Rebel Jobs

Post Reply
stochastic42
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jan 25, 2019 4:53 am

Rebel Jobs

Post by stochastic42 »

I was unable to find a sub-forum for feedback so I suppose I will put it here. Apologies if critical feedback is not appreciated.

I started playing Long War 2 and at first I was unsure what jobs to assign to my rebels. I read a 'rebel jobs' guide and it occurred to me that there is almost always a single, clearly superior job for rebels. Managing them effectively seems to entail assigning them to intel when there are 'hidden' jobs available and then to recruit in the interim period. I haven't gotten it down to a science yet but I feel like this is adding an aspect of mundane micromanaging that has little strategic depth. I would contrast this to research and skill selection where there are at least sometimes real viable alternatives by which you can gain specific strategic or tactical advantages which can all culminate in a overall plan or grand strategy. Instead this mechanic seems similar to LW1 where scanning for exalt intel was not a strategic move but rather a thing that had to be tracked and implemented according to a predefined schedule with only one optimal path. "Ideally, you scan 9 days after the covert extraction if there was only one cell revealed, and 7 days if there were 2 cells revealed." as it was put on reddit. For me personally this type of thing takes away from my sense of freedom and control and instead I feel like i'm going through predefined motions as set out by the designer.

I wasn't going to comment but my hope is that you guys are receptive to this sort of feedback, and that maybe it will be a positive influence on your future game "Terra Invicta" which I will doubtlessly end up purchasing as your mods have both been excellent and I've spent more time playing LW1 than all of the new xcom games (vanilla) combined.
User avatar
johnnylump
Site Admin
Posts: 1262
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2015 4:12 am

Re: Rebel Jobs

Post by johnnylump »

Reasoned and well-intentioned feedback like this is always welcome, thanks. I'll move it to the general LW2 forum.

For what it's worth, we didn't intend for the resistance jobs / mission timers to be "solvable" or quite so game-able via config-diving. The goal was a push-pull system with some effects observable at a more general level: More guys on intel means more missions and better mission initial conditions, but too many guys on intel means more retaliations.

We didn't want there to be a dominant strategy but didn't we want you constantly fiddling with settings to min-max, either. Ideally you'd set goals for each of your region and only need to make changes periodically as conditions change or you have new goals. Things like the "no production for a day after changing jobs" were an attempt to address this.

Ultimately, the problem may lie in that the overall game is built around going on missions, and one of the jobs is the pathway to that, so all the others will be secondary in nature. If we'd had more time, I guess, I'd have probably considered adding new jobs that support missions in a more direct way, providing other advantages to combats in that region.
SpinDoctor
Posts: 115
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2018 1:53 pm

Re: Rebel Jobs

Post by SpinDoctor »

stochastic42 wrote:I was unable to find a sub-forum for feedback so I suppose I will put it here. Apologies if critical feedback is not appreciated.

I started playing Long War 2 and at first I was unsure what jobs to assign to my rebels. I read a 'rebel jobs' guide and it occurred to me that there is almost always a single, clearly superior job for rebels. Managing them effectively seems to entail assigning them to intel when there are 'hidden' jobs available and then to recruit in the interim period. I haven't gotten it down to a science yet but I feel like this is adding an aspect of mundane micromanaging that has little strategic depth. I would contrast this to research and skill selection where there are at least sometimes real viable alternatives by which you can gain specific strategic or tactical advantages which can all culminate in a overall plan or grand strategy. Instead this mechanic seems similar to LW1 where scanning for exalt intel was not a strategic move but rather a thing that had to be tracked and implemented according to a predefined schedule with only one optimal path. "Ideally, you scan 9 days after the covert extraction if there was only one cell revealed, and 7 days if there were 2 cells revealed." as it was put on reddit. For me personally this type of thing takes away from my sense of freedom and control and instead I feel like i'm going through predefined motions as set out by the designer.

I wasn't going to comment but my hope is that you guys are receptive to this sort of feedback, and that maybe it will be a positive influence on your future game "Terra Invicta" which I will doubtlessly end up purchasing as your mods have both been excellent and I've spent more time playing LW1 than all of the new xcom games (vanilla) combined.
Rebel management can be overthought if you want to, but it's not that big a deal. You assign them to some task, and go on with life. If you wanna break it into some kind of max/min exercise, that's a personal choice. Some people like this kind of thing. Some people can't help themselves and then complain about it... Personally I don't want a game with a bunch of nit noid Rebel management stuff to think about. There's enough going on as it is.

I know you weren't talking to me specifically, but I don't want the developers to get the idea that this is a good thing to get into. There are other/better things to spend time on. All my opinion, of course.
User avatar
johnnylump
Site Admin
Posts: 1262
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2015 4:12 am

Re: Rebel Jobs

Post by johnnylump »

Honestly, we know some of our audience are min-maxxers by nature and our Skype logs would show that we worked on trying to ensure that you couldn't do so by constant fiddly micromanagement of the rebels. :)

One problem comes down to the internal limits on how many missions can spawn in a region at a time, which can be gamed if you are aware of it and have wikified config data available to you. Those really weren't intended to be exposed to the player.
SpinDoctor
Posts: 115
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2018 1:53 pm

Re: Rebel Jobs

Post by SpinDoctor »

johnnylump wrote:Honestly, we know some of our audience are min-maxxers by nature and our Skype logs would show that we worked on trying to ensure that you couldn't do so by constant fiddly micromanagement of the rebels. :)

One problem comes down to the internal limits on how many missions can spawn in a region at a time, which can be gamed if you are aware of it and have wikified config data available to you. Those really weren't intended to be exposed to the player.
LW2 is a great game and the mods community has made it, in my opinion, literally one of the greatest games ever created. I love it for what it is. I don't want to have perfect control of everything. Where in life does that ever happen?
Post Reply