Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

mustangdood
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2017 1:56 pm

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by mustangdood »

This issue could be solved in a dozen ways, ranging from effortless to complex. A simple change in verbiage would let the player know they have to press forward or the game could end.

The trap here is to assume the user intuitively knows something that is not explicit. If you expect players to play your game the way you want them to, you are nuts.

This isn't an edge case. With the myriad of things escalating the difficulty so rapidly in the early game, it's very reasonable to understand how a player is focusing on other things just to survive.
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8wayz
Posts: 340
Joined: Sat Jan 16, 2016 3:59 pm

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by 8wayz »

@Severian

You are correct in your assumption. :)

Higher ADVENT activity in a region means more missions. More missions means higher chance of getting a liberation one. Once you get the first, you will receive the next few quite fast.

Thus if you you have low activity in all but one or two regions, ADVENT will send extra forces there and will step up their activity.

Moreover the extra intel you saved from not contacting additional regions can be used on boosting key missions to get a better result out of them.

@mustangdood

The first thing the game tells you is literally to find a clue and then the quest chain ends with "Liberate a region". It is posted as a critical objective and the whole game is build around the liberation of humanity from the alien overlords.

I do not know what else can they do regarding the UI for example to communicate that you need to start liberating regions.
mustangdood
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2017 1:56 pm

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by mustangdood »

8wayz wrote:@Severian

You are correct in your assumption. :)

Higher ADVENT activity in a region means more missions. More missions means higher chance of getting a liberation one. Once you get the first, you will receive the next few quite fast.

Thus if you you have low activity in all but one or two regions, ADVENT will send extra forces there and will step up their activity.

Moreover the extra intel you saved from not contacting additional regions can be used on boosting key missions to get a better result out of them.

@mustangdood

The first thing the game tells you is literally to find a clue and then the quest chain ends with "Liberate a region". It is posted as a critical objective and the whole game is build around the liberation of humanity from the alien overlords.

I do not know what else can they do regarding the UI for example to communicate that you need to start liberating regions.
Really, you can't think of anything else? Not a single thing? It's perfect the way it is, there is no small change that could be made anywhere to solve this issue? I guess not everyone has the intellect to come up with solutions. It's okay, you can still get your participation ribbon hehe.

Consider this your meal for the day Mr. Troll, there will be no further feedings.
Thuraash
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jan 18, 2017 2:32 am

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by Thuraash »

The irony here is real! You keep whining as though you were wronged by being blindsided with the defeat. Maybe you were blindsided, but that's nobody's fault but your own!

The game isn't going to hold your hand and give you information you haven't earned. In your story, XCOM was behind the curve. They were so far behind that they didn't have the intel to even know how far behind they were falling. You might have won some battles, but not nearly enough. You lost the war because you never pushed hard enough to get to the point of even fighting it.

And I know you're saying the game never told you that you're on a clock. The game did, however, tell you that you're fighting a war, and it gave you immediate goals that, had you accomplished them, WOULD have informed you of the greater danger. The aliens are fighting to win as hard as they can, which means that if you aren't pushing the pace right to the ragged edge yourself, you WILL fall behind and fail. That's the nature of war.

The mod isn't for everyone. It's brutal, and it lets you fail without even telling you that you're failing if you didn't discover the reason yourself. That's not lazy design, and it's not poor design. It's a choice.

Because your actions have unmitigated consequences, and because the world goes on around you regardless of what you as a player do, it feels real. To a lot of us who are tired of games dragging us by the hand, telling us exactly what to do and how, rubber-banding the difficulty and challenge so it stays "just right," and generally making the player the center and anchor of the game universe, that indifferent brutality is EXACTLY what we're looking for.

Constructive criticism is always welcome, and the devs here frequently respond to it directly with either reasons or even implemented features. But that's not what you're doing. Every single one of your posts is an extended whine about how the defining qualities of Long War are "lazy design," "un-fun," "bad design," "unfair," etc, as though that's objective truth because you said so. This tells me that you WANT precisely the features that Long War purposefully excises. Given that every one of your posts lambasts the mod for its essential qualities, I suspect that your preferences are just fundamentally incompatible with LW2's design goals.

Again, that's okay. Everyone has preferences. But your dogged haranguing of everyone here as though we're some stupid groupthinking clique whose views are just objectively wrong about the mod's design, and who don't actually like LW2 but for some reason blindly follow the devs is getting FUCKING IRRITATING.

So, please, dood, shut the hell up for a bit, read, listen, learn what LW2 is about, learn how the game is played and won. Armed with that knowledge, decide if it's even something in the ballpark of what you're looking for. If it is, great! If you've got some informed suggestions on how to improve it, even better!

