder, but maybe it's time I learn *shrug)

Re: Lament for LWOTC

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 6:48 am
by cryptc
Yeah it's a real shame, since I completely share your opinions that LW2 was amazing in making you do hard decisions. The AI and Pod system of LW2 is the one thing I can never live without though. base XCOM2 AI was just so horrible, with it crawling up on you even when they don't know where you are.

I think WotC had some problematic systems to integrate with LW2 though, fatigue in particular wouldn't be good in combination with infiltration, since both those systems are trying to do the same thing. So if trying to keep squad cohesiveness like LW2, the fatigue system would be pretty bad. But could solve that by either dropping the fatigue system or repurposing it somehow. Would be fun hear what the LWotC had decided about it, even though they never implemented it.

There's a lot of good WotC mods, but I've yet to find a combination that makes me feel like I'm playing the depth of LW2... hopefully in time, more mods will come out to help make WotC more like LW2

Re: Lament for LWOTC

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 11:12 am
by ChrisTheThinMint
It's been hard for us to stop working on LWOTC and admit that it's no longer possible too. Regardless of that i am thankful of all the hope and support the community gave us, even after a bumpy and discouraging start.

There is still some small hope for LW2-style gameplay. Another small group is currently working on a strategy overhaul that aims to introduce infiltration via covert ops, and RM recently released a mod that introduces Regional Advisors to WotC, albeit with different mechanics than LW2. I think given enough time we might still see something good come out.

@cryptc Since youre interested in what we had planned: Our plan for infiltration & fatique was to combine them. Infiltration would be scaled down to about 1/2 to 2/3s of the time it had in LW2, depending on the mission type, and thus require you to have several squads ready for multiple missions when you or ADVENT are making a push on the strategy layer. Meanwhile Fatique would accumulate over the course of several missions and discourage overusing the same soldiers over and over, as well as give a stronger penalty to harder missions, as fighting more enemies at once or fighting boss enemies would incur bigger will reductions than small skirmishes. All in all, both mechanics would have contributed towards a bigger roster, but in different ways.

Re: Lament for LWOTC

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 12:38 pm
by unkin24@gmail.com
cryptc wrote:Yeah it's a real shame, since I completely share your opinions that LW2 was amazing in making you do hard decisions. The AI and Pod system of LW2 is the one thing I can never live without though. base XCOM2 AI was just so horrible, with it crawling up on you even when they don't know where you are.

I think WotC had some problematic systems to integrate with LW2 though, fatigue in particular wouldn't be good in combination with infiltration, since both those systems are trying to do the same thing. So if trying to keep squad cohesiveness like LW2, the fatigue system would be pretty bad. But could solve that by either dropping the fatigue system or repurposing it somehow. Would be fun hear what the LWotC had decided about it, even though they never implemented it.

There's a lot of good WotC mods, but I've yet to find a combination that makes me feel like I'm playing the depth of LW2... hopefully in time, more mods will come out to help make WotC more like LW2
I was thinking Fatigue is a little different because LW 2 I think still suffers from the "why would I not always send my A team?" Fatigue gives a reason.

I never really had success wuth keep squad cohesion anyway maybe that's why i'm ok with Fatigue.

I heard Xwynns mention on his stream he had a lot of idea's for LWOTC, but since it got shut down those idea's don't, not sure if he was joking but that could have been interesting.

Re: Lament for LWOTC

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 12:40 pm
by unkin24@gmail.com
ChrisTheThinMint wrote:It's been hard for us to stop working on LWOTC and admit that it's no longer possible too. Regardless of that i am thankful of all the hope and support the community gave us, even after a bumpy and discouraging start.

There is still some small hope for LW2-style gameplay. Another small group is currently working on a strategy overhaul that aims to introduce infiltration via covert ops, and RM recently released a mod that introduces Regional Advisors to WotC, albeit with different mechanics than LW2. I think given enough time we might still see something good come out.

@cryptc Since youre interested in what we had planned: Our plan for infiltration & fatique was to combine them. Infiltration would be scaled down to about 1/2 to 2/3s of the time it had in LW2, depending on the mission type, and thus require you to have several squads ready for multiple missions when you or ADVENT are making a push on the strategy layer. Meanwhile Fatique would accumulate over the course of several missions and discourage overusing the same soldiers over and over, as well as give a stronger penalty to harder missions, as fighting more enemies at once or fighting boss enemies would incur bigger will reductions than small skirmishes. All in all, both mechanics would have contributed towards a bigger roster, but in different ways.
Thanks for the info, man and small hope. I will keep my ears peeled to see what comes next.

Re: Lament for LWOTC

Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2018 7:26 am
by cryptc
unkin24@gmail.com wrote: I was thinking Fatigue is a little different because LW 2 I think still suffers from the "why would I not always send my A team?"
Because:

A) they are already infiltrating elsewhere (oh shit... do I need to cancel that mission to counter this dark event, it's only 1 day left though... hmm... could I boost it?)
B) errr... I better keep this team on standby since theres <UFO active> <terror mission coming soon> <facility I need to do soon>

Re: Lament for LWOTC

Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2018 7:30 am
by cryptc
ChrisTheThinMint wrote: @cryptc Since youre interested in what we had planned: Our plan for infiltration & fatique was to combine them. Infiltration would be scaled down to about 1/2 to 2/3s of the time it had in LW2, depending on the mission type, and thus require you to have several squads ready for multiple missions when you or ADVENT are making a push on the strategy layer. Meanwhile Fatique would accumulate over the course of several missions and discourage overusing the same soldiers over and over, as well as give a stronger penalty to harder missions, as fighting more enemies at once or fighting boss enemies would incur bigger will reductions than small skirmishes. All in all, both mechanics would have contributed towards a bigger roster, but in different ways.
Thanks for sharing, my gut feeling is that this wouldn't be ideal, but it's easy to be a backseat driver and naysayer, so I'm sure with proper play-testing it would have turned out fine (or gotten changed to better fit the game).

I just think having both infiltration time and fatigue time would be redundant, and although I haven't played as much WotC as I have LW2, it feels like the fatigue hits different soldiers differently... so unlike in LW2 where you would have whole squad ready or not (unless you have injuries), fatigue would make it so half your squad might be fine while the rest need to rest, making squads kinda clunkier (and it was already clunky to try keep squads together in LW2).

But again, thanks for sharing the plans, at worst I think it would have been a minor issue for me in a mod I really wish was finished :)

Re: Lament for LWOTC

Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2018 3:48 pm
by Dwarfling
It makes me sad too, since I spent so much time with LW2 (I estimate over 2000h). But I'm guessing it's just way too much complex work to be done by a small group for free. I'm looking out for Pavonis next project, but since the going is slow, I honestly just lost track.

Heh, I still check this forum out of habit. It's been months since I loaded LW2. I'm getting the itch as I'm writing this in fact, but I'm trying to improve my Starcraft 2 skills atm.