New liberation-themed campaign (wait for 1.3?)

[Kyrsoh]

Greetings,

I would like to start a new heavily modded Long War 2 campaign on Veteran difficulty. The main objective for me is liberation. I know that I can't win this game without countering the Avatar project but I want to liberate the planet from the alien invaders.

I have two questions:

- Is it worth it to wait the 1.3 patch with the campaign start? I will use about 40 mods with Long War 2 (including True Concealment, Suppressor mod, Beatdown mod and everything which makes it more realistic like additional Rebel jobs). I think that may cause issues if I start the campaign in 1.2 (mods work fine now with the Long War 2) and the 1.3 patch applies during the game. Am I right in this question?

- I will play on Veteran because I want more time to perform a lot of missions and liberate most regions. Do I have any chance to do that if I hunt Facility Leads with Rebels and delay the Avatar Project with liberated regions?

Thanks for the answers! I am a seasoned veteran with over 2500 hours in EW LW1 but I am a newbie to LW2. I understood the base mechanics and played a few campaigns without any hope of the final victory...

[chrisb]

I'm not sure you can really liberate as many regions as your planning. It might be possible, but I think at some point your going to be staring down the barrel of a Swarming+++++++++ network tower, not to mention the HQ!

The problem is, the more you liberate, the more concentrated the strength becomes in the remaining regions. This makes the liberation chain excessively difficult as it already has a +3 strength modifier on all but the first mission.

Not that it wouldn't be fun to try, but I think you'd have to very carefully plan where/when you are liberating. But ya, my guess would be you'd simply get swamped in strength on the map and either get your havens sacked and/or be unable to detect lib missions with any reasonable time to infiltrate.

As for 1.3, I don't know how far off it is. Might be worth playing a normalish campaign to get more of a feel for what it's like to try and liberate mid/late game in higher strength regions so you'll have a better idea of the gameplan from the beginning.

[JulianSkies]

To note, not sure if this was fixed or not but if you DO liberate the planet (and someone else had done it before) the you will immediately spawn an invasion on every single haven, which is technically a bug, the Last Stand should spawn only on one but has spawned on all when the guy did it

[Kyrsoh]

Thanks for the answers.

So it is incredibly difficult to liberate all regions because of stacking ADVENT strengh. If I manage to liberate all regions, there is a "Final Stand" invasion mission (which can be buggy and happening all over the world). Now I am thinking:

- If this is a bug (and the devs fix it) is it possible to win without the main quest?
- Maybe it is not a bug, just a feature to prevent you from winning without stopping the Avatar project?

Both sounds interesting.

[JulianSkies]

The Last Stand is in fact a feature to prevent you from having liberated the whole world, because you cannot in fact win the game without defeating the avatar project.

[Kyrsoh]

A Long War aimed at liberating the planet could be awesome, I think. I can imagine a new campaign line where the Avatar project is just a measurement of the alien Force Level, not the base story of the game.

The objectives/setup for this campaign:

- The main objective is to liberate ALL Regions of the World,
- You have to protect your Regions from Advent counterattacks,
- You have to obtain alien technology to create shields and anti-air (space) weapons to fend off UFOs,
- The Avatar project's standing dictates the Force Level of the campaign (not just the ingame date), so you can decrease it with facility raids and so on,
- Dark Events are linked to facilities, so you can remove them,
- You have to convince civilians to work for you in liberated Regions (there can be a media war/propaganda contest) between XCOM and Advent, so you have to complete propaganda missions, watch your fire to not kill civilians during action and so on,
- You have to provide land-air plasma cannons, missile systems and intelligence against airborne raids and clear up UFO and troop transport crash sites.

I think this theme can fit into the Long War concept and most of its elements are already included in the mod now. This could be an absolutly new way to play this game - maybe an alternate campaign with hard decisions. You could choose your victory conditions at the start of the game:
Long War 2 - victory via destroying the Avatar project and the master plan of the Elders
Long War 2 - victory via liberation of Earth and fending off the alien invaders

With a few new mechanics and mission types this can be a great change of pace for the future. I have game plans for this kind of campaign with correct descriptions of the mechanics and detailed ideas of the propaganda issues. There is no need to create air (space) battles, no need to rethink the haven system or the liberation chain: Long War 2 has all tools to create this new-themed campaign.

What's your thoughts about this idea?

[Frei_Ninjesus]

I'd really love a literal long war, free from the rush of trying to stop the avatar project. It would give more opportunities to enjoy the late game techs and new toys, I think. But I still have to win a campaign in LW2 (already did in vanilla though), so I have that to worry about for the time being.