And if not, that's okay too. But instead of just endlessly and passive-aggressively flaming people here and trying to turn this entire ship around into something completely at odds with its core design philosophy, please find something more in line with your interests and preferences. I think that's a reasonable request, and would be a mutually beneficial outcome.
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8wayz
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Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by 8wayz »

That kind of behaviour won't get you very far neither on these forums, nor in life in general.

Objectively the current tasks are shown with big font on the left of the screen when in the Avenger and on Geoscape. You can browse through them in the Commander's quarters as well.

There are even Dark events that mention that the aliens will make progress towards a top secret project. You just need to check them often enough and use some Intel to uncover the hidden ones.

You have information in a prominent place, displayed in big font and also colour-coded (completed tasks are in green). Even if you decide to not follow the liberation branch but go for the Skulljack one, you will eventually have to hack an Officer and later a Codex. Both will lower the Doom counter.

Any branch of objectives you decide to follow will lead you sooner or later to discovering the Doom counter and lowering it.

Both in design, as well as in presentation in-game, the objectives do their part. The only thing extra that Pavonis can do is just add a new entry in the archives mentioning that the Avatar project is active right from the start and you should go and find out what is happening.
mustangdood
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2017 1:56 pm

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by mustangdood »

Thuraash wrote:And I know you're saying the game never told you that you're on a clock.
Correct. An easy fix, as was pointed out a number of times. No real effort required.
Thuraash
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jan 18, 2017 2:32 am

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by Thuraash »

Sweet jeebus juggling crickets, mustangdood, you know how to read selectively! I was NOT agreeing with you. There is nothing that needs to be fixed; you should have damn well known you were on the clock because you're fighting a war!
jkmaks
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2017 5:51 am

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by jkmaks »

I have the lead discovered, I have a liberated region, I have even Shadow Chamber. I have only Forge on my map left. And there is no sign of avatar project. Image
Amineri

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by Amineri »

jkmaks wrote:I have the lead discovered, I have a liberated region, I have even Shadow Chamber. I have only Forge on my map left. And there is no sign of avatar project. Image
This definitely is a bug. Somehow the Liberation objective chain got stuck, even though you did liberate a region.

As a short-term workaround, you can use the console command

Code: Select all

ForceCompleteObjective LW_T2_M0_S5_CompleteActivity
This will force the avatar project to be revealed. Note that this isn't a general fix, but specifically fixes your case where the blacksite was revealed (allowing you to progress through the other campaign objective missions), but the Avatar project didn't get revealed. For those that might need it, the console command to force reveal the Blacksite is :

Code: Select all

ForceCompleteObjective LW_T2_M0_S4_AssaultNetworkTower
For those more interested in the details, in this screenshot what appears to be the issue is that the objective chain got stuck on "LW_T2_M0_S3_DefeatLiberation2Activity". This objective should complete when a trigger event 'LiberateStage2Complete' occurs. That trigger event is set to happen whenever the activity "ProtectRegionMid" completes with XCOM success. So I'm not quite sure how/why it failed in your case.
umie214
Posts: 13
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:44 pm

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by umie214 »

hmm i didnt liberate any regions until mid-game (at least 30-40 hours in) because I didnt understand the mechanic. When I did, the bar was only halfway there.
Soupidity
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2018 2:30 am

Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by Soupidity »

I actually feel Mustang pretty well on this. I just lost a campaign in the very same way simply because I didn't take the objective seriously enough. I was aware of the avatar project, but went straight to LW 2, skipping XCOM 2.

Maybe Mustang and I are a special group of plebs (although... I really was smashing the aliens on my commander run, and doing so, so well on research), but I really do feel that with the perfect mix of playing the game blind and seeing no immediate reason not to take my time with liberating regions and building up, I too experienced a deep sense of 'wut' when my game suddenly ended.
cryptc
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Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by cryptc »

Soupidity wrote:I actually feel Mustang pretty well on this. I just lost a campaign in the very same way simply because I didn't take the objective seriously enough. I was aware of the avatar project, but went straight to LW 2, skipping XCOM 2.

Maybe Mustang and I are a special group of plebs (although... I really was smashing the aliens on my commander run, and doing so, so well on research), but I really do feel that with the perfect mix of playing the game blind and seeing no immediate reason not to take my time with liberating regions and building up, I too experienced a deep sense of 'wut' when my game suddenly ended.
As deadly surprises from LW2 comes, this ranks somewhere in the middle I'd say :P I think you shouldn't expect to win first game anyways, and as long as you didn't do as one streamer I watched did who didn't understand infiltrations and immediately launched all missions at 0% I'm sure it will work out :P
Soupidity
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Re: Game Suddenly Ends in Defeat

Post by Soupidity »

Hahaha... that sounds pretty funny. :D
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