XCOM 2 crashes unless Long War 2 is enabled

[liquidmetal21]

Hello, I have been trying to solve this problem on my own for a few weeks now and have not gotten anywhere.

I played several missions in a LW2 campaign and wished to disable it to start a new save file. However, if LW2 is not enabled in my mod list, the game crashes on start-up; I don't even reach the loading screen before the title screen. Instead of the typical "XCOM 2 has stopped working, Windows is checking for a solution..." message, I instead receive no error message at all; all that happens is the little XCOM 2 logo icon on my taskbar appears and quickly disappears. Re-enabling LW2 allows the game to work correctly.

Solutions I have already attempted (in no particular order):

• - Clear config files (performed countless times)
  - Validate game files through Steam (performed countless times)
  - Uninstall XCOM 2 and then reinstall (performed twice)
  - Disable LW2 (obviously) and Unsubscribe from it on the Steam Workshop
  - Delete every single file in the 268500 "mods" folder, even the non-LW2 files
  - Attempt to find mod conflicts with the Alternative Mod Launcher (there were none in my setup while LW2 was enabled, so I don't even know how disabling it should become an issue in this context)
  - Enable half my mods, then enable half of those, then half of those, etc. until I determine a particular mod to be the problem (I was extremely thorough here. I tried all kinds of combinations of mods that I actually knew would break the game, such as enabling/disabling the following mods in numerous combinations: LW2, A Better Advent 2, the Wibbles AI mod, the Community Highlander, a handful of "additional mission types" mods, and I think even more. Consistently, the only way for me to get to the title screen was with LW2 enabled. I know I could never run a functional campaign with all these major mods running simultaneously, but that was never my goal. I just wanted to reach the title screen, and that was only possible with LW2 enabled.)
  - Delete the vanilla mod launcher known as ModLauncherWPF.exe and replace it by verifying through Steam (because I know the vanilla launcher was poorly designed and doesn't always disable mods correctly)
  - Delete and reinstall the latest version of the Alternate Mod Launcher (because at this point, why not?)
  - Literally bypass all mod launchers by clicking on Xcom2.exe
  - Try to trick the game into thinking LW2 is active by instead using the LW Toolbox, SMG Pack, Alien Pack, etc.
  - Remove all LW2 save files from the save folder
  - Change all soldiers in my Character Pool into classes that are not specific to LW2 (although I know from past experience that they really should just default to a "blank" class holding no weapon if the game can't find their correct class)

After doing all of this over a period of several weeks, I still have not found a way to play XCOM 2 with LW2 disabled.

Even if I verify the integrity of game files on Steam and then attempt to launch a mod-less game with the vanilla launcher - which is the simplest, most pure way of playing the game possible - the game crashes on startup. I bought XCOM 2 on release and played around with mods for over a year; I've never run into this kind of stubborn resistance before. I know for a fact I did not do anything out of the ordinary when I subscribed to LW2; that is, I did not do anything to any files that would make LW2 behave uniquely. I literally Subscribed to it, enabled it, played some missions, then tried to disable it in the Alternative Mod Launcher.

At this point, I suspect verifying files through Steam does not do a full sweep of every single XCOM 2 file on my laptop. I have read that even this function is not perfect and can occasionally overlook some aspects of some games. Is it possible that LW2 modifies some files which are, IDK, "out of the way" of what a program like that would look for? ...And that those files also remain intact through un-installation of the game?

I also noticed this: according to the mod page on Steam for the Community Highlander, the author says "your game will crash if the Highlander and LW2 are both enabled." The author is right; I do receive a crash message when both of these mods are enabled OR when only the Highlander is enabled. However, when LW2 is disabled, I don't actually get a crash message; the game simply fails to open a new window, and the little XCOM 2 logo on my taskbar appears for only a few seconds before disappearing. To rephrase this: the vanilla game fails to open or give me a notification at all, while the Highlander-enabled game crashes with an error message just as its author says it should when it conflicts with LW2. The behavior observed when the Highlander is enabled is consistent with the Highlander's incompatibility with LW2, which means the game thinks LW2 is enabled even when I'm not subscribed to it and its folder in the 268500 folder is empty or absent.

I also know that the Documents/My Games/XCOM2/XComGame/Config folder does not fully regenerate itself before the game initializes. Each time I attempt to start the game, XComEngine.ini and XComModOptions.ini show a Date Modified to be the current time, meaning the game is modifying and saving new versions of these files each time I attempt to play it. I looked at the Mod Options files and correctly determined that LW2 was absent from it and that all the mods that should be there, are. XComEngine.ini on the other hand is total gibberish to me.

Is XComEngine.ini the problem? Does it have some mysterious dependence on LW2 which causes problems now that LW2 is nowhere to be found? If so, how can I tell this file to stop trying to obey LW2?

Thank you for reading, and thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide. I may return to make a serious attempt at a real LW2 campaign in the future, but right now I'm more concerned with making sure a product I paid for still works in its un-modified state.

[Steve-O]

I played several missions in a LW2 campaign and wished to disable it to start a new save file. However, if LW2 is not enabled in my mod list, the game crashes on start-up; I don't even reach the loading screen before the title screen. Instead of the typical "XCOM 2 has stopped working, Windows is checking for a solution..." message, I instead receive no error message at all; all that happens is the little XCOM 2 logo icon on my taskbar appears and quickly disappears. Re-enabling LW2 allows the game to work correctly.

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

[tracktwo]

TL;DR: When turning off a major gameplay altering mod (LW2 included, but is not the only one), make sure you delete or move your save files too.

Longer answer:

The crash is possibly due to game trying to load a character from the latest save file to show on the main menu screen, but something about that character (or the save file in general, usually involving the event manager) is dependent on a mod that isn't loaded anymore. Once you get a "clean" save file at the top of your list you should be safe. This is also why you get mysterious crashes even through regenning configs, verifying files, and even just completely removing the mod from your system. It's not the mod that's causing the problem (at least not directly), its your saved games, and they are in a completely different location and unaffected by all those things.

I have seen this crash behavior before too, although not with LW2 disabled. We often get saved games from people with bug reports, and they'll have a random collection of mods that I may or may not have installed. And some of those mods will crash the game if I try to load the save without them present (reliable ever vigilant is a common one - trying to load a saved game with this will hard crash if it isn't present, and there are others too). Other times my game will just fail to start up at all until I enable one or more of those mods, with exactly the same behavior you see: no crash dialog, just the xcom icon appearing and then disappearing from the taskbar. REV doesn't crash on start like this, just when loading, but others do (although I can't recall which ones off the top of my head right now). This happens most frequently when the save I got from the player is really fresh and goes to the top of my save list as the newest file, because it's trying to load a character from that save to show on the menu, and something about that character depends on one of those mods that aren't present. Since I need that save to be able to repro the bug, I have to go track down the mods in the save and install them one by one til it works, because I have to actually load the save to be able to repro the bug it's supposed to show me. And since I can't even get to the load game screen for it to popup a warning dialog about which mods those are, I have to go digging around in the save file itself in a hex editor to find them.

For people who aren't mod devs, the simplest way to fix it is to clear out the save folder, or move all the saves to a backup folder somewhere else if you want to play them again some day.

I really like the feature that the game shows you one of your characters on the main menu screen, but man that feature has caused me a lot of grief with game instability.